I cleared my throat. “No, I’ll tell you in a moment. Just… you said a few questions. What else did you want to know?” I needed to stretch out this peaceful oasis, the afterglow of holding my mate in my arms, as long as possible. I knew the way she looked at me now might vanish forever when I answered that first question.
She ran her fingers over my chest, tugging lightly at the hairs there, tickling me gently. She had to see the scars that littered my body, but she didn’t say anything about them, just accepted them and touched them gently. “You took me as your mate to save me… but I don’t want you to not be able to have a real soulmate someday. I don’t want you to regret me.”
I lifted her chin with one finger. “Youaremy real mate, and I could never regret you.” I wanted to tell her I loved her. Tell her why I did, and shower her with compliments. But her first question weighed on me. I owed her that truth before anything else.
“Okay…” she said, waiting. But when I didn’t speak, she traced one of my deeper scars. “Tell me about your scars, if you want.”
“I want—no, I need to tell you about those. And a few other things as well.” I raised my hand to her hair again, sifting through the silk. A tiny piece of glitter caught there shimmered in the firelight. She had said, in the heat of her passion, that she loved me. Would she still feel that way after I shared the secret of her naming?
“When the Well was first shut, many of my friends sacrificed themselves to close our gate, and seal it against the Abyss. We knew that without the Well’s energy, Sanctuary would wither and drag us all down with it, into shadows.
“Eventually, the tremors began. I sacrificed some of my essence, my flesh and feathers, to keep it from falling. When Gavriel found out, he forbade me to do that again.” I sighed. “We were the only two Angeli left in Sanctuary, and we made a vow not to sacrifice ourselves unless we knew it would permanently save the gate.” I sighed as her fingers moved over the dozens of divots on the sides of my ribs, in an unspoken question. “When the Well was sealed, my work didn’t end. When Protectors come to Sanctuary damaged, they have to be isolated and healed with the same sort of energy that the Well had in it. The only sources of that energy are—”
“Mikhail!” Her hand stopped and trembled slightly. “You’ve been healing them with pieces of your own body?”
I shrugged, trying to smile. “Don’t tell Gavriel. He forgot to forbid that. He’ll have a fit.”
“I’ll have a fit,” she protested, her lip curling into a snarl. “You can’t keep doing that.”
I shrugged slightly. “The only sources of that type of energy are me and Gavriel… and Arabella.” Then I took a breath. “And you, Feather.”
She sat up like she had been electrocuted, blinking fast. “What do you mean?”
“I need to tell you a story. It happened four—”
“—hundred years ago,” she finished, and took a deep breath before continuing, “when I was made.” Our eyes met, and I saw her secrets shimmering on the surface.
I nodded. “I know how old you are, sweet soul. I know when you were made, and what went wrong.”
“You pretended—” she began, but I cut her off.
“No, I only put it together along the way. I’ll tell you what I did to you, Feather,” I said softly. “And then you can decide if you regret being my mate.” She nodded slowly, and I closed my eyes, remembering that day when I’d ruined my best friend’s chance at happiness… and perhaps my own.
Iwas in danger of losing my temper, and my mind. I glared down at the impossibility in my palm. Maybe I already had? I could not be seeing what was before me. It was inconceivable.
The word echoed over and over, until I realized it was being spoken, just not by me.
I clenched my jaw to keep from cursing. Some of my friends who had gone on to the Celestial Realm had warned me not to stay too long in Sanctuary. Even Seraphiel had cautioned me. “You’ll lose your mind here, Mik. The same work every day for millennia? You’ll need to move on someday.” But it wasn’t the monotony that would drive me mad.
It was my Apprentice.
“Azazel, I need you now,” I shouted across the Maker Hall.
He stopped mumbling the word “inconceivable,” though I knew he would find a new word and begin again at any moment. Though I’d told him a thousand times of the importance of staying silent while I worked on a Construct, or singing only the ancient songs of creation when he worked on creating Novices, he was mumbling, as usual. He always mumbled these days, just soft enough that the words were nearly impossible to make out.
At my shout, he scurried over, dropping whatever he had been holding and knocking at least three tools off tables as he ran. “Yes, Maker?” His narrow nose and close-set eyes made him look as if he were paying attention, but after six centuries of working with him, I never made the mistake of assuming that.
I shook my fist at him again. “Take it,” I demanded.
“M-Maker? What should I take?” He stared at me like I’d lost my mind. I almost didn’t blame him. I took a deep, patient breath. Then another. Finally, he held out his hand. I dropped the mistake onto his palm.
He gawked down at it. “Master Mikhail, is this… a Construct? An unformed one?” The small, irregular ball of golden light rolled around on his palm like it was playing with his narrow fingers. No bigger than his smallest fingernail, it was generally the same shape as the balls of soul energy he used to form the Novices we sent to Earth, though far smaller. And it was obvious this was not one of those—this torn scrap of light was glorious, golden, alive.
And a mistake. It rolled around on Azazel’s palm, and I forced myself to look away and back at Arabella. She was finished. Completed, every part of her perfect. But for some reason, when I came to the end of the sculpting and singing her into existence, there had been this… one small piece left over.
That had never happened before. Not once in five thousand years, since I had been given the role as Maker in Sanctuary, had I drawn too much raw material out of the Well to build a Construct.
And I didn’t know what to do with it.
