Feather
Iheard it when they died.
Mikhail and Righteous had been a combined, muted presence in my mind, an almost inaudible hum of reassurance and power in my blood, my bones, since I left the Celestial Realm. The energy they’d given me, their love, had been a tuneless song in the background of my mind, sustaining me for this long. And when the song ended, the empty silencethat was left made every one of my heartbeats, every breath I somehow still drew, sound like a shouted profanity in a world that had been dedicated to holy mourning.
A breaking heart didn’t make a sound, I discovered. It made a void. A cold spot in the fabric of the universe, where nothing could ever be warm again.
Gavriel’s power, combined with Sanctuary’s, was all that kept me alive now. If I was really alive.
When they stopped breathing, when their lives ended, like a thread cut off far too short, I almost followed them. I knew if I closed my eyes, I would. I hunted for some way to send energy back to them on the thread, but it was like trying to push water up a mountain with my breath. The filament of power that had been there was already beginning to go cold. There was nothing I could do.
So I prayed for one last miracle.
I prayed that I would be able to keep my eyes open, cling to life, so that Gavriel could get Rumple to the gate and back home.
I knew Gavriel would follow me and my other mates into death. My soul was already keening, a wailing cry echoing in my mind as I flailed in the darkness, seeking them. Not finding.
No, there was no chance for Gav and me. But we could save the First of the Celestial Children, and send him home.
My Rumple. He held me as I fell in the Maker Hall. Caught me, as he always had. His eyes were filled with anguish.We waited too long…
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t even project my thoughts. It was like there was a bubble around me. A coffin.
The thought of Mikhail and Righteous dead was like oil on the surface of water, spreading, tainting everything with a thin film of despair. I flailed, wondering how this could be my end.
After all the pain, all the lives, after I had finally found love with not one, but two… three… okay, potentially evenfourincredible men, this was how it ended? With me catatonic, a mute witness to the end of all my dreams?
It couldn’t be. The song of my life could not be over now, like this. I sent my consciousness down into my center, where everything was growing cold, and let the rhythm of my heart become a drumbeat of war. Each thump in the vast silence was a refusal to allow this to be it. To be over. I had just found them all, just claimed them.
I had plans for these men that involved endless love, and infinite moments of joy, and a metric fuck-ton of chocolate fondue, and when that ran out, edible lube. I refused to let this be the end of all my dreams, after such a relatively crappy existence up to now. No. All I needed to do was stay alive and try to live through the unbelievable agony of this fresh, hellish silence in the very interior of my soul… and remember that miracles existed.
Divine mistakes,Imriel’s voice echoed in my mind.And they usually work out.I had to believe it now. Believe that my mates weren’t dead.
I’d seen some super weird crap in my short lives on Earth. The street mime in Toronto who was stuck in a box that he pretended was a private toilet, but the police wouldn’t shut it down because it was city-sponsored performance art. The nun in Italy who collected all the Sisters’ chicken carcasses to make fake relics of John the Baptist’s finger bones to sell to pilgrims. The social worker in Albuquerque who swore she’d been abducted and anal probed by aliens every year on her birthday since she was nineteen, and had pictures that seemed to back up those claims.
It was one hundred percent within the range of possibility that my mates could be frozen in stasis right now. Their whole bodies on Celestial ice. Or maybe just their heads. I hoped not.
Or they could be having a super bad trip on some Fields of Joy weed. They’d seemed a little too happy in that dream I’d had. Whatever they were doing, whatever state they were in, I was not about to give up. Even though my body didn’t seem to have gotten that message. I could feel it shutting down all around me, my heartbeat slowing, my breath shallower, cold creeping over my extremities. Dang it, I hated being cold.
I couldn’t reach my soulfire, or maybe I didn’t have any left. Nothing was left… except the lump of sealed power Imriel had placed there. The Celestial key.Of course!I had its song, its power, inside me. Imriel had said it was never to be touched; without it, I could not re-enter the Celestial Realm.
But I sure as heck wasn’t going to get to walk through the ugly fire door and start doing mouth-to-mouth on my mates if I died right now. If Rumple could access it, unseal it, maybe he could use it to jump-start the thread that was almost dead. I could move again then, and?—
His thoughts bored into my mind.Do not give up, Feather. Do not let go. I swear if you make me put you back together again, I’ll… I’ll give you the smallest tits in the history of womankind.
I couldn’t tell him to stop joking and start cracking the key out of me, because I didn’t even have the juice to send a thought back to him. I was frozen and helpless.
I’d felt this way before. The memory of the time he’d retrieved me after my death in Mongolia centuries before drifted into my mind. When he’d found my tiny body, I had been run over by a stampede of cattle. I’d lain there broken during a sudden storm, and the temperatures had dropped so low, the rain and mud had frozen. He’d thought I would complain about the way I’d died—I usually bitched about it for at least a week each time—but all I could do was go on and on about how disgusting yak milk was.
If you promise to hold on, little one,he thought into my mind,I will make sure no yak milk ever crosses those beautiful lips again.
He could see into my memories. He couldsee!I fought to recall a memory of cracking open a walnut, or opening a can, or… anything, to give him the idea. But my thoughts were clumsy, my memories beginning to fade, and my heart numb with pain. The emptiness inside kept insisting that my mates were dead, gone forever…Nope. Nope, birch, you do not get to give up yet. They are sleeping deeply. Passed out on Celestial drugs. Not dead… maybe just mostly dead. But definitely partly alive.
And my totally-alive but void-infested idiot lover was still teasing me about the yak milk. I vividly recalled him telling me I needed to focus, in between realms, that “this isn’t the time for humor.”I put the memory on a short loop.
He scowled, not getting it.It very much is. It may be all that keeps us going right now. And I’m disappointed in you, little one. What if I had believed I couldn’t remake you, hm? It isn’t supposed to be possible. If I had seen all those disparate particles expanding in a cloud into the void, and sat on my hands and mourned you, I would never have been able to touch you.
I would not have been able to make love to you. Now, I have to believe I can go out there and fight the entire Abyss to save you and Gavriel, and I don’t know if I can do that with you already deciding it’s a lost cause. They are alive. I must believe it. And if you are to remain alive as well, you must also know that there is hope.His expression twisted into a dismissive sneer.So, are you going to keep whining, princess? It’s really not the most attractive trait in a lover. Honestly, I should have seen this coming. Giving up right before the end, lying around like a rag doll while your men do all the work…
