23. Cat
Chapter twenty-three
Cat
C ould one become numb from pleasure? Yes. Yes, one could.
Sated and exhausted, I slept that night with my back tucked against Zariel’s chest, his hands possessively around my waist and wing draped over me. Even though I was naked, I didn’t need any blankets—he kept me more than warm enough. Instead, the familiar comforter of his bed was wrapped around us, creating a fluffy nest.
When I woke the next morning, it took me a second to remember who was next to me. And then I remembered what happened—what we did—right as the distinctive soreness made itself known. Smiling languidly, I nestled closer to him, focusing on everything about him that I could. The press of his body. His scent. The even cadence of his breath. The way his right arm folded around my lower back and how his wing was my shelter, as if protecting me from the outside world.
His eyes suddenly opened. “You’re awake.” His thumb traced along my jaw, making me close my eyes to focus on the sensation, having every bit of his attention on me.
“I don’t want to be. Waking means that it’s time to get up, and I want to stay here. You have to go to the library today, right?” Angels didn’t have to work every day, but their work schedules and hours weren’t consistent, and understanding the order was beyond me.
He sighed and nodded. “Yes. But I don’t have to do much today. We can be done early.”
“Good.”
“There will be many more nights like this last one, and just as many mornings,” he said, kissing my forehead.
I hummed in agreement, and my freshly opened eyes found his looking deep into mine.
“This wasn’t what I expected,” he said. My heart lurched until he continued, “They never explained the peace that comes with completing the mate bond. The contentment from having you next to me. Like everything is right . There’s no doubt that there is nowhere else I should be other than right here. It makes” —he swallowed—“it makes me grateful that the worlds shifted, or my heart may have gone forever without finding this, without finding you.”
“You told me angels have many potential mates. ”
“Yes. But it’s impossible that I’d be feeling this way with anyone else but you. I could end up not liking my mate, once I got to know them. It happens all the time. And I know I will not have that issue with you.”
“How are you sure you like me?” I half-teased.
“How could I not? We’ve spent hundreds of hours alone together. You’re kind, clever, and far too patient with me than for your own good—not many can listen to me go on about star colors, qualities, and theories for an entire morning.”
“Keep going.”
“Well, you’re also—”
I kissed him in answer. Whether what he said about me was true or not, or was merely the mate bond, I couldn’t say, and it didn’t affect that I was feeling how I did, which was that I couldn’t get enough of him. I wasn’t as good as him at putting things into words, but I understood what I felt—that with him, I was something better than I was before. Complete.
But dawn had arrived, and we had a task to accomplish—figuring out what the High Artist had planned could affect everything. Plus, Zariel had to work. My dissertation was no longer nearly as important as potential world destruction. If Princeton was annihilated, that would make completing my degree a bit more difficult.
Reluctantly, we left the bed, dressed, ate, and then went to the library. He didn’t have to ask for permission to carry me, nor did he offer for us to take the stairs. Instead, I opened my arms to him and he lifted me—understanding what I was offering, and flying me to the library in mere easy minutes. When we arrived at the upper levels, he gently set me down with a kiss on the top of my head, and then we were back to normal behavior, as if nothing had changed.
We spent a couple hours in our familiar routine so that Zariel could complete his assignments, and then we were on our way to where Cael hinted that we needed to go. No point in making the Artists suspicious that there was something going on by having Zariel miss work.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I whispered. We were in a part of the library I hadn’t seen before, though I had a feeling that was true of most of the library.
“Yes. If anyone asks, I’m finding you a book on elvish fashions.”
I raised an eyebrow. “… Do you want people to know you’re lying?”
He shrugged and smirked, his feathers rippling. “It would explain why we’re wandering, and those books have pictures, so no translation is necessary. And it would explain why we’re in this general area. And some women like dresses and fashion.”
“What? I like dresses just fine.”
“Then why the protest?”
“It’s just not … very academic of me.” I surveyed the endless rows of shelves before us. “Then again, maybe I should ex pand my interests.” Since entering the mountain, I’ve worn nothing but gauzy white, blues, and/or silver robes, and I often felt as if I’d fit right in on the top of a Christmas tree. Fashions of the other worlds did interest me. Maybe I should ask him to grab me one of those books. Thinking of elvish fashions helped distract me from the fact that we were seeking an unaltered text on ritual magic that would probably get us in trouble if someone discovered us looking for it.
“They’ll just have the text out in public?” I whispered as we passed rows that had guards methodically placed nearby. As I learned these last few weeks, they’d rotate through the library, scanning every inch of shelves and every visitor. Their dependable heads turned to watch us as we passed, but no one stopped us. Zariel’s back was straight, his hand holding mine, while we strolled through the rows, like he did know exactly where we were going.
“Yes. They will.”
“If this is something secret, surely they wouldn’t—”
“It’s a training text. Moving it to someplace protected would attract more notice than being out in the open,” Zariel answered, his voice barely above a breath. “They’d have to explain it to the archivists, the guards, the cleaners—far more people than they’d want if they were to remove the book, and there’s more than one copy here. This library is full of millions of illicit magics and secrets—until recently I had assumed we were intelligent enough to leave them purely to the realm of the mind. I like to study magical experimentation, not become the subject matter of such.”
“Cael didn’t seem to like the book.”
