While she'd seen things more horrible in her dreams than the sight of those three corpses drifting through her home, there was no denying it shook her, the way those wings moved with the currents, curving around the lifeless bodies as if forming a loving shroud for the pure spirit that had inhabited the flesh. She could have just disintegrated their matter, but she didn't know what death rituals angels performed. David would need to see them, perhaps care for them in that way. She didn't want to just destroy them, as if they'd been debris.
It mattered what he thought of her. That was something she now accepted. More surprising was the fact she realized she did care about more than that. She cared enough to run a scarf around the decapitation point, tuck it in to cover it and steady the skull, touch the auburn hair on the angel's head and wish he weren't dead.
The problem is you feel too much. He was going to be right about that, too, wasn't he? Damn him. Now that he hated her, she supposed it was a moot point. It didn't matter what you felt or didn't feel, if no one cared.
She'd dissipated and lowered the water level below the ledge in the section where she kept her books so she could bring the angels to that flat surface. She'd been able to float the first one to the ledge, but once the water level was below it, getting the other two on it had been difficult work, and she was covered in blue blood that seared her skin. She didn't care much about that. She just didn't want David to get here, as she knew he would when he found her gone from the desert house, and see his men the way she'd found them. She noted the wings had started to stiffen in their curves around the angels' bodies, so rigor mortis affected those, too. She tried not to think about how David's would feel, if it were his lifeless eyes staring at her.
"I told you to stay in the Schism."
She turned then. He emerged from the water, stepped onto the ledge, water sluicing down his body, his wings gleaming with the drops. His gaze was only on her for a curt acknowledgment before it shifted to his dead. The angels beneath her touch were older than him, she knew. One of them probably well over a hundred.
"I thought it best to come back here."
He squatted and looked down into their frozen features, the staring, dark eyes. "Move back," he said quietly.
As she withdrew, he passed his hand several feet above the bodies. Silver light gathered beneath his palm in a sphere, then unfurled like a blanket that drifted down upon them, sinking into their wet, cold flesh. Slowly, the light became a pale fire that took them away with a quiet beauty, removing death from their faces, illuminating the tips of their feathers, fingers, the lengths of their limbs. When it was done, only silver ash patterns were left on the damp rock. He sang a soft chant during the process, a prayer of peace and rest, but in the roughness of his voice she could tell how responsible he felt. That he would miss them. The words of the chant revealed they were being sent back to the life force of the Mother until such time as they would be born from that energy again, centuries in the future. It reminded her that angels didn't have a guarantee on individual rebirth, a separate resting place for their souls. So he didn't know what awareness he would have in his afterlife, either. Another yin and yang comparison between them.
He was quiet for a bit afterward, then he glanced toward her. "I'm closing that portal."
"No."
He straightened. Mina shifted in front of the entrance, though she already saw it in his face as if he'd pinioned her heart with one of his daggers. No matter what he had to do to her to make it happen, he was closing that portal.
"I wasn't asking."
"You can't close it. Not until I go through it and send back the Trumpet."
HE didn't want to discuss it, probably thinking she was stalling, but with dogged persistence, she persuaded him to let her explain.
"You remember how I was able to get Jonah's sword to him in the desert, all the way from where I found it in the ocean? It's not an easy magic, particularly at this distance, but the connection is strengthened if I have a blood link to someone here, like I have with you. Once I lay hands on it, say the proper spell and offer it some of my blood, then the Trumpet could transport. The key isn't that it has to jump from one realm to another, but that the magic and mind's reach have to be sufficiently powerful. I can do it," she added resolutely, hoping she was right.
"You've never been to their world. You wouldn't get a chance to find it before they discovered you there."
"I have been there."
"A dream, no matter how vivid, isn't firsthand knowledge."
She bit back impatience. It was easier to focus on this than the flat way he was speaking to her, as if she were just a member of his platoon making a report. No, that was wrong. He loved the men in his platoon. She was far less than that to him now.
"Dream is the wrong word. I connect to it. See it, observe it. In some ways, they're aware of my presence, because there have been times they've turned toward me in the dreams, tried to speak to me. But they can't hold me there. They can't read my thoughts."
