Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
GAbrIEL
Iheld the dust in my palms, willing it to be Aki again.
Nothing happened.
Teardrops splashed the dust, my prayers to the tenshi puffing across the surface.
The dust remained dust.
The prayers went unanswered.
I existed outside of time and space, trapped in a new nightmare reality where Aki was dead and my heart broke every thirty seconds.
“How can you just leave me?” I rasped.
The silence of the room lay thick around me.
“Aki, please…”
In some of my darker moments in the dead of night, I’d wondered what it would be like if Aki died before me. How it would feel, if I’d know if we weren’t in the same place when it happened. Terrible things like that.
I put it down to the mind being a trickster, loving to poke at our darkest thoughts. But I never expected for them to come to be here in this safehouse.
“Aki…”
The dust began to slip through my fingers.
“Please, Aki. Please.”
I couldn’t cry, the tears on hold. As if crying were the release I didn’t want to face.
Release meant reality.
Curse reality.
“I’m begging you to come back.” I dropped the remnants of the ash, clasping my hands together in supplication. Fully at the mercy of a miracle.
“Please don’t let him be gone,” I begged. “Give me something, anything, to put this right.”
The door opened.
“It’s not his time.”
Zach stepped into my field of vision, signing at me.
I looked up, the sorrow probably evident on my face.
“Akira?” he asked.
It took me a moment to sign back at him. “I think he’s…” I couldn’t say it.
Zach’s eye narrowed into an angry slit.
“I’ll fix it. I promise I’ll fix it.”
Like you promised him you’d still be married?
Bile burned in the back of my throat.
There has to be a solution…
I saw Aki in my mind, in happier days. Baking, laughing, being him. Running around the central garden with a bubble machine one day like a big kid, enjoying every moment of that pleasant summer day.
He deserved more days like that.
I wanted to see them, to live them for real and not in memory.
“I failed to protect him,” I said aloud, Zach still watching me, able to read my lips. “But let me prove…” The lump in my throat made it hard to speak.
Please just give him back, I prayed internally instead. I’ll do better. I’ll make sure he never hurts again.
I really would do anything to make this right. Swan dive into a pool of acid, walk over broken glass, sacrifice myself to a pantheon of vicious gods so he could live.
And leave him all alone.
Great plan.
Why was this happening? Why couldn’t the magic of the Cherry Moon sweep the mazoku aside, change the world, and leave Aki be? Why couldn’t it weave us a utopia to live in instead of this continuous shift from peace to chaos?
My Aki can’t be dead.
It didn’t make sense. One moment he was here, then he was dust. Did the mazoku attack remotely somehow with a vicious new form of magic to pierce the anti-magic?
Sakura fell from the ceiling, the sweet scent of cherries wafting into my nostrils. Rosy light flooded the room, and my heart hiccupped when I felt Aki struggling.
Alive, out there in the darkness. Too far away, his heartbeat thumping with mine.
“Aki!” I gasped.
There was a jolt of pain in my chest, and the connection dropped. But the light and the blossoms and the smell of cherries remained.
That same light shone in my fingertips, hot and powerful.
Zach signed, “You’ve tapped into something.”
The light brightened, ribbons of sparkling energy curling across the floor toward me.
“Babies?” I heard Aki’s voice. “Have you—”
It cut off.
“Aki!” I cried, stepping forward.
His babies. Bob and Rose.
“Aki? Can you hear me?”
The amount of relief coursing through me was almost too much to bear.
He was alive, still fighting. But he needed me. Now.
The same light appeared in Zach’s fingers. He held them up, cocking his head to the side.
We’d both tapped into something.
The magic of Cherry Moon?
The brush of fur against my arm, a swirl of blossoms in the middle of the room.
“What…”
A wolf. Gray-furred, its eyes shining with the different shades of the Cherry Moon.
“Rose?”
Did the wolf just shake it head?
“Bob?”
He licked my arm.
“You’re Bob?”
He licked me again.
One of Aki’s metaphysical babies here in the flesh?
“How?”
The Cherry Moon? Breaking the rules, turning everything on its head?
Clearly.
Bob brushed against me, turning his large body around to face Rose nuzzling up to Zach.
He stroked Rose’s back, her eyes the same color-changing spectacle as Bob’s, scrolling through the shades.
Zach’s mouth hung open in shock.
Incredible. Such beautiful wolves, such an amazing sight. Something spun from a dream, yet a complete furry reality.
My heart swelled, pushing back some of my anguish.
Aki is alive and just as glorious as ever.
“Can you sense Aki?” I signed to Zach, getting to my feet.
“Yes,” he responded. “How about this?” He gestured at the wolves.
“A miracle,” I said.
Bob moved to the middle of the room. Rose followed him, the two wolves brushing against each other.
I think those umbrellas have a new contender.
Bob and Rose cast their eyes my way, then Zach’s, before turning their attention to the bathroom.
Pink light burned the edges of a doorway beside the actual door. Tiny cherry blossoms puffed out of the line, scattering across the floor, glittering as the doorway became a curtain of flowers billowing in a warm breeze.
“Your love for Akira has captured the attention of the Cherry Moon’s magic,” a soft voice drawled from behind the veil. “It is a gift to love and so a gift has been bestowed upon both of you. The sibling and the soulmate.”
“Who are you?” I demanded.
Zach signed to me that he’d been feeling the words. Not hearing but experiencing them in his own way.
“Help Akira find his path,” the voice replied. “He is at the precipice, yet he needs a push to clear this hurdle. You are all joined together by your love, a great part of the next step. The world is changing, and a new darkness rises. Help him. Let him be glorious.”
My face heated over those words.
“Are you a tenshi?” I asked nervously.
“Help him, Gabriel.”
They must be. “Why do you need him?”
“Because he is Akira,” the voice answered.
“But he’s…he’s different now.” My stomach clenched.
“Step through the veil, both of you. Help him.”
Bob and Rose dashed through the blossom doorway.
Aki…
I asked Zach if he’d caught that.
He had.
There were no more questions to ask for now, nothing else left to say until Aki was safe. Then the lid would be off the jar, and I’d go against the tenshi themselves to spare him from whatever plans were in place.
His path was to be my husband. That’s what he wanted.
“Let’s go,” I told Zach.
Without any hesitation, I charged through the veil of blossoms to help my man, Zach right behind me.