35

That it is a pity she can never forgive me for helping to murder her daughter, for I am still as intelligent and as dangerous as I ever was.

Even though Neha’s daughter, Anoushka, had been a monster who’d gone so far as to brutalize a child in her quest for power, Elena might’ve still felt sorry for Neha for losing the child she’d loved so deeply, except that she now knew how Neha had treated another child in her care.

Mahiya rarely spoke about her time in Neha’s court, but Venom and Dmitri both had contacts there and Elena had picked up enough through those two to know that Mahiya was a miracle: a woman who’d held on to her kind spirit and heart through sheer effort of will, despite a childhood not only utterly lacking in love, but filled with acts of what Elena considered flat-out torture.

“However,” Neha added, “be that as it may, I do not believe the Cadre needs to be involved in internal Luminata matters.” Her eyes went to Ibrahim’s broken body, but from her position—and taking into account how Laric was hovering protectively beside his patient, while Gian’s stiff form further blocked her line of sight—she could likely only see part of his lower half. “Especially given the ferocity of the storm outside. That should be our priority.”

“Why are you here, Neha?” Raphael asked.

“As it happens, I was simply walking the hallways.” A graceful movement that was as close as Elena had ever seen Neha come to a shrug. “I want to leave this place and find out what is happening in China. However, it appears we are trapped here for the time being, and since we are . . .”

The Archangel of India’s eyes went to Ibrahim again. “I cannot see his face, but that appears to be blood on his robe. He is injured?”

“This novice was beaten to a pulp,” Raphael said flatly. “Kicked while he was down.”

“A distasteful act.” Neha pursed her lips. “We may as well discover who was behind it.”

It was an ironic thing to say, given what Anoushka had done to one of Raphael’s vampires. Then again, the Queen of Poisons steadfastly chose to believe in her daughter’s innocence despite evidence to the contrary.

Her eyes lifted to Gian, who was icily furious at being told his little fiefdom wasn’t actually a fiefdom at all—but who was doing an excellent job of hiding it. His calm facade never cracked, but Elena saw the truth in the flatness of his gaze, the rigid tension of his body.

“What do you know about this man?” Neha’s question was a cold demand.

“He is new here.” Gian’s voice was as unshaken as always, a leader well on the path to luminescence. “Only with us for five years.”

Elena hadn’t realized Ibrahim was that new. In angelic terms, five years was literally the blink of an eye. The slender male wouldn’t have had time to gain the trust of anyone here—but neither would he have been drawn into whatever it was that was going on beneath Lumia’s shining surface. He wouldn’t have known not to do something.

Mouth drying up, she stared at him in horror. Raphael, he got us that map.

Raphael met her gaze, the blue of his eyes a metallic shade that denoted an anger so cold, it came from the primal core. You think that caused this?

I think it might be part of it at least. Ibrahim was being helpful probably without realizing that certain things are off-limits.

Then, Raphael said, there must be something on that map we’re not meant to see. Do you have it on your person?

Yes, it’s still in my crossbow bolt sheath. It had survived the rain thanks to the fact she’d closed the sheath out of habit—it had only taken losing a bolt onto the city streets to learn that lesson. She’d been lucky she didn’t accidentally hurt anyone.

Raphael turned to respond to something Neha had said, but his attention remained with Elena. Go with Aodhan, see if you can discover what it is that we weren’t meant to find. I’ll make sure your friend is safe.

“Aodhan.” Elena looked into the splintered shards of Aodhan’s eyes. “Let’s go back to the spot where Raphael and I found Ibrahim. There might be a clue there.”

To Aodhan’s credit, he didn’t question why she was leaving the injured man. He just held open the door for her, and as she strode past him, her wing brushed his chest. The contact was nothing momentous, not now, not between friends, not when Aodhan had given her permission in multiple small ways but she felt eyes boring into her back.

Sliding out a blade as if playing with it, she used the polished surface to catch a glimpse of who it was that was staring at her and Aodhan.

Gian.

And he wasn’t focused on her but on Aodhan.

It could be nothing, his calmly stifled anger directed outward at whoever happened to be in his line of sight, but that look . . . it made her glad Aodhan was going to be nowhere near Gian’s vicinity.

A second later, she and Aodhan were in the hallway and heading in the right direction. “Ibrahim found that historical map I asked for,” she explained to him after they were out of hearing distance and alone. “We need to figure out if there’s something in there we shouldn’t know about.”

“We’ll need a place to examine it.” He thought for a moment. “There’s a small library in the tower where Laric makes his home.”

“Let’s head there.” Elena had zero doubts that Gian would know soon enough where they’d gone, but it would take a little while for the message to filter back to the Luminata leader. Long enough for them to get a head start on whatever was happening here.

