A Gift of Wings (46 page)

The actual room was roughly the same dimensions as it had appeared through the veil of magic at the doorway, high-ceilinged and probably one-third the size of the great room, but it was differently arranged. A few curved benches were placed in a semicircle around a central circular dais upon which stood something that looked like a cross between a chair and a piece of sculpture. Its surfaces appeared to be padded, but the angles looked all wrong for sitting. Floor-to-ceiling banners in alternating red-gold and white softened the corners of the room, rounding them into curves which echoed the semicircular arrangement of the benches. The banners were covered with angelic sigils, black on red-gold, and fiery red-gold on white.

The room was not unoccupied, as the magic had made it appear. Not only Aidan, but Malachi, Kev, and Sambethe peopled the far ends of the benches in the innermost row, those closest to the dais. Lilith, flanked by two dark-cloaked figures, sat in the outermost row. Zeke lowered Lucky onto the central bench in the innermost semicircle, positioning himself beside her. Scanning the grave faces of her friends, Lucky’s mouth went suddenly dry. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t possibly go through with this. Her hands twisted together in her lap, her fingers squeezing so tightly her knuckles whitened, as she willed herself to stay on the bench, instead of crawling, whimpering, beneath it.

Zeke’s big hand covered her joined ones just as she heard the now familiar rushing of wings. The Archangel Uriel and a companion whom Lucky assumed to be another Archangel appeared in a brilliant flash of light, at first seeming to stretch from ceiling to floor, dwarfing the room and its other occupants, then shrinking to a size still larger than human, but more in keeping with the room’s dimensions. Everyone stood as the Archangels made their appearance, Zeke sliding an arm around Lucky’s waist to help her to her feet.

Lucky had a vague sense that Uriel was speaking, but she heard nothing over the sound of her own accelerating heartbeat. Gradually, she became aware that Zeke was urging her toward the dais. As he helped her onto the oddly shaped structure, she realized it was designed to support a kneeling figure, with pads for the front of the shoulders and bars around which to wrap the hands. Clenching her fingers around the bars, she felt Zeke lift her long hair so it fell forward on either side of her neck, leaving her back bare. Her heart pounded so hard, she felt as if it would beat a hole through her chest. Then Zeke placed a hand between her shoulder blades, and a kind of calmness settled over her, not displacing her fear, but lowering its intensity, so that it no longer eclipsed her awareness.

The Sensitive has called her Makers,
said Uriel,
and I call them now. With your Powers, your Gifts, your Marks, she will be Made Naphil. Grandmother-Crone, come forward.

Lucky held her breath. It wasn’t possible that G-Ma could be here.

A wind swept through the room, whipping Lucky’s hair across her face, and with a blinding flash of light, another huge figure appeared to Uriel’s left. Shrinking, he stepped forward to the edge of the dais. His hair was the brilliant white of heat lightning and floated on the breeze that Archangels seemed to generate; his pupil-less eyes were like screens upon which showed a film of clouds scudding across the luminous blue of a summer sky. He turned those eyes on Lucky, and she shivered as they looked at, and through, and beyond her.

I will stand for the Grandmother
. Even his voice was like lightning, flashing into the mind, leaving behind a strange frisson of excitement tinged with fear.

Gabriel, Grandmother, Crone, you are the first to make your Mark. Let the Making commence.

The Archangel held Lucky’s eyes briefly with his uncanny ones, and for a moment she could see G-Ma’s smiling face reflected in their depths. Then Gabriel stepped around the dais, so Lucky could no longer see him. She sucked in a breath as she sensed him approaching her back. Fire seared the skin and muscle below her left ribs, and she sank her teeth into her lip to keep from crying out. Her mouth filled with the slightly metallic, salty taste of her own blood. Dear God, it hurt! She felt like she might pass out from the pain, wished she would. How could she possibly endure six times this? And that was before the Power rushed through her, rolling her over and under, like an ocean wave. A few years before, the entire family had spent a week at Cape Cod, and she and Josh had passed much of that time body-surfing in the ocean. Once, a wave had swept her off the body board, turning her around so that she no longer had any idea which way was up toward air and which was down deeper into the water. She had discovered which way was down when her face had slammed into the sand. This felt surprisingly similar: a rush of adrenaline and fear as she was tumbled in the wave of power, and then pain as that power smacked against the limitations of her still human self.

