Sentinel of Heaven (22 page)

“Enough,
enough, enough,” she could hear her lips saying, “too much for any mortal; have
mercy, you angel of death!”

“But one more,”
he crooned, moving to stretch her out on the mattress, “Just one more, my lady,
my love, my Moira... I have my desire at long last...”

Moira couldn't
deny him anything, ever, least of all this.  She waited with nerves aflame and
body limp and drained as he stroked and kissed and caressed and thrust and made
her drunk on him, on them together.  The angel gathered into her that final
little death, the one that bordered the real death as close as two fingers on a
hand.  He was murmuring again in that foreign tongue cursewords or blesswords
or terms of endearment until she unraveled and dissolved in it, finding that
last climax in his or his in hers, weak cries from both voices tangling and
entwined.

Now she felt it,
saw it as he had first shown her inside herself – the white light that was what
remained in him when all thoughts and all emotions were burned away, the
crystal clarity that left only the certainty of her existence within his heart,
forever after.

He lay down on
his side and held her for a long time, pressed against his broad tanned chest
as if she were some precious mysterious thing that might vanish into smoke were
he to release her.

Moira was
pleased to let him do so, relaxed enough that she could have fallen asleep in
the cradle of his grip.  She fought to stay awake, however, not willing to let
even one moment of this bliss escape her into unconsciousness.  She lay with
her head pillowed on his shoulder, listening to him breathe and simply allowing
herself to be.

“I'm not in
any pain,” she whispered what felt like hours later.  “All of that was very
good... better than I can ever say... but I should be starting to pay for it
right about now.”

Leo kissed the
top of her head languidly.  “With we two sharing a certain level of spiritual
intimacy, I felt it now acceptable to manage your pain myself.”

“How?” she
asked, raising her face to look up at him.

He took her
chin in his fingertips and kissed her.

“My lady of a
thousand questions,” he answered, mock-seriously, “at last you return to me! 
As for 'how': your body creates a specific nerve chemical to tell your brain
that you are in pain.  I am monitoring for it; as it gathers, I burn it away. 
The residual amount is far below your regular conscious pain threshold.  You
currently cannot feel it.”

Moira thought
about it.  “I take it there was a reason you couldn't – or wouldn't – do it
before?”

“Yes, my
love... would you want a stranger meddling in your brain chemistry?”

“Depends on
the stranger,” she replied, tangling their legs together companionably.

“Mmmmm, so.  I
can only do it when we share physical proximity; when you return to work you
will have to take your medication as before.”

“And you can't
just... fix me?”

“I wish that I
could,” he admitted.  “My talents are in changing inanimate things – stretching
and reshaping them, disassembling and reassembling them, aging or un-aging
them.  If I attempt to use my power to heal a living thing the results are
agonizing.  I save it for the battlefield, in times of life or death.  To try
to reverse your ancient wounds would bring a dozen years of pain down on your
head – and there is a real possibility you would die of the shock of it.”

The screaming
wooden board he had shown her...

“I am sorry,”
he offered quietly.

“Don't be. 
What you're doing for me now is far more than I had a week ago.”  She ran her
hand up his naked flank.  “In every way.”

He smiled.

Moira reached
up and touched his lips, then tapped her ear.  His smile widened to a grin.

“What of?” he
asked her.

“Anything. 
Everything.  What can you remember?”

“Flashes, for
the most part.”  Leo gazed over her head, eyes troubled as he examined his
missing memory.

“War.  Blood. 
Death.  Eons of it.  A bright place, that I know as Provenance.  Rank upon rank
of angels kneeling, awaiting command.

“And there is
a question.  Something important, more so even than my own existence.  There is
an absolute edict I gave – I cannot recall it.  But I know that I myself have
broken it.

“More, so much
more... but all behind a fog that will not yet part.  I cannot return home
until I know.”

“Then don't
push it.  Stay here with me.”

“Wholeheartedly,”
Leo replied.  She noticed his wings were shrinking; he drew the covers up over
their bodies.

“And no wife,
no children?”  Moira pressed.  “No lovers?”

“Lovers, of
course – all temporary to their years, as you have had.  But no lasting bonds,
no claims on my heart; none but yours, my lady.”

