Chapter 34 #2
"Stronger than Raphael expected," she says. "Stronger than I expected."
I don't answer. I attack.
Fire erupts from my hands. Kael's wrath made manifest, holy flame hot enough to scorch divine armor. I direct it at Gabriel's chest, a concentrated beam that turns the air between us to steam and sets the edge of Seraph's desk on fire.
She sidesteps. Not fast. Not slow. Just not there anymore when the fire arrives.
But I'm already following up, channeling Seraph's precision to predict where she'll move and sending a wave of gold crashing into that space.
The greed hits her shoulder. I see the soft fabric of her suit char, see her foot slide back half an inch on the marble.
Half an inch. I moved an archangel half an inch.
Behind the ward, I feel Kael's savage satisfaction pulse through the bond.
I press. Mirror shards from the wall, pulled by Seraph's power and aimed by Idris's precision, streak toward Gabriel like silver knives. Fire follows. Then gold, hardened into projectiles. Then Lysander's desire, a wave of psychic pressure aimed at her resolve.
She deflects the shards with the blade. The fire parts around her like a river around a stone. The gold projectiles stop in midair, trembling, and dissolve into dust. Lysander's pressure washes over her and does nothing.
But she's working now. Not straining. Not struggling. But engaged in a way she wasn't when she walked through the door. I can see it in her posture—the slight forward lean, the blade held at a functional angle rather than a casual one. She's taking this seriously.
I pull harder on the bonds. More fire. More gold. Dorian's hunger opening like a mouth in the air around Gabriel, trying to consume her power the way gluttony consumes everything. Caspian's weight pressing down on her, gravity itself trying to bring her to her knees.
The room is chaos. The desk is on fire. Three mirrors have shattered. The marble floor is cracked in radiating patterns from the heat and the force and the collision of seven different types of power slamming against a being who was built to withstand all of them.
Gabriel takes a hit. Lets it happen. I see the decision in her eyes when she opens her guard deliberately, allows a blast of fire to catch her left shoulder. Her skin scorches and her arm drops half an inch.
And she uses the opening to close the distance.
The dark blade doesn't come for my body.
It comes for the space between my shoulder blades. For the invisible point where the bonds converge. For the nexus of threads that live in my chest and connect me to the seven angels only thirty feet away.
The blade sings.
A sound like a harp string being cut, except the harp is my nervous system and the string is something more fundamental than nerves.
The blade passes through my body without breaking the skin.
I feel it like a draft of cold air through a gap in a wall, a chill that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with connection.
It touches Lysander's bond.
The newest. The thinnest. The most recently formed thread in the web.
And it cuts.
Not severs. Not yet. But the blade drags across the connection like a razor across a wire, and I feel the bond fray. Threads peeling apart, tension releasing, the careful architecture of desire and connection that links me to the angel of lust unraveling at the edges.
I scream.
Through the bond, through all of them, I hear Lysander scream too.
Gabriel pulls the blade back. Adjusts her angle.
"You think connection is strength," she says.
And here, finally, is something other than calm in her voice.
Conviction. The absolute certainty of a being who believes she is doing a necessary and terrible thing.
"It isn't. It's a leash. Every thread you've woven between yourself and these broken things is a weakness waiting to be exploited.
" She strikes again. "And I am doing you a kindness by cutting them. "
Dorian's bond shudders. The blade doesn't hit it cleanly as I twist away, pulling on Kael's fire to create a wall of flame between us, but the edge grazes the connection to gluttony and I feel Dorian's warmth gutter like a candle in a gale.
Behind the ward, I feel him diminish. Feel his eternal optimism, that load-bearing warmth that holds up everything else, flicker and thin.
His voice reaches me through the bond, not words but a feeling, a desperate clinging of someone trying to hold onto something that's being pulled from their hands.
I fight back. I fight with everything I have and everything they're giving me and it isn't enough.
It isn't enough because Gabriel isn't trying to hurt my body and I can't protect what she's actually targeting.
The bonds are everywhere and nowhere. They don't have a physical location I can shield.
They exist in the space between souls, in the invisible architecture that connects me to seven ancient beings, and the blade was made to cut precisely that.
