“Mikhail?”
Her eyebrows flew up. “You use his name?”
I frowned; I didn’t want to admit I called him Growly Bear about half the time. “What else would I use?”
She stammered for a bit, then shrugged. “Well, it’s funny about that joke you told in the Dining Hall. He is usually called Master. Or the Maker, or High Angelus Mikhail. Nobody calls him just by his name.”
“Master? For real?” I followed her down some marble stairs. “But not as, like, a kink thing—it’s his title? Who or what is he the master of?” I mean, before he had forced me to torture myself all day, I would have said he could be my master. But having him see me at my weakest made me think that ship had probably sailed. Not much sexy about snot, grease, blood, and tears.
“No one anymore,” Sunny murmured, “but centuries ago, he had an Apprentice who was supposed to take his place. The Maker was done with all his Constructs except one—"
“His what now?”
“Oh.” Sunny stopped at the top of the stairs, thinking. “So, in his workshop, you saw the dais?”
I recalled the empty stage, the golden cloth, and the name. “The Beautiful One.”
She nodded and started walking down another hallway. “Arabella was the last Construct the Maker attempted. The one meant for Gavriel.”
“Meant for?”
“To be his paired mate. His perfect complement. The only one he will ever love,couldever love.”
The weirdest emotion, some sort of internal dragon, opened one narrow eye deep in my gut, waking at this news, and blew a trail of smoke from its scaly nostrils.What the hello? Jealousy?I didn’t even like the mysterious Gavriel. “Ah, so his wife?”
“Well, more than that,” Sunny said, her face going tragically dreamy. “Before the catastrophe, the Maker spent his life creating perfect mates for the Protectors who’d moved on to become one of the Angeli.”
“Wait, you mean you don’t hook up with each other? You have to have a new person made?” That seemed excessive.
She rolled her eyes. “Protectors don’t normally bond, only Angeli—though honestly? A bunch of us really do have strong bonds. Anyway, when a Protector’s ready to ascend, if they haven’t found another Protector who called to their soul, one would be made for them.” I nodded like I didn’t think this was completely nuts. “Once it was apparent you would ascend, the Maker would start work on finding the true name of your bonded, so he could pull their soul from the Well and create the Construct that would house it.”
I didn’t interrupt, although I was dying to ask questions. Scooping up the stuff to make your soulmate? That wasn’t like love on Earth at all. Unless you thought of making an ice cream sundae as love. Which… actually, I got it now. My soulmate would definitely be made of un-meltable ice cream.
“After you bonded, you had a choice: work with Protectors here, or go through the gate to the Celestial Realm with your mate.”
I filed away the knowledge that Protectors could become Angeli. And that staying in Sanctuary was a choice. “The Celestial Realm is Heaven?”
Sunny scrunched her brow. “Close enough, I guess. I mean, no one has been there and returned in millennia. The entrance to the Celestial Realm is beyond the Great Gate, but it hasn’t been opened for four hundred years.”
Four hundred years. That number kept coming up.Oh, please let me not be the reason all this went wrong.But coincidences had never been on my side before. “Wait up, girl. What actually happened four hundred years ago?”
Sunny blew out a breath. “So the Maker had chosen an Apprentice, and his training was almost complete. And then, the day Arabella received Gavriel’s feather—”
“Back up! A feather?” Gah. This felt like watching the middle episode of a soap opera I hadn’t ever seen.
“From what I learned in my History of Protectors lessons, the thing that ignites the pair bond—and actually brings the new Construct to life—is receiving a part of the mate into yourself.”
“Yes, Sunny,” I said soothingly. I felt like she should know this by now. “It’s called sex. The Daddy angel takes a very special part of himself and puts it into the Mommy angel—”
Sunny stopped walking, her face stern. “No, not just physical merging, Feather. This is more. Gavriel took a part of hissouland placed it into his intended mate.”
The jealousy dragon opened another eye. Gavriel had given some woman a part of his soul? That was more than a wedding ring. But why did I even care? I shook the feeling away again. “What happened then?”
“No one knows for certain, but somehow the Apprentice must have been allied with the Abyss.” She held up a hand when I took a breath to ask about it. “That’s a subject for another day. Just know, they’re the ones who’ve tried to upset the balance forever, the reason the gates were built and later sealed.”
I fought the sudden urge to run back to the Great Gate, to be near it. What was this feeling? Was I pansexual? I wanted to lick Mikhail, and Gavriel… and Righteous, to be fair. And now a gate? I leaned forward and licked Sunny’s cheek. Nope. Sunny tasted nice, like powdered sugar, but I didn’t want to jump her like I did the dude angels… or jump into her like I did a freakinggate.
She shoved me away. “Ew, what was that?”
