Chapter 28 #3
"I don't know. Stronger? Older? That doesn't make sense. Forget it." Another pause. "Are you eating? You sound thin."
"You can't hear thin, Luna."
"I can hear tired. And I can hear that voice you get when you're holding something together with both hands and pretending it's fine." She's quiet for a beat. "It's the same voice you had when you were trying to work three jobs to pay bills and you told me everything was going to be okay."
The accuracy of that nearly breaks me.
"I'm fine," I say. "Really. It's just a lot of work. Stressful project."
"Okay." She doesn't believe me. "Just... you'd tell me if something was really wrong, right? You wouldn't just disappear on me?"
"I'm not going to disappear."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
The lie tastes like poison. Because I absolutely would if it meant keeping her safe.
We talk for another ten minutes. She tells me about a documentary she watched about deep-sea creatures.
I tell her about a book I've been reading, which is true, except the book is a three-hundred-year-old text about angelic bloodlines and I leave that part out.
We make plans for next Sunday. She tells me she loves me.
"I love you too," I say, and mean it so fiercely it hurts.
The call ends.
I sit there holding the phone in both hands, staring at the dark screen, and feel the silence of the House of Ruin press in around me.
A knock.
"Go away."
The door opens anyway. Because locks mean nothing to these angels.
Croesus stands in the doorway, gold eyes soft. He doesn't say anything. Doesn't ask. Just crosses to the bed, sits beside me, and puts his arm around my shoulders.
I lean into him. Press my face against his neck. Breathe him in. Gold and amber and something warm underneath. Home.
"She's going to find out," I whisper.
"Maybe."
"She wants to FaceTime. She'll see me."
His arm tightens. "Then we'll deal with it."
"How? I can't explain this." I pull back enough to gesture at my own face.
At the eyes that are more gold than brown now.
At the silver threading through my hair.
"What do I say? 'Sorry I look different, I've been absorbing divine power from seven fallen angels and it's giving me a glow-up from hell'? "
"You could try a filter."
I stare at him.
"It was a joke," he says.
"It was a terrible joke."
"I know." But his mouth curves, and the warmth in his blind gold eyes is enough to make the knot in my chest loosen, just slightly. "She's your sister. She loves you. When the time comes, you'll figure out what to tell her."
"And if the time comes too soon?"
He doesn't answer. Just pulls me back against him and holds on.
Through the bond, I feel his love. His fear. His guilt for being part of the thing that's changing me.
I don't tell him that the changes scare me more than Heaven does.
I don't tell him that this morning I caught myself thinking in patterns that aren't mine, cold strategic calculations that feel like Seraph's mind, hot surges of aggression that taste like Kael's wrath.
I don't tell him that yesterday I looked at Lysander and felt desire that wasn't entirely my own, or that Idris's envy keeps whispering in the back of my thoughts, wanting, wanting, wanting.
I don't tell him that sometimes, late at night, when the bonds are quiet and the house is still, I lie awake and try to remember what I felt like before all of this. Before the gold and silver and the seven threads humming in my chest. Before I became whatever I'm becoming.
And I can't.
Day seventeen.
Five bonds at once. Clean. Controlled.
I stand in the center of the arena and hold five simultaneous connections open like a woman balancing plates on sticks.
Seraph's control. Croesus's hunger. Kael's fury.
Lysander's desire. Dorian's abundance. All of them flowing through me, braided together, and I'm directing them. Pointing them. Using them.
I send a wave of combined power toward the far wall and blow a hole through six inches of solid marble.
Nobody moves. Nobody breathes. Seven ancient beings staring at a hole in the wall that a human woman just punched with borrowed divinity.
"Well," Dorian says brightly, "there goes the renovation budget."
"Do it again," Seraph says. His eyes are wide. I've never seen Seraph look surprised before. It makes him look almost human. "Do it again, right now."
I do it again. The second hole is cleaner than the first. Precise. Surgical.
"Six," Seraph says. "Try six."
"Seraph." Croesus's voice is a warning. "Last time she tried five, she bled from the nose and her eyes went full gold."
"And now she's doing five without breaking a sweat. She's ready."
"She's standing right here," I say. "And she'll decide when she's ready."
I look at Caspian. He's on his bench as usual, pale eyes watching from behind half-closed lids. His bond is the one I've been avoiding. The void. The crushing weight of nothing.
"You don't have to," Caspian says, reading my expression. "I wasn't joking about what it does."
"I know what it does. I felt it." I take a breath. "But I need all seven. If we're going to have any chance against Heaven, I need to be able to do this. Or we’re all dead—have you forgotten?"
He studies me for a long time. Then he stands, slowly, leaning heavily on his cane. The effort it takes is visible. Painful to watch.
"Then I'll meet you halfway," he says. "Pull from me, but let me control the flow. If you take too much of my power at once, the apathy will swallow you. And getting you back from that would be... difficult."
"Okay."
I reach for his bond while holding the other five open.
His power trickles in. Slow and measured.
It's cold and heavy and it wants to smother everything.
But with the other five bonds blazing, there's enough heat and hunger and fury and desire and excess to counterbalance it.
Sloth sits at the bottom of the weave like ballast in a ship, grounding the other five, stabilizing them.
Six bonds. Six angels' power flowing through one human body.
I raise my hand toward the wall. The air shimmers. Light gathers at my fingertips, gold and silver and red and violet and warm amber and cold blue-white, all of it swirling together.
I don't release it. I just hold it. Let them see.
Let them all see what I'm becoming.
"Seven," I say. "I want to try seven."
"Absolutely not." Seraph's voice is sharp. "Six is already unprecedented. Adding a seventh while you're still—"
"Still what? Still human?" I turn to face him, and whatever he sees in my expression makes him stop mid-sentence. "Look at me, Seraph. Really look. How much of me is still human?"
He doesn't answer.
None of them do.
The arena is quiet except for the hum of six bonds vibrating inside my chest. Six threads of ancient power woven through a body that was never meant to hold this much.
I look at my hands. They're glowing. Faintly, but unmistakably. Gold light under the skin, pulsing with each heartbeat.
Somewhere in a dorm room, my sister is studying for an exam and wondering why I sound different on the phone.
Somewhere in Heaven, a clock is ticking.
And here, in a shattered marble arena surrounded by fallen angels who are watching me with expressions that range from awe to terror, I hold six streams of divine power in my human hands and wonder how much more I can take before there's nothing left of the woman who walked into the House of Gold all those months ago.
Before there's nothing left of Raven, and only the weapon remains.
Thirteen days left.
I close the bonds. One by one. Careful. Controlled. The light fades from my hands. The hum in my chest quiets. The arena settles back into cold marble silence.
"Tomorrow," I say. "We try seven."
Nobody argues.
Nobody tells me it's too dangerous, or too fast, or too much. Because they've done the math. They know what's coming. And they know that six won't be enough.
I walk out of the arena on legs that barely shake and pretend I don't see Croesus and Seraph exchange a look behind my back. The same look. The one that says: we're losing her.
They're not wrong.
But they're not losing me to the power.
They're losing me to the thing I have to become to keep everyone I love alive.
If that means shedding my humanity like a skin I've outgrown, so be it.
Thirteen days.
I'll be ready.