Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Nine

Mira had been watching Seraphel for three weeks before she asked the question.

She was a thorough observer; she had always been, even as a small child, the kind of person who watched a situation through to the end before committing to an opinion. She had watched Seraphel move through the house in the mornings, watched her sit with a stillness that was not quite human, watched her hands when she thought no one was looking, the faint warmth at their edges, visible only in low light.

She had watched Aldric watching Seraphel.

She chose a quiet afternoon when Aldric was out with Cassian.

"What are you, really?" she asked, without preamble.

Seraphel, who had been sitting by the window doing nothing in her particular way, fully present, utterly still, looked at Mira with those eyes that were always too old and too full.

"Your brother asked me the same question," she said.

"What did you tell him?"

"Considerably less than he wanted to know."

Mira pulled the blanket up around her shoulders and looked at the angel with the directness of someone who had recently come very close to dying and found that surviving had eroded her patience for evasion. "You healed me. I remember parts of it. The healing doesn't happen like that. Not with herbs. Not with anything mortal." She paused. "Also, you don't eat."

"You've been watching."

"Obviously."

"You are correct that my nature is not mortal," Seraphel said at last.

"Are you a saint?"

"No."

"A demon?"

"No." A brief pause that might have been, on a mortal face, the ghost of a smile. "Emphatically not."

"Then you're an angel."

The word settled into the room. Mira said it the way she said most things plainly, having weighed it, satisfied with its accuracy.

"Yes," Seraphel said.

Mira nodded. "I thought so." She was quiet for a moment. "Are you in trouble? For helping us?"

The question caught Seraphel entirely unprepared. She had expected fear, awe, and theological objections. Not the immediate, practical, empathetic cut to the relevant issue.

"Possibly," she said.

"Is Aldric making it worse? By not letting you go?"

"That is complicated."

"Because you could go now, couldn't you?" Not quite a question. "He said he wouldn't hold you. Which means you're staying because," Mira stopped, and her young face went through several expressions in quick succession. "Oh," she said, very quietly.

"Mira."

"No, I won't say it out loud. That seemed like something that should be said first by someone who isn't fourteen." The girl settled back against her pillows, and the expression she wore now was something old and knowing and gentle. "He had given up, you know, before you. He didn't say so, but I could tell. He came home because of me, not because he had nothing left to come home to."

Seraphel looked at the fire.

"He's not given up now," Mira said.

"No," Seraphel agreed, very quietly.

"Neither have you."

A pause. "No."

Mira smiled a proper smile, sudden and bright, the first one Seraphel had seen from her. "Good. You can teach me about angels. I have a great many questions."

"I believe it," Seraphel said, and felt, quite clearly and unmistakably, something she recognised now as relief and underneath the relief, something warmer and less nameable, which she chose, for now, not to name.

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