I stepped around the fire, and leaned close enough to see what he meant, the soul knife still in my hand. Just in case. “What are you looking… Oh.” There, in the fleshy part of the baby’s heel, sat a smudged, filth-encrusted mark. It wasn’t a demonic letter, or symbol. It was a familiar one, though. One that I had seen hundreds of times before.
One that Mikhail had impressed upon every single Novice he’d created, before sending them to Earth on their first missions.
“It can’t be.”
“She can. She is,” Mikhail choked out as the toddler squirmed in his hands, twisting around to stare into his incredulous face. A string of drool fell from one side of her mouth to her naked belly, and then she smiled at my best friend, as if she recognized him.
“Dada!” she shouted, and Mikhail fell backward on the filthy floor, holding the creature in front of him, his face frozen in an expression I had never seen before.
Chapter 22
Mikhail
Ihad never been particularly envious of humans. I’d spent decades walking among them, though not nearly as long as most inhabitants of Sanctuary, since my work kept me sequestered in the Maker Hall almost around the clock. The one thing I had wished I could experience, though, was to be the sort of creator a human parent was. To not only supply the basematerial for a new being, in harmony with a mother, but also to nurture, guide, and protect a child as they did.
I’d considered myself the most fortunate of all the High Angeli to be chosen to craft new Novices, which came as close to being a father as one could. And when the Well had been sealed, and I’d delved into my own flesh to form the final generations of Protectors, I’d entertained myself with the thought that this was more like biological, human fatherhood—providing even the material itself for each child.
I stared down at the smudged angelic sigil on the heel of this strange, demonic baby, and wracked my brain for an answer as to how it had appeared there. It was my handwriting; I recognized it. And I knew my mark… but this one had been changed.
I ran my finger down the curled lines, tracing each one, reading the infinitesimally small angelic instructions there. The marks I inscribed on each heel of the Novices I created took years to perfect. Every facet of their nature had to be pondered, weighed, and included in the mark. A Novice’s personality and behavior was shaped by the carving of each trait and their name and, at the very end of the laborious process of creating them, by the one ingredient I had never shared with anyone, except my former Apprentice Azazel: their naming song.
The secret of that, that the mark was truly formed by the combination of the name, mingled with notes of an ancient, secret melody passed on from one Maker to the next, hummed into the ear of the first Maker by the Mother of All Herself… I had been careful never to allow anyone, not even Feather, to overhear that song.
As I traced the marks, I pondered what I was seeing. Could this change have been effected on Earth? I knew Novices’ first mortal lives had some influence on their final attitude and disposition. But nothing like this.
What if the material I’d drawn from myself to create those final cohorts was somehow changeable, mutable? I’d had a feeling the Novices I’d been sculpting the past few centuries were different somehow. Made of my own flesh, and marked by my hand, they felt… dearer to me than those I’d drawn from the Well. Possibly because they were more mine, in a way.
Or possibly because they were made of a less pure material.
This one, though, wasn’t just my creation. Someone else—and I had a very strong feeling I knew exactly who else, though I had no idea how she’d managed it—had a hand in its formation.
The toddler squirmed around in my arms, looked up into my face, and repeated the one thing I’d never expected to hear. “Dada!” The babbled word held a ring of truth so plain, I didn’t need a naming chime to know it was true.
I’m her father.
I came back to my senses when I realized Gavriel was shouting my name, and the baby was crawling over me, sucking on my nose. “Who are you, little one?” I cooed, pulling her off, and wiping the sticky mess from my face with one arm. “What’s your name?”
“Mik, are you hurt?” Gavriel held his soul knife up, as if he might cut the baby out of my arms. I hissed at him, and folded my wings around us both.
“I’m fine. I’m confused. But not injured. The children in the other room, however…”
Gavriel lowered the knife, his eyes narrowed on my child, and I struggled not to hiss at him again. “I will get help for them,” he said slowly, “and come back for you and… it.”
“Her,” I corrected. “She is my daughter.” Gav’s eyes bulged, and his face turned a strange shade of golden-red, before he turned away and stalked out of the room. I looked down at the tiny, corrupted Novice on my lap, who was chewing at the edges of my robe like a puppy with a bone. “Are you hungry?”
She blinked up at me, and I realized why Gavriel had stared for so long into her eyes. There were swirling galaxies, stars and emptiness, endless possibilities crashing into each other, in those small orbs. She stuffed more of my robe into her mouth.
“Daddy’s pretty girl needs a snack, eh?” I made kissy faces at her, then grunted like a pig. She gurgled a laugh, screwed up her face in concentration, and in an instant, held two more marshmallows on her palm. She stuffed one in her mouth, handing me the other.
I took it carefully, sniffing it before biting down. It was delicious, more so than the food in Sanctuary. “You made this yourself?” What had she used to create it? What form of energy… My eyes fell on the dead men. I blinked, reading the currents of the balance there. It had to be impossible; I couldn’t be sure until I witnessed it. But there was no deepening of shadow here, not even with their recent deaths. Had she changed their smut into… sugar?
I laughed at myself for even thinking it, watching as the little thing made a new marshmallow appear. “What a clever little angel.” She frowned at the word angel, and I stopped. “Clever littledemon?” She burbled something that sounded like a mixture of angelic and demonic gibberish, and chewed her marshmallow some more.
I chewed alongside her, thinking. When Gav returned, he stared down at us. I was sure my stubble was almost as covered in stickiness as the girl’s face, and the smut she wore as a thick coat over her skin—or it might havebeenher skin, for all I could tell—had rubbed off on my robe so thoroughly, I probably appeared to have been dragged around a racetrack a few times.
“Mik,” he said once he could get his jaw to shut. “It’s a demon.”
“As far as I can tell,” I hedged, “it has both demonic and angelic qualities.”
