Archangel’s Ascension (The Guild Hunter Series)

Giulia had asked Illium and Aodhan to stay with her following the execution, “so we can spend the night hours talking about Marco and Tani.” While she liked Navarro, she’d shared that he intimidated her, while they reminded her of her son.

Yet this same woman had taken her quest for justice to Navarro’s very door.

But when they reached her apartment, she said, “Stavros called,” her eyes tear-reddened and her voice raw as a result of her earlier heartbreaking sobs. “Invited me to join him and Norma in a private memorial to our children.”

“Would you like to go?”

“Yes.” A maternal smile at Aodhan’s question. “It’s all right. I know Stavros wishes his daughter had never gotten mixed up in the immortal world, but he didn’t sound angry today, just sad. A heartbroken father. I think it will be good for all three of us to be together.”

It took no time at all to recall the Tower car and driver who’d taken her to and from the Catskills. After opening the car door for her, Aodhan made sure she knew she could call them at any point should she have need. “Whether tonight or any night to come,” he said, his voice that beautiful quietness that wrapped around a person like a hug.

Giulia squeezed his fingers with her own. Her eyes were wet again, the tears that fell silent. “I will,” she said. “And for so long as I live, I plan to call you both my friends.” A shaky smile. “Don’t make a liar out of me.”

“Never,” Aodhan promised as Illium nodded in agreement. “I cherish your friendship, Giulia. We’ll talk soon.”

They escorted the car from above, flying high in the night sky. Though they couldn’t hear the conversation when Stavros and Norma stepped out of their small townhouse to welcome Giulia, that it was a welcome was clear.

The three hugged in a huddle of grief before moving inside.

“Will you come somewhere with me, Blue?” Aodhan asked as they hovered above the city. “I know it’s been a hard day, but it feels like the right time for this.”

“You never have to ask,” Illium said. “Where are we going?”

“To what I wanted to show you before we broke the case and time got away from us. A storage locker on the outskirts of the city that I’ve been using to keep some of my work.”

Illium whistled as they stretched their wings in flight. I’m guessing no one knows that or the place would’ve been robbed ten times over by now. Fans, unscrupulous dealers, art enthusiasts, the list went on.

It’s in Beth’s name.

Illium fell a few feet, he was so startled. Ellie’s sister?

Yes. I asked Ellie for help when I wished to hire the facility, and she was with Beth at the time. Her sister was happy for us to use her name as a shield. They set it up online then and there, but Beth knows nothing of what’s in it and doesn’t wish to know. She asked me to please change the door code she had to input as part of the rental process so that she’s never even tempted to peek.

Illium wanted to smile at the idea of Elena’s younger sister hiring a locker for one of the Seven, but his stomach was tense. He couldn’t imagine what it was that Aodhan stored in that locker—they had plenty of other locations to keep their things. You never told me about this locker.

It would’ve hurt you then, was the firm answer. If you can protect me, Blue, then I can protect you.

Illium scowled, thinking of their conversations in China, of how Aodhan had accepted Illium’s need to look after him. Not just accepted, Illium admitted to himself, but embraced. No longer did his best friend see Illium’s care as an attempt at control—he understood that this was how Illium loved his people.

And Aodhan?

Aodhan was his everything.

I don’t like this place already, he muttered as they overflew the pulsing night beat of the city.

Cars flowed on the streets where they weren’t backed up in a sea of red brake lights, angels flew cross town to clubs or to meet up with friends, all under a moody charcoal sky where clouds had blotted out the stars. It didn’t matter. New York created its own stars in the thousands of points of light dotted around the city, along the streets, and strung up on rooftops.

I love the city at night, Aodhan said at that moment, before taking a deep breath of the cold air this high. The streets become rivers of light, the skyscrapers jagged mountains under an endless sky.

He’d always been good at that, Illium thought, painting scenes with his voice as well as his hands. Will you paint New York for me just that way?

I’ll do it in black and white with only flickers of colors, so the light appears to move. His hair rippled back in the wind, his wings glinting in an errant spotlight that had been pointed skyward.

A few more minutes of flight found them over quieter residential areas, then even those fell behind.

How did you get stuff into the locker without being noticed?

I did it in the darkest part of night when the sky was cloudy and starless much like today. Part of the reason I chose this facility is because it’s run-down and doesn’t have much security. No cameras. It’s also in an industrial area that’s all warehouses. No street activity after night, for it’s too remote and, as Beth put it, “creepy.”

And you chose this place to store your art?

The actual storage lockers are tough, and I placed a strong lock on it. As for the work inside…let’s just say I had a complicated relationship with it at the time.

Though tension gnawed at Illium’s gut, he didn’t badger Aodhan for further details. It had to be bad if the other man hadn’t told him all this time…and he’d know the full extent of it soon enough.

