A Terrible Fall of Angels (Zaniel Havelock #1)(65)

“The hand just has to match,” I said softly.

The phantom face smiled at me as much as the shape of the face allowed. It wasn’t a human smile, but that didn’t make it any less happy.

I put both my hands on the heavy scaled hand. It still felt wrong, like a jarring when someone in a band doesn’t hit the right note, but this was a tactile jarring; my fingers were feeling something that shouldn’t have been.

I began to smooth the heavy, mismatched flesh like wet clay, except that I wasn’t just shaping the clay, I was getting rid of excess, and as I whittled down the heavy skin and flesh it turned into more of the dark liquid smoke. Suriel was there to siphon it off into the magical cage.

I kept working the flesh until it was much smaller, and then finally small enough that it matched the width of the wrist it was attached to, and still I kept working my hands over the skin, smoothing the rough scales down smaller and finer until they were almost as smooth as the skin of the arm. The nails had become smaller to match the rest. I drew my fingers over them to lessen the razor sharpness of them, so she’d be able to touch another person without slicing their skin. The nails were still more claw than human fingernail, but having an extra weapon wasn’t always a bad thing. I remembered Kate and her mourning for the claws she’d had before the magical therapy that made her more human. What was so great about being only human?

I was almost too far gone in the magic, but part of me that wasn’t Zaniel but still Detective Havelock swam to the surface of all the power. I was able to look up at Ravensong, though I saw her face through the shine of her angel, and then I realized that the Goddess behind her had placed a ghostly shield in front of Ravensong’s head and chest as if the hand were a bomb I was defusing and she was protecting her charge from possible shrapnel. The bear had somehow merged with the shield as if the bear had given its strength to it, or perhaps the bear wasn’t a personal totem, but a part of the Goddess’s power. I didn’t need to know, so I stopped thinking about it and searched for Ravensong’s face through all the layers of power.

It was like trying to see her through gauze, or misty glass. I found my voice, but it was thicker, so resonant with power that it sounded strange to my ears, like it was my mouth but someone else’s voice. I knew I could have simply thought what I wanted to know and planted it in the woman’s mind, but that was an intrusion, rude at best, and potentially illegal, though I knew that Ravensong wouldn’t worry about it; but it isn’t about whether you will be blamed for something, it’s about is it right, or is it wrong, will it cause harm? I hadn’t used this much power in this many layers in so long; if there was even a small chance that my control was less perfect than it had been, I couldn’t risk telepathy with anyone right now, especially someone who wasn’t initiated into the same mysteries. Ravensong wouldn’t want me helping her conjure at full moon, because I didn’t know how her magic worked; the same worked in reverse here.

“I can’t understand, Havoc,” she said.

“He’s speaking in the language of the spheres,” Suriel said.

I tried to remember how to speak in a language that she would understand, embarrassed that I’d lost so much so quickly to the power. I threw my willpower into speaking English to Ravensong and still holding on to all the power I needed to finish this. It was like holding on to a string that was being pulled out of my hands while I was looking in the wrong direction.

“You okay with claws—little ones?” I managed to say out loud.

“Can you make them human fingernails?” she asked.

Which meant she wasn’t okay with it, but I’d taken my attention away from it too long, the power was unraveling. The small paw touched my hands this time and I could feel every texture of the raccoon’s hand, rough and smooth, the tiny prick of the claws at the end of the dexterous fingers, and that was my answer. This was her totem, a piece of her spirit; there was nothing wrong with delicate claws at the end of clever fingers.

I had a moment of cradling the small hand between my larger ones. It was a pretty hand, a feminine hand, but it was still covered in red scales like a snake and had black fingernails that ended in points that made her raccoon chitter excitedly.

The power flowed away from me, all the many pieces of spirit sliding back to where they normally existed. I had a moment of wanting to see spirit all the time, all the totems and guardians and Deities that surrounded us until the world was made glorious and haunted by it. I knew there was even a chance I might keep that double and triple vision, but I also knew that it would drive me mad, because that was part of what happened to Jamie. It hadn’t even been a choice for him; the angels had awakened his deeper vision and then he hadn’t been able to shut it off. The College had seen his inability to control his psychic gifts as a failure. He wasn’t strong enough to be an Angel Speaker, so they’d expelled him as if he’d flunked a final or failed to turn in his last research paper. Jamie had excelled at any paper test or essay, but you could fail all of those in the College of Angels if you were gifted enough in other areas. If you could survive the power, stay sane and functional, they would find a place for you, but madness that failed to be useful? That was unforgivable. Angels are about order, and any angel that preferred chaos was cast out. If Heaven would cast out the angels themselves, how could they do less to a human being who had proven too frail a vessel?