Текст книги "Raziel"

Автор книги: Kristina Douglas

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

It did. Everything about Raziel made a great deal of difference to me, but admitting that only made things worse. “No reason at all,” I said brightly.

I looked past her toward the bank of windows overlooking the fog-shrouded Pacific Ocean. At least, I assumed it was the Pacific—for all I knew, we could be on Mars. The windows been left open, and a strong breeze tossed the sheer white curtains into the air, sending a little shiver of some unnamed emotion down my backbone. “Is everything white in this place?” I demanded, feeling cranky. Being dead would do that to a girl.

For a moment I thought I saw something just beyond the windows—the breathless shimmer of iridescent blue wings, the sun sparkling off them. I narrowed my gaze, but there was nothing out there, just a few seagulls in the distance, wheeling and cawing. No seagulls on Mars,I thought.

Sarah looked around as if noticing for the first time. “I suppose so. Raziel tends to see things as either black or white—never shades of gray. He’d probably really hate it if you painted anything.” She grinned, suddenly looking mischievous. “Just let me know if you want some help.”

The idea was irresistible, and I laughed. “Do you want to make his life a living hell?”

“No, dear. That’s going to be your job.”

Another odd fluttering. I rose and crossed the living room to peer out into the bright sky, the rolling mist on the ocean. There was nothing in the sky but the seagulls—I must be imagining things.

Or was I? I was stuck in the sterile aerie of a creature who could fly—why would I assume that mysterious dark wings were a figment of my imagination?

I turned my back on the windows. If Raziel was out there buzzing the building in an effort to spook me, I wasn’t going to let him. Though the sight of him dive-bombing the place would have been pretty damned funny.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you before Sammael gets here. Apart from welcoming you to Sheol,” Sarah said, “I wanted to warn you about Raziel.”

Oh, great. As if things weren’t bad enough, now I needed to be warned about the only man I slightly, somewhat, minimally trusted. “He’s an ax murderer?” I suggested cheerfully.

Sarah’s responding smile was a token. “Don’t be fooled by his kindness. Raziel has shut himself off from all human feeling, from caring about anyone besides the Fallen and their wives. I will speak for you at the meeting today, but if you’re relying on Raziel to protect you, you’re wasting your time.”

I was still trying to reconcile the term kindnesswith the bad-tempered Raziel I’d been saddled with. Though more likely Raziel would consider he’dbeen saddled with me.

“Oh—there’s a meeting?” I said, feeling doomed. “I suppose they’re going to decide whether I live or die, and I’m not going to have any voice in the matter. Of course, I’m dead already, so I guess it doesn’t really matter. I just don’t feel like I’m dead. And I really don’t want to go back to that place.” I shivered. I couldn’t remember much, just heat and noise and the pain of thousands of souls reaching out. . . .

“I’ll speak for you. I’ll do anything I can to stop them. Right now they’re more worried about the Nephilim and whether Uriel will use your presence as an excuse to move against us. I just don’t want you to count on Raziel. He’s sworn off caring about anyone, and I’m afraid he’s not going to make an exception for you.” She tilted her head sideways, assessing me. “At least, I don’t think so. But I’ll fight for you. And sometimes they listen.”

And if that didn’t sound like a rock-solid guarantee, I figured it was the best I could expect. If I was going to get out of this mess, I’d have to figure it out on my own.

Sammael appeared at the door just as Sarah was leaving, and he didn’t look any happier to see me than he had before.

“Are you ready?” he asked politely.

I suddenly remembered all those flights of stairs, and groaned. Once a day was enough. “I don’t suppose you have an elevator hidden anywhere around here?”

“No.” Sammael moved past me to push open a section of the windows that I had blithely assumed was solid wall. The wind was rising, swirling into the apartment, but in Raziel’s sterile environment there was nothing loose that could be blown away. “Come with me—we’ll take the shortcut.”

I looked from Sammael’s calm face to the wind and ocean just beyond those doors to nowhere. He was an angel, wasn’t he? Albeit Sarah had said he was one of the angels of death. He wasn’t going to toss me out the window, was he?

You can only die once,I thought, not knowing whether it was true or not. Taking Sammael’s hand, I stepped out into a nothingness that was blindingly bright.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

IT SEEMED AS IF A MOMENT HAD passed, or an hour. I found myself standing on a cliff, much higher up than the house had been, and I’d never been crazy about heights. I could see out over the vast ocean, and the sun beginning to sink lower on the horizon. Pacific Ocean, then. The ground was wet beneath my feet, and there was no sign of my missing mentor. I glanced at Sammael. I couldn’t remember holding on to him, soaring through those misty skies. But clearly I hadn’t walked.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“In the cave. Just go straight—you’ll find him.”

