I shrugged, but the look she gave me was suspicious. “So…” I held up a donut. Time to change the subject, and get to the bottom of a mystery. “Question. We eat and we drink, but so far, I haven’t needed a toilet. What’s up with that?”
She grinned. “Well, the food is really energy in shapes that remind us of Earth cuisine. Since we all do missions, and eat on Earth, it’s good to stay in practice. Otherwise, we could just soak the energy in through our pores, I suppose.”
“No, I like it in donut form,” I mumbled, my mouth full of sugary goodness. “So where does the power come from?”
Sunny chewed at her lip. “Ugh, Energy Science was not my thing. So, there’s a more complex explanation, but it boils down to the fact that we are all essentially made of pure power—drawn originally from the Well of Souls, right? And that power is infinite; it stays with us forever, never decreasing, unless it gets overwhelmed with, um… well.” Her gaze dropped to my filthy arms. “Anyway. It’s divine, and our connection to it is what gives us our forms, helps us fly, and makes us effective as Protectors to our charges. Which is why it’s shocking to see you so covered with smut. I don’t know how you’re even able to walk around. Protectors don’t have as much soul energy as High Angeli to begin with, though we can develop what we have through our missions on Earth, as well as meditation and merging here. You must be a very strong Protector to be able to walk or even talk while your energy is so smothered.”
I finished my donut quickly, annoyed that people kept being surprised by me—though that had been a recurrent theme even on Earth— and jumped down, tired of being in bed.
But Sunny hopped up, getting between me and the door, like I’d made a break for it. “The Master said to come to the Maker Hall in two hours. So, to keep you occupied in here, I brought… craft supplies.” She did a classic jazz hands move.
I squinted at her; she seemed a little too happy. “What kinds of crafts?”
“Every kind.” She almost wiggled with suppressed…something. “I asked High Angelus Mikhail for some, and he had an entire closet full of things to choose from—stuff he’d collected from his trips to Earth, he said, and things the Protectors don’t use anymore. Stay here.”
She ran outside and dragged in a giant golden sack, opening the white satin cord that tied it shut on top. I watched in awe as she unloaded an entire hobby store onto the floor of my room. There was yarn, felt, paints, fabrics of every kind, plain t-shirts, silk flowers, glue guns, wooden dowels, and craft sticks. I chewed my lip in anticipation as she got to the last few items.
Please let it be there. Please let there be…A thrill of illicit joy raced through me as I thought of the one craft supply I had discovered in the past seventy-five years on Earth, the one which I’d been forbidden to use at least once in every lifetime. After I learned how awful it was for the environment, I’d begrudgingly switched to other crafts. But this stuff was my secret addiction. It was the crack of crafting, the heroin of home décor, the meth of maker spaces everywhere.
“Glitter,” Sunny and I both breathed at the same time.
“Let me see.” I held my hands out. She put an enormous glass jar full of every color glitter in my grasp, and I cradled and stroked it like the precious one ring that it was. “It’s not bad for the environment up here, is it? No water supply systems to pollute or whatever? No fish or birds that might eat it and get sick?”
“Nope!” Sunny’s whole face shone with unholy glee. Or holy glee. Whichever.
“What are we decorating first?” I asked. “The t-shirts? Oh! We could make glittery sticks for all the big-winged Protectors like Righteous and Valor, with their names on the sides.” She frowned, so I explained. “Then they’ll have a spare. All the older ones I’ve met already have huge sticks up their butts. We can at least make them pretty ones.”
“Feather, you’re going to get in so much trouble,” Sunny gasped. “You’re not supposed to makethingsfor the Protectors.”
“Didn’t Growly give you the supplies for me to use? He won’t care what I make.”
“You don’t really call him that.” She looked around, like someone could be listening in. For all I knew, someone was.
“To his ruggedly handsome face,” I said, smirking. “I think he likes it.”
She winced. “I think you might be the most reckless Protector in history. He’ll unmake you by the end of the day at this rate. To be honest, I’m not sure he knew what was in the closet he let me gather from. They stopped arts lessons the same time they did music. You might want to keep the crafts in here.”
“Nuh-uh. I’m gonna make him a thank you shirt,” I announced, tamping down my anger at whoever had decided art and music was unnecessary. At least Mikhail knew the value of making stuff. “I need a double extra-large. My Growly Bear is all muscle.”
Sunny rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe you’d call him that to his face. Wait. Feather, you don’t like him in aromanticway, do you?”
“The guy that’s about to make me shave off smut and cry acid tears all day? That’s a super obvious red flag for a potential boyfriend, Sunny.” Despite my denial, I could feel my cheeks heating up. I poured a pile of pink and silver glitter onto a piece of paper and tried not to think of Mikhail’s muscles.
Sunny and I worked for a couple of hours, and I discovered two things. One, crafting with a friend is way more fun than doing it alone. Two, glitter is even harder to get off than smut. And when glitter touches smut, it makes Superglue look like kindergarten paste.
She dragged me into the purification chamber to try to remove it before my scheduled morning knife playdate with Mikhail. I got distracted, admiring myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. I had no clue what my actual body looked like—which was weird, having no idea what might be under all this gross grease. But for now, I looked like a contestant in a back-to-back mud run and color run. It was kind of cool.
Sunny got agitated when I told her I wanted to keep the glitter on, so I made a show of wiping it off, pretend-frowning when it didn’t work. “Come on, birch. You know this makes me look sexy.”
No one else was in the purification room. In fact, we hadn’t seen anyone else all morning. I was starting to suspect there was a coordinated effort to keep me away from the other Protectors.
“Sunny, admit it—I look hot. I could totally score in this outfit. Mud, glitter, toga? They have whole festivals where this is practically the uniform, and I’ve heard they’re pretty much orgies.”
Sunny snorted, picking glitter off her nose. “You talk about sex a lot. Your physical form only looks about eighteen, though. Did you have sex on Earth? Orgies?” Her gaze dropped to my smut, and I could almost hear her thinkingthat might explain some things.
I pulled on my greasy toga while I considered my answer, wondering for the thousandth time why I’d never had a life longer than twenty years or so. In the early days, I’d been killed or fallen asleep and woken in a new body—usually as an infant, but every once in a while as a young girl. I’d had more than one pervert try to get handsy with me as a child, but I’d fought them all off. I didn’t even mind wearing the smut for killing those bassholes. In my middle centuries, I’d lived longer and had enjoyed having sex, mainly for the snuggling after.
Most of the men I’d been with had been gentle lovers—I could never be attracted to the ones with the shadowed souls, anyway. But every one of them had popped like a champagne cork within seconds of actual penetration, none of them able to keep it going for long enough for me to even glimpse the proverbial stars. More than a few had said touching my body intimately felt like dying and going to Heaven and Hell at the same time. After one poor man had experienced an actual heart attack a century ago when I tried to give him a blow job, I’d mostly stopped experimenting.
