Revel.I almost stopped singing, and he took over again, a new energy in his tone. Gavriel always did love a good mystery.
His voice held a hint of frustration.Who is Revel? Your brother?
Yes, my brother,I admitted.My youngest brother. He was… joy itself. The life of the Celestial party.I dug up an image of Revel, with his gleaming dark skin, his flashing eyes, the way the space around him seemed to press in on him, like even the very atoms of the air wanted to be closer to him.Everyone who saw him wanted to touch him.
Gavriel’s thoughts ran next to mine as I showed how ridiculous the fawning had become by the time we left the Celestial Realm to build Sanctuary.
He was so happy.
Almost too happy. Frivolous. He became consumed with pleasure, and knew it.
He was fascinated with Sanctuary. He was here in the very first days, helping me plan the shape of it, the hallways. When it was almost done, the imbalance in the Abyss was growing dangerous. The currents of shadows lapped at the walls of the realm, attracted to its light, and began to degrade the energy we’d placed here.
He got the idea that he could do something more meaningful with his power, his strength. He asked the Singer of Songs to let him hold back the tide of shadows until this realm was established and could act as a barrier between the Abyss, Earth, and the Celestial Realm.
“And as a school. Not only for the High Angeli who resided here, but also for Revel. He wanted to learn to live for others. Not for their approval and adulation. But to give of himself while hidden, uncelebrated. Unappreciated, even.” My sister’s voice was soft. I’d known she was privy to my thoughts, but hadn’t cared. If there was any soul I could trust in the realm besides Gavriel, it was her. She handed me a cup of glowing water, and I drank it down, the purity of it burning my throat. But it helped me sing again.
While I sang, I grappled with my recent realization that I had been the instrument of my own downfall, and how to tell Gavriel what I’d done.
Meanwhile, Thysia—Arabella—filled Gavriel in on her mission. “I came to call Revel home. His lesson was learned, his mission ended.”
“Is that your message? For him to return to your realm?” he asked. When she nodded, Gavriel’s furrowed brow eased, but he sent us both an image of the mythical Atlas, unable to set down the Earth. “How can he be freed?”
She smiled gently at him, but didn’t answer. Her mind was closed to us, and though I knew I could tear through her mental barrier, I let it lie.
Gavriel and I worked in tandem for most of a day, taking turns with the melody and harmony. The Celestial sword changed texture entirely, first lying in the bowl in its original shape: the wing of a Celestial being I had known long before. And then, as we kept up the chorus, it melted into a small, shining lake of molten ore. Yet it wasn’t enough.
With a sad smile, Gav dropped the feathers he’d harvested into the bowl, and we continued singing, finishing the task. Finally, it was done.
Gavriel and I were both exhausted, but we wrapped our hands in Mikhail’s heat-proof gloves and carried the whole thingacross the Hall. Once there, my sister dipped a small cup into the bowl, singing prayers of healing and sacrifice over it as she poured the heated liquid around the disintegrating seal. As if they sensed her work, the shadows behind the seal began to scream and shake. The whole wall rumbled with the force of their protest.
I stepped away, placing my hands on the wall, and sent a command through Sanctuary to them.Stop! There is nothing for you here.
I felt the mass of shadows rear back, roiling in confusion. And then the horde withdrew. The wall stopped shaking, and Gavriel and Thysia finished repairing the seal. All three of us were breathless with fatigue by the end, and we slumped into the closest chairs available.
Gavriel, still leaking his soulfire from some internal wound, slipped into unconsciousness. I nudged Sanctuary to send energy into him, and it complied, funneling a faint thread of power directly through his feet where they met the floor. Even Thysia seemed drained as we rested from our work. She eyed Mikhail’s bed for a long moment, then shook her head and stayed in her seat.
“Had enough napping, I bet,” I murmured as I went back to check on the cooling seal while Gavriel slept. When I laid an ear against the side of the Well, I could hear nothing, and there was no sense of connection between the shadowed souls I carried in my physical form and their cousins in the void. I let myself lapse into sleep for a short while, knowing the angered creatures had truly fled.
But I woke not long after, with a very bad feeling about where they might have gone. The newest entities that had formed from shadows in the Abyss were more dangerous than any I’d ever faced. Intelligent, and endlessly hungry.
I hadn’t had space in my soul to siphon off enough evil to weaken the largest of those beasts. And without a Celestial weapon, we would be helpless against it if it found a way inside.
If it found the weakened spot in the basement.
Fuck. There was noifabout it.
I’d just turned to wake Gavriel and ask where the other soul knife was, when the unlocked Maker Hall door slammed wide, and an angry mob poured into the sacred space.
“There it is!” a Guide near the front shouted, directing a dozen Protectors who were armed with blades to advance on me. “Kill the demon!”
Chapter 10
Gavriel
The Maker Hall door was open wide, and a contingent of the strongest Protectors had their weapons in hand, pointing them at me. Well, at Rafe. But I was sitting right next to him.
None of them realized that normal weapons like theirs, edged only with a thin line of distilled power, would have no effect on beings as powerful as Rafe, or the larger shadowcreatures I’d seen in his thoughts. Well, I supposed they might piss them off.
