Chapter 14 Mikhail #2
I would find him and unmake him. To act as if her filth disgusted him, yet take advantage of her lack of experience… She wasn’t even qualified to merge; she had no wings. She’d only been to Sanctuary once. It was revolting.
My thoughts coalesced into a spear of intent.
Gavriel and I needed soul stuff to repair the Great Gate.
Righteous’s light could keep it in good condition for at least another century.
Preying on this young, smut-covered Novice.
Maybe I would unpack the vessel in the back corner after all, get it ready to melt down a soul that truly needed it.
I cringed at my oddly murderous thoughts.
Maybe I’d just melt his wings, then.
“Is this Righteous your lover? Does he know how young you are?” My wings snapped out on both sides, throwing golden light around the room.
Her soft sound of awe had me turning back to her. Her dark, smutty lashes flared wide around those unbelievable green eyes, and her mouth formed a circle as she gaped at me. “Mikhail, your wings. They’re glorious.”
“Flattery,” I scoffed, folding them again, but slowly. She seemed to like looking at them. “Does he know you don’t even have your true name yet?” I stomped across the workshop, scooping up the naming bell with one hand.
Feather let out a snort. “Righteous? You’ve got to be kidding. I was talking about my bed.”
I stopped, my chest still heaving with repressed rage. “Your what?”
She ignored my question. “Ugh. Righteous would have to pull the stick out of his ash before I’d let him take a ride through my tunnel of love.”
“Your tunnel?” I stumbled on the bare floor, piecing together what that meant. “Your, um…”
She picked up the knife, cutting away a sliver of smut from her hand with every word. “Yeah, my vajayjay. My bajingo. My front bottom. My penis fly trap. My lady garden. My beef curtains. My—”
“Stop!” I pleaded. “Stop talking!”
She rolled her eyes. “Anyway. All those years on Earth with practically no action, and now I’m up in Heaven Lite. Apparently, I’m going to grow cobwebs on the old growler. I’ve gotta get merge-worthy.” Feather set down the knife, panting for breath. “A girl has needs, you know.”
My tongue was suddenly too large for my mouth. “Of course,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Ah, you may have... intimate needs, as you say. But you are not allowed to merge without first knowing your name. In fact, it’s not possible.”
Her eyes narrowed as she glared at me. “Did you just lie to me?”
I sucked in a breath. I hadn’t lied in full. Not precisely. “There is almost no way a merge would be satisfactory without a true name. It requires opening yourself up. Your name is your key.”
“The key to my love box, eh? Well, didn’t we learn it yesterday?” The corners of her mouth turned down slightly.
“That was not, apparently, that was not the, uh, your entire name,” I stammered.
“You’re kidding me.” She fiercely peeled the smut away from another fingernail. “I’m not just Useless Inutilia? I’m also, what, Hideously Ugly Inutilia? Dried Up Snatch Inutilia?”
“Let’s find out.” I held up the bell. Whatever I did, I had to get her to stop slinging semi-pornographic terms for her anatomy in my workshop.
This was a sacred space. Or it had been, until she walked in.
“What other names have you been called? Nicknames, names that felt… right somehow, when you heard them?”
We spent the next half hour, as Feather thought back to names she had been called, muttering words toward the bell when they came to mind while she worked.
“Little bitch? Waste of space? Brat? Burden? Trash? Wait, I was also called the worst decision someone ever made.” Her eyes cut to mine.
“Do I need to say them in the languages they used on Earth?” That seemed a very odd question. Had her family moved often?
“No, the meaning is what matters.” Though I felt sick, hearing the dozens and dozens of epithets she’d been called.
The bell never chimed when she spoke, but the truth in her memories echoed through the workshop.
I rasped out a question, although my throat felt like it had been cut by a thousand knives.
“Who called you that? The worst decision they ever made?”
“Hmmm.” She tapped her chin with a newly pink nail. “At least three of my mothers.”
“Your mother and… two others?” This didn’t make sense.
Feather laughed, nervously, I thought. “Oh, I must have meant my mom, right? People only have one biological mom, with the whole ‘one life’ thing. Mom singular, absolutely.”
