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Her shoulders slumped, and flecks of deep lavender glitter sloughed off her wings and onto the clouds below. “I guess not.”
The hardest part of being a parent was not being able to soothe every hurt, to bend the world to fit your child’s dreams. But the sort of change she’d been trying for wasn’t possible, and even the attempt came at much too high a cost. Some consequences could not be avoided.
Something in my heart told me that Precious was going to learn that lesson soon.
CHAPTER8
Feather
My oldest mate was easy to find in the sky over the Limen. Rumple glowed, his vast wings and bright skin every bit as polished as they had been when he emerged from the Celestial Realm and came back to me in the Limen. The matching golden horns and tail were every bit as shiny, and I sent a kiss to him down our soul bond. The feather he’d wrapped around my left breast gave a warm, reassuring throb.
Precious wasn’t as easy to spot, but she was there, flying a few hundred feet behind. Her deeper coloration was almost a match for the glittering void behind her.
“The Abyss doesn’t have glitter,” I mused aloud from my seat on the soft grass. “Not from what Rumple told me.”
Gavriel fed another grape in between my lips, and I leaned back into his arms. I wished we could run back to our bedroom, lock the door, and open another 55-gallon drum of lube. Or at least another jar of maple syrup. I was not looking forward to the next few moments.
“I don’t believe it did. The void didn’t either, not all that long ago. But the glitter you brought here from Sanctuary—and the glitter Mikhail created for you—is spreading into the void around us. It’s changing.” Gavriel’s voice was filled with wonder, and amusement. Maybe a little concern. “Each piece reflects any available light, of course. But from what Rumple, Mikhail, and I have figured out, each speck of this glitter has a balancing property. Which is odd. Glitter is, by its very nature, a tool for great evil.”
I punched him lightly in the side. “Glitter is not inherently evil.”
“Agree to disagree, my love.” He hummed an apology against the top of my head, his clever hands moving over my ribs and sides like I was a living xylophone. “But we do believe glitter, even if it is a force for ill, can be used as a tool by the Maker of All to spread light in the darkest places. Perhaps it’s already doing so.”
It wasn’t the first time one of my mates had mused about this, but Gavriel was the most circumspect of all of us. If he had come to this conclusion, it was almost a certainty.
I pushed his fingers away from my neck, where he was messing with Mikhail’s mating feather. “Stop teasing me, Gav. The glitter is rebalancing the void around us—is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not just a pretty face, are you?”
I smiled smugly over my shoulder. “So glitter is saving the universe, not destroying it. You’ve been wrong all this time. Glitter isgood. Holy, even.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said with a laugh and a tickle that made me squirm and almost pee a little. I went to punch him again, but he picked me up. I settled for wrapping my legs around him as he unfurled his wings of light around us.
“So shiny,” I whispered, half-entranced as usual by the glow that surrounded us. When I’d first met my mates, I’d thought being dickmatized was the thing. I’d never realized how hotwingswere. Especially wings that had as many divine nerve endings as these. I ran my finger along one edge of the light, and Gavriel growled.
“Not now, little wretch. We have to be the bad guys.”
“I hate being the bad guys.”
“All good parents do.”
In less than a minute, Presh and Rumple landed. Gavriel and I stood, waiting under the golden aspen trees in the park. Rumple blew me a kiss and walked away, leaving the three of us to take seats on the sturdy benches, with Presh on the smallest one.
She’d added all sorts of marks into it over the years, carving them with her sharp nails. I hadn’t realized until just now that I’d seen marks like those before. Not the angelic sigils that made up our written language, but demonic ones. She’d used a mixture of demonic and baby-babble for the first years of her life, but it had been a long time since I’d heard her speak it. Most of the Protectors and Guides here said it hurt their ears to hear it. One of the younger residents had bled from the ears when she’d thrown a tantrum, shouting in demonic.
Did she still speak it when she was alone? Did she still remember it?
A thought came to mind. “Presh,” I said in a whisper. “When you talk to the void, what language do you speak in?”
She didn’t answer, but her eyes went wide, and her cheeks flushed a deeper purple.
“Never mind,” I murmured as Mikhail walked out of our house. I had my answer.
“Dad, I can explain about the chime,” Precious said, standing when he approached with the golden chime in his hand. We had all agreed we wouldn’t talk about the Perception problem in a group. A girl’s—no, a young woman’s first kiss should not be the subject of a family meeting.
Mikhail didn’t smile, but his deep bass voice rumbled with acceptance. “You don’t need to explain what happened. I already know, and my shiny, lovely, stubborn girl? I already forgave you. You never even have to ask.”
Precious burst into tears and raced to him, burying her face in the glittery shirt that covered his broad chest. It was all I could do not to cry along with her as she hiccupped through a dozen more apologies. Finally, we all sat back down, Presh next to Mikhail, her eyes stuck on the ruined chime in his open palm.