“'My hive’s
abandoned, lady, and no queen / Could reign above the radiance of you',” she
quoted.

“I spoke it
true.”

“Why did it
upset you so much to know that we'd shared that dream?”

Faster now,
his transformation – his wings had become a tattoo again in a fraction of the
time and apparent effort as before.  He lay full on his back and pulled her
over him with ease.

“Because I had
thought myself safe inside the privacy of my own head.  Safe where I could
pretend to lay with you as I desired, and to admit all that I felt to you.  To
begin with I had not even realized it was a dream – I woke in terror that I had
endangered your life with my voice, and my sanity with my words.  If I had
confessed of love that you did not return, I would have given you utter power
over me,” he responded seriously.

“But haven't
you?” she replied.  “Haven't you given me that power?” 

His hands
moved again, cradling her face in the emptiness of his palms.  She leaned into
his caress, fumbling after the gate between their minds, seeking to open it as
he had done.  Leo did it again, slow enough for her to feel how.  She sighed in
bliss.

“You are
special to me,” he told her, answering the question that she’d left unspoken.  “I
do not care if I have lain with half a million mortals and angels before today –
they are not you.  You are yourself alone; and it is you that I love.”

“You've only
known me for a week.”

“My lady, there
you are wrong.  I have known you all your life, although I do not remember
how. 
You
have only known me for a week... how much more then should I
fear the vagaries of your heart, mmm?”

“Not at all,”
she murmured.

Moira
stretched out and lay her head over the slow drumbeat of his heart; it was a
long time before he moved again, to stand up and lead her into the bathroom
where he stepped into the shower now large enough for his frame.  She took the
rare opportunity of not being Leo's focus of attention to relieve herself.

“You know,
I've never seen you excuse yourself to use the restroom,” she said
conversationally.  “Do angels excrete like other living beings?”

He chuckled at
her wording, visible only as a shadow behind the shower curtain, soapy all over
with body wash.

“The answer to
that, my lady, is much like the other answers:  Angels can do all the things
humans can... but we have more choices of method.  Why excrete when I can
discard my wastes in a similar process to that by which I strip your pain
chemicals away?”

“I really
can't answer that,” she muttered.

“I can.  Fledglings
and infant angels do not have that level of control or finesse and must make
their messes like any young animal would.  Likewise if an angel is deeply
wounded or unpowered somehow, they may have no other option but the regular
digestive route.”

“Angels can be
unpowered?” 
No quiet way to flush a toilet,
she sighed internally. 
Well,
we can't all be superhuman. 
She slid aside the shower curtain and stepped
in behind him.

“We can be,”
he answered soberly over his shoulder.  “Through various ways.”

Ahhh.  
I'd take that as a Leo-ism for “I'd rather not discuss it; please don't ask.”

“I think the
shower head is a bit too high for me, sadly,” she said instead.

Leo turned
around to rinse his hair.  “I'll draw you a bath for now and fix the shower
later.  Tomorrow, perhaps.  I have an idea for an improvement.”

She watched
the water run down his front, appreciating the view.  “You do plumbing as well?”

He shrugged.  “I
do something of all things.  Across centuries one develops small hobbies.  Some
named me the Blacksmith of Heaven – jokingly, I believe.”

“You look the
part, my dear...”

His laugh was
low and intimate.  “Keep your gaze on me in that fashion and soon we will
return to our previous activities.”

“Ha!  Pax, you
grim reaper.  Don't you know when to give a woman a break?”

“I do indeed: 
only when she requests it.”

Leo finished
his rinse and shut off the shower head, turning up the hot water from the spout
and plugging the tub so it would fill.  He pushed aside the shower curtain and
lifted the bath seat out of their way to drip on the tile.  Moira stretched out
in the porcelain tub, which was now fully long enough for her to do so.  The
angel himself sat down on the edge to allow it to fill. 

“Been a while
since I've gotten to have a real bath,” she sighed.  “Too afraid that my back
or my leg would give out and I'd be stuck in the tub for days, or worse.”

“No fear of
that now,” he replied, letting the water run over the back of his hand.

“No... you've
shown you can lift me with practically no effort.”  The water was just the
right temperature and felt good on her muscles which, although not sore,
definitely felt as if they had received a workout.  She reached up and touched
his knee with her foot.

