Chapter 31 Gavriel #2
I loved Sanctuary, and wanted to protect it…
and yet I wasn’t certain I would ever have agreed to take on the smut of the entire realm to do that.
I loved Arabella, but not nearly enough to sacrifice myself.
I stared at Feather, wondering how it could be that this creature would be so much better at loving than the leader of Sanctuary?
Who was she?
Suddenly, something vast moved through me. A presence that was familiar, and terrifying, and comforting. For a split second, it felt like someone was paging through my mind. Flickering through my thoughts, every moment of my existence. Reading the story of my life.
And then giving a loving, disappointed sigh.
It felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. As if I’d been judged and found wanting by the only being who would ever matter. Give me the chance to try again, I begged. Once more. Just once, to get it right. To do better.
I didn’t have time to ponder the odd sensation when time sped up again, so fast it was disorienting for a moment. My foot hit the ground, and I raced toward the stage.
Mikhail yelled beside me and pounded forward, half flying, half running.
On the podium, Valor lunged at Feather, but stabbed the baby instead. A great metallic clanging shook the Hall. Then, somehow, the baby had the sharp end of the blade in her tiny grip, until it slipped from between her fingers, falling to the floor.
Feather turned her back on Valor, hugging Precious close to her chest, her ineffectual wings folded around them both, protecting the little one. An unholy rage in his eyes, Valor reached out with both hands as if to tear Feather’s wings from her back.
I ran, drawing a breath to halt his actions, to order him to stand down. But even before I could speak, before Mikhail or I could reach the stage, Sunny dropped to a crouch. She grasped, then straightened. Shining as bright as any Angelus ever had, she lifted a hand that was no longer empty.
The soul knife lay in her palm, her fingers curled around the grip like it was an old friend. Her eyes hardened, her arm extended. And then, in one swift, smooth movement, she stabbed Valor through the heart. A killing strike.
Valor made a muffled sound of confusion, crumpled on the podium, and after one breath, went still.
His energy buckled in on itself, vanishing like a spark going out.
As I watched, the particles that had formed his body began to unbind, flowing into the fabric of Sanctuary itself, until Valor was no more.
We all stopped. The world stopped, though time was moving at a normal pace.
Sunny wailed, as the pain of what she had done, the murder she had committed, crashed down on her.
The room itself seemed to hum with shock, the floor vibrating with echoes of the blow.
Sunny’s shine flickered, dimmed, and went out.
She was, for a moment, as shadowed as any soul destined for the Abyss.
But then Feather set the baby down and was there, embracing her friend, laughing at something. Speaking, and then doing what Feather always did. What she’d told me she felt compelled to do, no matter the cost to her.
She protected.
I watched as almost all the smut from Sunny’s choice, Valor’s murder, fell not on the one who had committed the act, but on the tiny, already-overtaxed High Angelus.
It looked like a skyscraper made only of shadows collapsing and folding into one small space.
But Feather didn’t budge. She didn’t even move.
As she held Sunny, tears streaking down both their faces, she did something else completely unexpected.
And yet totally in character. She sang. Her liquid, lyrical voice was heartbreakingly beautiful, and the song was one of Rafe’s.
A healing song. The whole Hall stilled again, listening.
Sunny stopped weeping. And to my great surprise, an old, painful wound began to close in my heart as tears seared my cheeks.
Maybe she was right. Maybe Rafe was alive in the Abyss, and not yet twisted beyond redemption. If he’d taught her this song, given her this powerful weapon, then possibly he could still be rescued. I could save him.
While Feather sang, the shadows continued to fall on her, and she flinched under every new weight, her voice wobbling with each blow. When the song trailed off, the room began to grow lighter, as if an invisible sun were coming out.
To my surprise—though I needed to stop feeling that around her, it was a useless reaction—Feather rose, popped her neck, and wiped her hands on her repulsively dirty toga.
The Hall was utterly silent, with all eyes on her.
“Motherfudger!” she yelled, looking down at herself, then at Mikhail, who had at last reached her side.
She was every bit as smut-covered as she ever had been.
“Now I gotta start all over again!” Her hands flew to her head, and she wrapped her fingers around the horns that had formed.