We were three-quarters of the way up a mountain that I hadn’t even realized was nearby. Its top was enshrouded in mist, as was the rocky shoreline below, and I could see the great yawning mouth of a cave closer than I would have liked. I waited for the familiar panic to set in. “I’m claustrophobic when it comes to caves,” I finally admitted, glancing nervously at the rough-hewn entrance, worn smooth by centuries of scouring winds. In fact, I didn’t like heights, closed-in places, places that were too open—give me a phobia and I embraced it enthusiastically.

“Not anymore,” Sammael said in a colorless voice. “You should watch what you say. You’ll be lucky if the Council simply decides to grant you the Grace.”

“The Grace?” That sounded almost pleasant.

“Your memory would be wiped clean. I promise you, it wouldn’t hurt, and you’d be perfectly happy. You’d be able to do simple tasks, perhaps even learn to read and write a few simple words.”

I stared at him in absolute horror. “No,” I said flatly.

“It won’t be your choice.” He seemed unmoved by my reaction. “Do you want me to take you to Raziel?”

“I can manage,” I said, not sure that I could, but I really didn’t want to hear any more of Sammael’s awful possibilities. The inhabitants of Sheol seemed to have mixed feelings about me. Azazel, Sammael, and Raziel clearly thought I didn’t belong, and I was happy to agree with them. Tamlel, Sarah, and the Stepford wives were welcoming, but that would probably mean nothing once they held their council meeting. “But I thank you for the offer. I think I need to figure out how to get what I need on my own, don’t I?”

He barely registered my question. “I’ll come back if there’s a problem.”

“How will you know?” I asked suspiciously. Raziel had been able to read my mind—if it turned out the whole place knew what I was thinking, then maybe I wouldn’t mind getting a lobotomy.

“Sarah will know. Sarah will tell me,” he said simply, as if he expected me to know something so basic.

Clearly Sarah was a force to be reckoned with. It was a good thing that she seemed to be on my side. “I’ll be fine,” I said firmly, and before I could add to it, Sammael had disappeared into the wind.

“Well, damn,” I said out loud. I’d been hoping to see wings. If Sammael came equipped with them, I hadn’t had time to notice. Which made travel convenient, but still a little bit puzzling.

I turned to look at the cave, waiting for the icy fear to set in, but I felt nothing but an entirely reasonable nervousness at the thought of bearding Raziel in his den. Sammael had told the truth—the claustrophobia had vanished. Whoopee,I thought with a suitable lack of enthusiasm, walking forward.

I still wasn’t crazy about enclosed spaces. The wide corridor into the mountain looked as if it had been a mine shaft, if they had mine shafts in the afterlife. It narrowed a little too swiftly as I made my way down it. Normally I’d be curled up on the ground, covered with a cold sweat. The fact that I could keep moving, deeper and deeper into the mountain, was more proof of how different things were. A proof I could easily have done without.

I wasn’t quite sure what I expected. The corridor took a couple of sharp turns, shutting out the daylight at the entrance, but I managed to keep going without stopping to hyperventilate. Where the hell was Raziel? I had the sudden fear that Sammael had pulled a Hansel and Gretel on me, luring me to this mountain to abandon me, thereby getting rid of a messy problem. Sarah wouldn’t let him get away with that, would she?

I’d almost given up trying to find him when I turned one last corner and saw him sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of a huge stone cavern, his eyes closed.

I had planned to be a smart-ass and say something like “Yoo-hoo, imaginary creature, I’m here,” but I thought better of it. He was sitting at the edge of a great yawning hole in the center of the cave, and it looked like some of the walls had collapsed inward. He was at the very edge, too close for comfort, and as I looked he seemed to sway toward the opening.

I tried to stifle my instinctive scream, but he heard me anyway and jerked, startled. He fell backward, away from the pit, and the chair went over. I could hear it splintering against the stone walls as it fell, and I shivered. He rose, focusing on me, and I tried for a cheerful smile.

As I expected, he wasn’t the least bit pleased to see me. “How did you get here?” he demanded, not moving any closer.

“Sammael,” I said.

He grunted. “You’re wearing my clothes.” “It’s better than all that white,” I said. “Were you frightened by an albino when you were a child?” “I was never a child.”