“If you are a
general, with rank upon rank of angels kneeling to your command – why do you
act like you're my servant most of the time?”

“Do you not
enjoy it?” he returned.

“Now, I never
said
that
.”

A bottle of
bubble bath appeared in his hand from nowhere.  She was certain it had been
tucked away under the sink, previously forgotten.  He popped the cap, sniffed
it, then added a long dollop under the faucet and watched the foam rise up.

“It can get
old,” Leo mused, almost to himself.  “Absolute control requires maintenance. 
When all eyes look to you for answers, you are exquisitely and singularly
responsible for the results.  Men and women, mortal and celestial alike, have
lived or died on my smallest word – I know it in general but do not yet
remember in specifics.

“When you
would give me an instruction... or even merely voice a wish in my presence...
all that fell to me was the execution of that directive.  To obey, to enact
even your smallest commands – that returned to you the personal power that you
must have felt was lost across the years.  And in surrendering that power to
you I felt freedom that I had not experienced for millennia.

“And are not
men and angels all fools, willing fools, when we are first in love?”

He smiled and
plucked one of her washcloths from the air, handing it to her with a short bow.

She plunged it
into the water amid the bubbles, deep in thought.  “Do you think you've ever
been in love before?”

Leo eyed her
lazily.

“Did my heart
love till now? forswear it, sight!  For I ne'er saw true beauty till this
night,” he quoted.

She gaped,
delighted.  “You know Shakespeare?”

“Flashes and
fragments, although I remember that play – a tragedy of incautious hearts. 
'These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire
and powder, / Which as they kiss consume.' “

“And our
delights... are they the violent ones?”

He shook his
shaggy head, sending droplets of water flying loose into the tub.

“We neither
are so young as that, my love,” he demurred.

Leo slid into
the water as he turned off the faucet, folding himself to sit cross-legged in
his end of the tub, taking her feet into his lap and rubbing them under the
surface.  Moira ran the cloth over her face and throat and shoulders, cleaning
away the sweat of their afternoon together.

“Do you know
what surprises me?”

“Mmm?”

“I'm actually
hungry.”

Leo pressed a
thumb gently but firmly into her instep, massaging it.  “I am not surprised;
you have not had the medication that would dull your appetite and,” here he
smiled faintly, “I dare say I have helped you to exert yourself today to the
point of whetting it.  When you are ready to get out of the bath, I will cook
you a meal.”

He lowered his
gaze, seeming suddenly and strangely shy, focusing on her feet with grave
intensity; Moira watched him as she sponged off languidly. 
Violent
delights,
she mused. 
He remembers blood and death and war... what did
he feel about them?  Were they his delight, another life ago?

He fears
what he can't remember,
she realized. 
He plays my servant, my
paramour, my Romeo – and he fears that he'll wake up to all his memories at any
given moment and become Ares instead of Eros.

He is
still terrified he will harm me.

You don't
know,
she thought at him
.  You don't know that I know what you are
capable of, to some extent –  and that I can imagine the rest.  You don't know
that I see the scars up your arms and know that they might each be the last
mark left by a soul dying on the end of your blade.

You don't
know that I can guess your fears – that you could go mad when your memories
return and wake at some point again to find yourself covered in my blood.  You
fear a berserker violence in yourself.

You know
that you physically overpower me.  You know that you could break me with a
single blow.  You know that you could destroy me.

You don't
know that I don't care.

What is
it?  Am I suicidal?  Am I so deep in love already, with you or death or both? 
Or is it trust that would make me lay my life again and again in the palm of
your hand and believe that you will treat it gently?

You don't
know that I've given myself to you now, entirely.  I've tossed my fate at your
feet – wholeheartedly, irretrievably – and you don't know it.

Leo raised his
face slowly, blue eyes gazing at her sadly from behind his tousled locks.

“But I do
know,” he answered.

Moira wrung
out the washcloth and lay it over the side of the tub, then crawled to him
through the swirling water to sit again in his lap.  He let his arms close
carefully around her.

She pushed the
damp grey mane out of her way with tender fingers, smoothing it back to caress
his cheeks, to bring his lips down to hers.