“That’s another point. We’ve all had enough of it during our studies, why would we want to see more of it, for something that was deemed hypothetical?”
I considered this. Alright, if it was part of a common textbook, one that students hated, it would make sense they’d just leave it out in the open. But would we find the book? I’d struggle to find a hot pink book with blinking lights and a glitter bomb in this place, much less a nondescript text.
Zariel suddenly stopped at one bookcase, crouched to his knees, and muttered under his breath, reading the edges of the shelves, which were etched with what I assumed was an angelic Dewey Decimal System. Now we were far away from the guards, far away from other occupants, and the absolute silence weighed over us, to the point that I could hear Zariel’s fingers rubbing over the books’ spines.
While we searched, I moved up and down the aisle, painfully aware that I was useless to him. Instead, I took in the hall, as no two places in the library were the same. At this moment we found ourselves in an area where the ceilings rose to around a dozen feet above Zariel’s head in a gentle curve, with carved arches decorating the sides and meeting in a peak in the center. The same ashen snow effect was on the stone as it was the rest of the library, surrounding us with a muted light that was amplified by the steady enclosed lamps. But there were a few things that were unique to this area, such as the open-mouth bust of an angel perched on a stone column. That was … quite the pose to be captured in for all eternity, unless it was meant to depict someone after their execution. From what I’d seen of angels, that was a possibility.
“There’s the mirror Cael mentioned,” Zariel suddenly said, gesturing behind me, towards the wall at the other end of the aisles. It was an artsy mirror, full length and adorned with pearls and silver wire.
I strolled back to Zariel, admiring the mirror that would have fit in at a bridal shop in Brooklyn. “That’s lovely, but hardly worth the trip here.”
“It was made by the rusalki,” Zariel said. “The mirror is said to show your fate.”
“That’s … ominous.”
“The rusalki are ominous. Their victims never leave their water. Even after death.” He paused. “The very water they live in is called the Fated Surface.”
“Damn.”
I wasn’t familiar with rusalki, which were basically bloodthirsty water nymphs from Slavic mythology, other than that they had caused a commotion when their swamp appeared in the Sonoran Desert just outside of Phoenix. Silv didn’t like them—they weren’t common near his home, but still, he tended not to like creatures that would be willing to eat him. And the rusalki apparently weren’t picky about what they had for dinner.
“Have you looked in it?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“And?”
“Nothing. I was here, as always.”
“Do you know anyone who has seen anything else?”
“I know some who claimed to. I’m skeptical of the whole thing, myself. I asked Cael and he had the same experience as me.”
“Oh.” I eyed the mirror. Should I look? What if it showed me something I didn’t want to see? Though, Zariel seemed to think that it was just a legend, and it seemed like he couldn’t be bothered to test the mirror further, not that he didn’t have lots of other things to distract him. It wouldn’t hurt if I looked, right? Zariel was digging through books on one of the shelves, still crouched cursing to himself. I’d be no help to him.
Slowly, I wandered to the mirror, stopping mere feet away. It did have an odd surface, like cloudy ice that seemed to move, despite it being glass. How did it end up here?
I looked at my reflection.
And I saw myself staring back at me.
That was it. Just me. In the library. With Zariel, still searching for the book.
For magical creatures, the rusalki seemed to have left the magic part as something to be desired. Though this mirror, the way the pearls wrapped around the wires, made me think of something else, something from the time Zariel and I spent outside last night, wrapped in each other.
“There’s a plant on the mountain,” I said quietly to Zariel once I made it back to him. “I only saw a couple, but they were large trees, with no leaves and small white berries. What are those?”
“Oh, those aren’t real.”
“What?”
“They’re not living trees. They’re landmarks that we placed here. Well, not me, but other angels. Most of them are to mark an entrance to the mountain, though I can’t say how accessible any of them are. Or where they even lead. We’re requested to leave the trees undisturbed when we fly around the mountain.”
A marker for entrances? Disguised as trees? And here, Zariel mentioned it as casually as if he was describing candlesticks. Though, he had a point. The trees were on the Ashen Mountain, and without Zariel’s help, there was no way I’d be able to make it to the trees without wishing for death, much less find an entrance.
“Found it,” Zariel whispered, sitting on the ground and splaying the text open on his lap. “I hate this book. I really, really hate this book.”
I crouched to join him. “I can see why.” The tome was filled with diagrams, scribbled notes, arrows—it looked like a scholar’s fever dream. “They never bothered to organize it?”
“This is organized,” he said, not looking up. “Magic tomes are … different.” He flipped through one page after another, searching for something. “This cannot be it,” Zariel said, finally focusing on a page. This particular section had large sigils similar to Zariel’s runes, with additional notes. “Maybe Cael forgot something, or has the wrong book.”
“What is it?”
“It’s … so you know how our runes are a binding, where it binds someone’s magic and essence to us?” I nodded. “Well,” Zariel continued, “this is another version of the same concept, but it’s basically on how to bond with the earth. No, more than the earth.”
“Universe?”
“Not quite. I’m sorry, but I need to focus to translate. I don’t know how long we have here, but I’ll tell you everything when I finish.” Zariel kept reading, turning whiter and whiter, as my heart beat faster and faster. What was he reading? What was so horrible that it was making his hands shake as he flipped the pages? Finally, he looked up at me, eyes wide, and said, “I think the High Artist is going to become a god.”