“It’s all right,” I said to the figure. It looked up at me and made a different sound, more a chirp.
“I’m not all right yet,” Ravensong said.
Suriel said, “He wasn’t talking to you.”
“You see them, too?” I said to her.
“Yes.”
Ravensong looked at us and then she looked around her. “Oh,” she said, “do what you need to do, Havoc.”
“Zaniel,” Suriel said.
Ravensong nodded. “Zaniel; names have power, and magical names have more.”
“Precisely,” Suriel said.
This time I didn’t argue, because they were right; I’d been Corey and then at seven I’d been chosen by the angels and I became Zaniel. I left the angels and went straight into the army, where I was Havoc, and now I was Detective Havelock. Corey, Zaniel, Havoc—different people, different mes. I could see the point in her arm where the corrupting magic started. I didn’t just see the demon’s hand on her arm, but I saw the dark smoke—no, thicker than that, black water swirling not over her skin but under it. The heavier wards in this room were acting with her own magic to stop the corruption from spreading, because that was what it wanted to do. It was like water, meant to flow, to fill the vessel of the body it touched.
I knew what I had to do. I heard my voice almost from a distance; the magic had almost taken me too far into the vision to be attached that much to the physical world. “Everyone out but Suriel and Ravensong, now.” I didn’t look around to see if Charleston and the other officers obeyed me, not because I assumed they’d just do it, but because I couldn’t divide my attention. The world narrowed down to the black “water” under her skin. I reached toward it, my angels pulsed, and I had a moment of seeing an army of angels connected to my guardian in a shining endless line of holy fire and power. I blinked and I was back in the room seeing the corruption in her skin. Her raccoon laid its paw on my arm and there was another flare of power; the bear laid its great head against my shoulder, the Valkyrie at her back touched me with a shining hand against my forehead, and the power built. Suriel was at my back and her power joined mine, feeding into all of us so that we were a circuit of power and magic. It was a group effort when I let my fingers finally touch her skin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I began to strip the darkness off her skin. It swirled in the air, half smoke, half liquid, raising part of itself like the head of a snake searching for its next victim, and in the moment I thought that it was a black cobra rearing up to strike. I blanked my mind, took back the power I had given the energy, and it flowed back to just curling liquid smoke. I kept my mind even, empty, peaceful, and gave no strength to the blackness between my hands, but it was seeking someone else to corrupt. It wasn’t always this active, but clearing the room of anyone but the patient was standard practice for a reason. Some types of dark energy sought new vessels to enter even as you pulled them out of the first, contagious like a flu virus.
Suriel came up to “catch” it as it spilled out. I could see the pale yellow glow of the angelic script and other symbols between her hands as she captured the darkness. She would take it back to the College for study, before it was released to return to Hell. I had to blink to unsee the glowing symbols and concentrate back on the dark energy that I was still cleaning out of the arm. I trusted Suriel to do her part, and she trusted me to do my part. It was as if no time had passed and we were back in the College of Angels curing the corruption of the world together.
The blackness filled the cage that Suriel had built, but the last bit of dark energy clung to the arm like a root that had to be dug up. I didn’t want to dig into Ravensong’s arm; I wanted to change the arm and take the roots away with it.
“Why are you hesitating?” Suriel said. “Just strip it off like a glove and let me cage it.”
I tried, but this wasn’t an illusion or the impermanence of immortal substance; this was mortal flesh and though we drained the negative darkness out of it, the shape of the flesh did not change instantly back to match the pale skin of the rest of the arm.
“It is no longer immortal substance painted over mortal flesh; it is somehow merged together.”
“Impossible,” she said.
“But still true,” I said.
“If you’ve done all you can, I understand,” Ravensong said.
I did not look up at her but kept my gaze on the arm and the darkness that was still rooted in it. I had one hand on her arm, which was as it should be, but the other hand rested on the demon part, which should not have been real. At best it should have been a temporary spell, but under no magic that I knew should the monstrous hand have been as solid as the arm.
A small black paw came to rest on my arm. I could feel the weight of it against my arm. It made me turn and look at her spirit animal. The raccoon looked up at me with large, dark brown eyes. Real-life raccoons could give you looks that made you anthropomorphize them and believe they think just like us, but totem animals are both the original animal and a piece of the human they walk beside. Which meant it wasn’t just me projecting human emotions into those inhuman eyes.
I almost asked out loud, What is it, little fellow? But I didn’t have to speak, I just had to listen.
Out of the corner of my eye the raccoon had looked solid, but looking directly at it made it less physically substantial, except for the eyes. They were big and dark and lustrous and very alive. It raised a paw and wiggled its clawed fingers and then touched its other hand to it, showing that the hands were the same size, placing fingertip to fingertip so that they mirrored each other.
“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.