They passed a number of the sect in the hallways, their faces hooded and their hands tucked into the wide sleeves of their robes. None spoke. “Creeps,” Elena muttered after the most recent one had slithered down the corridor. “Why not look people in the eye, show your face?”

“I think your view has been impacted by what was done to Ibrahim,” Aodhan said quietly. “Laric does not cover his face because of a lack of courage.”

“Shit.” Elena blew out a breath, rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. These Luminata, though—they hide things.”

Aodhan didn’t argue. “I think secretiveness has become embedded into their culture.”

“What happened to Laric?” Elena asked. “Did he really come here to find luminescence?”

“He was in the sky when Caliane executed Nadiel.” Aodhan’s words were like rocks thrown into a still pond. “He wasn’t close, was attempting to land when he saw what was about to happen, but he wasn’t fast enough. The flames from Nadiel’s death crawled across the sky like the ‘most violent lightning fire’ according to him, and he was caught in the inferno.”

“Hell.” Elena couldn’t begin to imagine the pain Laric had suffered. “Why hasn’t he healed?” She’d seen angels heal from all kinds of things, including wings that had been sliced off.

“Even Keir can’t give him an answer to that.” Aodhan led her down a narrow corridor. “He is healing, but at a glacial pace. In the over a thousand years since Nadiel’s execution, he says the scars have become less rigid, freeing up the movement of his hands. But there is no outward sign of that softening, no indication the scars will one day disappear.”

Elena thought about what Aodhan was telling her. “He was caught in the backwash of an archangel’s death at the hands of another archangel. That violence of energy . . .”

“Yes. It would burn even an immortal to the bone—only the fact he was so distant and descending rapidly saved him, I think.”

They walked in silence for several minutes, and a number of times, as they entered covered external walkways, Elena felt the pummeling force of the wind, saw lightning stabbing at Lumia, the clouds above thunderous black. Nothing would be flying in that until it was all over. “Good thing Lumia’s built to last.”

“This lightning is scoring the stone nonetheless.” Aodhan pointed out the signs of charring she’d missed in the erratic flashes of light. “If the storm doesn’t abate within a day, it may threaten the integrity of even this place that has stood for millennia.”

Because the Cascade made its own rules.

Her eyes took in the purple-hued sky split with lightning. “You know what that would mean.” Raphael and the other archangels would have to fly out, drawing the lightning with them—and risk being smashed to the earth by the bolts.

“It won’t kill him,” Aodhan reminded her softly.

Elena’s hand fisted. “But it’ll hurt him badly.” Forcing herself to flex her hand after they passed back into an internal hallway, she blinked away the after-images of lightning on the backs of her eyes. “Let’s not borrow trouble, focus on the now.” Thinking of Raphael heading out into the malevolence of that unnatural storm made her stomach churn, a cold hand choking her throat.

“I think Laric is hiding here,” Aodhan said after nearly a minute, the words heavy. “As I hid in my home in the Refuge. At least I was protected in a sense by my appearance. It is unusual, but also coveted by many.” A long pause before he continued. “Immortals do not have to face physical ugliness in anything but a fleeting manner—many were not kind to him. Especially the girl he was courting at the time of the fire.”

Elena thought of her own comments about immortals winning the genetic lottery, her mind awash with the searing beauty of the angels and vampires she knew. And she thought of Jessamy, so gifted and kind, but with a twisted wing that defined her in the minds of many immortals.

Her heart squeezed. “He’s been here the whole time?”

“From about a decade after the incident,” Aodhan told her. “He says this place had a kind heart once, that the Luminata in charge had true luminescence in his soul, and he offered Laric sanctuary with no end date attached.

“Not only that, Laric says the Luminata sat with him for many hours, offered him wise counsel, urged him to return to his studies at the Medica, and spoke to him in the silent tongue.” Aodhan moved his hands to show what he meant. “But that man has long been Asleep. I think he is afraid, Elena, afraid that the heart of Lumia is gone and he will be shoved out into the world again.”

Elena thought of how Laric kept his shoulders hunched in, his face angled in a way that kept light from illuminating his scarred face. “How old is your new friend, Aodhan?” From everything Aodhan had said, she didn’t think Laric was very old. “Or I should ask—how old was he when he came here for sanctuary?” Because he’d stayed in stasis since then, no matter the physical passage of time.

“A hundred and twenty.”

Elena sucked in her gut. “He was a baby.” So close in age to Izzy that the difference didn’t matter a damn.

