Page 38 of When Monsters Fight
“Morningstar power doesn’t work on celestials like it does on watchers, Rue,” Kabiel said softly.
A vise gripped my lungs. “I can try. I have to try.”
Gabriel cracked open one eye, but it wasn’t me he looked at; it was Kabiel. “Protect…her.”
“I will. I swear it,” Kabiel said.
Like hell were we doing this. I gripped Gabriel’s chin and forced him to look at me. “You arenotgoing to die. I won’t let you. Where’s the serum?” He must have brought some serum. I patted his pockets, but they were empty. “Where is it?” His eyes rolled, and a sob bubbled up my throat, but I swallowed it. There was time. There had to be time. “Where’s the fucking serum?”
“Didn’t bring any.” His eyes fluttered closed.
“It wouldn’t have been enough,” Kabiel said. “He’ll need a huge injection of celestial energy to heal him. More than a vial could give. More than ten could give.”
He was saying it was futile, but I didn’t accept that. I wouldn’t. I’d failed to save Shem, and I’d be damned if I lost Gabriel too.
I slapped his cheek. “Wake up. You have to stay awake.” I couldn’t lose another person I cared about. “You need to heal.” But he was heavy and limp in my arms, his breath shallow and reedy. My vision blurred. “Please, Gabriel…don’t you…don’t you dare…” I blinked back tears and gripped him harder, my eyes blazing with enough determination for the both of us. “Wake the fuck up!”
Kabiel touched my shoulders lightly. “Rue, I don’t think?—”
Panic flooded my senses. “No.”
I pressed my palm to Gabriel’s charred chest, and the fact he didn’t cry out in pain told me how severe these injuries were, so bad that the sensory vessels in his body were dead. The scout in me said this was good, that he would die painlessly now, but right now, I wasn’t a scout. I was a woman determined to save someone precious, so I shut the voice down. He was not dying today.
I opened the channel to the Morningstar power,allowing it to rush through me and into Gabriel.
The tugging sensation at my solar plexus intensified.
I was losing him.
This wasn’t working.
But then a low-grade vibration filled me, and his charred skin began to knit and recover.
“It’s working,” Asbeel said in a hushed tone. “How is it working?”
“The bond…” Kabiel said. “I think this must have something to do with the bond they share.”
I continued to channel until his skin was smooth and unmarred. “Gabriel? Wake up. You’re okay. I fixed you. You’re okay now.” But even as I said it, I knew it to be a lie. The special connection between us that had become so much a part of me the past few weeks that I barely noticed it was gone.
“He’s gone,” Yomiel confirmed flatly.
A strange calm settled over me—an eerie emptiness that part of me recognized as the absence of him.
He’d been with me all this time.
His essence, connected to mine through the bond.
He'd been there, silent and unintrusive but exuding security. But now he was gone. Just like Shem.
Where were they?
“Where is he?” The words stuck in my throat, thick with emotion. “Where’s his essence? Where’s Shem’s? Where are they?” Fresh seeds of panic took root inside me.
“If our earthly forms are destroyed, our essence returns home,” Kabiel said. “A new earthly form is provided when it’s time for us to walk the earth again. But with heaven’s doors closed and God gone, Gabriel’s essence will be trapped in between heaven and earth and eventually…eventually it will be lost.”
“And Shem? He’s there too? In between?”
“No, Rue. Shem was killed with a celestial sword. His essence was destroyed along with his earthly form.”