Another of his flat, incontrovertible statements. At least he was talking to me. “You mean you were born this way?”

“I wasn’t born.” He stayed where he was, on the edge of the pit, and it made me nervous. Though I supposed if he fell, he could probably fly out of there, couldn’t he? “Why are you here? I told Tam and Sammael to keep you busy. This is no place for you.”

“I don’t belong in this dank little cave? I can agree with that,” I said. “Not that it’s actually dank or little, but you get the point. Or I don’t belong in Sheol at all? Because I’m willing to agree with you on that one as well, but apparently it’s your fault I’m here and not back in New York dodging buses, and I really don’t feel like having a bunch of men get together and decide what’s going to happen to me, particularly when one of the options includes the equivalent of brain damage. And I don’t like white.”

He blinked at the non sequitur. “Tough,” he said shortly. He started toward me, and I watched him, trying to put all the strange, disparate things I knew about him together in one package.

“Where are your wings?” I asked. If I was going to be stuck with angels, I should at least get to see some feather action.

He rolled his eyes. “Why is that always the first question? You don’t need to know.”

“If I stay here, do I get them?”

“You’re not and never will be an angel,” he said.

I was willing to put up a fight. “Oh, you never can tell. I mean, clearly I’ve been far from angelic so far, but I can always change my ways and become positively saintly.” I gave him a hopeful beam that left him entirely unmoved.

“People don’t become angels,” he said in a tone that said, Any moron knows that.

“How about heaven? Don’t people get wings there? Since I’m dead and all that, it seems like a good place to start.”

His laugh wasn’t flattering. “I don’t think you’ve reached that point yet.”

“Then you’re stuck with me. Get used to it.”

He halted directly in front of me. “For now,” he said. “I wouldn’t count on a lengthy stay. But for as long I have to put up with you, you can stop stealing my clothes. And you can stop talking—the sound of your voice is like fingernails on a blackboard.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, totally unmoved. “I have a delightful voice. It’s low and sexy, or so people have told me. You’re just being difficult.”

“I don’t care how glorious your voice is, I’d appreciate hearing less of it.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again. If I wanted to survive, I needed him on my side, and I was going to have to behave myself, at least a little bit. I stood perfectly still, saying nothing, waiting for him.

He tilted his head, letting his strange eyes slide down me, assessing. Odd, but it felt as palpable as a touch. “My clothes are too tight for you,” he said helpfully.

“You’re a man, I’m a woman. I have hips.”

“Indeed,” he said, and I looked at him sharply to see if there was an insult hidden behind his bland tone of voice. “I meant to have clothes provided for you.”

“You did. They were all white.” “You don’t like white? It’s the color of rebirth, renewal.”

“It’s not a color at all, it’s the absence of color,” I said. “I may be in limbo, having to get by on your charity, but I’m not going to let everything go a dull beige.”

“Limbo is a mythical construction,” he said. “And white is not beige.”

“Sheol is a mythical construction, and angels are part of fairy tales, and vampires are nightmares, and you don’t exist,” I snapped. I was getting a little tired of all this.

“Then where are you?” He wasn’t expecting an answer. “What did Sammael tell you?”

“Sammael’s a teenager. He barely said two words. Sarah was more forthcoming. She told me not to count on you for anything.”

“Did she?”

“She said that despite your great kindnesses to me—and I have to admit I have yet to see any evidence of kindness on your part—you wouldn’t speak up for me at the meeting and you’d let the others do what they want with me, and I wanted to make sure—”

“Be quiet!” It was spoken in a soft voice, soft but deadly, and I shut up.

Almost. “Are you going to let them melt my brain?”

He looked confused for a moment, before resuming his familiar exasperated expression. “Oh, the Grace. No.”

It was one small syllable, but I trusted him.

“In the future, you’re not to come up here,” he continued, his tone cool, “and I will make certain Sarah knows where you’re allowed to go and what’s offlimits.

There are dangerous places in Sheol, including the gates that surround us. This place is almost as dangerous.”

“Have you found Lucifer?” He opened his mouth to reprimand me, and I shot back, “It’s four words, for heaven’s sake. Deal with it.”

He looked annoyed. “Sarah’s been talking too much.”

“Everyone seems to talk too much to suit you. Or is it just women?” Sexist bastard,I thought with a peculiar lack of heat.

“No I’m not,” he said.

Not what?I thought.

