Having washed her hair, she tamed it into a neat knot at her nape while it was still wet and manageable, then slipped her feet into the provided slippers of white silk before opening the door. “Thank you for waiting.”
The vampire bowed again and turned to lead her onward. The corridors through which they walked were wide and, thanks to myriad windows, full of morning sunlight. Art lined the walls: fine pencil drawings and detailed paintings of parts of Lijuan’s territory intermingled with small but intricate tapestries. Flowers sat fragrant and lovely in large porcelain vases almost as tall as Andromeda.
“Oh.” She couldn’t help herself when she saw one particular vase. Touching her fingers to the masterwork by an angel long lost, she felt her heart weep. Lijuan had lived so long, seen so much beauty, been a patron of it . . . how had she become this twisted nightmare?
“Honored guest.”
Swallowing the sudden lump in her throat, Andromeda rejoined her escort.
The light-filled and gracious atmosphere of the citadel began to change in slow degrees the closer they got to the center. Darkness licked at the edges like a crawling beast, creating pools of shadow the leadlight lamps set into the walls seemed unable to penetrate. There was no longer any natural light. And the flowers . . . they were wrong.
Instinct told her they’d come from stock identical to the flowers she’d seen earlier, but a dark power had warped these blooms after they’d been picked, the same maleficent energy that made the hairs rise on Andromeda’s arms and on the back of her neck and that caused nausea to churn in her gut.
Girding her stomach, she took care that no part of her touched the shadows . . . at least until they grew so thick not even a child could’ve avoided them. Cold whispered over her feathers and her skin where the shadows found purchase, and it was a cold that made her think not of winter, but of the grave and of dead, decaying things.
She tried to tell herself it was just her imagination, but the mute courtiers she passed in the corridors, their faces pinched and skittering fear in their eyes as they walked rapidly in the opposite direction, argued otherwise.
“We are here, honored guest.” Her escort stopped in front of a set of large doors that had been opened outward. Two vampires stood guard, both dressed in dark gray combat uniforms embellished with a single stripe of red down the left side.
The same colors as those in Xi’s wings.
As Lijuan had used these colors since her ascension, it made Andromeda wonder if the archangel had paid a young Xi particular attention because of his patriotic coloring. Had Xi’s future been written the instant his wings settled into their final coloration?
If she survived this meeting, perhaps she’d ask Xi.
In front of her, the guards didn’t so much as appear to breathe. One was a square-jawed and blue-eyed blond, the other dark-eyed and black-haired, his features angular, but they’d clearly been tempered in the same merciless crucible, their eyes without pity.
Walking past the two and leaving her guide outside, Andromeda found herself in a cavernous space that contained only a single piece of furniture. It was a throne carved of jade, the shades within spanning the spectrum from creamy white to a green so dark it was near black. Set atop a dais reached by five wide steps, it was spotlighted by the gentle golden light of the standing lamps set behind it. The soft lighting brought up the warmth in the jade, made the carvings glow.
Drawn to what was surely a treasure beyond price, she glanced around but saw no one else. She couldn’t resist. Going up the steps, she didn’t touch but bent to closely examine the carvings. Eerie, haunting, and disturbing in equal measures, they made her fingers itch once again for a pencil and a paper so she could record what she was seeing.
“Astonishing, is it not?”