Then she yelped, and inexplicably cried out, “Clit horns? What the actual fudge?”
Mikhail moved to embrace her even with all the smut on her, but someone else got there first. “My love,” Righteous rasped.
Perception had been untying him while Feather sang, and now Ry gathered her into his arms and laid the sloppiest, most intimate kiss I had ever witnessed, right on her filth-covered mouth.
I blinked in disbelief. He… dared? And she was letting him, was returning his ridiculously artless kiss? I blinked again, noting her small, filth-encrusted hands rhythmically squeezing the cheeks of his robe-clad butt.
Was I hallucinating? Was I unconscious and dreaming? There was no reality in which this sequence of events made sense.
“My love, my Tili,” Righteous gasped, pulling away before kissing her again. He held her as if he didn’t even notice the filth on her, though it rubbed off on him in great slabs, and… turned to glitter when it hit the floor.
Glitter? I must be dreaming.
Righteous’s hands slipped and slid all over her body. “Clit horns?” he asked, laughing. Then he held her face in his hands, and I noticed something at the exact same time Mik did. A new marking on Righteous’s left hand and forearm that matched Mikhail’s right arm precisely.
Mik began growling like a feral wolf.
“My perfect Scrap,” Righteous said. “My mate.” Every soul in the Hall simultaneously inhaled, so suddenly I could feel a breeze, right before Mikhail’s fist sailed through the air and landed on the Head Protector’s jaw.
Within seconds, the room resembled Madison Square Garden in the middle of a prize fight. Mikhail was pummeling Righteous, and Righteous was doing his best to duck and weave, shouting unintelligibly. The shining crowd was cheering on both fighters.
The energy from the podium and the assembled spectators bombarded me, and I fought for control, but was driven to my knees. I was the leader here. It was my responsibility to keep order.
My eyes flew to Tradition, the Guide who had helped me for centuries to do just that.
He had backed up against a wall, and looked as if he might flee.
Horror at what was happening here distorted his face…
No. Horror at the tiny, dark gray demon who darted at him repeatedly, spitting on his robe.
Tiny wisps of smoke rose where every droplet landed.
Why was she attacking the Head Guide? She had only ever attacked the worst sort of criminals on Earth. Was he… But no. She wasn’t trying to kill him. Just expressing her displeasure. With acidic spittle.
“Demon!” someone yelled, noticing the baby at last. “The Abyss is here!”
When others finally averted their attention to the little menace, they panicked and began stampeding from the Hall.
The floor quaked with the sound of thousands of feet, the walls themselves shaking with their passage.
Dozens of Protectors were unwisely taking wing and crashing into one another, falling back onto their comrades below.
I heard screams of fright and pain. Some of them would be injured. Maybe worse. I had to stop this.
Still, I ordered in my mind, then repeated it, in High Angelic.
“Still.” I was commanding the very fabric of the realm to halt the riot.
But to my shock, for the first time, Sanctuary wasn’t listening.
I gasped when I realized why: it was almost totally depleted.
Quickly, I channeled as much of my personal energy into it as I could safely give at one time.
I rocked back on my heels for a moment, breathing through the dizziness.
What had happened here? Why had Sanctuary’s reserves dwindled this far? Mikhail and I had been gone, but not long enough for this to have happened. We’d both sent power into the realm before we left for Earth, and it had been healthy for the first time in centuries.
A memory from over two thousand years before, when Rafe had first begun teaching me how to guard the realm’s resources, welled up and carried me away.
“Rafe, be reasonable. No one being can control all the energy in Sanctuary. It’s a realm. An entire realm.”
My best friend put his harp down and laughed.
He might have been laughing at my expression, or at my painting.
I shot him a look, stepped back and squinted at the landscape I’d just created, using thin ribbons of energy as paintbrushes to learn control.
I thought it looked pretty good, and I told him so.
“Well, I like the dolphins,” he said in a condescending tone. He tilted his head, and his gleaming hair fell in a perfect wave over one gold and silver eye. “They’re very abstract.”
“Those are horses,” I grumbled. Gathering up a small line of Sanctuary’s energy, I snapped it across the canvas, burning it into ash that disintegrated before it hit the ground.