There it is. Aodhan angled over an area that was dark but for a few anemic lights, which barely penetrated the gloom.noveldrama

I think we’re in danger, Illium said in an ominous tone, taking it in from above.

The facility appeared even worse than Aodhan had described—cement walls with peeling paint, the roof pockmarked with rust, the driveway cracked in so many places, it was almost a grass lot. He spotted no movement around the storage facility, but someone was working a forklift at the warehouse across the road.

They waited until the operator was on the far side of that warehouse before they landed. It took Aodhan only a moment to key in the entry code.

The door locked behind them with a hard snick.

“This way.” Aodhan began to walk down the cool cement hallway filled with endless doors that ended at a vanishing point into eternity.

“You know, in those movies you watch with Ellie,” Illium said darkly, “this is where you both start yelling at the innocent future victim to run.”

“Stay close. I’ll protect you from the monsters.”

“Funny.” Illium’s scowl hid the rapid pulse of his heart—not at the environment, but at Aodhan’s teasing words.

Whatever this was, wherever they were going, it didn’t hurt Adi any longer.

His locker proved to be halfway down the hallway on the left.

When he input the code, Illium said, “The day of my birth.” Angels didn’t often celebrate such things after their majority, and many of the old ones had no idea when they might’ve been born, but Illium had come into the world at a time when Jessamy was the Librarian; she kept a neat list of all angelic births.

Aodhan’s smile carved his cheeks, turning him from handsome to devastating. “I had to choose numbers I’d never forget.”

Illium wanted to haul him close and kiss him until neither one of them could breathe. It took serious effort to keep it contained, but this wasn’t a moment to interrupt.

This, whatever it was that lay in the locker, was important enough to Aodhan that he’d first hidden it, and now wanted to share it with Illium.

Once they were past the coded lock, the door opened to reveal another door, this one barred with a huge padlock. “I’m starting to get why this facility hasn’t gone out of business despite its less-than-personable appearance.”

“Ransom told me about it,” Aodhan said. “I was talking about finding a place to store some of my art, and he said the most secure place he knew looked like an abandoned building and was surrounded by chain link with holes in it. A facility no self-respecting burglar would even think about wasting his time on.”

Taking a key from a small pocket in the front of his pants, he unlocked the padlock. “Close both doors behind us.”

Only after Illium had done as ordered did Aodhan turn on the light.

Canvases sat in piles across the majority of the space. Not stretched over wooden frames, not even rolled up in cardboard tubes. Just flat, paint-heavy sheets that had been placed one on top of the other…and still, despite the lack of anything to bulk them up, the piles reached halfway to the ceiling and filled up three quarters of the room.

Illium could see none of the work, the canvases stored face down.

“Where did you find the time to paint all these?” It wasn’t as if Aodhan hadn’t been creating art Illium had seen in the interim, and his work wasn’t slapdash. A single piece could take months if he had dedicated time to spend on it, while a number had taken years.

“Here and there over two centuries.” Aodhan pulled one off the pile. “It was almost a compulsion for the first century. Then it became a way to try to understand my own scars.” He placed the canvas on the ground, face up.

Agony seared Illium.

It was a self-portrait of Aodhan as he’d been when they’d found him, his body emaciated, his face hollow, his eyes devoid of the light that was Illium’s Adi. And his wings…Illium wanted to fold over in anguish, only stayed upright because Aodhan was looking at the painting with an expression of interest but no pain.

Almost as if he was examining someone else’s work.

“I never saw you do these,” Illium whispered.

“I never did them when you were near.” Aodhan spread his wing over Illium’s in a sweep of heavy warmth. “It was my secret thing for a long time, a kind of inner flagellation to punish myself for having been so naïve.”

Illium struggled not to interrupt; he hated Aodhan talking about himself that way, but this was the past, unchangeable even by the Cadre.

“I did eventually tell Eh-ma—and even lost as she was then, she never revealed my secret. Instead, she used to sit there sketching while I painted feverishly, then she’d critique my work.”

He chuckled. “Took me a pitifully long time to work out that it was her way of taking the emotion out of it. She turned an act of anguish and rage into a thing mundane.” He pointed at his own painted face. “I think on this one, she told me I got the cheekbone shading wrong because I was working too fast.”

Illium loved his mother, adored her for being kind and generous and a loving pair of arms all his life. Today, he found himself aching to hold her tight, make sure she knew how important she was to him, to Aodhan, to the world.

“I’m glad you showed someone.” His eyes felt gritty, his emotions hard and brittle. “Are they all…”

“Like this?” Aodhan shook his head. “But there are only three variations. It’s either me, the box, or this.” He dug through the pile to show Illium a painting so black that that was all it appeared to be at first glance. A square of nothingness.

