Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Twelve

He arrived on a morning of hard frost.

Seraphel felt him before she saw him, a change in the quality of the air, the way air changed before a storm, the pressure shifting. She went to the door.

He was standing at the edge of the Greywood.

She had not seen Uriel in what passed for a long time, even by angelic reckoning. He looked the same as he always looked: tall, still, with a quality of absolute certainty about his posture that was either deeply comforting or deeply frightening, depending on which side of a judgment you stood on. His eyes, when she reached him, were sad in the way that Justice was always sad performing a function he wished was unnecessary.

"Seraphel," he said.

"Uriel."

"You are a long way from your post."

"I am aware."

He looked at the village. At the house. At the light in the window where Aldric was, she knew he was awake; the awareness had arrived without her noticing and stayed. "I know what happened," Uriel said. "The Sighting is an old mechanism. Not unprecedented." A pause. "But you are no longer bound by the Sighting, Seraphel. He released you, and you stayed."

"Yes."

"Of your own will."

"Yes."

"The Order has noticed. The grace you are expending here shows. It leaves traces. They know where you are."

She had known this. She had permitted herself not to think about it.

"You have three days," Uriel said. "Return willingly, and the matter will be assessed with leniency. You have served well, for a very long time."

"And if I do not return."

He looked at her, and the sadness deepened. "Then I was sent back. And the mechanism that follows is not leniency."

"Erasure."

"Yes."

She looked at the house. At the light in the window.

"Three days," she said.

"Three days." He put his hand on her shoulder briefly, an old gesture between them from a different time. "I do not wish this outcome, Seraphel. I am doing what I am meant to do. I believe that is true of you as well, though the Order would not agree."

He was gone. She stood at the edge of the Greywood in the frost and the silence.

When she turned back toward the house, Aldric was in the doorway.

He had seen and heard enough, at least. She could tell by the set of him the carefully still face of a man who had registered something and was deciding how to hold it.

"Three days," he said.

"Yes."

"And then?"

"And then Uriel returns, and I am recalled. By force."

He looked at the space where Uriel had stood. Then at her. His expression was doing something complicated, too many things at once to read clearly.

"Come inside," he said. "It's cold."

"Aldric"

"Come inside," he said again, and his voice had the quality of someone making an effort. "Please."

She went inside.

★ ★ ★