"So if you saw the Trumpet in the Citadel, there's no way they knew its location through you."
"That's what Jonah and Marcellus think, don't they?" It's what you think.
When he didn't reply, she tightened her jaw. She should never have let him matter. Should have figured a way to neutralize that blood link so he could never find her. The Trumpet might have been taken regardless. She'd be in mortal danger like everyone else in the world, but without this terrible sense of loss in her chest. "I know the landscape of their world, David," she forced herself to repeat the words. "I have their blood, so I can walk through the portal and survive there. I will locate the Trumpet. It's an item of tremendous power, so I can pick up the energy signature. I suspect they didn't take it far. They'll want to use it, as soon as they can figure out how."
"According to Gabriel, it requires a Full Submission angel or a strong, exceptionally powerful magic user to unravel the spells over it," David responded. "Has it occurred to you that they might intend you to be the one who does that? You told me that every day is a struggle not to walk through that portal, that they've always been calling to you. That they offer you the sense of belonging you lack here."
"I also told you that I know that's a lie, David. I can't belong to them. I'm not fully one of them. I'm not fully a merperson. I can't belong to anyone." She swallowed as something flickered in his eyes. "I guess you know that now, too."
She turned away, because she didn't have the courage to look at him. But she would give him truth. The bodies before her, everything he'd given her so far, had earned him that right.
"Yes," she said. "I believe they're trying to get me into their world to play the Trumpet. If so, then under the same criteria, I might be the only one who can get close enough to take it away from them."
"Why would they trust you?"
"I've got to convince them to trust me. It will be difficult, but I don't think it will be impossible." She looked toward the dark hole leading to the portal chamber. "They'll wonder about my actions at the Canyon and will probably test me on that. But one thing they understand is the nature of Dark One blood. I'm hoping they'll believe no Dark Spawn is strong enough to resist it when immersed in the energies of their world."
"What if they're right? I've seen what happened at the Citadel, Mina. Based on what I felt in that portal, it seems the balance tilts in their favor, exponentially. There will be nothing to pull you back the other way."
"I can impose some shields they can't detect to filter it." She didn't like the thoughts moving behind his eyes. Angry he might be, grieving, but damn it, his mind never stopped working. She crossed her arms, managed to bump her injured finger and bit her lip against the pain. "I don't pretend to care about the battle for good against evil the way that you do, but I do care about what's done as a result of my actions. If I had let you seal the portal when you asked, this wouldn't have happened. I intend to do what I can to make this right."
"It was my decision to keep it open.
I bear responsibility for it."
"We're both responsible, then."
"Then we should both go."
"No." She'd seen it coming, but the icy hand of fear still gripped her. "David, have you lost your mind? You can't go. You're an angel."
"You can cast an illusion spell over me so I appear like one of them. You changed my appearance in the saloon, as well as yours."
"That's not the problem. There are energies in that world... Remember how you felt, just stepping into the portal chamber? Also, Dark Ones raise that battle instinct in you. Imagine that magnified a thousand times, with an illusion spell in place where you have to react as a Dark One would to another Dark One. You can't do that."
"You know every spell there is. Dark magics as well as light ones." His gaze slid around the room, over her books, back toward the room of her stores. "There's a way around that. Isn't there?"
And when his gaze came back to her face, she knew he'd seen something in her eyes or body language. Gods, they needed to stop talking about this. He saw too much. And he was too noble, too damn self-sacrificing...
"No," she repeated stubbornly. "I won't do it. You can't make me."
"Mina, do you know what the Resurrection Trumpet does? Blow one note and that tone resonates, plunges deep into the crust of the Earth, waking layers upon layers of the dead. A second blast, and the earth shifts, folds back peacefully to uncover those bodies. On the third blast, the dead begin to walk, to live again. Their souls return to them and they are restored to life."
"That doesn't sound terrible," she said, though she knew he wasn't done.
"That's what happens if an agent of the Goddess blows it. If the one with the Trumpet is evil, those who rise are not given their souls, or free will. Mountains crumble, and the shifting of the earth becomes earthquakes. They're the walking dead only, obeying only hunger and impulse. In short, they will be an army for the Dark Ones, creating the chaos they need to turn this world into a reflection of their own."