Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Three

She told him her name just before dawn.

He hadn't asked. He'd spent the remainder of the night in the chair, dozing in and out, waking each time to check Mira's breathing and to find the angel still at the window, unmoving, unblinking, watching the dark with the patience of something that did not need sleep. The third time he woke, he said, without preamble: "I can't keep calling you 'the creature' in my head."

"Most mortals do not get far enough in the conversation to need a name for me."

"Most mortals let go, I expect."

"Yes."

He waited.

"Seraphel," she said, at last. "My name is Seraphel."

It was a strange name, not Latin, not French, not anything he recognised from his years on the continent. It sat in the air differently from ordinary words, like a stone dropped in still water, the ripples spreading out and out. He tried it once, quietly, and she went very still, as prey animals do when they hear the hunter.

"You can feel that," he said. "When someone says your name."

"It is," She considered. "Unusual. Mortals do not generally know my name to say."

He filed that away and moved on. There was too much to understand to stop at any one piece of it. "I want to make an agreement with you."

"You already have leverage. You do not need an agreement."

"Leverage isn't the same thing as agreement." He stood, moved to check Mira still warm, still breathing, the rattling almost entirely gone, and then turned back. "I won't hold you by force. I won't keep you against your will beyond what the covenant already does. But I want something from you, and I'm asking."

Seraphel watched him. "Ask."

"Help me. Not just Mira, the village. There are eighty people left in Ashenmere, and most of them are sick, frightened, or both. I'm one man, and I've been gone two years, and I don't know how to fight a plague." He met her eyes. "But you do. You've watched plagues. You know what helps, what doesn't, and what kills the survivors faster than the disease. I want that knowledge."

"I am not permitted."

"You're already not permitted. You're standing in my father's house at four in the morning, having a conversation with a mortal. The permission ship has sailed, Seraphel."

A pause. Something shifted in her expression, not quite amusement, but adjacent to it, like a country that shared a border with amusement. "That is one way to characterise the situation."

"Help me," he said again. "And when it's over, when Mira is well, and the village has made it through or done all it can, I will release you. Freely. You have my word."

"The word of a disgraced knight," she said, and it was not cruel, just precise.

"The word of a man who has nothing left to lose by keeping it." He extended his hand. "That's actually worth more."

She looked at his hand. He had the sense she was looking at more than his hand at something beyond it, some pattern or possibility invisible to him. Then, slowly, as though performing an action she had read about but never practised, she reached out and took it.

Her hand was warm. He had not expected that.

"I will help," she said. "Within what I am able. I will not promise miracles."

"Eighty people," he said. "Just try for eighty people."

She nodded, once. Outside, the first grey light of dawn was beginning to seep across the Ashenmere fields, and somewhere down the street, a door opened, and the village diminished, frightened, surviving began another day.

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