“I whispered to them from the chains, said things like Mother used to say. I put worms in their heads until they were mine.” His head jerked toward Aodhan, though Aodhan had done nothing to attract his attention. “The sunbright one,” he whispered. “That’s what Mother called you. She wanted your wings.” Hard, envious eyes drilling into Illium now. “And yours. Pretty wings.”
Looking sideways, he fingered his own limp and faded feathers. “Ugly.” A spitted-out word.
“They’ll heal.” Aodhan’s voice was grit. “You are an immortal.”
“I am a god,” the boy said in the way of someone saying their hair was black or their eyes were brown. As if, to him, it was simple fact. “I am Mother’s son.”
“Where are your worshippers?”
A shrug. “I wanted to see what wearing their skins felt like.”
“Didn’t they fight?”
The boy frowned. “I was their god. They cut each other’s heads off for me. The last one knelt down so I could behead him.” He flexed his hands. “It took a long time. I’m weak.”
No one, no matter how loyal, would kneel without protest for such torture if they weren’t being controlled in some way.
Worms in their heads.
The boy’s features altered in front of Illium even as the eerie statement reverberated in his mind. “Quon shouldn’t have done that,” Jinhai whispered. “We were all alone after that.” Rubbing at his belly. “After a while, I couldn’t find anything to eat. I went back to my hole, but there was no food there, either, so I went back out.”
“Why didn’t you come toward the other angels in the area?” Illium knew the boy had to have spotted angels flying this way and that from the stronghold.
“Mother said,” he whispered. “Mother said I wasn’t to be seen. I was her secret. Her special secret.” A bright and horribly innocent smile. “I was to be her new skin, her new life.”
She was mad, so mad, Aodhan said. Why did we not see it until of late?
Because she was also very old and very clever. Her insanity had also been the kind of affliction that could look like nothing more than megalomania, or a hunger for power. Both of which were acceptable in the angelic world. “What will you do now?” he asked the son she’d doomed to the same madness. “And what will Quon do?”
A lost look. “Quon says he will be a god like Mother. He says I can stay with him. But he will be the god.”
Illium nodded, as if everything about their conversation was rational. “Will you stay here with us for the time being?”
“Yes.” Jinhai’s expression brightened. “Mother said you were strong. The sunbright angel and the bluebell angel. She would have you in her court. Quon says you can serve him now.” He looked out at the snow. “And it’s cold outside. It’s warm here. Quon likes it here, too. Quon says we can stay.”
* * *
*
“I have to tell Suyin first,” Aodhan said to Illium when the two of them moved into the hallway to discuss what to do next.
Illium scowled. “I’m not about to keep this from Raphael.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to—but beyond it being my duty as her second, it’s a thing of respect to go to her first. This is her territory, and sadly, this is her family.”
Illium folded his arms, but he didn’t have any good arguments to the contrary. It wasn’t as if Lijuan’s son posed any direct threat to New York. He was, however, a very real threat to China. “You have reception?”
Taking out his phone, Aodhan glanced at it. “Yes.”
While he remained in the hallway to make the call, Illium returned to the warmth of the room that held a boy whose mind had split in two. He’d heard of this type of mental wound, but had believed it to be a far less defined division—a blurring of personalities or a veil falling over the person’s mind, as had happened with his mother.
But this was nothing akin to that.
To all intents and purposes, Jinhai and Quon were two different people.
Having spotted an old game set on a bookshelf in the room, he grabbed it, set up the board on the low table in front of the fire. “A game?”
Jinhai jumped at the invitation.
He knew the game very well. It was one taught to most angelic children, to help them with their mathematical prowess. Partway through, he said, “I won’t wear your skin,” and his voice had shifted again, as if his mind couldn’t settle. “I don’t want to be all alone again.”