She hits Kael's bond next. A clean strike, the blade singing through the connection to wrath, and behind the wall the angel of fire roars.
I hear it physically, through the stone, a sound of rage so pure it shakes dust from the ceiling.
His fire surges through the bond in a desperate, explosive torrent, trying to burn the blade away from the inside, and for one second I think it might work—
The blade absorbs the fire.
The dark that makes up the blade isn't an absence of light. It's a hunger. It eats what it cuts. Kael's fire pours into the blade and disappears, and through the bond I feel him stagger, diminished, his eternal blaze reduced to something guttering and small.
"Stop fighting," Gabriel says. There's something in her voice now that I don't want to examine. Something that sounds like a plea. "Stop making this harder than it needs to be. The bonds will dissolve. They'll survive. Separate, diminished, but alive. That's more than Michael offered."
"No."
"Raven—"
"No."
I pull on everything. Every bond. Every sin.
Every scrap of power seven fallen angels can feed through connections that are fraying and bleeding and coming apart under the dark blade's assault.
I pull until I taste copper and my nose bleeds and the gold light under my skin burns hot enough to be visible through my clothes.
And I use it all at once.
Not aimed at Gabriel. Aimed outward. An explosion of raw power radiating from the nexus point where the bonds converge, a shockwave of gold and fire and silver and shadow that blows the remaining mirrors off the walls, cracks the marble floor in half, sends two of the warrior angels staggering, and catches Gabriel full in the chest.
She flies backward. Hits the far wall. The marble craters around the impact. Seraph's carefully constructed house buckling under the force of seven combined sins detonating simultaneously.
For three seconds, Gabriel doesn't move.
I stand in the center of the destroyed study, breathing hard, bleeding from my nose, surrounded by shattered glass and burning furniture and cracked marble.
Every bond in my chest is screaming with the effort of what I just did.
I can feel the angels behind the wall, all of them drained, depleted, scraping the bottom of reservoirs that have never been this low.
But they're still connected. The bonds are damaged, yes, frayed, bleeding energy, held together by stubbornness and desperation more than architecture. But they're intact.
Gabriel stands.
She peels herself out of the crater in the wall. Straightens her suit jacket. Wipes a line of something luminous from her lip. Then she looks at me.
And for the first time since I've met her, what I see in Gabriel's face is not calm and not curiosity and not regret.
It's recognition.
Deep and old and frightened. The expression of someone staring at a ghost they buried millennia ago.
"Oh," she says softly. "Oh, I see."
She tightens her grip on the blade. Raises it.
And this time when she moves, she's not testing. Not measuring. Not gauging what I can do.
This time she's trying to end it fast.
The blade comes for the center of my chest.
I get my hands up. Gold shield, Kael's fire, everything I have poured into a single point of defense—
The blade punches through.
Not through my body. Through the shield, through the fire, through every layer of protection I've wrapped around the bonds. The dark edge sinks into the invisible space where seven connections converge and it twists.
The sound the bonds make is not a harp string being cut. It's a chord being broken. Seven notes collapsing into discord, harmony destroyed, and the pain is—
I have no reference for this pain. It's not physical. It's not in my body. It's in the space where the bonds live, the fabric of my soul connecting me to seven beings I’ve come to lov—, and it's being torn apart.
Through the wall, I hear them.
Seven voices in agony. Seven ancient beings feeling their connections to me ripped and shredded.
I fall.
Knees hitting marble. Hands slamming down. My vision whites out. When it comes back, Gabriel is standing over me, blade raised, and her face is—
Sad.
She's sad.
"I told you," she says softly. "Connection is weakness."
She brings the blade down for the killing stroke.
And between one heartbeat and the next, something gold fills the space between us.
Not light. Not power. A body.
Croesus comes through the wall like it isn't there, and it isn't, because the heartroom door has blown open from the inside, marble exploding outward in chunks, and he is running.
Running the way a human runs toward someone they love when something terrible is about to happen. Clumsy. Desperate. Arms outstretched.
He doesn't attack Gabriel.
He doesn't raise his hands against her.
He puts himself between us.
The blade, already falling, hits him.