Their only weapon against Lijuan’s poison had failed.

47

Raphael was called into a Cadre meeting only three hours later.

Elena woke when he stirred, accompanied him down to the meeting space after pulling on some sweats. Raphael, in contrast, wore his warrior leathers—conversations with the Cadre were never simple things, especially now. The man who’d held her tucked against his bare chest, his wing her blanket, had to give way to an archangel ready for war.

Neha was streaming live from the border with China. Bright sunlight glimmered off the roofs closest to the border . . . on Lijuan’s side.

The fog was retreating.

“It’s happening all around the territory,” Neha said, her voice clipped and precise. “Lady Caliane, Michaela, Alexander, and I have had our squadrons running patrols near the border regions and they all report the same thing. The fog has begun to withdraw toward the center.”

The image on the screen changed as the feed switched to a drone flying directly over a section now clear of fog. It showed the edges of a small village.

“A typical border village,” Neha told them. “Mostly the homes of off-duty soldiers. Lijuan and I never displayed enmity toward one another, but it’d be foolish of us not to have soldiers positioned along our borders.”

Raphael, do you have soldiers along the border with Elijah?

Yes. As he has his on the other side.

Sometimes, she forgot how many layers there were to the relationships between archangels. Friendship, when it came, was a long and complicated process.

“The homes are empty,” Neha continued as the drone scanned the eerily motionless area; not even a tumbleweed blew in the wind. “She must’ve recalled her soldiers to a central location. Unexpected since she knows I have a strong force of my own, but as I said, Lijuan and I have never gone to war.”

Michaela broke in, her voice sharp. “Where are the wives, husbands, lovers, children, servants, pets? This was not a garrison. It was home.”

Elena’s skin chilled. She stared again at the scene unfolding in front of them. Absolute and utter stillness. A village utterly abandoned. No sense of life at all.

“It’s possible she called entire families back to a base command,” Titus said, his voice far more somber and quiet than was Titus’s normal.

“Possible, but unlikely.” Charisemnon curled his lip. “She was my ally, but I do not wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to her. Lijuan wouldn’t care about pets and mortal servants. They should be present.”

“We need more information.” Elijah sounded like the general he’d once been. “An abandoned border village can be explained as a strategic retreat. The animals could’ve run away disoriented during the fog.”

“Eli is right.” Raphael’s tone was calm, measured . . . but wildfire arced across his fingers out of sight of the screen. “Is it possible to switch views?”

“Yes,” Neha confirmed. “However, the border views all show the same thing. We will have to wait until the fog retreats farther inland.”

No one spoke in the interim.

The first person to appear in the footage did so on a square rooftop like the ones Elena had seen in India while on a hunt. She’d slept on a roof like that herself during the heat of summer and for a second, she thought they’d intruded on a poor schmuck who was trying to get some shut-eye under the weird fog night. Though it had to be freezing up there—roof sleeping wasn’t a winter activity and the fog must’ve caused temperatures to drop even further.

Then the drone flew closer.

Her stomach lurched.

The man who lay under the thin sheet was a husk. His skin was dark brown parchment over wide cheekbones and hollow cheeks, his eye sockets sunken black shells, his hair strands of dried-out grass that would blow away in the next wind.

The fog continued to retreat.

The bodies came faster now. Fallen in the streets, more lying on rooftops, several just sitting under a tree. People who had no horror on their faces. People who’d simply been going about their lives when a dark goddess sucked that life out of them.

Elena caught the edge of what looked to be a homemade children’s playground created from bamboo stakes and ropes and old tire swings. She wanted to look away, her gorge rising, but forced herself to stand in place. She would bear witness. She would remember.

There were no bodies. None.

A cold wind across her skin. Raphael, where are the children? They hadn’t seen a single living or dead child.

I fear the answer, Guild Hunter.

So did Elena, the claw of fear a vicious grip around her heart.

The fog stopped retreating.

They waited for ten minutes, but the barrier had settled at a new point and there it remained. Neha’s drone pilots began to explore the exposed areas in more depth: mummified bodies inside the homes, both human and animal, everything desiccated. Plants, food, even a large spider that hung in the corner of one house.

Neha directed one of the drone operators to use the drone to touch the shriveled corpse of what might’ve been a cat. It collapsed into dust at first contact.

