Chapter 22 #2
I waited until he quieted, then said, “I have no mission, Gav. No purpose. I’m a Maker with no material left to create.
And this small being… She is mine—I feel it in my bones.
She is not just my creation. She is my daughter.
” A tear fell down my cheek and splashed on the forehead of the sleeping baby, who woke, blinking furiously.
I wiped the wet place on her skin, and the fingers that I used came away coated with smut.
I squinted, but couldn’t tell whether the tear had made a difference in her coloration at all.
She grinned up at me, two small white nubs poking out of her pink gums. “Dada,” she said softly.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Dada.” She squirmed out of my arms and began playing on the grass, stuffing everything she discovered into her mouth as she explored.
Gavriel paced, thinking so loud I could almost hear him—though he’d been careful not to communicate with me mentally that often since we came to Earth. He was hiding something.
The small demon was playing with some bugs she had found, so I focused my attention on my friend. “What’s going on, Gav? Not with the baby. With you. What’s really wrong?”
He stopped, but refused to look at me. Finally, he spoke.
“I’m failing. In my leadership of Sanctuary.
In my personal life. I almost destroyed your…
your mate.” A flash of pain crossed his face when he said that, and I understood on a bone-deep level what he wasn’t saying.
This wasn’t just sorrow or shame at hurting me.
Something in Gavriel was mourning… Feather?
It couldn’t be. He didn’t even like her. He’d been nothing but cruel.
“I don’t understand. You’ve been faithful to Arabella for all these years,” I said softly.
“Do you regret that choice? Do you resent her… or me, for my failure in her creation?” He didn’t answer, but his face went stony as it did when he was trying to camouflage his inner turmoil.
For all that Gav was meant to be the calmest, most controlled being in Sanctuary, the waves that rocked his soul were tsunamis of emotion.
“No,” he replied at last. “I don’t blame you, Mik.” He clenched his jaw. “I am envious of you. I see what you have with Feather, and I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”
I rocked back on my heels. Envy was the kind of taint that grew insidiously on the soul of an Angelus.
Unlike the more overt forms of evil that showed up early on the physical form and were easily excised, Gavriel was admitting to a stain that was far more dangerous.
“Gav. You’ve been around hundreds of mated Protectors.
Have you felt this way about them? Envied their love? ”
“Not like this.” He hung his head, arms wrapped tight around his chest like he was trying to hold himself together physically.
“At first, I was… tormented by any happiness. I left Sanctuary for so long. I stopped singing, teaching, interacting with the other Protectors. I stopped having friends, besides you.”
“I deserted you, when I retreated in my own shame to the Maker Hall, to work,” I admitted, striding over to him. I pulled him into my arms, embracing him. “I knew you were as alone as I was. With our closest friends gone to the gate, or ascended.”
My mind skipped back to the centuries when Gav and I had first grown close.
We’d spent every moment I wasn’t required in the Maker Hall singing together, and with Rafe.
Or getting up to mischief. Gav’s mentor, Haneul—who I’d had a crush on for longer than I’d like to admit—and mine, the old Maker, had been good friends, and encouraged the bond.
As leader of Sanctuary, Rafe had been far older than either of us, but his playful spirit had made him seem eternally youthful.
He’d always made time for us, for our relationship.
Rafe would have been ashamed at how I’d failed our friend in his darkest hour. “Please forgive me, Gav. I should have flown the skies of Earth with you, wept alongside you. Instead, I stewed in my own grief.”
“Your grief was real,” he rasped. “You mourned the soulmate you thought you would never have.”
I held him for a long moment, wondering how to fix this. If there were some way I could help Gavriel complete his soul, I would do it. I would sacrifice almost anything.
“If I had a mate like Feather, I wouldn’t know what to do with her anyway.
I ruin everything I touch. Sanctuary is falling apart.
Demons are loose on Earth. The Guides are intolerable.
They keep insisting on upholding the oldest traditions, the worst laws that Seraphiel worked to change long ago.
They don’t respect me. I don’t deserve respect,” Gav said, pulling away.
I didn’t let him go entirely, keeping a firm grip on one forearm.
He seemed so unbalanced right now, I wondered what currents had caught his soul.
“Be calm, brother,” I murmured, and hummed a snippet of a healing song.
He closed his eyes, swaying as I sang, though his lips formed a word I knew. A name.
Feather.
The close guard he had on his mind slipped as I sang, and I saw snatches of memories, thoughts, that revealed feelings I did not know how to justify with his behavior toward her.
Why was my mate’s face in the forefront of my best friend’s thoughts like this?
Why was it her green, sparkling eyes that reflected on the gold of the walls of his mind?
Her laughter that spilled down the quiet pathways of thought?
His fingers moved hesitantly toward the feather she had pressed into my arm, though I didn’t think he meant to do such a thing. One simply didn’t touch the mating feather of another High Angelus.
But I allowed it, my mind whirling while he stared into the middle distance, unspeaking.
When his hand rested on the feather, something changed in his face.
A lightness I had not seen in hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years, overtook his visage.
The corners of his lips turned up as he remembered his joy at the mating of some of the older Protectors, and how he’d been able to celebrate with them for a while.
His fingers didn’t move on the feather, but I could almost feel the flow of something…
Strength? Compassion? A feather-light brush of something devastatingly important, rushing back and forth from the feather to Gavriel.
He wasn’t causing it; I examined his thoughts as I sang, and though there was a thick, cloying undercurrent of shame for his unspoken desire for her, he had no intention of acting on it.
And I wouldn’t mention it either. There was nothing to be done about his feelings. And I could understand them—my mate was perfect in every way that mattered. I would wonder at any Angelus who didn’t gaze upon her with some fascination.
What frightened me, confused me, was the connection Gavriel seemed to have to my mate. When had that formed?
My mind hummed with dark suspicions and fears.
When I finally shook free of the twisted paths I’d traveled down, and stepped away from his grasp, he was saying something about the demon child again.
“We can’t take her into Sanctuary, Mik. That much smut will harm the realm’s balance. And there’s no place to contain her.”
“The cells in the lower level?”
He hummed. “I’m not sure. Prosperity said they were using them for some purpose, I can’t recall what.”
“Wait,” I said, looking around. Where had the baby crawled off to? I saw a trail of marshmallow sludge and took a few steps in that direction.
“This can’t wait,” he protested, pulling me around. “You must see we need to destroy her—destroy it—and return to Sanctuary. We’ve been gone too long as it is.”
“We will do no such thing!”
Gavriel bristled. “I am the leader of Sanctuary, and it is my decision to make.”
“Go ahead,” I replied, my fists tight at my sides, though I was one more word away from punching him in the mouth. “Do your worst, leader of Sanctuary. Destroy an innocent baby. You are right, though. You should know that.”
His eyes snapped to mine. “What do you mean?”
“If you do this, if you order me to go against what my soul knows is true—if you become the murderer here, then you are right. You are not worthy to be the leader of Sanctuary. And not worthy of my respect.”
He stood gaping at me. Then, after a long moment, he shook his head and turned away, the soul knife in his hand again, though his grip on it seemed unsteady. “Well,” he said after a minute. “Where is the damned thing?”
I laughed so hard, the clouds overhead thundered. “A perfect devil indeed. Good luck finding her. I won’t help you.”
He cursed, a smudge appearing next to his nose, and flew off to find her.
And though I missed Feather, I spent the next week making sure he didn’t succeed.