“You are the only female around here who seems unable to control her tongue You don’t need the details of our fight with the archangel. It’s none of your —” “—business,” I chimed in with him. “And Sarah didn’t tell me much. Besides, I might point out that Lucifer fell because he dared ask too many questions.” I shot him a wry glance. “You should have some sympathy for the curious.”

“Don’t get delusions of grandeur. Lucifer’s questions were more important than whining about why there are so many stairs.”

“And that reminds me—judging by Sammael’s ‘shortcut,’ I shouldn’t have had to walk. You have wings—you could have flown me up there in no time.”

“I could have,” he agreed. “But you need to know where you are, what’s expected of you. There won’t always be someone around to transport you. And I don’t want to transport you if I can help it.”

“Why not?” He probably didn’t want to touch me, I thought, grumpy at the idea. He was treating me as if I had an advanced case of leprosy, which was both annoying and ever so slightly depressing. Not that I was attracted to him—he wasn’t my type.

“You know why,” he said shortly.

“What do you mean?”

His eyes met mine, and I had the oddest feeling I could see my own thoughts in them. Which was truly a horrible idea, because I’d had some thoughts that were decidedly warm, indecent, and embarrassing. This was hard enough without him knowing that I had feelings I was using all my excess energy trying to fight. If he could read my every thought, I was screwed.

“No, I can’t always tell what you’re thinking,” he said by way of an answer, and my heart sank. “Some things are easy, other things are well protected inside you. It takes a lot to get to those, and I’m certainly not going to bother.”

I wasn’t sure if that was reassuring or insulting. At least he had no idea that I had a furtive desire to jump his—

“Stop it!” he snapped.

Shit. Okay, I could try fighting back. I batted my eyelashes, giving him my most limpid, innocent look. “Stop what?”

He crossed the cavern so fast I wondered if he’d used magic, or whatever his abilities were called. “It will not happen, so you can stop thinking about it. I am never going to mate with you.”

“ Matewith me?” I echoed, much amused. “Why don’t you just call a spade a spade? You’re never going to have sex with me. Which, incidentally, is fortunate, because what makes you think Iwant to have sex with you?” No one likes rejection, even from someone they despise.

“There’s a difference. Mating is a bond for life. Yourlife. Sex is simply fornication.”

“And you don’t approve of fornication.”

He looked at me then, a slow, scorching look. Maybe I was wrong on the rejection part. He loomed over me, dangerously close. “I could quite easily fuck you,” he said deliberately, the word strange in his faintly formal voice. “You are undeniably luscious. But I’m not going to. And you need to get it out of your mind as well. It’s not just the words that distract me. It’s the pictures.”

Oh, crap. He could see the visuals? “I can’t help it! It’s like telling someone not to move. As soon as someone tells me to be still, I end up having to wiggle. Anyway, you were the one who brought up the subject in the first place.”

He opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. “I have things to do,” he said finally. “I don’t want to transport you.”

I looked around the cavernous room. “You’ll have to put up with it,” I said. “Otherwise there’s no way down and I’m stuck here.”

“You tempt me,” he said, and his stark, beautiful voice danced down my backbone. I really was much too susceptible to him. “But someone would come to find you.” He moved past me, heading toward the corridor that led to the outside world. As outside as Sheol might be. He paused, looking back at me.

“Are you coming?”

I would have loved to tell him no, but there was a chill to the place, and I didn’t want to wait there alone until someone came to rescue me. I was managing pretty damned well, given the situation, but I was hisresponsibility and I was not about to let him abandon me.

I raced after him, catching up as we reached the mouth of the cave and the misty daylight. “What next?” I said. “Do I climb on your back, or do you carry me in your arms, or—”

“You stop talking,” he said.

I almost tripped over the white rug that covered part of the white marble floor. We were back in his sterile apartment, and he was in the kitchen. My legs felt a little wobbly, and I sank down on the sofa and put my head between my legs to keep from passing out. Then I looked up. “You could give me some warning next time,” I said irritably.

“There won’t be a next time if I can help it.” He leaned against the counter, looking at a plate of doughnuts someone had left. “Aren’t you going to eat these? I suppose Sarah told you you can’t gain weight.”

I bristled slightly that he would even mention my weight in such an offhand manner, but hey, that was permission enough. I got to my feet and moved into the small kitchen.

And it wassmall. Too small to hold both of us, really, but he wasn’t shifting away and I wanted those magic doughnuts.

