Chapter 17 Feather #2
“I love your freckles.” I hadn’t realized the ones on her face were smut, in fact.
Sunny shrugged. “Well, normally I hate them, but tonight? I’m incognito!”
“Have fun, Incognito!” I called, as she gathered the dishes and walked to the door. “I wish I could be there to watch you merge. Even though, to be completely honest, it seems super perverted. Public merging, how crude.”
“Don’t knock it till you try it, Feather.” Sunny laughed. “Don’t wait up. I’ll be super late tonight. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”
“Carpe noctem, girlfriend!”
The evening stretched long and empty before me.
Rumple hadn’t shown back up to chat since that first time.
The gate still sang and screamed louder than ever.
And the one time I’d tried to sneak out and check on it, Sunny had woken up and caught me.
She’d warned me that someone like Valor was stationed there pretty much all the time now to keep watch.
I rolled around on my sheets, trying for sleep, imagining Sunny and her new lover, and all the other Protectors.
What did merging even look like? It couldn’t be actual sex.
Would quasi-angels really do that, all together in a group?
I’d seen an orgy once in Greece, centuries before.
Well, I’d had to stop a politician’s manservant from slipping poison into the wine jugs, and I’d spent most of the night trapped underneath his dying body in the wine cellar, so I’d really only heard an orgy.
It had sounded messy.
Would the Angeli show up? Gavriel was still away, as far as I knew, but would Mikhail stop by for a little bit of low-level hanky-panky?
The idea of that made me itchy, and slightly angry.
He couldn’t, right? It was like an Indiana Jones and the Ark of the Covenant thing.
Any Protector who stared into the pants of a High Angelus was burned up, according to Sunny.
But what if Sunny had been exaggerating? If everyone was going to The Merge, Mikhail would be there.
I sniffed. I was an everyone, too. A girl had needs, right?
And this girl needed to know more about merging.
And to make sure my Growly Bear didn’t accidentally laser some poor Protector’s private parts off.
Or that some sneaky jerk like Valor didn’t pull an “Oh no, I tripped and fell on his dick” move on my big, grumpy sweetheart.
That capped it. I was going to The Merge. I just needed a disguise.
I held up my mostly clean hands. If I cut up one of my sheets into cloth strips and wrapped up like a mummy, then made some sort of mask out of more cloth, maybe some pages of a book… that might work. I had been pretty good at origami two hundred years ago.
Jumping up, I ran to my chest of drawers, energized for the first time in days.
I was out of paper in my craft drawer, and I didn’t want to use my sketchpad…
Aha! I opened my tiny bedside table drawer where I’d seen a book someone had snuck in there, written in some angelic language I couldn’t read anyway.
I’d sacrifice a few pages for my mask, then go take a very quick, totally harmless peek at The Merge.
I’d do it for Mikhail’s sake. Just in case.
I grabbed my scissors and got to work.
Curiosity got the better of me on my way.
When I’d arrived in Sanctuary, every hallway had looked exactly the same, white and endless and marked only by a few depressions in the walls that indicated doorways.
The doors themselves were just slightly shinier bits of wall, no knobs or handles in sight.
After a few days, though, I’d realized the monotony had been partly caused by my blurry vision.
I’d had smut on my eyeballs. Now that I’d wept agony tears often enough, I could see more detail.
Angelic script at the tops of doorways, and arrows that were really faint, white-on-white.
Now that my hands were clean—or cleanish, at least—I was brave enough to press on a few of the doors and see what was inside. A few of them opened up to rooms filled with books or tables, but most wouldn’t open at all. High Angelic locks, I assumed.
What felt like ten minutes later, I’d taken enough turns down identical hallways that I realized I should have rubbed smut on the walls like I’d done before.
Or dropped breadcrumbs. Wait. I turned, looked behind me, and pumped my fist. A trail of tiny metallic flecks marked the hallway I’d just walked down. Glitter for the win!
But I still couldn’t find the club, and there weren’t any signs saying This way to The Merge. I was starting to think I should go check on my precious gate instead, but just then, I heard music. Not gate singing either.
Pounding, rhythmic, party music, coming from just ahead.
