Oh, yeah. Feather.My heart ached, but I tried to push it out of my thoughts. I grabbed Righteous’s hands and pulled him up to sitting, then tore off a strip of my robe and used it to bandage his sluggishly bleeding cut. While I worked, he answered my question, and I had to fight to conceal my shock at his story.
“Four hundred years ago, right after the Well of Souls was sealed, I had a mission in a small village just outside Rome. I was to keep a sixteen-year-old named Dina from choosing to… have sexual relations with an older man. An evil man.” He hesitated, his golden eyes darkening. “I wasn’t able to stop her. I didn’t realize she’d only agreed to lie with him to save her younger sister.”
Horror swamped me. “Younger sister? You mean Tili.”
His gaze met mine, and I flinched at the pain there. “Feather was Tili.”
I nodded. “She told me about Dina. And Ashtad, her friend. That was you?”
Righteous closed his eyes and sighed heavily. “Tili ended up killing the man, Julian, but it was too late. Dina was brutalized and murdered, and I was so concerned with following our laws, our rules for missions, that I didn’t step in. I didn’t try to save her because I was certain about what was right.”
I held my tongue, but there was something about his story that wasn’t ringing true. He wasn’t lying. He was just… not seeing something. I sent up a prayer to the Light of all Lights that I would be able to help untangle this mystery.
“Tili stabbed Julian in the neck with a hoof pick. But Dina was dead, and Tili was injured. Her soul was being eaten by the shadows, and it was my fault. I flew to get help from Gavriel, to see if he could save her, but when we returned, Tili was gone. There was no sign of her being there at all. No body, no trace of her soul. I searched for her, hunted everywhere. No one knew where she might be, or if she was dead.” We both fell silent.
“You said your mission was to stop Dina from choosing to have sex with a grown man,” I said softly. A group of Guides, now that Mikhail’s High Angelic whispers had dissolved into weeping, had drifted close enough to eavesdrop. “But she was practically a child herself. The man who attacked her was theone who needed to be stopped. Are you sure your Guide told you what the actual goal was, the parameters of the mission? Who gave you that assignment?” His eyes flared wide, and his mouth dropped open. “Later,” I breathed.
I had a terrible suspicion that my prayer had been answered. I could feel my naming mark pulse as my thoughts moved at the speed of light, illuminating an incident that lay in the distant past. My innermost soul said there was something hidden, shadowed, about the catastrophe four centuries ago that was every bit as dangerous now as it had been then. The Guides nearest us had clustered around Mikhail, but the eyes of the other lead Protectors, Hope and Valor, were on Righteous.
“You never knew Tili—Feather—was a Protector?” I asked.
But it was High Angelus Gavriel, still staring at the gate but close enough now to hear my hushed voice, who answered. “Feather was never a Protector.” It was like throwing a loaf of bread into a flock of starlings. The Guides and Protectors all began squawking and speaking over each other, until Gavriel calmly spoke the word for silence.
Ignoring all the others, he strode to the gate with wings flaring, and reached out to touch it with one hand, as if he was preparing to walk into it. I gasped, wondering if he had gone as nuts as Righteous. Was he planning to leave Sanctuary without a leader?
But then nothing happened. Gavriel’s hand met the surface and moved over it, as if it were made of metal instead of shifting soul energy. “She’s truly sealed it,” he said softly. “She didn’t shore up the gate. She changed it.”
My knees wobbled at that, and I realized I was using the Celestial sword as a walking stick. I walked closer and lifted one hand. His eyes met mine, and he flashed his palm at me, releasing me from his command to be silent. My voice was loudin the stillness as I asked, “What do you mean? Did Feather break the gate?”
“No. She more than repaired it. It has no flaw. No cracks, no taint… no way to reopen it. She has erased the Great Gate, and made it a part of Sanctuary. A wall.”
I frowned. “But wasn’t it already sealed shut? All those High Angeli who sealed it after the Well was taken away?—”
He shook his head absently and shared something I knew no other Protector, at least not one as unimportant as I was, should know. “It always had cracks. The cold wind that came into Sanctuary recently, the tremors—it was all because the gate could never be entirely sealed shut. Sanctuary leached power from the gate and the… and other sources, to feed its inhabitants.”
I blinked. I had never taken any lectures in Advanced Gate Theory, and Energy Science was my worst subject, so I only sort of understood how Sanctuary operated. “So it was never fixed to begin with? The solution from all those years ago was to what? Keep sacrificing more and more of us to the gate to hold back the Abyss?”
I wanted to thunk him on the head. He was our leader, and this had been his big plan? It reminded me of that story from Earth about a boy who stuck his finger in a hole in a dike. It was a brave stopgap, but what was the real solution?
Gavriel’s lips curled down. “We were supposed to have corrected the imbalance, so the gate could be opened again. It was never intended to be sealed entirely. Permanently.”
I cleared my throat, knowing I wasn’t going to like his answer to my next question. “Why not? What’s the worst that can happen?”
“It may be happening now,” he said softly. “Sanctuary is a place for learning, but also a watch post. To keep the forces of the Abyss from reaching the Celestial Realm. Beyond thisgate”—he tapped it with a fist, making a ringing sound—“lie the entrances to both those realms. If we are truly closed off, then the forces in the Abyss can make their move. Our gate can no longer absorb and combat the energy from the Abyss that batters at it, and keep it from attacking the Celestial Realm.”
“Oh shizz,” I breathed. “Is there any way we can find out?”
“Yes,” he replied calmly. Too calmly. “If you go to Earth, commit a horrific murder—or something similar—and forfeit your soul to the Abyss, I’m sure you can check from their side.” Then he held his hand out for the sword.
Before I handed it to him, I asked, “Why did she do it?” He flinched, and his blue eyes swam with an emotion I hadn’t expected. Guilt.
He hesitated, then murmured, his voice cracking, “I told her to. I said she was trash. I told her she wasn’t needed.”
Before I could stop myself, I was hissing at him, my wings extended in rage. “What kind of idiot are you?Ineeded her.Mikhailneeded her.” I pointed to the Maker, crumpled on the floor, unmoving, barely breathing. “They were mated, and now she has been unmade, thanks to you. If he dies because of it, it will be your fault!” He didn’t react, his face frozen in resignation and silent horror.
When I handed the sword to him, he strode off without another word. I was glad he left; I had been on the verge of cursing him out, and to heck with the smut-freckles it would bring me. Of course, freckles wouldn’t have been my biggest problem if I did that. He’d probably pull my wings off and stuff throw pillows with the feathers.
Wait, wings.“Righteous?” I called, but before I completed his name, he’d risen and taken my hand. “What’s wrong?” I squeezed his cold fingers. “Are you okay now? No more cutting off… things?”
