“I do not have moods,” I growled. She bit her lip, muttering something inaudible. “Tell me, why do you make up such ridiculous curse words?”
She turned her head back to her task, one arm lifted high as she scraped under her arm. I winced as the smut liquified and flowed to the table, smelling of burning flesh and rancid oil. “I dare you to try walking around with this much smut,” she panted, then folded a small piece of cloth and dabbed it on her arm before she began cutting again. “When you get close to as much as you can carry, you have to make choices, right? Like, ah!” I flinched as she closed her eyes, the tear rolling down her cheek clearing a new stripe of skin. “Cursing doesn’t add a lot of smut. Just a little. But with how much I was gaining each year, I knew I had to make a choice. Even if each word is just a little hit, I didn’t have to carry the burden from cursing, so I didn’t.”
My blood had frozen, and I was dying to ask what she’d meant, but I kept silent. She’d had to make a choice. She didn’t carry any smut that she could avoid.This kind of sin takes a hell of a lot longer than eighteen years to accumulate.Her mystery only got deeper, the more time I spent in her presence.
When she’d slipped into Arabella’s room the night before—I assume fleeing Righteous, since he’d been hounding her constantly—she’d almost caught me checking on my failed creation. I’d barely stepped into the secret passageway that led from my workshop to Arabella’s resting place when I heard the outer door open and creak shut. From where I stopped behind the curtain, I could just make out Feather’s curious behavior.
When Gavriel had entered with the soul knife, and whispered his desperate confession, I’d almost leaped out to stop him. Sanctuary would fall without both of us, but sooner if he was gone. Sanctuary needed us for more reasons than anyone besides Gavriel and I knew.
My main job was to create Novices and repair the Protectors, although in the past I’d had the job of repairing the gates as well. Gav’s pressing work was a greater task; he had to fight the battles that once would have fallen to an entire Celestial army, alone.
Feather had also been on the verge of jumping out to stay Gavriel’s hand, which had surprised me. He’d been nothing but cold to her.
Cold, and suspicious. And maybe he had the right of it. I frowned at the small stack of four Novices I was engraving, my hand holding each glowing, amorphous ball of soul light steady as I stamped their names into the surfaces.
Why had I not seen it? Not asked? Of course it took longer than eighteen years for a soul to accumulate Feather’s level of filth. If she had done it in one short life, Gavriel would have seen her—the sheer number of murders and crimes she’d have had to commit would have attracted his attention.
My mind spun. Either she had been on Earth far longer than eighteen years, or she wasn’t a Protector at all. And somehow, she hadn’t felt like my creation from the very start, though the smut had obscured her essence.
I supposed she could have come from the Abyss, as Gavriel hinted. But she never seemed evil. Never felt tainted, no matter what she’d looked like. Already, she wasn’t nearly as repulsive as she’d appeared just over a week ago.
In fact… I glanced at the arm that wept silver and red and charcoal gray into the gutters around the table. It shone from within, bright as white fire when the light hit it at the right angle. A creature from the Abyss would never shine like that. By the Gate, what would she look like when she was done? She slipped a hand under the strap of the sequined bikini top she’d insisted on wearing ever since she’d begun work on her torso, and I realized she had womanly curves.
Nice ones.
I cursed as my chisel slipped. Slipped! Like a fucking Apprentice. I’d just ruined a potential Novice’s naming mark.
“A farking Apprentice?” Feather’s laughter pulled my horrified focus away from the ruined engraving. Had I spoken aloud? “Is that what you’re making?”
“No, these are Novices.” Her eyebrow rose higher. “I take a very small amount of base material, blend it with pure soul energy, and send it through the gate to Earth. Novices are all born of human mothers, and they only realize their missions when they come of age.”
Her eyes stayed glued to my hands as I carefully sanded out the blemish in the glowing ball of soul light. “So would you ever train another Apprentice?”
“No. I had one. He was a disaster.”
“The one from four hundred years ago?”
I sucked in a breath. “What do you know about that?” Suddenly, Feather’s presence in Arabella’s room seemed less mistake, and more machination.
Feather shrugged, setting down her knife and rolling out her shoulders. “Sunny said that’s when a lot of shizz went down up here.” She nodded at the sealed up Well of Souls.
“Yes.” I picked up the naming chime, casually palming it. Lifting it behind her head where she couldn’t see, I held it up as I spoke, pretending to examine her foot. “The Apprentice I had, the last one. Azazel. He was the one who sealed himself into the Well of Souls.”
“He killed himself?”
“He unmade himself,” I explained. “We didn’t know he had been sent by… a force of evil.” I paused. The naming bell remained silent. “A denizen of the Abyss.” Another pause. Another silence. “A being from Hell. An agent of Hell.”
Muttering, I ran through the list of names of Angeli who had left Sanctuary to strengthen the gate. We had no way of knowing where their souls were now, though we all prayed they lived on somehow. It was possible they had been unmade, their energies taken by the Abyss. The gate’s weakening indicated all was not well with whatever plane they inhabited.
“Azriel, Sakarizel, Vandriel...” I stopped when I’d run out of names. Then I whispered one more, “Seraphiel,” at the same moment that she muttered, “Just a little more.” The naming chime hummed silently in my hand for a second, but didn’t ring. What did that mean?
Feather slanted a look up at me. “You’re playing a game I play with—playedwith—a friend on Earth. I call it Eternal Rumpelstiltskin. He gives me three guesses every time we get together. I haven’t been able to figure out his name yet, and I’ve guessed tons.”
“A game?” I grumbled. “This is no game. And why would you not know the name of a friend?”
“Well, he’s more than a friend,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “He was sort of… a teacher. But the kind that makes you guess all the answers, instead of telling you.”
“Maybe his name is longer than one word,” I murmured, wracking my brain for more ideas to try. “Could be you’ve already guessed a part of it, but not the whole.”
