Archangel's Storm (Guild Hunter 5)

Amethyst. That’s what his mother always called her favorite color. Amethyst.

It had taken him a long time to say it right, and she’d always laughed in delight when he used the word, her shining black hair dancing in the sunshine.

The mat crackled under his feet, and he realized he’d moved, realized he was dragging the meat wearing the amethyst top to the other part that matched, that he was adding her arms and legs, the ripped and bloodied feathers of her silvery-white wings, his chest straining with the effort, the pieces too heavy for his small body. But he had to do it.

The sun hadn’t dried out the bits in the shade and hidden from direct light, and his hands became slippery with dark red once more. When her head slid out of his hands and thumped on the floor, he bit hard on his lip and picked it up again, stroking back the hair that had gotten in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mama.” He had his mother’s hair, her skin, her eyes, she always said so. But today her eyes weren’t right, weren’t smiling as they always did when they turned his way.

Finally settling her head where it should be on her body, he knelt down on the mat that always made crisscross patterns on his knees and said, “Wake up now.”

His mother was an immortal, just like him. Only four hundred and sixty-five years old, but that was old enough.

Angels lived forever.

That’s what his mother said the mortals said, but she said angels simply lived a very long time.

He shook her shoulders, her brown skin cold instead of glowing with warmth. “Wake up.” He tried not to remember what else his mother had said, but her words whispered into his mind, spoken in the lyrical language of the island where she’d been born and lived until she was taken to school in a place she called the Refuge.

“Angels can die. It is a difficult thing but not impossible. Especially for younger angels.”

Now he looked at the chunk of meat wearing the amethyst silk, and he knew what that hole in her chest meant. Her heart was gone, ripped out. Her stomach, too, had a hole. And her head . . . it hadn’t been too heavy for him to lift. Because there was a hole in it, too.

All his mother’s insides were gone.

An angel of her age and power could not reawaken without her insides, could not reform. Still he shook her, telling her to “Wake up, wake up, wake up!” Until he realized he was screaming, when he was supposed to never, ever scream.

Shutting himself up by biting down on his lip again until it bled, he patted his mother’s hair back into place and rose, putting one bloody hand on the doorknob to open it. Silence greeted him on the other side. He followed the trail of dried blood, determined to find his mother’s insides. If he put them back, she would wake up, he knew she would.

His wings dragged on the ground, streaking dirt and rust red along the shiny wooden floors, and he knew his mother would scold him. He was always supposed to keep them up, so his flight muscles would grow strong, but he was so tired and hungry. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he whispered again. “I promise I’ll do better tomorrow.” After she was awake.

Outside, the full might of the sun was blinding, the light reflecting off the white sands on the other side of his mother’s lush garden, the water an endless blue horizon. He blinked until the spots faded, and continued on his task. The trail of sun-hardened black brown went around the side of the house and to what had been the small shed where his father had built things, like the instruments their friends took away to sell at the Refuge place and the toys Jason used to love.

Before.

Smoke still rose from the collapsed remnants of his father’s work house, but the fire had devoured a good meal and was settling down to sleep, the fallen beams glowing with a final few embers. He knew he wasn’t supposed to go near fire, but he went anyway, pushing away still-warm pieces with his hands. When the embers burned his skin, singed his feathers, he shook off the hurt and carried on, kicking aside the ash and the lumps of charcoaled wood until he saw his father’s head.

It was rolling around on the floor, all bone, the eye holes empty. His father’s body—charred black bones—lay in another part of the small building, and Jason knew then that his father had burned up his mother’s insides as well as his own, that he’d cut off his own head using the chopping thing he’d built . . . would have cut off Jason’s if Jason had made a sound when his father called out for him after the screams stopped and the blood began to seep through the trapdoor.

39

But maybe his father had made a mistake, he thought suddenly, hope a bright star inside him, and his mother’s insides had survived?

He began to dig through the ash again, his skin burning, his face blackened by the dust. He dug, and he searched, and he left a trail of sticky red as his burnt skin peeled and his battered hands began to bleed. It was only when night fell that he realized there was nothing to be found.

His mother’s insides had been turned to ash.

“Only a very powerful immortal can rise from the ashes of flame.” Brown eyes shining with relief and concern both. “That’s why you must never play with fire, Jason. Even I cannot survive a fire should it reach my heart and mind, and you are a babe.”

Wings dragging under the half-moon, he walked out to the closest part of their lagoon, washed himself in the warm, shallow water. His mother didn’t like it when he came into the house dirty, so he washed and washed until all the blood and the dust was gone from his body, his raw and cut flesh stinging from the salt water. Carrying his dirty clothes, he left them on the porch where she always picked them up to wash. His wings were slick with water, so he opened and shook them off before going inside.

Mama always kissed his cheek and patted his wings dry with a soft cloth, but today, he had to do it himself. It was hard—his wings were bigger than his body, and he couldn’t reach every part.

“This way, Bumblebee.”

Listening to the memory, he spread the cloth on the floor and lay down on it like Mama and his father had once done, both of them laughing after a swim, their wings glistening in the sunlight as he circled delighted above them like “a big bumblebee.” That was a good memory, of the time before his father became a stranger who locked the bedroom door and made his mother make small, hurting sounds that twisted Jason up until he couldn’t breathe.

Dry, he put on clean clothes, and even though he wasn’t supposed to wear shoes inside the house, he thought it would be all right this time, because the floor was so dirty. Ready, he walked to the back door and out to where his mother kept things with which she worked in her garden. She’d like to be near her big yellow hibiscus flowers, he thought, beginning to dig. They were her favorites—when he brought her one, she always put it behind her ear, where it shone “brilliant as the sunrise against the black silk” of her hair.