“Someone’s at the door.” Eve started toward it.
But the seraph with white wings put a hand on her shoulder, staying her.
Eve rolled her eyes. “Gabriel. Let me answer the door.”
Under normal circumstances, my mouth would’ve fallen open in surprise at the irreverent way she treated a messenger of the gods. They still were messengers from Erlik, weren’t they? Even if Castiel spoke the truth when he said he was a seraph? But right now I didn’t feel much of anything at all.
“I’ll get it.” The seraph behind me hitched and relaxed his bronze wings, then stalked to the door. All morning he’d been annoying and irreverent—traits that had shocked me, for the god Erlik was not known for levity. But now he moved with otherworldly grace and a menacing posture that made the hair on my nape stand up.
He opened the ancient, large wooden door. “State your business,” he snapped.
“Please.” Elder Tomes’s voice drifted in, thin and wavering compared to the rush of wind behind him. “Have you seen the reverend?”
Castiel glanced back at Gabriel, one wing sort of cocked behind him, a seraphim gesture I didn’t understand. Then he stepped back, and with a grand sweep of one wing, allowed the middle-aged man into the Great Hall.
Elder Tomes stepped in, hat in his hand. He was in his late 40s with cropped gray hair, a clean-shaven face that betrayed the long frown lines around his tight mouth, and sharp gray eyes.
My stomach twisted, as it usually did when one of the elders entered the room. He was tall and reed-thin. Fingers, long and delicate, clenched the brim of his hat as he peered around the darkened room. His shoulders tightened and his nostrils flared.
“I am looking for my travel companions. Are they here?” His rough tenor voice stretched across the room, growing thinner as it fell onto the stone floor.
Strange. I’d always seen him as an imposing man. Quiet, but powerful and with harsh tones and scalding punishments for the wicked among us. But when he stood next to the seraph, he looked thin—not in a slender way, but insubstantial, more of a smudge than a physical person. His voice did not boom like it did back home.
The seraph with the beautiful bronze wings and the wicked mouth crossed his arms over his bare chest again, his muscles bulging. He wasn’t trying to look intimidating, but there was no comparison between the seraph and the human males.
I scowled. Why did I care what he looked like?
Gabriel finally spoke. When he did, it was like shards of ice cutting the air. “Lilith Meadows is here, unharmed, as you can see. It seems you left her alone in the village.”
The elder stiffened. He wanted to protest, I could see. But a mere human contradicting Erlik’s voice?
I sucked in a silent breath. Maybe having an angel at the Church of the Love of His Divine Saints wouldn’t be terrible. Some of those elders needed to remember they served Lord Erlik too, just like the rest of us.
“And Reverend Zorababel Grimshaw? Elder Absalom Meadows?”
Gabriel stepped away from the shrouded bodies.
Tomes gasped. He glared at Eve, then myself. “What happened?”
Eve opened her mouth as if she were about to speak. I glanced over in time to see Gabriel’s hand, still on her shoulder, squeezing.
She shut her mouth.
“There was an accident,” Gabriel said severely. I had no doubt he was the leader of the seraphim that had fallen to our earth fifty years ago. “Eve was leading them to me, up through the moorland. It’s treacherous during storms and nightfall. Both your reverend and your elder tripped and fell off the side of a low cliff.”
My eyes narrowed. I didn’t know Gabriel or Heralds at all, but his tone of voice was too measured. What he said might be the truth, but it wasn’t the complete truth. How had my brother died? And how was the church going to withstand the heavy blow of our reverend dying?
At least we have the Heralds, I thought, watching the others in the room. We shan’t go back empty-handed. Though the how and why still eluded me, because nothing I had seen of the seraphim so far suggested they wanted to be worshiped in a stone building, surrounded by mortals and mundanity. My gaze snagged on the gold filaments catching the candlelight in the bronze wings. No, they were made to fly free and wild, to ride the storms without fear.
They might be Heralds of the gods, but the reverend’s plan to tame and venerate their leader didn’t seem like something either Herald would agree to.
Tomes blanched, his pale facing turning white as bone as he stumbled forward. His knees didn’t hit the stone floor, his shoulders didn’t quake with suppressed sobs, and he didn’t reach for the makeshift shrouds to glimpse their faces.
But, then, neither did I. What did that mean? In surviving, was I becoming like them?
He just stared. Like I did.
“We are sorry for your loss,” Eve said gently.