“Abandon that device in Lijuan’s territory once we’re done,” Neha commanded. “In fact, land all the devices on Lijuan’s side of the border. We will fly them again from that point. If their energy fails, we will send out new devices. I do not wish anything from that territory to come into mine.”

Elena didn’t blame the Archangel of India. She had no idea how Neha had managed to stay so cool-eyed and rational. Having that nightmare at your border had to be fucking terrifying. At least Michaela was buffered by a massive expanse of relatively uninhabited territory in Mongolia—in the last balancing of territories, the country had been split between Lijuan and Michaela, and the residents had mostly moved either into China or into Russia.

Alexander also shared a massive border with China, but his people, too, tended to live more inward from the border, for much the same reason. Better to be closer to your archangel and distant from a neighboring one seemed to be the thinking. Neha alone had a border with China that was inhabited—likely as a result of the long-term friendly relationship between the two archangels.

The population there wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t miniscule, either.

“She’s feeding again.” Raphael’s voice, cold and remote in a way that raised the tiny hairs on her nape . . . but the wildfire, it continued to dance over his fingers. “And, given the depth of land exposed by the retreating fog, she is already monstrous in her power.”

Thousands of people, Elena realized, Lijuan had already fed from thousands. Maybe tens of thousands if some of the other border areas had been more heavily populated. Ports, she thought suddenly, China’s oceanic borders were home to thriving port cities . . . so much life, so much fuel for Lijuan.

Horror was an acidic taste on her tongue. Raphael, she only fed on a few people when in New York and she was nearly unbeatable. It was stating the obvious but she had to state it, had to get the horror out of her head.

At least we have warning. He held out his hand, an act he never did when speaking to the Cadre.

Wildfire arced between them as she slid her hand into his, and it was cold, so cold. She tightened her grip, set her jaw, and accepted it. Accepted him. Raphael sucked in a small breath at the same time. His skin warmed, his wing brushing across the lightning storm of her own.

On another screen, she saw Elijah turn to drop a kiss on Hannah’s black curls as she, too, came to stand next to her archangel. Unlike Elena’s hand-combed locks and old Guild sweatshirt, Hannah wore an elegant green-striped blue gown and her hair was braided in a complicated and lovely pattern twined with thick golden threads.

Dismay was a heavy darkness on the face of the only other—living—consort in the Cadre. That was when it struck her: Is the Hummingbird Aegaeon’s consort?

No. Raphael’s grip grew stronger, his voice a whip. The arrogant fool never understood the treasure he’d been offered.

“Lady Caliane?”

Caliane nodded at Neha’s query. “Tasha’s squadron is on the deck of a ship I ordered moved near a port border and their drone machines are about to reach land. Ah, to be young and to quickly comprehend a new world.” A turn of her head. “Avi, we wish to see through the eyes of the machines.”

The feed cut into static before it switched to an oceanside view. Water lapping against a shore, ships raised up on blocks in a nearby yard, in the process of repair. Nets crumpled on the sand. Baskets piled up on a dock where a small-time fisherman might pick them up to throw back onto a boat.

A view shift to a different drone. Elena clenched her gut. What they’d just seen had been nothing but the tiniest edge of a huge port. Hundreds of containers sat ready to be loaded onto massive ships that sat waiting in the deep water against which the port had been constructed. Large fishing trawlers sat alongside the container ships. Cranes arched overhead, all of them motionless and silent in the sunlight.

No forklifts or other vehicles moved in the container area, industrious ants going about their business. Day or night, no major port was ever this quiet. Someone was always coming in or shipping out.

The drone pilot flew deeper into the city.

The only sounds picked up by the drone’s systems were the lap of the waves and a dull banging that sounded as if a loose piece of wood was whacking up against the metal side of a ship.

The drone zeroed in on a large warehouse emblazoned with Chinese characters. It had huge openings on either side where roller doors had been pulled up.

It is the fish market such as on our own port, Raphael translated silently for her.

The noisy, busy place where restauranteurs and shopkeepers came early in the day to bid on fish auctions and haggle over the freshest catch. Of course, a few other locals always wandered in, too—you could often get the “leftovers” for trade prices.

The drone flew inside the market.

Bodies lay everywhere. Behind the large display counters full of a mix of rotting and desiccated fish, in the wide aisles, near pallets stacked with boxes ready for the refrigerated trucks that had to be waiting out back, under a massive central scale the market must’ve used for its showier auctions.