“No. Quite happy, point of fact. I have you three in my office, begging me for a favor. That always makes my day. Now, I have the ability tostrong-arm you for new additions tomyarmy. That makes me even more deliriously Panglossian.”
Sraosha made a sound of supreme disgust. “This was a waste of time.” He started to leave.
Gabriel stopped him. “We need him.”
Sraosha and Michael growled low in their throats.
Thorn smiled. He loved whenever he had them over a barrel.
Gabriel scowled. “Why are you so dedicated to helping the damned escape the sentences they’ve earned?”
“Because unlike you pricks, I understand the difference between those who are born rotten and those who made mistakes because they were fucked over by creatures like you who ensured that their only choices in life were bad and awful. Just because someone was betrayed into committing acts they didn’t want to do, I don’t think that they should be eternally damned for it.”
Or, in his case, because they’d been betrayed at birth by forces conspiring against an infant.
“Rather than pat myself on the back for some imagined goodness I was supposedly born with and never earned, I’d rather actually go out and do some good for others.” Thorn cleared his throat. “So do we have an accord?”
Gabriel nodded. “But I have the right to veto five of your choices.”
Thorn bristled, but knew that if he didn’t give in, they’d refuse the bargain entirely.
Saving a single Arel from Belial would be worth pulling twenty souls out of their respective hells. Too many had been damned for wrong reasons. He was all about redemption and giving others a second chance.
People like him.
So far, he’d only been wrong a handful of times. Most of the souls he’d bargained for had done him proud.
The few who hadn’t…
He paid dearly for those mistakes.
So had they.
By his hands.
“Agreed.” He held his arm out to Gabriel.
With a grimace, Gabriel shook his hand. “Find her. Quickly.”
Valteri paused at the castle’s site. Darkness lay across the stones and half-built walls, turning their shapes into ghastly, evil beasts that could frighten even the stoutest of hearts.
That was what people thought when they glanced upon his own likeness, even in the full light of day.
Against his will, Ariel’s words drifted through his mind, and he flinchedat the truth. Perhaps he did provoke some of those fears by his words and deeds. But then it’d always been easier to allow people their beliefs than to try and make them see past his deformity and into his human soul.
As a child, he’d reached out to the brothers and they’d recoiled in horror.
Or backhanded him for the affront.
As a squire, his lord had shied away from him just as the monks had done. Indeed, if not for William’s direct orders, no lord would ever have accepted him as a squire.
“You’re a freak, boy! Be glad I owe the duke a favor, else I’d throw you to the wolves for fun.”
Even now he could hear his brother’s men arguing over who would take him, and Will’s voice ringing out in an order for his best knight, Hugh, to take him.
Hugh had quickly made certain Valteri knew better than to approach him on any matter. And when Hugh had bothered to train him in war, Valteri’s lessons had been hard, brutal, and malicious.
Since the moment of Valteri’s knighting, Will had urged him to take lands and a wife. And each time he’d turned aside Will’s offers.