Aodhan nodded. “He was far too young to request entry into Lumia, but the then leader of the sect made an exception for him—the sole exception ever made—because he came not to be a novice but as a terribly wounded being who needed refuge.” Aodhan’s voice was no less potent in its emotion for being quiet. “The Lumia of today, however . . . I don’t want to leave him here, Ellie. It’s not a good place.”

“We’ll figure something out.” If Laric wanted to leave with them, no one was going to stand in his way, Elena would make sure of it. “Is that his tower?” It was at one far corner of Lumia, a light burning in the window high above.

The covered but open corridor that led to it howled with wind, lightning slamming into the stone directly above their heads and gusts of rain pelting their faces and bodies as they ran to the tower. Aodhan took the windward side, his wing raised to block out the worst of it.

“Thanks,” she said, her heart thumping as they reached the end.

Folding back his wing, he gave her one of those rare smiles that lit him up. “I ran with a girl like this once,” he said, a wonder in his tone that said the incident had been long buried under far darker memories. “I wasn’t even eighty yet. She let me kiss her afterward, called me her hero.”

Even in the storm-lit darkness and with the ugliness of what had happened to Ibrahim fresh in her mind, the story held a stunning sweetness that had Elena’s cheeks creasing. “Your first kiss?” He’d have been a young teen in human terms, if she was doing her calculations right.

A slow nod that made the fine droplets of rain on his hair waterfall with translucent light, his smile growing. “I strutted for months afterward.” He pulled open a side door to the tower that was old but appeared in good working order.

Elena entered to find they were on a lower floor that was basically just stone with a staircase in the center. Aodhan told her to go on up to the first floor. “I must follow, Ellie,” he said, once more her grim-eyed escort. “The danger is more apt to come from the outside rather than the inside.”

Moving without delay, Elena went up, her gun in hand. The staircase opened out into a small library that had books on three walls, a fireplace set into the fourth, with two antique armchairs suitable for angelic wings placed in front of the small fire Laric must’ve left going. The carpet on the floor was as ancient, this place frozen in time but for the books she could see stacked here and there.

“Where does he get his books?” Somehow, Elena didn’t think Laric would’ve caught on to the Internet and mail order.

“There are some Luminata who are still kind to him. Donael is one, Ibrahim another,” Aodhan added. “They make sure he has books.”

“Glad to hear they’re not all bastards.” Reaching out with her mind, she touched Raphael’s. Any news?

Not yet. We have asked Gian to gather all those who might’ve walked through the nearby areas at the time Ibrahim was attacked.

She told him about Donael getting Laric his books. Not sure what that tells us except that he’s not totally self-absorbed in his quest for luminescence.

I will keep that in mind.

Elena found a small table in front of the armchairs, and taking a seat in one since the table was too low to use standing up, she put her gun on the table, then retrieved the map and spread it out. She placed a throwing blade on each edge to keep it pinned down. “It’s beautiful.”

Shock had her staring.

She’d been expecting an old-fashioned blueprint at best, but this was a three-dimensional artwork that showed Lumia as a dollhouse peeled open, with more detailed smaller drawings around the edges for areas where the dollhouse approach didn’t permit an inside look.

Candles, books, even tiny pots and pans in the kitchens, they’d all been drawn with stunning attention to detail. And of course, there were Luminata scattered throughout, going about their daily business. “They’re not all wearing robes.”

Instead, they were dressed in various types of clothing from warrior leathers to flowing garments of color and more prosaic outfits that said “everyday wear” to Elena. The robes were present but not many of these Luminata wore them with the hood pulled up. In fact, in the scenes she could see of people passing each other in the corridors, the one with the hood was always shown as pulling it back to greet his fellow resident.

Only one thing remained the same: this was a brotherhood. No women.

Not an inexplicable choice, Elena found herself thinking—hard to keep sex out of the equation otherwise.

No, wait.

I have been alive thousands of years, have learned that love does not always wear a single face.

Keir had said that to her after she saw him flirting with a male warrior—where previously, she knew he’d had a female lover. As with mortals, immortal sexuality was a wide-ranging canvas with many variations. So having a male-only environment wouldn’t necessarily take sexual temptation off the table.

“Why just men?” she murmured.

A shrug from Aodhan. “Why did human men create gentlemen’s clubs in earlier times? And why does Caliane have a temple in which only her maidens are permitted?”

“Hmm.” She twisted her mouth to the side, thought about what he’d said. “I see what you mean. Might be nothing more complicated than the fact the angels who set up Lumia wanted it to be a male club.”

“Whatever their reasons for not admitting women, Lumia has changed in a profound way since this map was created,” Aodhan said. He’d remained standing beside her, but he’d pushed aside one of the armchairs so he could look down at the map without compromising his ability to move quickly should he need to.

His wing lay half across hers, a warm weight. “Does it have a date?”