But a closer look and he began to see the screaming faces hidden within.

A horrifying vision of nightmare.

“The inside of my brain,” Aodhan said in a pragmatic tone. “Once.” Raising Illium’s hand to his mouth, he pressed a kiss to his knuckles, that beautiful starlight hair falling over his forehead as he did so.

“I know it’s a shock to see these, but I wanted you to before I destroy them all. I haven’t done one for the last three or so decades, but I couldn’t let go of them. To the extent that I boxed them up before I first left the Refuge, and every so often I’d ask the stronghold staff there to ship me a few boxes. No pattern to it, a way to keep from drawing attention.”

A noxious secret, Illium thought, a shadow Aodhan hated but couldn’t shrug off.

“Now, at last”—Aodhan took another canvas, scowled, dropped it atop the others he’d shown Illium—“I feel nothing when I look at them except annoyance that I was working so fast that I did nothing close to my best work. Eh-ma was right about the cheekbones on that first one. And this one, the definition’s awful. It’s fit only for the rubbish heap, all of it.”

Illium swallowed hard, his hands in brutal fists. “I feel like I should be a good citizen of the world and stop you, tell you this is a priceless collection of work for all that you’re able to find flaws with it, but fuck that. I want to burn it to cinders.” It was a physical representation of Aodhan’s pain, and Illium hated its very existence.

His hand glowed with power. “Can I do it now?”

“Blue, you’ll blow up the building,” Aodhan chided, his eyes flicking to Illium’s wings. “Especially when you’re glowing like that.”

For once, Illium didn’t care about the lingering symptom of archangelic power that wasn’t his, would never be his if he had his way. “How else are we going to do it?” He wasn’t leaving until he’d erased this pile of hurt and terror from existence.

“I never really thought about it.” Aodhan rubbed his jaw, scanned the piles. “I threw away all the boxes after I laid out the canvases, so we don’t have those to reuse.”

Illium’s rage was fuel for his brain. “I’ll get someone to drive a large truck here, and we’ll load up every last canvas, take them out to a remote location, and have the bonfire of all bonfires.”

It was Dmitri he decided to ask to drive the truck—because Dmitri had been there when they brought Aodhan home, Dmitri knew all of it, and he had no wings that made driving a truck awkward at best.

Despite the fact it was after midnight by now, he made the call, got a husky-voiced Honor on the line. But though it was clear both had been asleep, Dmitri didn’t tear Illium a new one for his request. The second knew Illium would’ve called him only if it had to be Dmitri who drove the truck. “I’ll be there soon as I can requisition a truck from the Tower garage,” the other man said before hanging up.

“Do you want Dmitri to see these?” Illium asked. “Or shall we carry them in a way he can’t?”

“The latter,” Aodhan said at once. “I want no more memories of these than already exist. They were a cleansing of my soul, stroke by stroke. Now it’s time for the detritus to be removed.”

Dmitri just nodded when Aodhan refused his offer to help carry out the canvases, then stood watch over the truck in the moonless dark. Clad in black jeans and a black T-shirt, his hair roughly brushed, he should’ve looked young and careless. Except this was Dmitri, a vampire of such power that even senior angels treated him with wary respect.

His presence was a pulse in the air, dark red and viciously controlled.

Illium had the feeling that Dmitri knew what Aodhan had been doing. But if he did, he said nothing about it, and—once they’d emptied the storage locker—Illium and Aodhan flew overhead while Dmitri drove the vehicle over two hours north out of the city, to a remote area inland from the Hudson River.

No city to warm the air with particles of light here, the world pitch-black.

“Thank you,” Aodhan said to Dmitri after they’d emptied the truck of its cargo.

A nod from the second.

But Aodhan had more to say. “Did you know?”

“No.” Dmitri shrugged. “But I figured something like that had to be going on. You’re an artist, Sparkle. It’s what you do.”

A gentle slap to Aodhan’s face that held the affection he’d shown them when they’d been baby angels. “I, meanwhile, spent my rage getting into every fight I could, got beaten to a pulp more than once because I took on far older vamps.

“Only reason they didn’t rip off my head is because, one, Raphael kept hauling me out before it got to that point, and two, even the most infuriated old ones felt sorry for me—they thought I’d had a bad Making, was half-insane. I think you took the better route.”

The hug between the two was initiated by Aodhan, but Dmitri’s hold was tight, the fisted thump on Aodhan’s shoulder one of brotherhood. He murmured something to Aodhan that Illium didn’t catch before they broke the embrace.

“Don’t linger too long,” the second said. “Forecast says there’s a huge storm coming.” Jumping into the truck on that, he turned it around for the drive home.

And Illium set fire to the stack of canvases after a nod from Aodhan.

The flames were a dazzling blue that sent curls of black up into the atmosphere.