As Rumple explained, he carried the small, glasslike blade over to me. It was wickedly sharp, cutting though the edge of the sheet with the merest touch, but when I tested my finger against the point, it didn’t dig in at all. I blinked at Rumple, confused.
“Do you believe there is any part of me that would see you hurt, little love?” he said, chucking me under the chin. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I may be a monster—but I’m your monster, through and through.”
A wave of dizziness rushed through me, and Gavriel sat up. “What was that?”
Rumple raised one eyebrow, then plunged himself into my mind. I felt his energy move from my chest up to my nape. “That, my lovely ones, was Mikhail needing his soulmate.” Fear shone in his whirling eyes before he looked away.
I sucked in a breath and was on my feet, grabbing my clothing, dizziness be damned. “Right. Time to go.”
In a few minutes, Gavriel was up and dressed in Mikhail’s clothing, and I was wrapped in a spare toga I’d kept here. Rumple had also grabbed a pair of Mikhail’s pants to replace his loincloth, though they were far too short on him. The thought of having a mate even larger than Mikhail made me want to laugh.
“They’re at both doors,” Rumple said. “The secret hallway is completely filled with them, pressing the door shut. We can’t even try to go out that way.”
Gavriel was unsteady on his feet as he grabbed a sword and gave it a few unsteady swings. “Harder than it should be,” he muttered. “Center of balance has changed significantly.” He made a few more practice thrusts and strikes, a pattern I vaguely recognized. By the end of the kata, he looked as if he’d been fighting without wings for centuries. Apparently satisfied, he ran his eyes over me, and shook his head. “We need some sort of armor for you.”
“I don’t need armor,” I argued while he started flinging things off tables, as if a set of Celestial armor might be lying around somewhere. Honestly, knowing how much Mikhail hoarded his creations, it wasn’t a completely ridiculous thought. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to carry the weight of anythingheavier than a feather. My limbs now felt like they weighed a thousand pounds each, and it was growing worse by the second.
I sent my consciousness within, to examine the pools of energy at my mate marks. The power was gone, the threads unraveled.No, it can’t be. I reached deeper, seeking the ends of the tethers that connected me to my mates, but finding only the deeply buried well of energy that was my Celestial key. It was untouched, sealed in my core, a frigid, heavy lump that couldn’t be opened—at least not by me. Imriel had said only the Celestial gate could unseal it. But maybe Rumple could crack it open if I needed the juice. For all I knew, he’d built the ugly fire-door gate, too. I saved that thought for later, turning my attention to my chest and my embedded feather. A mating feather now, for real.
The connection with Gavriel remained, but I was siphoning energy from it almost too fast to register. And Gavriel… I peered into his spiritual vessel.Holy crap.He was drawing energy directly from Sanctuary so fast, it seared him.
But Sanctuary normallytookpower from the High Angeli. I noted that it wasn’t pulling anything from me. That was a relief.I guess you can’t get blood from a stone,I thought.But how is Gavriel forcing the realm to give him this much, this fast?
He’s much more experienced with juggling the lines of power,Rumple supplied.He’s been taking it at this rate for hours now to keep you both on your feet. But he won’t be able to sustain that while he’s fighting,he thought quietly, as Gavriel strode over to the giant bag of glitter.
“Is there any way to change it back to armor?” he wondered aloud.
“No.” Rumple raced to my side, catching me just as I began to stumble.
“Whoa, feels like being drunk,” I said, my speech slurring. “Just like it.”
“Feather, we have to move now, but I need to know. The tether between you and your mates. Is it breaking?”
I closed my eyes and focused on the energy that connected me to Mikhail and Righteous, but it was like trying to see through overly strong glasses. The blue thread wasn’t a thread anymore, only a smudge against the darkness of my thoughts. It was hazy, knotted strangely in places, and so thin in others it almost disappeared. “I see it, but…”
Suddenly, even speaking was too much. My jaw turned to stone, my wings anvils. My eyelids flickered open, the last of the muscles I could move, and even those felt like lead curtains. I stared up at Rumple, my body frozen.
“Gavriel, I think—” Rumple’s voice cracked. “I think we waited too long.”
Chapter 28
Sunny
“They’re failing. Sing with me, Sunny. Sing them out of this life and into their next.”
I couldn’t sing. All I wanted to do was scream.
Haneul drew a breath anyway, and began making the exquisite music I’d heard when I met her first in Sanctuary. Precious sat beside me with the puppy Shadow on her lap, squeezing him hard as she stared at Mikhail and Righteous.
They had stopped breathing, even intermittently, an hour before. Their consciousness remained, but only just. Haneul had dipped into their thoughts, and said they were together in what looked like a dreamscape, just the two of them. We’d tied their arms together, so that the marks were as close as physically possible. But there wasn’t anything else we could do. They needed their soulmate.
“Maker of All, Singer of Songs, take these beloved souls into your light…” Haneul’s soothing voice in my ear reminded me of a mosquito’s buzz in the night. It made me want to slap things. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop what was happening.
If only Hope was here. There was something about her that made every day brighter, and not in a figurative way. For all that I was named Sunny, being with her had transformed me. She made me shine brighter. As if her hope and my light amplified each other.
But Hope was not here, and might never be. And I would not stay here then, either. If Feather fell, and I was alone with Precious in this realm, surrounded by Celestials who only looked at her with suspicion and fear, I would go. Find some other place to raise my ward, a place without so many terrible memories.
“They are gone,” Haneul said aloud. The room went utterly silent, none of us breathing as we stared at the motionless figures. The once-great Angeli were growing smaller… crumpling, both of them. And there was no spark of life that I could sense.
