The words echoed over and over in Sharine’s mind as she stood at the burial site of her beloved Raan. She hadn’t known what he would’ve wanted because no one in angelkind prepared for death, and so she’d chosen his resting place according to all that she’d learned of him in their five decades together.
Such a short time.
She’d thought that he, older and wiser and gentle, would be by her side for an eternity. Her mentor in the art that was liquid flame in her blood had become her lover with an ease that seemed written in the stars, both of them more than content with their life together. She and Raan, they’d spent hours in the sunlight, alone with their canvases and their thoughts and their paints, yet together at the same time.
Angels aren’t meant to die.
Her fingers trembled, chilled and bloodless, as she brushed them over the small sculpture Raan had loved so much that he’d never parted with it; the favored piece now marked the location on this windswept part of the Refuge mountains where her Raan lay in eternal rest.
At first, when she’d woken next to him on that morning that still seemed a nightmare mirage, she’d thought that he had decided to go into Sleep, that deep rest of immortals who no longer wished to be part of the world. It was a thing done with intent, and her first response had been a razor-sharp stab of hurt.
She’d asked him so many times never to do that. She’d worried that because he was so much older than her, he’d want to Sleep and she’d want to stay awake and he would just leave her. But Raan had laughed his warm, calming laugh, and told her not to worry.
“Little bird,” he’d said, “why would I Sleep now when I’ve finally found you?”
So she’d been hurt and angry at the apparent broken promise. Then she’d touched his hand because even angry with him, she still loved him. His hand, gifted and strong, had been ice cold.
Her breath broken stalactites in her lungs, her blood crushed frost.
No angel in Sleep was ever that cold. Sharine knew that firsthand—she’d been a half-grown fledgling of eighty-five when she’d sat sentry at her parents’ sides as they chose to slip into Sleep. She’d watched the rise and fall of their chests to the final point of stasis, hoping they would change their minds and not leave her all alone, but they hadn’t.
“You’ll be fine, Sharine.” Her mother’s voice firm but her eyes tired. “You are an adult now.”
“We’ll see you when we next wake,” her father had added with a pat of her hand, but she could tell he was already gone, thinking of the rest he’d craved for endless years.
But long after they’d sunk deep into Sleep, they had been warm. Fifty years later, when she’d gone to their secret underground shelter to ensure no one had disturbed their rest, they’d still been warm. So she’d known that angels in Sleep didn’t go cold, didn’t have blood chill and blue.
She hadn’t needed the healers’ shocked gasps to confirm the truth.
Her kind and talented lover was gone.
Dead in the night, as he lay beside Sharine.
A thing so rare among angelkind that none of the healers in attendance had ever experienced the like. They’d had to consult dusty tomes, talk to older angels and archangels, until at last they found someone who remembered another case two millennia ago. Angels were immortal . . . but sometimes, the incidents so infrequent that they were forgotten between one lifetime and the next, an angel simply . . . stopped.
As if a long clock had finally run out.
The healers had told her all that and still she didn’t comprehend the way of it. Raan had been old, but nowhere close to the oldest of them. Many angels double or even triple his age walked the earth. But it was Raan who had stopped. Stopped as he lay in bed next to her, his life slipping away while she slept unconcerned at his side.
Had he choked for breath? Had he looked to her for help?
The questions tortured her as snow dusted her cheeks, stung her skin. She watched it settle gently over the sculpture. And she wondered if, in the centuries to come, he would be remembered by anyone but her. He had been a great sculptor and painter, but a reclusive one,