Tradition turned to stare dolefully at Righteous. “And in his absence, by your own admission, you impressed a mating feather on Righteous while he was recovering from grave injury.” He turned to the crowd and announced, “She was already mated when she took advantage of Righteous’s weakness, his unconscious state, and stole his choice from him. A spiritual rape, if you will. And spiritual infidelity to our own Maker in addition to her crime.” His voice lowered as the Hall exploded into cries of outrage.
Directed at me.I could feel their vitriol pouring out. It felt like a weight being dropped on my soul, and I staggered. I couldn’t muster the strength to defend myself. I could hardly stay on my feet. I tried to close off my mind, to not read the hateful thoughts that pummeled me, but it was almost impossible.
“And the ancient punishment for that crime is death.”
Righteous was yelling through his gag, being held back by Guides. Sunny was flinging herself against the much stronger Guides who held her, while Hope was… praying? Perception was listening to something, his head tilted as his eyes grew wider.
“Should I have let him die?” I asked softly. “If you could protect the one you loved, is there any price you wouldn’t pay? I didn’t hurt anyone.”Did I?
Tradition looked down at me, frowning. “You may believe that your crimes are insignificant. But the balance is precarious at best. All our lives, and the realm, is at stake. If we allow you to overturn millennia of tradition and law, if we don’t scrub out the impurity as soon as we recognize it—you—then we will be to blame when Sanctuary falls. I take no joy in this judgment.” His voice was as earnest as I’d ever heard. It rang with truth, and the whole crowd gathered there could tell.
He meant every word. I was a blight, and needed to be extinguished.
But his truth wasn’t mine. Or Mikhail’s, or Sunny’s. And I prayed to the Singer of All Songs that it wasn’t Gavriel’s.
I knew it wasn’t Truth’s, who was standing closer to the podium now, and looked like he was about to be sick. Righteous had begun shouting again, and I fought my torpor to open my mind to hear Truth’s thought.
Righteous told me the word to open the Flight Hall. I can go to Earth and tell them what’s happening.
No,I thought back, each word an anchor I pulled from the depths of my mind.There’s no time. Go here instead, as soon as you can sneak away. And I gave him exact instructions. I felt bad when his eyes went suddenly bloodshot, and reminded myself not to speak High Angelic in someone’s thoughts again. If I lived long enough to have the chance. Black stars swum in my own vision as I felt Sanctuary pulling energy from me fast.
Too fast.
“We will carry out the sentence immediately,” Tradition announced, as Truth scooted away. “Guides, seal the doors. This must be witnessed by every soul in Sanctuary.”
Perception flared his wings, and Tradition had the gag removed so he could speak. “What about the ones you have incarcerated in the cells?” Perception licked his dry lips. “There are at least ten there.” He’d obviously had the same thought as me, though I’d sent Truth to the opposite end of Sanctuary. If the Protectors here knew what had been going on—if we had some proof—maybe this whole miscarriage of justice could be avoided. Where were our allies?
My silent question was answered by the smug grin on Valor’s face, and his next words. “Ten times ten. The spiritual malaise has been spreading so quickly, we had no choice but to isolate them.”
“That is in fact what the cells were built for,” Tradition said somberly. For some reason, Truth turned his head and puked on the floor, as the Head Guide went on. “It was to provide a quiet, safe space for those suffering from soul decline. We can’t disturb them; it might do further damage to their already fragile psyches.” Truth scrambled for the door, still vomiting. The Guides there let him leave, against Tradition’s orders, after he inadvertently splashed one of them.
I closed my eyes, feeling weaker by the second, but unable to stop the leaching of power from me. I called out to Rumple, toMikhail, to Gavriel—toanyone—for help. There was no answer except for the tiniest glimmer that winked up at me from the floor. A piece of glitter at my feet. Silly, useless.
But distracting.
Chapter 28
Mikhail
For hours now, the feather on my hand had throbbed and pulsed, distracting me from my task, and I wondered what Feather was doing to make it feel so odd. She wasn’t hurt. I could tell that much, which shocked me. I hadn’t known the soulmate bond could be felt across realms. Still, I needed to get back to her, back to Sanctuary.
But I couldn’t. Not just yet.
I peeked around the corner of the Avenue des Anges, a seedy little alley in an arrondissement in Paris I’d never visited before. My daughter was playing with the entrails of the four rapists she’d disemboweled right before I’d found her again.
“No, daughter, we don’t play with that.” I almost didn’t have the heart to tell her to stop; she was having so much fun, and she fussed when I lifted her away from the carnage. “We protect the humans, but we don’t take pleasure in hurting any of them. Not even the bad ones,” I explained.
She screwed her nose up like she might cry, and I gave her a glittering unicorn I’d found in a toy shop to distract her. I set her down a little ways off, and went to clean up her mess with holy fire.
This was the third group of men she’d slaughtered on her own, and they had all deserved their fates. Deserved worse, even. This particular group had done unspeakable things to young boys, including ritualized murders, having convinced themselves they were some sort of dark wizards.
My girl had stabbed them in their eyes with their own pretend wands, and taken her time eviscerating them while I took care of the surviving boys the “wizards” had been keeping in a darkened basement. I knew I should have stopped her from killing them, but I just didn’t have the heart, even though the smut from their murders stuck to her tiny body like mud. It didn’t seem to hurt her, though, like Feather had reported. The toddler would only give a cross-eyed, precious sneeze, and get back to work. Or play. I still had a suspicion that she was somehow using the smut she carried around as an energy source to make her constant supply of marshmallows.
I’d been following her all over Europe for six days, hiding her tracks and mine from Gavriel. She’d cuddled up next to me at night once or twice while I was sleeping—I could smell her burntsugar and brimstone scent on me, and see the smut stains on my robe where she’d lain—but she was always gone before I woke.
Sleeping.I almost laughed. I hadn’t needed so much sleep for centuries. Keeping up with a toddler was exhausting.
“Dada?” Her tremulous call alerted me to something.
