I held him for a long moment, wondering how to fix this. If there were some way I could help Gavriel complete his soul, I would do it. I would sacrifice almost anything.
“If I had a mate like Feather, I wouldn’t know what to do with her anyway. I ruin everything I touch. Sanctuary is falling apart. Demons are loose on Earth. The Guides are intolerable. They keep insisting on upholding the oldest traditions, the worst laws that Seraphiel worked to change long ago. They don’t respect me. I don’t deserve respect,” Gav said, pulling away.
I didn’t let him go entirely, keeping a firm grip on one forearm. He seemed so unbalanced right now, I wondered what currents had caught his soul. “Be calm, brother,” I murmured, and hummed a snippet of a healing song. He closed his eyes, swaying as I sang, though his lips formed a word I knew. A name.
Feather.
The close guard he had on his mind slipped as I sang, and I saw snatches of memories, thoughts, that revealed feelings I did not know how to justify with his behavior toward her. Why was my mate’s face in the forefront of my best friend’s thoughts like this? Why was it her green, sparkling eyes that reflected on the gold of the walls of his mind? Her laughter that spilled down the quiet pathways of thought?
His fingers moved hesitantly toward the feather she had pressed into my arm, though I didn’t think he meant to do such a thing. One simply didn’t touch the mating feather of another High Angelus.
But I allowed it, my mind whirling while he stared into the middle distance, unspeaking. When his hand rested on thefeather, something changed in his face. A lightness I had not seen in hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years, overtook his visage. The corners of his lips turned up as he remembered his joy at the mating of some of the older Protectors, and how he’d been able to celebrate with them for a while. His fingers didn’t move on the feather, but I could almost feel the flow of something… Strength? Compassion? A feather-light brush of something devastatingly important, rushing back and forth from the feather to Gavriel.
He wasn’t causing it; I examined his thoughts as I sang, and though there was a thick, cloying undercurrent of shame for his unspoken desire for her, he had no intention of acting on it.
And I wouldn’t mention it either. There was nothing to be done about his feelings. And I could understand them—my mate was perfect in every way that mattered. I would wonder at any Angelus who didn’t gaze upon her with some fascination.
What frightened me, confused me, was the connection Gavriel seemed to have to my mate. When had that formed?
My mind hummed with dark suspicions and fears. When I finally shook free of the twisted paths I’d traveled down, and stepped away from his grasp, he was saying something about the demon child again. “We can’t take her into Sanctuary, Mik. That much smut will harm the realm’s balance. And there’s no place to contain her.”
“The cells in the lower level?”
He hummed. “I’m not sure. Prosperity said they were using them for some purpose, I can’t recall what.”
“Wait,” I said, looking around. Where had the baby crawled off to? I saw a trail of marshmallow sludge and took a few steps in that direction.
“This can’t wait,” he protested, pulling me around. “You must see we need to destroy her—destroyit—and return to Sanctuary. We’ve been gone too long as it is.”
“We will do no such thing!”
Gavriel bristled. “I am the leader of Sanctuary, and it is my decision to make.”
“Go ahead,” I replied, my fists tight at my sides, though I was one more word away from punching him in the mouth. “Do your worst, leader of Sanctuary. Destroy an innocent baby. You are right, though. You should know that.”
His eyes snapped to mine. “What do you mean?”
“If you do this, if you order me to go against what my soul knows is true—if you become the murderer here, then you are right. You are not worthy to be the leader of Sanctuary. And not worthy of my respect.”
He stood gaping at me. Then, after a long moment, he shook his head and turned away, the soul knife in his hand again, though his grip on it seemed unsteady. “Well,” he said after a minute. “Where is the damned thing?”
I laughed so hard, the clouds overhead thundered. “A perfect devil indeed. Good luck finding her. I won’t help you.”
He cursed, a smudge appearing next to his nose, and flew off to find her.
And though I missed Feather, I spent the next week making sure he didn’t succeed.
Chapter 23
Feather
Istood at the front of my Intro to Sacrifice and Redemption seminar in a line of young Protectors, wearing only my sequined bikini and shivering slightly. I only had on a few scraps of fabric, but the rest of the class were naked as jaybirds.
Which was funny when I thought about that Earth saying, because of the wings. But nothing else about the situation was humorous at all. A few of the class were crying quietly. Everyonekept their eyes carefully north of the neckline, except Valor, who was helping Prosperity and two other Guides I’d never met inspect the class for unsanctioned mating marks.
“This really isn’t how I saw today going,” I said, my teeth chattering. The week had been a clusterfudge, all things considered. I had been caught sneaking out to check on the women in the Maker Hall two days before, and I wasn’t sure they were okay. They couldn’t get in or out—only I could do that, thanks to the new secret word Mikhail had put on the hidden passageway. I’d left them food, but not enough for more than a day.
Guards had been stationed outside my room around the clock since then, and even though Sunny had been allowed to enter—and she had assured me she would find a way to get food to Glory and Heart—I had been trapped in there, and escorted to my classes and the Dining Hall, with a lot of Guides constantly watching.