He laughed again and snapped his fingers, creating a plate piled high with fruit and small cakes. “Don’t be mad. The Singer of All Songs loves every voice, not just the beautiful ones.”
“I can sing,” I muttered, popping a cake into my mouth.
It tasted divine, of course. Since Rafe’s premonition that he would be leaving someday, and his subsequent decision to train me to fill in for him while he was away, I’d needed to eat more.
Manipulating the balance of energy on Earth and in Sanctuary was difficult work, and it built up an appetite.
But he insisted we take breaks every few days to focus on art.
Music, I didn’t mind one bit. Singing a duet with Rafe—or sometimes a trio, if Mikhail could get the crusty old Maker to let her Apprentice have a few hours off—was as close to the Celestial Realm as I imagined I’d ever get before I went there with a soulmate.
But painting? If I had a paper that told me precisely where to put the colors and shading, perhaps even numbering the different sections, I might be able to make it work.
Especially if I had more interesting colors of paint, shinier ones, with metallic, reflective pieces…
and maybe someone who wouldn’t notice how useless I was at painting.
Who wasn’t so dang perfect at everything all the time, like Rafe and the others. A soulmate who was perfectly imperfect.
Rafe dipped into my mind, and laughed even louder.
“Your thoughts are all over the place. Soulmates and paint by numbers? Be careful to keep your thoughts narrow and focused when you’re playing with the cords of energy.
Sanctuary has a way of listening to your dreams and trying to make them come about. ”
I sighed. “Well, Sanctuary is welcome to make me a soulmate whenever it desires.”
Rafe’s eyes went unfocused, the way they did when he was having a vision.
I waited, holding his hand, while he traveled through the liminal space, between the time we were resting in now and the futures he couldn’t stop seeing.
Often, these visions ended with him sobbing uncontrollably, and me holding him while he recovered.
But today, his eyes were full of wonder when he surfaced.
“She’s so beautiful,” he whispered, his tone almost a melody as he spoke what wasn’t quite prophecy.
“She’ll be everything you ever wanted, yet never expected.
Your perfect complement, and your… nemesis?
Yes. But you might lose her if you don’t recognize she was yours all along.
Be careful, Gav. If you don’t live up to your vow to her, she won’t stay with you.
And if she goes, you’ll lose the realm.” He sighed.
“It may not be worth saving by then, though.”
When I asked what he meant—why would I not hold true to my future mate? Why would the realm be beyond repair?—he shrugged and said, “I’m just the messenger, Gav. You’ll figure it out.”
I blinked the memory away, and saw that the demon baby had flown over to Sunny.
Righteous and Mikhail were still fighting, Feather watching while Perception, heedless of the smut that encrusted her, held her up.
A few Guides were unconscious, lying on the podium.
Tradition was still nearby, now crouched underneath a fallen chair, silently taking in the scene with wild eyes and an open mouth.
I fought for calm as I saw what Sanctuary had become. A carnival, a comedy of errors. A ruin. A shipwreck of a realm. And I was responsible for it.
I’d broken all the rules. Most importantly, I’d broken the vow I’d made when Rafe ceded me the responsibility to hold the reins of power here—to put Sanctuary above all else. Above my friendships and my own desires. My own life. My softness toward Mikhail and Precious had clouded my good judgment.
My feet vibrated slightly, and I sensed something approaching the realm. Was the army of the Abyss coming now, through the Great Gate? Had the shadows sensed the chaos inside these walls and known the exact moment to attack?
Had someone in the Abyss been waiting for this very moment?
Rafe. Rafe, is it you?
I waited in vain. But I knew what I had to do; it wasn’t too late. I had to at least try with as much bravery and self-sacrifice as the young, silver-haired Angelus had shown. Somehow, I would hold to my vows, all of them, and regain my honor. Repair the realm.
But first… I fixed my eyes on the demon that I had allowed into Sanctuary. She couldn’t be let to wreak havoc through our halls, and there was only one thing I could do with her to keep her from damaging more than just Tradition’s robes.
I strode forward, intent on dealing with the demon child.