Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“It’s a plan,” he said when one of them suggested a proper gathering after another member of the wing returned from the Refuge. “I’ll bring the moonshine.” He rose up into the air to the raucous sound of their cheers.
After he’d handed Aodhan his food, the two of them flew to one of the massive bridges that spanned the Hudson, and took a seat on the top girders, where New Yorkers had become used to seeing the two of them. It was also far enough up that no one could stare at them in close proximity.
As for binoculars, neither of them was worried about that. Aodhan was so dazzling in this kind of light that he basically couldn’t be seen, and sitting close to him obliterated Illium’s image, too—though he didn’t much care if people looked.
They ate in quiet, basking in the sun, just watching the water and the cars.
No pressure to talk. No pressure to do anything.
No peace was as deep as the one he found with Adi. His best friend had always had the gift of quiet, could spend hours, even days, working on his art in silence. But until the kidnapping, Aodhan’s silence had welcomed Illium in—he’d never closed himself off even at his most intense. He’d look over now and then to where Illium sat polishing his weapons, or doing exercises to increase his strength, or reading lessons designed to take him from simple warrior to wing commander and beyond, smile, then go back to his work.
Illium, in turn, had never interrupted him except when he’d seen Aodhan work too long without fuel. Aodhan would take the food from him with an absent-minded glance, eat it without noticing what it was, and at some point much later, Illium would get a “Thanks. What did I just eat?” as his brain caught up to what his body had been doing.
It had always made Illium grin. “Jellied squid,” he’d say. “No, wait, I think it was crushed grasshopper sprinkled on a bed of pungent river moss.”
This…it felt like them again in a way Illium couldn’t explain to anyone else. He just knew that the long-locked door hadn’t only been unlocked, it was gone, destroyed from the inside out.
But tempting as it was to linger, they were both too invested in Giulia’s anguish, and the lust and obsession-driven murder of two young lovers. And Illium, he was viscerally focused on what this case meant to Aodhan. Would it dredge up memories better left forgotten? Would it cause harm or do good? There was no way to know until it happened; the only thing Illium could do was fly by his side.
That afternoon, it was to Tanika’s distraught family.
“All she wanted was a normal life,” her mother sobbed through her tears when they confirmed that the deaths were apt to have been murder, her ebony skin ashen. “A husband, couple of kids, a small place of their own. A nice apartment with a window box where she could plant flowers in the spring. She was a happy girl, our Tani, content with a normal life, not always searching for more.”
“Not like Marco.” Tanika’s father’s face was flushed red under the bluish paleness of his skin, his jaw working. “This thing, this evil? It came from him.”
His barrel of a chest heaved. “I got no problem with Giulia. She lost her boy, too. But he chose that life, chose to go into a world that isn’t for mortals. Chasing immortal life, chasing future things so far away that it don’t matter to no one now. He should’ve never taken my daughter into that world with him.”
“She had her own mind, Stavros.” His wife’s chiding was soft, the hand she curled around his bunched biceps gentle. “When was the last time she asked your approval on a boy, hmm?”
Stavros closed his palm over her fingers, the back of his hand nicked and scarred by life. “I told her, didn’t I? That she shouldn’t date a vampire, that it would all end in tears? Why didn’t she listen, Norma?” A roar of anger…but below the surface rage was a shivering pain that was tears contained in amber. “She was so small when I held her after she was born. Remember?”
“I remember. That funny smile they told us was gas, but she was always smiley, wasn’t she?”
Stavros’s nod was jagged, his hand tight on his wife’s.
Unlike many Illium had met over the years, these two had been glued tighter by their loss. But though they had love aplenty for their child, they had nothing to give Aodhan and Illium when it came to their daughter’s murder—just their certainty that the trouble had come from Marco.
“She was a good girl,” her mother said. “A bit too ‘head in the clouds,’ as her nonna used to say, but it just made her all the more fun to be with. She was never into anything dangerous—her favorite thing was to go to those fairs where they dress up like in medieval times.”