Reeling from the onslaught, she sensed Gabriel remove his hand. Unfortunately, the burning sensation did not abate in the slightest. It felt as if his sigil were tunneling a fiery path through each layer of skin and muscle.

Will the Dragon please come forward?

Lucky forced her eyes to focus, wondering who the Dragon would be. Aidan? He had given her the pendant. But the medallion had belonged to his father. Would the Dragon be Lucifer himself? With a start of surprise, she saw Kev step to the front of the dais. Apparently, he was here as himself and not as
Ha-Satan
. Instead of the open blood-red robe, he wore his standard faded blue jeans and a soft green buttoned shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled to the elbows. His sun-dappled brown hair looked as if he’d recently shoved a hand back through it. When his eyes met hers, she saw they were not the gold-tinged dark green she remembered but a strange yellow-gold with vertical, cat-like pupils.

Dragon, make your Mark.

Lucky closed her eyes, steeling herself against the pain, as Kev stepped behind her. His hand touched her back over her left ribs, above and to the right of the fierce burning of Gabriel’s sigil. This time, the pain was not immediate. Kev’s touch was warm, gentle, on her skin. His fingers flexed against her in a tiny caress. And then she felt as if a red-hot coal had been placed on her back, just where his palm rested. Sucking her bleeding lower lip into her mouth and squeezing her eyes shut to block the tears, she understood that Kev had not yet activated his palm sigil when he’d first touched her. He had instead placed his hand on her back, skin to skin, in a gift of simple human touch. She offered him silent thanks for that momentary, soothing contact, even as his sigil seared another path through her, adjacent to the one Gabriel had left behind.

Kev’s Power didn’t slam into her, tumbling her over as Gabriel’s had. Instead, it ran through her limbs like fire. Every inch of muscle and sinew in her body burned, and she couldn’t hold back the whimper that escaped her lips. She knew when Kev removed his hand from her back, though how she could sense that absence in the midst of the various fiery pains that filled her she had no idea. She thought she felt his fingers brush over her hair before he stepped away from the dais.

Protector, Cherub, come forward.

Lucky raised her head to watch Zeke move to stand before her. Her hold on her heightened senses was shaky, and she could no longer limit her view of him. As a consequence his form flickered before her, morphing and changing, only his kind gray eyes remaining the same. Feeling dizzy, Lucky closed her eyes to block the sight.

Protector, make your Marks.

Uriel’s use of the plural penetrated Lucky’s awareness when she felt not one but two sigils searing their fiery tunnels through her skin and muscles and bones, one on each side of her spine, just beneath her shoulder blades. Like molten worms, they seemed to be crawling through her lungs and out the front of her chest. Sweat ran down her forehead to drip off the end of her nose, and she wondered that it didn’t evaporate in the heat. Then she no longer had the presence of mind to wonder anything. Zeke’s Power took her like a whirlwind, a sandstorm of dizzying force. The physical pain she had endured was as nothing compared to the mental agony that ripped through her. Thoughts disappeared and senses swirled as the fabric of her being seemed to unknit itself. She might have heard herself screaming, but there was no way to be sure. There was no way to be sure of anything. Everything was chaos.

She was vaguely aware of the burn of Malachi’s sigil over her right ribs, and the rush of his Power into her added a swirl of darkness and the echoing caws of crows to the already overpowering jumble of her senses and her self. By the time Sambethe’s sigil seared her right side, completing the upside down V Gabriel had begun, she was barely conscious. Surprisingly, the onrush of the oracle’s Power brought with it something of a clearing, a momentary cessation of thoughts, senses, pains—a blessed moment of empty, velvet darkness. Then everything crashed back upon her, leaving Lucky reeling once more.

Raphael, Healer, step forward.

Lucky heard the words as if she were underwater, yet somehow she understood them all the same. She couldn’t lift her head to see Raphael, couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t have focused them even if she had been able to open them. She sensed the Archangel’s presence beside her and felt his hand on her back, spanning the distance between her shoulder blades. There was no burn of a sigil. Where he touched felt cool, as if bathed in a healing balm. That space on her back was the only part of her whole being that didn’t feel completely ripped apart.

