Elijah was visibly shocked. "I've never heard that of Lijuan."
"She was ancient when I was born, when you were born." And Elijah was over three thousand years older than Raphael.
"She's done many things which have been hidden in the mists of time."
"Then how do you know?"
Raphael simply looked at the other angel.
After a while, Elijah nodded. "It says little about our intelligence that we do not. What did she do with the children she took?"
"Some, she apparently raised as her mortal pets - kept alive so long as they amused her.
Others, she gave to her vampires as a source of food."
"That," Elijah said, "I cannot believe." His face was a mask of revulsion. "Children are not to be touched. It is our most sacred law."
Angelic births were rare, so rare. Each child was considered a gift, but - "Some among us believe it's only angelic children who matter."
Elijah's bones pushed up white against his skin. "Do you?"
"No." A pause, brutal honesty. "I've threatened mortal children to leash their parents."
But no matter the parents' transgressions, not once had he touched their young.
"I did the same in the first half of my existence," Elijah said. "Until I understood that the threat is only a step distant from the act."
"Yes." A year ago, while in the grip of the Quiet - a cold, inhumanly emotionless state caused by a specific use of his power - the darkness in Raphael had weighed up the life of a mortal child like so much grain. It was a stain on his soul, a crime for which he'd never seek forgiveness - because it was unforgiveable. But never again would he hold a child's life as ransom. "The one who discovered the atrocity committed by Lijuan," he said, wondering once more what he'd have become without Elena, "witnessed things that make a mockery of any doubt."
"I saw the bodies." Jason's voice strained to the breaking point, his tribal tattoo standing out vivid black against skin that was normally a healthy brown. "Tiny, shriveled things.
She keeps them as souvenirs."
"How are they still preserved?"
"After her vampires took their blood, killing them, she had them dried." Jason's dark eyes met his. "There are babies in that room, sire."
Even now, Raphael couldn't think of it without a feeling of profound abhorrence. There were some things you simply did not do. "Had Uram lived," he said, speaking of the archangel he'd killed the night he tasted ambrosia, the night he made a mortal his own,
"he may have been well on the road to Lijuan's evolution. He butchered an entire town, even the young in their cribs, for giving offense to one of his vampires."
"The angel who tried to break Noel" - Elijah's rage a thousand steel blades - "he's already on that road. We don't need another on the Cadre."
"No." Because once an angel held that position, the Cadre wouldn't step in - not so long as the angel in question limited his atrocities to his own territory, causing no problems on a global scale. No archangel would countenance interference within his or her sphere of power.
"Have you seen some of the girls Charisemnon's taken to his bed?"
"Too young." It was Venom who'd brought him that information, the vampire - with his skin that spoke of the Indian subcontinent - sliding smoothly into the desert heat of Charisemnon's territory. "But he straddles the line just enough that it remains an internal matter."
Charisemnon was careful not to take any girl under fifteen, his excuse being that he'd grown up in times where fifteen was considered more than old enough for marriage.
Except the girls he chose were always the ones who looked far, far younger than their chronological ages. There were enough immortals - and mortals - who agreed with Charisemnon that the archangel could indulge his perversions unchecked.
Elijah looked to Raphael. "Titus is saying Charisemnon took and abused a girl from his side of the border."
"I've been keeping an eye on the situation - it looks to develop into a border war."
"Titus might have his flaws, but on this I agree with him. If Charisemnon broke the territorial boundaries, he must pay - he'll not account for his crimes in any other court."
Raphael agreed. But even Charisemnon, for all his repellent ways, wasn't the threat coming inexorably closer. "I'm not certain Lijuan can be stopped."
"No." Elijah's mouth was a grim line. "Even if we combined our strength, I don't think we could end her life." He took a deep breath. "But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Perhaps she'll remain content to play with her reborn inside her court."
"Perhaps." And perhaps Lijuan would decide to unleash her armies, become the literal embodiment of the demigoddess she already was in her homeland. But this goddess would bring only death, her reborn feasting on the flesh of the living as she watched with smiling indulgence.
It was, Elena later thought, inevitable that she'd dream that night. She could feel the past pulling at her with hands dipped in blood. She fought, kicked out, but still they dragged her down that black corridor, down the curving path her father had laid stone by stone one hazy summer, and into the bright white kitchen her mother had kept spotless.
Marguerite was at the counter. "Bebe, why are you standing there? Come, I will make youchocolat. "
Elena felt her lower lip tremble, her feet hesitate. "Mama?"
"Of course, who else would it be?" A laugh, so familiar, so generous. "Shut the door before the cold gets in."