No wonder vampires wanted to ride them. That kind of power was unimaginable.
And what happened to the memory of the one who altered time? Did they lose the memory of the time they had changed? Or did they keep the memories that they destroyed? There was one person I could ask, but if I asked, then Soul would know that I knew the secret of the arcenciels. Might the future show her something, some decision I might make, some action that I would or might do that was bad for her or another arcenciel? If so, would she feel the need to kill me to stop that action?
All this meant that Soul knew the potentialities of the future, if she wanted to. If she looked. I had a feeling that Soul didn’t look at the potentialities as often or as deeply as Opal did. But it was just a feeling. One that said that the adult or mature arcenciels made conscious, or perhaps unconscious decisions, to view the future seldom, decisions that came from age and experience and the memories lost. Or worse, the memories of a present unalterably violated and destroyed.
Something had changed in the air around me, and I opened my eyes. They had drifted closed, bringing me close to sleep as I meditated in the Gray Between. Now, rain was falling at a normal speed; time had sped back up, as if a natural part of the experience of the Gray Between. While I had been bubbled in time, the rain had fallen off to a sprinkle of widely spaced drops and I had relaxed, my muscles feeling more calm than I expected, as if I hadn’t sat still all this time and had instead been stretching and loosening up. The ward over the house included most the rocks in the garden, and I stood, stepping off the porch into the mud left from earlier in the day. It was drier now and didn’t squish up between my toes. The rocks were clean and dry, and I climbed to the top of the one closest, careful to keep from cutting myself on the sharp edges of the rocks I used when I needed to borrow or lose mass to shift into a bigger or smaller creature.
Sitting cross-legged, back relaxed, I continued my meditation. This time I entered the Gray Between, I was in my soul home, a real place in the real world, seen once long ago, but reimagined in the darkness and shadows of my mind. I was squatted before a fire pit, cold and flameless, but the darkness wasn’t absolute. Rather, a pale, soft illumination seemed to emanate from the stone walls, throwing dim light but no shadows. From what I could see of myself, I was dressed in the new garb of drab cloth leggings, unadorned moccasins, and a blue tunic tied with a long scarf. My green-and-black leather medicine bag hung from a thong around my neck, swinging slowly back and forth. My braids moved as well, two of them, one to either side of my head, as if I had been standing and had just now squatted at the ring of cold stones.
I looked up at the center of my soul home, the stone dome high overhead. I had learned that it changed as my life changed, reflecting known and unknown truths about me and the possibilities of multiple futures. At the very top, there was a bird, what looked like a dove with white wings outstretched, spreading, improbably large, down the stone walls of my home. The flight feathers spread and lengthened until they touched the stone floor. I wondered if the dove symbolized the angel Hayyel. And if it did, had the celestial being who had so altered my life and its timeline marked his territory over my soul?
I couldn’t decide whether to be ticked off by the marking of territory, or feel blessed and protected. Briefly I wondered if the wings could keep me from becoming u’tlun’ta. I wondered if the wings in my soul home were a result of being struck by lightning. I wondered a lot of things, none of them useful in this moment or contributing to a decision about Angie Baby, Molly, her unborn child, and the arcenciel.
Directly overhead and to the side of the angel, there was a black dot or spot or mote. It was positioned near the heart of the dove but to the side. It looked like a black blood splatter, one dropped straight down, not flung or slung or thrown. It pulsed like a tiny, dark heart.
Hayyel’s heart? Why would an angel have a dark heart? But it did nothing, just sat there, unmoving except for that strange pulsing. It was curious but not worrisome. For now.
A bizarre notion sped across my mind and skidded to a halt, lingering. What if the blood diamond, buried in the new weapon, the one made by lightning and the battle between Hayyel and the dark thing he had been fighting in my last vision of him, might allow me to “ride” an arcenciel? And see what Molly’s baby might do in the future?