It was a novel experience, having a beautiful man tell me to eat fattening foods, the stuff of daydreams. “ No, dear, at one hundred and eighty pounds, you’re too thin. You need to put on some weight.” Be still, my heart. Oh, he was hardly the first beautiful man I’d been around. I was shallow that way—I liked men who were pretty and just a little stupid, and I’d always preferred them on the beefy side. I had the unhappy suspicion that Raziel was a little too smart for my peace of mind. But I was beginning to see the appeal of lean, powerful elegance.

Most of my boyfriends had wanted me to go on a diet, get down to a size six or eight from the comfortable size twelve I’d worn since college. We’d go out to dinner, I would dutifully order a side salad with a spritz of lemon juice or vinegar, and then the moment I was home alone I’d plow through the Ben &

Jerry’s. Super Fudge Chunk had marked the end of many a dull date.

“So I’m still going to be hungry and eat, use the bathroom, sleep, bathe, and never gain weight. Sounds delightful. Do I get to have sex with anyone if youdon’t want me?”

He stared at me, momentarily speechless. “No,” he said finally. “Absolutely not. It’s forbidden.”

“But you said you could happily—”

“I said you and I won’t have sex,” he interrupted before I could drop the F-bomb as he had.

“Why would you want to?” I said, managing to sound bored with the idea.

“I don’twant to,” he snapped. “ Youasked meif we would have sex.”

“You misunderstood. Deliberately,” I added, just to annoy him. In this strange, otherworldly place, annoying him was one of the only things that made me feel alive. “I do understand why you’d want to, but I really don’t think it’s a good idea. You being my mentor and all.”

This was working even better than I’d expected. He was ready to explode with frustration. Not the right kind of frustration, unfortunately. Indeed, it was too bad that I was taunting him, but I couldn’t resist. He really was freaking gorgeous. It was probably unwise—I needed him on my side. “No,” he said repressively.

I shrugged, taking another doughnut. “Do we get sick? Will I start feeling bloated if I eat a fourth doughnut?”

“Yes,” he said.

I put the doughnut down. “Well, at least you’ll outlive me. Cheer up. You can dance at my funeral.”

“I won’t know you when you die. Assuming we figure out what to do with you, we probably won’t see each other again.”

This wasn’t very comforting news, but I wasn’t giving up the battle. “Once they decide, how long will it take to get rid of me?”

He just looked at me, his expression saying it couldn’t be soon enough.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave, even if they could give me back some semblance of a normal life with mental acuity intact. Yes, I enjoyed picking on him, and the white had to go. But despite my arguments, I . . . kind of liked it here. Liked the sound of the ocean beyond the open windows, the taste of salt on my lips. I’d always wanted to live by the sea. I was getting my wish a little earlier than expected, and it wasn’t technically living, but it was close enough.

I liked the bed I’d slept in, I liked Sarah, and I most definitely liked to look at Raziel, even if he was frustrating, annoying, and all the other negative adjectives I could think of. And if he could read my mind, tough shit.

In fact, I was living my dream. I’d spent most of my adult life sifting through arcane literature and Bible criticism to come up with my far-fetched mysteries, and I was well acquainted with the totally bizarre fantasies of Enoch, with his tales of the Nephilim and the Fallen.

Except it turned out Enoch wasn’t the acid freak I’d always thought he was. All of this was real.

The kitchen was too small for both of us, but for him to leave he’d have to brush past me, and I knew he really didn’t want to touch me. It was lovely to think that it was unshakable lust keeping him away, but I knew it was more likely annoyance—I’d done my best to make him want to strangle me.

“No,” he said, “I don’t want to strangle you. I just want you to go away.”

Grrrr. “How long are you going to be reading my mind?” I demanded, thoroughly annoyed.

“As long as I need to.”

“Well, that time is now over. Turn off the switch, or whatever it is you do. Stay the fuck out of my brain. Don’t read my mind, don’t cloud my thoughts, don’t wipe out my memory. Keep your distance.” I didn’t bother trying to keep the snarl out of my voice. I’d had enough of this crap.

He was looking dangerously close to be being amused. His gloriously striated eyes glinted for a moment, but I seriously doubted that Raziel possessed even a tiny trace of a sense of humor in his cold, still body. Sure enough, the expression vanished so quickly I was sure I’d imagined it.

“Or what?” he said.

Asshole. He knew I didn’t have much to fight back with. Little did he know that I’d always been wickedly inventive. Maybe that was why I’d been sent to hell. H ands sliding down my body, beautiful hands, his mouth following, on my breast, sucking—

“Stop it!” he said with complete horror, pushing away from me as if burned by the sultry image in my brain.

