“Her mind isn’t broken,” Raphael agreed, “but the things she’s using that mind for—they’re not what she would’ve done had she been truly thinking.” Lijuan was no longer anything close to what was known, but she’d always played the political game with a clear head.
“Are you sure?” Elijah bent down to pick up a pebble that had somehow ended up on the otherwise barren ridge. “None of us witnessed her youth, but there are whispers that she was fascinated with death even then. Some say . . . no, I cannot lay that slander on her without proof.”
Raphael said what the other archangel wouldn’t. “That she took the dead to her bed.”
A sharp glance. “You’ve heard the rumor?”
“You forget, Elijah, both my parents were archangels.”
“Caliane and Nadiel knew Lijuan in her youth?”
“No. But they knew those who had.” And what they’d told his parents had been whispered behind the thickest veil of secrecy. Because by then, Lijuan had already become a being to be feared.
“Now she’s the only ancient,” Elijah said, his voice contemplative. “They call us immortals, but we, too, eventually end up dust on the sands of time.”
“After millennia,” Raphael pointed out. “As Elena would say—are you not curious about what awaits us on the other side?”
“According to many humans, we are the messengers of their gods.”
Raphael glanced at Elijah. “After Lijuan, you’re the oldest among us. She’s a demigoddess in her territory. Did you ever consider setting yourself up as one?”
“I’ve seen what happens to those who take that path.” Elijah didn’t look at Raphael, but his meaning was clear. “Even had I not, I have Hannah. What I feel for her is far too real, far too much of this world.”
Raphael thought of the way his parents had loved each other, that powerful, almost exalting love, compared it to what he felt for Elena. There was nothing exalted about the hard ache of his cock when he touched her, the pulsing lust of his need. “Titus and Charisemnon will slaughter hundreds,” he said at last, “but it’s Lijuan who remains the true threat.
“My men tell me her army of the reborn has doubled in number over the past six months.” And there were disturbing rumors that some of her soldiers were the very newly dead—as if they’d been sacrificed to feed the cold embrace of Lijuan’s power. “If she unleashes them on the world, it will augur the start of another Dark Age.”
The last Dark Age had devastated civilizations that had grown up over thousands of years, destroying buildings and works of art so magnificent, the world would never again know their like. Millions upon millions of humans had fallen—collateral damage in a war between angels.
But then, they hadn’t been fighting armies of the dead, nightmares given flesh.
Elena watched child after child accompany Jessamy into Sam’s room. Keir had brought the boy up into a half-awake state where he was aware of what was happening but felt no pain. A chaotic mix of happiness and rage tore through her as she watched him beam at the gifts his classmates had brought him.
How could anyone be immoral enough to hurt such innocence?
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
“She likes it, you see.”
Pain shot through her jaw as she wrenched herself back to the present, but it wasn’t enough; her daylight hours were no longer safe from the long hand of nightmare. She could see Ari’s eyes staring into hers, that bright turquoise gaze going slowly dull as Slater fulfilled his monstrous thirst. Ari had whispered at Elena to run, but her older sister hadn’t been able to run herself, her legs not just broken like Belle’s, but torn off altogether, a barbaric amputation.
Kindling.
That’s what the broken bones sticking out of her thighs had looked like, the blood drying as it came into contact with the air.
“She won’t run.” A giggle. “She likes it, you see.”
“Would you like to see him?”
Swiveling on her heel, Elena stared unseeing at Jessamy’s startled face, her mind locked in that kitchen awash with a suffering that would stalk her for eternity.
Jessamy touched her with a hesitant hand. “Elena?”
“Yes,” she said, forcing the words out past the brutal hammer of memory. “Yeah, I’d like to see Sam.”
“Go on in.” Jessamy’s eyes held a quiet concern, but she didn’t pry. “I’m herding the other children back to the classroom.”
Digging up a smile from somewhere, Elena shut up everything else and walked inside Sam’s room. “So,” she said, “this is how you get out of writing Jessamy’s essays.”