Chapter 22
Mikhail
Ihad never been particularly envious of humans.
I’d spent decades walking among them, though not nearly as long as most inhabitants of Sanctuary, since my work kept me sequestered in the Maker Hall almost around the clock.
The one thing I had wished I could experience, though, was to be the sort of creator a human parent was.
To not only supply the base material for a new being, in harmony with a mother, but also to nurture, guide, and protect a child as they did.
I’d considered myself the most fortunate of all the High Angeli to be chosen to craft new Novices, which came as close to being a father as one could.
And when the Well had been sealed, and I’d delved into my own flesh to form the final generations of Protectors, I’d entertained myself with the thought that this was more like biological, human fatherhood—providing even the material itself for each child.
I stared down at the smudged angelic sigil on the heel of this strange, demonic baby, and wracked my brain for an answer as to how it had appeared there. It was my handwriting; I recognized it. And I knew my mark… but this one had been changed.
I ran my finger down the curled lines, tracing each one, reading the infinitesimally small angelic instructions there.
The marks I inscribed on each heel of the Novices I created took years to perfect.
Every facet of their nature had to be pondered, weighed, and included in the mark.
A Novice’s personality and behavior was shaped by the carving of each trait and their name and, at the very end of the laborious process of creating them, by the one ingredient I had never shared with anyone, except my former Apprentice Azazel: their naming song.
The secret of that, that the mark was truly formed by the combination of the name, mingled with notes of an ancient, secret melody passed on from one Maker to the next, hummed into the ear of the first Maker by the Mother of All Herself…
I had been careful never to allow anyone, not even Feather, to overhear that song.
As I traced the marks, I pondered what I was seeing. Could this change have been effected on Earth? I knew Novices’ first mortal lives had some influence on their final attitude and disposition. But nothing like this.
What if the material I’d drawn from myself to create those final cohorts was somehow changeable, mutable?
I’d had a feeling the Novices I’d been sculpting the past few centuries were different somehow.
Made of my own flesh, and marked by my hand, they felt…
dearer to me than those I’d drawn from the Well.
Possibly because they were more mine, in a way.
Or possibly because they were made of a less pure material.
This one, though, wasn’t just my creation. Someone else—and I had a very strong feeling I knew exactly who else, though I had no idea how she’d managed it—had a hand in its formation.
The toddler squirmed around in my arms, looked up into my face, and repeated the one thing I’d never expected to hear. “Dada!” The babbled word held a ring of truth so plain, I didn’t need a naming chime to know it was true.
I’m her father.
I came back to my senses when I realized Gavriel was shouting my name, and the baby was crawling over me, sucking on my nose. “Who are you, little one?” I cooed, pulling her off, and wiping the sticky mess from my face with one arm. “What’s your name?”
“Mik, are you hurt?” Gavriel held his soul knife up, as if he might cut the baby out of my arms. I hissed at him, and folded my wings around us both.
“I’m fine. I’m confused. But not injured. The children in the other room, however…”
Gavriel lowered the knife, his eyes narrowed on my child, and I struggled not to hiss at him again. “I will get help for them,” he said slowly, “and come back for you and… it.”
“Her,” I corrected. “She is my daughter.” Gav’s eyes bulged, and his face turned a strange shade of golden-red, before he turned away and stalked out of the room.
I looked down at the tiny, corrupted Novice on my lap, who was chewing at the edges of my robe like a puppy with a bone. “Are you hungry?”
She blinked up at me, and I realized why Gavriel had stared for so long into her eyes. There were swirling galaxies, stars and emptiness, endless possibilities crashing into each other, in those small orbs. She stuffed more of my robe into her mouth.
“Daddy’s pretty girl needs a snack, eh?” I made kissy faces at her, then grunted like a pig. She gurgled a laugh, screwed up her face in concentration, and in an instant, held two more marshmallows on her palm. She stuffed one in her mouth, handing me the other.
I took it carefully, sniffing it before biting down.
It was delicious, more so than the food in Sanctuary.
“You made this yourself?” What had she used to create it?
What form of energy… My eyes fell on the dead men.