I smiled sweetly. “I’ve got a hell of an imagination, Raziel,” I said, calling him by name for the first time. “Stay out of my head or prepare to be thoroughly embarrassed.”

Taking the plate of doughnuts, I sauntered back out into the living room.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SHE WAS A WITCH. SHE SHOULD have been humble and weepy and afraid of me. Instead she was the complete opposite, and the quick vision of her sex fantasy was having the expected effect on my body. Azazel was right—I’d been celibate too long.

I stayed in the kitchen, not moving. I’d thought I at least had my body under control. In truth, it was no wonder I was hard, with that brief fantasy she’d indulged in. I had no idea whether she really found it appealing or whether it was just part of the game she was playing.

No, it was real. As I’d seen the thought, I’d felt her own fevered reaction, as intense as mine despite the brevity of the image. If that had simply been an intellectual exercise, it wouldn’t have been so . . . disturbing.

I had to get rid of her, and fast. I needed her out of my rooms, out of my world. There was no way in hell I was going to let them invoke the Grace of forgetting, but apart from that anything would be an improvement. Sarah was always looking for someone to mother—Allie Watson was the very thing. I could pass her over, then go out on my own and not have to think about her anymore. It might take a day or two to get her out of my system, but I could do it. I could turn myself off. As long as she wasn’t living in my apartment and taunting me.

I was getting closer to Lucifer’s burial ground. I could sit and listen and hear him deep in the earth, feel his call vibrate through my body, and I was close, so close. I didn’t need to get distracted by a woman with a mouth that wouldn’t stop moving and erotic images invading my mind.

Why the hell had Sammael brought her up to the cave in the first place? He knew better than anybody that place should be off-limits, particularly to an interloper like Allie Watson. It was the closest we’d come to Lucifer, the Light, and to have her bumbling around with her incessant questions was close to blasphemy.

Not that I believed in blasphemy. That was part of why I was here, wasn’t it? Because I, like the others, refused to follow the rules, to kill without question, to wipe out generations and scourge the land. I had looked on a human woman and fallen in love, and for that I was forever cursed.

Surely there was something wrong with an ethos that equated love with death. It was so long ago I wasn’t sure I could remember what we’d been thinking, could barely remember her. But I couldn’t forget the emotion, the passion that had driven me, the certainty that choosing life, choosing human love, was the right thing to do. It had been worth it, worth everything, and I had never regretted it.

I could regret the vulnerability, the need that had driven me to such a desperate act, but it no longer mattered. I had done what I had done, and I wouldn’t wish it changed. But it would never happen again.

Uriel knew how to use vulnerabilities. He knew how to torture, even with the rules that kept him from wiping us out. I wasn’t going to let him use me again.

So perhaps there were times when I wished I could still feel that innocent, powerful love. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of years, millennia, piling up, and I’d never been able to recapture that pure, essential passion that had made me destroy everything.

But I still would have done it. Chosen to fall. We’d been taught that the humans were like cattle—you trained them, destroyed them if they disobeyed, never answered their questions, and, most of all, never looked upon them with lust.

We’d been sent to earth with our appointed tasks. Azazel had been sent to teach the people metalwork; his job had been to train and to pass on the magic. The first twenty each had jobs, and we’d done well enough at first. But the longer we remained on earth, the more human we became. The hungers started, hunger for food, for life, for sex. And we started thinking that we could make this benighted world a better place. We could bring our wisdom and power, we could experience love and dedication. We would intermarry and our children would grow strong and there would be no more wars and God would smile.

God didn’t smile. There were no children—the curse was swift and vicious. We were damned for eternity. Because of love.

No wonder the woman wandering around my rooms annoyed me. It wasn’t just her prattle—she was right, it was a pleasant voice. But after all these years I had no use for humankind, for women in particular. And this woman, of all women. A moment of unexpected sentimentality, and I’d complicated my existence and that of the Fallen. No woman was worth it.

Still, it was my choice, my mistake, and my only option was to fix it, even if I wanted to pass her off. There had to be someplace we could send her where she wouldn’t cause trouble. And then we could deal with Uriel’s wrath.

I was the keeper of secrets, the lord of magic. Within me resided all the wisdom of the ages, and I had been sent to earth to give that knowledge to its hapless inhabitants. So how could I be so fucking stupid?