“Because I told her I would look out for you.”
The air turned heavy. “You… you knew my mom?”
Nodding, she continued weaving through the leaves, the ice clinking around her with the soft echoes of a windchime. “It’s not often an archangel befriends a Nephilim—but Mira always preferred the company of those of us stuck on Mortal Earth. I more than knew her. She was a dear friend.”
Shock blew through me. There had always been a spark of familiarity to her rose-tinged face, because I’d seen her—met her—before she showed up as my new therapist that fated day.
Pushing off the tree, I staggered after her. “I met you that one summer. At the beach.”
Most of the memories before my mom’s death were fuzzy, as if they’d been plucked from my head, but that sunny afternoon in the cold sea and the hot sand came rushing back to me.
“I was walking my dog.” Tossing her chin over her shoulder, she gave me a glassy smile. “You just adored him. Do you remember?”
“Yes! The fluffy white one. What was his name?”
“Henry,” we said at the same time.
The dog had kept me occupied while my mom and Olivia spoke, their words hushed and quick.
Now that I thought about it… “That happened a few times—us running into each other. It wasn’t a coincidence, was it?”
Stepping out of the branches, she waited for me on the other side, her silhouette wavering like a mirage behind the dense curtain of ice. “No, it definitely was not.”
“Why—ow.” I pulled a twig out of my hair. The limbs twisted around my own, snagging on my braid, until I stumbled out the other side. “Why the secrecy?”
“To protect you.” Turning on her heels, she headed for a vaulted corridor. “The laws for the angels are not like the ones you know. There’s no such thing as forgiveness—no room for mistakes. Mistakes are sin. Sin is treason. You commit treason, you are sentenced.”
“I mean, my mom must have known that when she decided to date my dad in the first place, right?” I asked as we approached a crumbling stone stairwell blanched with what looked like salt. “She was an archangel. That’s millennia of life and laws.”
With soft steps, Olivia descended. “Yes, but what you have to understand is most angels who serve the Court of the Creator do not feel. They exist in a realm of order, and anything that threatens to disrupt that order is chaos. Chaos cannot exist in Empyrea.”
I followed her without hesitation, light playing off the walls. “Even more reason to just walk away from him…” I grumbled. My heart cinched in my chest, as if to remind me, Easier said than done.
“That’d be the easy answer, wouldn’t it? Especially for beings that experience no human emotion. But the Watchers were created in the image of mortals. Mortals are equal part order and chaos. They’re moody and messy, beautiful and cruel. They’re complex. They’re not perfect.”
We rounded a corner, the passage abruptly pitching into shadow.
Torches guided our way downward, illuminating my former therapist’s silhouette in a warm glow.
“Despite this very big difference,” she continued, “the Watchers are still bound to the same rigid laws as the others.”
“That seems unfair.”
She tsked. “Truly.”
A faint trickling of water rippled in the distance—pipes, or maybe runoff from the glacier pooling beneath the castle floors.
“But…” My brows furrowed. “Didn’t a bunch of angels come here and, you know, fall in love? Make babies? Get corporate jobs?”
“You’re funny,” she said, a tinge of laughter coloring her words. “Being sent to a world after a lifetime of order, witnessing the intricacies of human interaction…” She shrugged. “I’d be tempted. Wouldn’t you?”
“Even if it were a death sentence?”
“Oh, it’s much worse than that. Death would be a courtesy.” A tremor worked its way into her shoulders, and I imagined we were, in our mind’s eyes, seeing the same gruesome images of the Fall. I’d never forget those cries of despair, the air full of decay and hopelessness in that glimpse of the past Madame Myrian had shown me in her crystal ball earlier that summer. “But for some, experiencing the emotions that make us human, even if only for a brief moment in time, is better than an eternity of feeling nothing at all.”
She slowed, rounding a corner.
The stairway opened into a massive room—a cave—lit by flickering torchlight. A turquoise lagoon rippled in the center, winding into dark nooks and shadowed corners.
