He smiled again. “First, I will ask master artisans to build an iron box for each of you, lined with spikes and infested with spiders and biting insects, so that you can never rest, never not be touched.” As they hadn’t permitted Aodhan to escape their touch. “They will crawl into your mouths, set up home in your orifices, dig their teeth into your eyeballs.”
Sachieri threw up.
Ignoring the stink of it, Raphael continued. “Then I will bury those boxes so far beneath a weight of soil and stone that only an archangel will be able to retrieve you. And I will retrieve you. I don’t intend for you to fall into a stupor and miss out on the experience of being buried alive.”
“Please!” Sachieri screamed, her beauty lost in a tracery of burst veins and smeared cosmetics. “We’re sorry! He’s so beautiful! We just—”
Raphael flicked out a hand and her lower mouth and jaw broke apart in a splatter of blood, bone, and flesh. Her head dropped. He raised an eyebrow at Bathar, then burned off his gag with a carefully modulated use of archangelic power . . . just enough to sear off the first layer of his skin. “Would you like to speak?”
A convulsive shake of his head, his eyes all but bulging out of his head as he fought not to scream at the agony around the red flesh of his mouth.
“A good choice. Now, to wake your lover.” Raphael dug his fingers into her mind, wrenched her out of the peace of unconsciousness.
After he had the full attention of her bloodshot, terror-filled eyes, he tapped a finger on the arm of his chair, Aodhan’s feather still curled safe in his other hand. “You took Aodhan from us for six hundred and ninety-nine days.
“Now, I’m not so severe that I’ll make you serve a year for each day.” A small smile of apparent boredom. “That would be tedious after a while, as you’d be so insane you wouldn’t understand what was happening.”
He spread out his wings, folded them back in. “And it would be a merciless thing to offer you no hope of survival. So I will say . . . one year for each month. Twenty-three years is not so long in the scheme of an immortal life.”
Gratitude in two pairs of watery eyes.
Raphael leaned forward. “After those years, if you are yet sane,” he said softly, “I’ll put you both in the same box—wooden this time—so that you’ll have company as I take you to an island far from all else, and set you aflame.”
It took a long time for an angel to burn to death, especially if the fire was set to be a slow, slow torment of embers. “I will only scorch you for the first week, sear you for the second, then burn you down to ash over the next seven days. A mere three weeks, then death. Is that not merciful?”
Bathar screamed, while tears rolled out of Sachieri’s staring eyes.
In truth, Raphael didn’t expect either one of their minds to survive even the year. They were worthless worms, with no bravery in them. But they would now spend what little time they had thinking of the other horror to come. And it would come. Because Raphael would watch their minds—and he would dig them up the instant before the final insanity.
Each would go into death knowing for what crime they burned.
You must understand—for Aodhan, the Seven and Raphael are family, the bonds between them far beyond blood and bone. It is a thing elemental.
—Lady Sharine
39
Today
It was only ten minutes after Illium went into the tunnel with the food that Aodhan saw a stirring in the trees. Movement, he warned.
The snow had fallen steadily in the interim, and had long erased any evidence of Illium’s passage. So it was on pristine white ground that the newcomer stepped, their head swiveling this way and that on a thin and small body as they ran toward the cavern.
Their hair was a river down their back that shone as white as the snow.
And their wings . . . they dragged on the cold earth, weak and twisted.
Then Aodhan saw that the angel below had no primary feathers.
Rage a hum in his cells, he said, Get ready, Illium. He began to drop down at the same instant, careful to do so in silence.
The runner had entered the tunnel by the time he landed. A scream sounded even as his boots touched the snow, followed by the sound of movement . . . then a relatively light body slammed against his chest.
Aodhan had the runner’s hands manacled behind their back before they could claw at him. “We mean you no harm,” he said in the tongue Lijuan had used most often. It was an older dialect, but all of Raphael’s people were fluent in it, for to know your enemy was the greatest advantage in battle.