The table at which they were to sit today was a huge slab of wood on sturdy legs. It had been sandpapered to take off the roughness, but that was about the extent of the polishing. Illium didn’t need to ask why Suyin wasn’t using the formal table that must surely exist in this stronghold.
All the polish and shine would’ve brought Lijuan into the room with them.
This table represented Suyin alone.
Two long bench seats ran along either side, while at the head of the table was a single chair built for an angel. Four warriors were already at the table when he entered and they waved him over.
He knew Xan, of course, but hadn’t yet managed to catch up with the other familiar face. His own cracked into a huge smile. “I heard you’d joined Suyin’s court,” he said after exchanging the embrace of warriors with a small bronze-skinned woman with wings of a blue so dark they were near-black.
Yindi would have the perfect wings for spying if she didn’t have large splashes of white on the primaries. Also if she wasn’t so loud and exuberant. He always had a good time with her when they met—the previous time around, they’d gone ice-flying below a massive glacier, nearly frozen off their butts, then drunk copious amounts of Illium’s potent liquor.
“A better decision I’ve never made,” she said, before introducing him to the vampire and the angel he didn’t know.
Jae was the vampire, quiet but with a glint to her eye, Maximus the angel. And a bigger angel Illium had never met. The other man was more heavily muscled than Titus or Aegaeon, his body white marble sculpted to define every possible line. It was a wonder his wings could lift him aloft.
Beside him, long and lean Jae, her skin a rich brown, appeared as insubstantial as air—until you noticed the razor-sharp throwing knives in her arm sheaths. She’d braided her curly hair into two side braids that began close to her skull and carried all the way down to the middle of her back.
She looked nothing at all like Ellie and she reminded Illium of her all the same. When he said, “Are those garrotes woven through your braids?” she grinned, and Maximus leaned in close to examine the lethal tools that once more put Illium in mind of Ellie.
“Forget about Jae’s obsession with hiding weapons,” Yindi said with the rudeness of long friendship. “News, gossip, breaking stories, we want it all.”
“We’re insulated here.” A freshly showered Xan, with a shirt on for once, threw back whatever deadly concoction was in his glass before continuing. “Not so much technologically—those links have been put back up, at least to a basic degree—but in terms of distance.”
“The amount of work doesn’t help,” Maximus said in a voice deep and rumbling, but it wasn’t a complaint. “We have little time to look to the outside when there’s so much to do to rebuild China, build our archangel’s land.”
“And we’re going to be building in truth soon,” Xan said, the warrior’s face bearing the refined beauty of an old vampire—the olive-gold of his skin so flawless as to be unreal, his cheekbones knife blades, and his lips delineated as if by a master artisan.
His eyes—thin, slightly hooded—gave him an enigmatic air, the entirety of Xan coming together to form a face so compelling that Xan only slept alone when he wished it.
“To tell my descendants that I helped build the court of an archangel?” Xan shoved a hand through the damp strands of his hair, broke out that berserker grin. “I will be even more of a legend than I am now.”
They all laughed, and Jae threw a bread roll at him—which he plucked out of the air and began to eat. Feeling at home among the friendly group, Illium updated them on how the other territories were doing, what had been rebuilt, what hadn’t. Additional senior members of Suyin’s court joined them in the minutes that passed, the conversation flowing with ease.
Yet still—and though he had his back to the door—he felt it when Aodhan entered the room. The others had left a space to Suyin’s right, and that was the spot into which Aodhan slid.
Because he was Suyin’s second.
Illium forced himself to keep his wings motionless, didn’t clench his fingers on the cutlery at hand, didn’t even look away from his conversation with Yindi to meet Aodhan’s gaze. The effort cost him, his abdominal muscles rigid and the tendons at his nape stiff.
“Mead?” It was a soft, feminine murmur at his shoulder.
He turned to smile at the mortal woman who’d appeared next to him, a jug in hand . . . and his heart, it stopped.