He shifted his gaze back to mine. “Then signoff.”
“Seraph—”
“I beg you, Leigh, no more questions. This conversation will undoubtedly already get me in trouble.” He scanned the sky as though angels were hovering aboveus.
I silently assembled all the scraps of our conversation, trying to puzzle out the reason I should sign off from Jarod. “I can’t die,” I remindedhim.
“If you don’t complete your wings in time, you could,” he answeredsoftly.
“But I still have fourteenmonths.”
His Adam’s apple jostled, which made me realize how it had sounded—like I no longer felt an urgency to ascend. “Perhaps, but this mission has already cost youfeathers.”
Shame made me tuck in my wings. I didn’t think three feathers were that noticeable, but he was an archangel . . . all-seeing. “I’ll earn them back. Jarod’swilling—”
“Not if you don’t select anothersinner!”
A protective instinct surged within me, which was nothing new. I’d always been protective of mysinners.
I squeezed Jarod’s jacket against my hardened stomach. “He didn’t shoot anyone tonight. He didn’t evenpunchanyone. And he protected me. Surely, that will take a digit off hisscore.”
“His score cannotchange.”
“But he’s in thesystem.”
“And he shouldn’t be,” he shot out, fast and low, gaze skimming the sky and streetagain.
Besides the occasional vehicle rumbling past us, we werealone.
“I don’t understand, Seraph. Are some crimes sounforgivable?”
What could Jarod Adler have done that merited a permanent score of a hundred? I ran through my years of celestial lessons, sensing the answer to that question suspended just out ofreach.
And then it hit me, robbing me of breath and heartbeats. “He killed an angel,” I said on agasp.
Buthow? Only angel-fire could kill us once our wing bones appeared. And before that, we weren’t allowed out of guilds. Unless a celestial child had escaped into the human world—I couldn’t imagine Jarod killing a child but then remembered he’d earned his score when he was eight.Anaccident?
“It wasn’t an accident,” Asher saidsoftly.
I hadn’t realized I’d voiced my thoughts. “So he did kill anangel?”
Asher was back to being silent andunhelpful.
“How is that even possible, Seraph?” I whispered, my voice as thick as the coating of dust on the hookahs. “We’reimmortal.”
“Not all ofus.”
Not all of us?I almost choked on my next breath. “He killed aNephilim?”
The fact that the blood on his hands wasn’t that of a child shouldn’t have alleviated my dread, but it did. Nephilim were the black sheep of the angelic race—mortal, wingless,soulless.
When they ran out of time to seal their feathers to their wing bones, they were pitied. When they voluntarily forfeited their wings, they were considered heathens, worse thanTriples.
Asher neither confirmed nor denied my suspicion, but I could tell I’d assembled the pieces he’d given mecorrectly.
“He was eight. Children makemistakes.”
“It’s late, Leigh. Let me fly youhome.”
