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Steeling my spine.
I’ve never defied him.
“Watch your tone, daughter. It’s better not to speak the words of a story you only know half of. Affliction or not, I won’t have you sullying your mother’s memory.”
I take a breath and slowly turn my head to face him once more. Heat rises in my cheeks, and I lock eyes with him.
And it may have only been the flames—now darkened and flickering with his wrath—casting shadows on his face, but I swear his eyes widen as I match the fury of his gaze.
“Speaking about her is hardly sullying. Now, if I were to say Mother was a fallen whore who jumped on as many cocks as she could find,thatistruly sullying her memory.”
My cheeks grow hotter still, this time with embarrassment.
My father’s flames fan outward, shifting to an even deeper iron blue, a shade I’ve never seen before now.
I brace for another blow.
But it doesn’t come.
Malachi Umbra knows when it’s the affliction that takes hold of my tongue.
On the mortal plane, they call it frontal lobe disinhibition.
The inability to keep thoughts from becoming words, no matter how hurtful.
And another reason Father doesn’t want me going back.
But I divide my life into two parts.
Before Gael and after Gael.
See, he found me on the mortal plane after the accident that left me unconscious and bleeding in a ditch.
The human nurses said the impact threw me from the car. Right through the windshield. That is, they said it when I woke up from my coma several weeks later.
An angel in a coma?
Preposterous, right?
Except, I wasn’t of age. I hadn’t received my Grace yet. And an angel without her Grace on the mortal plane is just as vulnerable as a human.
Granted, if I’d died while on the mortal plane, my soul would come back to Celestus, where I’d be born once more.
But since my injury happened pre-Grace, pre-immortality, and since I was stuck on that plane for so long, the damage became permanent.
Gael didn’t have his Grace either. He couldn’t simply shimmer us back to Celestus. To our healers.
I think he still feels guilty about that.
When we finally returned, the healers did what they could. They smoothed the scars and strengthened the muscles that had wasted away. But they couldn’t fix the damage to my mind.
If I’d gotten back sooner, they might have mended me fully.
I wish they’d never told me.
Never said it loud enough for Gael to overhear.
But as difficult as it is having a brain that refuses to filter thought from speech, that says the most inappropriate and hurtful things, I don’t regret the accident.