Two corners and one long corridor later, I was peeking inside a large door that I’d never seen before. It had a lot of writing around it. Maybe it was like one of those corkboards outside bars on Earth. Or Sanctuary’s version of Tinder profiles.
Flashes of colored light spilled through the seams in the door. I checked to make sure my mask was firmly in place, then pushed open the door and stepped inside the room.
Inside the rave.
“Holy shizz,” I breathed, taking it all in.
Every Protector in Sanctuary had to be there, and all the Guides as well.
There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all swaying and gyrating to gorgeous melodies woven around a solid, thumping bass beat that reverberated through the floor and up through my feet.
In the center of the enormous room, couples moved in perfect synchronization, facing each other, wrapped tightly in embraces that looked like they were one bass beat away from taking their vertical dancing horizontal.
Without meaning to, I started swaying as well, drifting along one of the walls to get closer to where I could see some of the single Protectors.
That seemed like a safe enough spot to watch from.
Peering through the crowd, I thought I saw Sunny dancing with another Protector, but it was hard to tell.
I saw a guy standing on his own about fifty feet away who I was almost certain was Righteous, wearing a mask that was pure white, though his robes were stained with dark gray.
Wow. Had my kiss left that much smut on him?
It almost seemed like there was more now than there had been before.
But he’d been bathing all the time, or so Sunny had said—how could he be accumulating more?
The Protectors around him were shying away as they drifted past, obviously worried they would be stained if they got too close.
One of them raised a hand to their mask. Did Righteous smell bad?
Wait, did I? I discreetly sniffed at my underarm. Sunny had mentioned that my funk had subsided, that sometimes she didn’t notice it at all. No one near me was reacting to it, so I figured I was safe. I tucked down the edges of the hood I’d made to go over my mucky hair, and moved into the crowd.
The moment I did, Righteous’s head snapped up, his eyes flashing bright as he glared around the room. Searching for something, probably a hookup. I tried not to react as his gaze swept across me and seemed to hesitate. I was safe, my mask in place.
“These are not the angel-droids you’re looking for,” I breathed super softly, moving with the music. I let out a breath as his gaze passed on.
I took a moment to look around, soaking in the amazing atmosphere.
For the first time since I’d arrived, I didn’t feel like I stood out.
The masks everyone had on really did disguise us, although Guides were easy to spot, with their golden flowing robes instead of the white togas.
Huh. No one really stood out, except for Righteous, because of his muck.
I had never realized how similar the Protectors’ bodies were—none of them were particularly thin or curvy, and all of them were almost exactly the same height.
“Hey!” A shout interrupted my thoughts.
The same height. Oh, crapsticks. I’d completely forgotten how short I was. And the person shouting was drawing attention to my corner of the room. I drew myself up onto tiptoes and tried to scoot toward the doorway.
“Stop that Novice!” the voice shouted again. Dangit. It was Righteous, and there was the promise of violence in his voice.
“Excuse me, pardon me.” I bumped into couple after couple, interrupting their sensual dances. “Sorry about that, don’t mean to be a mood killer.”
Righteous had almost reached me when I slipped between the legs of two particularly, uh, engaged Guides, and ran flat out for the door. I heard Righteous yell as he slipped, but knew better than to stop and look. I had to get out, and get hidden, fast.
My stumpy legs wouldn’t get me down the near-endless empty hallway and around a corner in time, so I took a chance, slapped one hand on a doorway and slipped through, not bothering to check if anyone was inside before closing it as quietly as I could behind me.
Crouching behind the door, I listened as running footsteps passed by and kept going.
Whew. For once, a lucky break. I straightened, hand out to push the door back open, when a chill ran up my spine.
Someone was behind me.
I whirled, my hands in what I imagined was a karate stance, to find a bed. No. I stepped closer. Not exactly a bed. It was more of a… “Oh shizz, I’ve seen this movie.”
At the Wright Children’s Home, they’d played the same ten cartoon films over and over.
My least favorite had been Snow White, because of the creepy dwarves who fell in love with a woman after she cleaned their disgusting house.
But Lily had loved it, so I’d watched it enough times to have every little weird trill of Snow’s songs down pat.