I blinked, reading the currents of the balance there.
It had to be impossible; I couldn’t be sure until I witnessed it.
But there was no deepening of shadow here, not even with their recent deaths. Had she changed their smut into… sugar?
I laughed at myself for even thinking it, watching as the little thing made a new marshmallow appear.
“What a clever little angel.” She frowned at the word angel, and I stopped.
“Clever little demon?” She burbled something that sounded like a mixture of angelic and demonic gibberish, and chewed her marshmallow some more.
I chewed alongside her, thinking. When Gav returned, he stared down at us.
I was sure my stubble was almost as covered in stickiness as the girl’s face, and the smut she wore as a thick coat over her skin—or it might have been her skin, for all I could tell—had rubbed off on my robe so thoroughly, I probably appeared to have been dragged around a racetrack a few times.
“Mik,” he said once he could get his jaw to shut. “It’s a demon.”
“As far as I can tell,” I hedged, “it has both demonic and angelic qualities.”
“It’s a murderer,” he stated baldly, waving a hand at the still-smoldering pile of corpses.
“And we need to go. The police are coming. They’ll find this…
mess. We need to be gone when they arrive.
” I ignored him; we could both be invisible if we chose to be.
Of course, maybe this little one couldn’t do that.
I stood, holding her on my hip, unsurprised when she pulled one of my blades from the shoulder harness and started gnawing on the bone handle.
I quickly wrapped a bit of my robe around the blade’s edge to keep her from cutting herself.
Gav leaped into the air, winging his way to a city park, and I followed, enjoying the slight weight on my side, and the awed babbling as the little one flew higher than she probably had before.
“Is it one of yours, Mik?” Gavriel asked when we’d landed in a secluded, grassy plain. There were no humans around for at least two miles, so I relaxed.
“It is. One of my newest Novices. Made from my own flesh, but changed. Altered somehow.”
Gav’s face went pale. “Do you think the Abyss has altered the other Novices in the last group you sent as well? If this is one of those four....”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so. We should check before we go back to Sanctuary.”
Gav nodded, and only groaned softly when I insisted on picking up supplies for the child at a human store.
The pacifiers melted in her mouth almost instantly, though, and she cried as she tried to scrape the rubber off her tongue.
So I wrapped my knife more securely and let her suck on the handle as we flew to visit the other three Novices.
Gavriel had their missions memorized, as he’d chosen them specifically for that group.
We flew all day, from the United States to South Africa, then New Zealand, and finally to a village on the border of what was called Afghanistan and Pakistan in this century.
None of the other Novices noted our presence. They were still unawakened, living their human lives before the memory of their purposes would bloom and they would be called on to perform their tasks.
Finally, Gavriel’s shoulders slumped. “Thank the Maker of All,” he murmured. “It’s only that one we’ll have to destroy.”
“Destroy?” I repeated, backing away from him, and rocking the now-sleeping toddler in my arms. “We’re not destroying her. She’s a living soul.”
He sputtered for a moment, then glared at me.
“She’s the embodiment of evil. Philanthropy reported she’s killed dozens, maybe hundreds of humans in the United States.
Who knows what horrific acts she’ll perform once she—once it—is grown?
It can’t be left on its own!” It sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.
“She won’t be,” I said, setting my feet and holding her tighter, in case he got the wrong idea that I would hand her over. “I’ll take care of her.”
His jaw opened and shut a few times, and I wondered if I’d somehow broken him. Finally, he wheezed, “Mikhail. Friend. It’s not a pet. You can’t… keep it.”
“Her,” I corrected. “And what would you have me do? I am a Maker, not a Destroyer. I made this soul, and how she became what she is now is a mystery. I will care for her, discover what befell her”—though I already had a suspicion, and the longer I was around this one, staring at the glitter that was my greatest clue, the more I knew I was correct—“and I will return her to her perfect, pure state.” He didn’t say anything.
I sighed. “Let me try. It’s not as if I can make more Novices, Gav.
Unless you want me to cut myself into ribbons—”
“I never wanted that to begin with!” he protested, throwing his hands up.