Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Two

She did not struggle.

That was the first strange thing. Aldric had half-expected her to pull against him to use whatever power had made her hands glow to throw him across the room, or to dissolve the way figures in fever-dreams dissolved when you reached for them. Instead, she stood very still, her wrist in his grip, and looked at him with those grey eyes that had too much in them, too many years, too much quiet knowledge, and said nothing for a long moment.

Mira's breathing, he noticed, had eased. Whatever the woman had done, it was still doing something. The awful rattling had softened. The flush on his sister's skin had retreated slightly from its hectic peak.

"You are holding my wrist," the creature said at last.

"I am aware."

"You should not be able to hold my wrist." There was no anger in it, only a careful precision, as though she were working through a problem aloud. "You should not have been able to see me at all. The veil," She paused. "You are not like other mortals."

"I am exactly like other mortals," Aldric said. "I bleed. I tire. I come home to find my village dying and my sister half-dead and a creature glowing over her in the dark. I do what any reasonable man would do."

"No reasonable man would hold an angel."

The word fell between them. Angel. He had expected her to deny it or to offer some lesser explanation. She had not. He respected that, in some distant part of his mind that was still capable of respecting things.

"If I let go," he said carefully, "you will leave. Yes?"

"Yes."

"And my sister?"

A hesitation so brief he nearly missed it. "The slowing will hold for some hours. After that, the progression will resume."

"Resume." He looked at Mira. At the stillness of her, the terrible fragility of her face against the pillow. "Meaning she will still die."

"Meaning it is possible she will still die. I cannot." Another pause, longer this time. Something moved behind her eyes. "I am not permitted to intervene further than I have already intervened. What I have done tonight already exceeds what is allowed."

"Then you're already in trouble." He released her wrist.

She did not leave.

He watched her face change subtly, the way the weather changed at a great distance, visible only to someone watching closely. Surprise, he thought, though it sat strangely on features that seemed unaccustomed to expressing anything so ordinary.

"You released me," she said.

"I did."

"Then I should," She turned toward the door. Stopped. Her head tilted, almost imperceptibly. "I cannot."

"No." He sat back down in the chair by the bed. "When I grabbed you, something changed. I don't know what, but I felt it. Like a lock engaging. I've opened enough doors in enough wrong places to know what a lock sounds like, even if it's not a real door and not a real lock." He looked up at her. "You're trapped."

She turned back to face him. The expression on her face was one he would come to know well in the weeks ahead, the expression of a being confronting something that had not happened in an immeasurably long time, if ever.

"The Sighting," she said softly.

"Is that what this is called?"

"It is a covenant." She moved to the window, not walking, quiet, but close enough, and looked out at the dark village. "If a mortal truly perceives an angel, not glimpses, not dreams, but genuine recognition and knowledge of what they are, the angel cannot leave that mortal's presence until the mortal freely releases them. The covenant was written in the first days. It was meant as a protection. It assumed"

"That mortals would choose to forget."

She turned to look at him again. "Yes."

"I won't."

"I know." She said it without anger, and that was almost worse. "I know you won't. I have been watching humans for a very long time, Sir Aldric Vale. I know stubbornness when I see it."

He should have been alarmed that she knew his name. He found he was not. "Then we have a problem."

"We have a problem," she agreed, and the word 'we' seemed to cost her something, though she did not show it.

Outside, the burial fires burned on, and Ashenmere waited for morning, and an angel stood at a dead man's window and considered, for the first time in a thousand years, what it meant to have nowhere left to go.

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