Then he lifted his hand. And a cry tore from her lungs as she arched backward in agony. She would have flung herself off the structure on which she knelt if not for the death-grip her hands had taken on the support bars as soon as Gabriel’s palm had touched her. She felt as if every sigil burned into her was crawling up her back to writhe and swirl in the space between her shoulder blades where Raphael’s hand had been. Simultaneously, all the Powers that had been gifted to her with the Marks swirled and writhed inside her, coalescing into a ball of intensity that wrung another scream from her as it exploded outward. Then, blessedly, there was nothing.

***

It was with a strange sense of relief that Aidan watched Lucky collapse against the supporting pads of the kneeling chair. As she slumped in unconsciousness, his muscles relaxed as well. He had tensed a little more every time another Maker had touched her, had wanted to rush forward and push each one away from her as the pain seared her. And when his brother had run his fingers over her hair after he’d Marked her, Aidan had wanted to slam his fist into Kev’s jaw. Not just because he’d hurt her, but because he’d been in a position to offer her a gesture of comfort that Aidan could not.

At least the bestowing of the Marks was over. Now, they had to wait, for the requisite three hours, for the Making to complete itself. Aidan feared they were going to be three of the longest hours he’d ever endured. Then again, they might not be any worse than all those hours he’d spent outside her closed bedroom door, waiting for Malachi to come out and tell them if he’d been able to save her or not. He clenched his jaw again as Zeke and Kev lifted the unconscious Lucky from the kneeling chair and laid her facedown on a mat that someone had placed beside the dais for that purpose. He wanted to help, wanted to care for her, but as he was not one of her Makers, he couldn’t touch her until the whole thing was over.

She was still breathing. He could hear each ragged breath she took. And, yes, there it was—faint, but growing louder: the accelerating beat of her heart. Lucky’s heartbeat filled the room as her body labored to assimilate the changes worked by the Making.

Aidan remembered how Malachi’s heart had thudded, echoing in the great room, which had been filled almost to capacity for the ceremony. He also remembered the deafening silence when that heartbeat had ceased, a full two hours before the required three-hour waiting period was complete. Waiting in that room, knowing Malachi had died, well, those two hours ranked right up there with the worst. Not once in the history of Makings had anyone’s heart ever started back up when it had stopped for more than a few beats.

Not until Malachi. Just as the final few minutes of the third hour were ticking down, they had heard a loud gasp, like that of a man near to drowning breaking the water’s surface to fill his lungs with life-giving air. And then Malachi’s heartbeat had resumed, strong and steady. Aidan guessed he should take some comfort in the fact that Malachi himself had been one of Lucky’s Makers. Maybe he’d passed on something of his gift of survival to her.

With that thought Aidan shifted his eyes from Lucky’s still form to the big, dark man across from him. Malachi was sitting still, spine straight, eyes cast down. Aidan wondered if he were meditating, or if he’d gone inside himself or wherever it was he went when he did his battles with death and darkness. Maybe he’d figured out a way to help Lucky through this ordeal. Aidan hoped he had.

Unable to look away from Lucky for long, Aidan turned his gaze back towards her, wincing as he scanned the wounds on her back. The burns from the palm sigils looked raw and painful. Once the Making was complete, and she was Naphil, the burns would heal, leaving behind scars that would look much like slightly raised tattoos. Between her shoulder blades, in the spot where her personal sigil would take form, was a swirling, writhing mass of intermingled black and gold. The way it moved reminded him of worms. Just watching it made him shift uncomfortably, shrugging his shoulders beneath his jacket. His own sigil had simply manifested at puberty. His back had burned when it first appeared, but he didn’t recall ever feeling like worms were crawling beneath his skin. And he was pretty sure that was a sensation he would have remembered.

As time passed, and he and the others continued to wait without speaking, Aidan started counting the beats of Lucky’s heart. One beat, two beats, three beats, four beats. He counted to ten, then started over, then counted to a hundred, before starting again at one. He didn’t know how many times he had counted to a hundred, when suddenly the heartbeat stopped. In the silence, he found himself counting the beats that should have been there. One beat, two beats, three beats, four beats, five beats, six beats.
Seven hells! Lucky, don’t you dare die on me.
Seven beats, eight beats, nine beats. And it was back, slower and quieter than before, but strong and steady in its rhythm. Aidan released the breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding in an audible sigh of relief. Glancing at Kev and Zeke, he saw that same relief reflected in both their faces. The Cherub looked up and, catching Aidan’s eye, gave him a tiny, reassuring nod. So far, so good.