There was something wrong and slightly deceptive about her stammering explanations, but I couldn’t get past the list of abusive names she’d recited in such a matter-of-fact tone.
I set the bell down, hands shaking. A gentle tremor rumbled through the floor, as if the whole of Sanctuary were as affected as I was by her revelations.
For over a century, Novices had been kept from places where they would be degraded and abused.
Their debut missions were carefully curated by the Guides, and they were placed in missions that would reinforce their innate goodness.
It was standard protocol, a gentle induction into the vital work Protectors were needed for.
I began to understand how this Novice might have come away from her first human mission so stained. She had been thrust into a life filled with relentless abuse, and lost somehow.
“Couldn’t a Protector just call me Feather while we merge?”
“No.” I relished the knowledge that here, in this realm, her innermost soul was at least safe from Righteous, or others like him.
“To merge fully, you must give your true name to another, and accept theirs. There’s no other way.
” She didn’t need to know about partial merges, the purely physical ones; she was far too young.
She squinted at me again. “That was close to a lie.”
Could she hear lies? That was not a skill Novices had. And only a very mature Protector would be able to hear the tone a lie carried in the voice of one of the High Angeli. I glared back, holding the bell up. “What other names have you been called?”
Feather grimaced. “Well, that jerk Righteous called me a new one in the Dining Hall. He called me—get this—a scrap.”
On the last word, the naming bell rang out, slightly muted.
“No farking way,” she breathed. “Am I for real named… Useless Scrap?” The bell rang, clear and pure, louder than it had the day before. “Useless Scrap,” Feather repeated, making the chime sound again.
My heart raced so fast, I felt dizzy. “Stop!” I held up a hand, afraid she would say it again. “I am sorry the search for your name is… what it is.” And if I had some part in making it that way, I would be more than sorry. “I’m sorry, Feather.”
She tilted her mucky head and stared for a moment before nodding.
Something settled in her gaze, as if she had seen and understood more than I’d meant to show.
“Thanks. I won’t say it makes a girl feel good, but it’s sort of par for the course for me.
” She shrugged, and set the knife to another finger, the smut curling away, leaving a stench of burned flesh, metal, and sour rot in the air. “At least now I can get laid.”
I sighed at her subdued tone. “It’s not that easy.”
“Of course not.” Feather let out a grunt of pain. “Of freaking course not. So what? I have three middle names?”
“When your full name is revealed, the chime rings like a thousand church bells.”
She sighed. “Fine. I know I have to get cleaner anyway. No one would want to merge with Useless Scrap McMuddy Britches anyway.” She smiled up at me, the tears streaking down her face causing her cheeks to glow slightly, a faint pulse of light that stayed.
As if the skin beneath pulsed brightly before it subsided to a paler glow.
“I think you’d be surprised,” I said without thinking.
“Your sort of courage and beauty is rare. You’re like a jewel buried deep in the rock, Feather.
Just give it time.” I reached out a hand and stroked one large, scarred finger over her cheek, then picked up her hand, marveling at how small and perfectly she was shaped.
Smaller than any Protector I’d ever created. A Useless Scrap.
Something flashed in my thoughts, a memory of something, of saying those words. I pushed it aside. There was no way, in all the thousands of years I had been forming and naming Protectors, that I would have done such harm, even unconsciously.
“Um, Maker.” Her soft, small voice drew me back. “I need my hand. It’s not going to clean itself.”
I dropped her hand and rushed to the opposite end of the workshop.
I spent the next few hours there, wondering at the strange feelings she had stirred up in me.
Worried at what it might mean for me to feel…
sympathy, I decided. Not attraction. Basic common decency required her story to touch me deeply.
Still, for her to elicit such a response, when I’d never before been emotionally affected by such things, concerned me.
Gavriel suspected she was a tool of the Abyss. How was it possible I could feel such an instant, deep attract—sympathy for such a filthy creature?
And why was it that, as she carved away at the smut she’d accumulated by committing what must have been grievous sins, it was all I could do to stop myself from returning to her side and throwing the bloody soul knife across the room?