Stretched out on the armless gray sofa, Gabriel watched Jaoel shift and turn in bed, his wings gradually unfolding from around his ivory torso. The angel’s long lashes fluttered up next, revealing two turquoise globes behind pale eyelids. The gleam in them came to life slowly, a flicker first, then a kindling that settled into a ring of blue-green fire around his black pupils. As one of Gabriel’s, Jaoel had inherited Gabriel’s eye color, though the similarity of hue and the intensity were both unusually prominent.
Two perfectly contoured eyebrows pinched together as Jaoel pulled his arm from beneath his platinum-blond head and stretched it out as if fighting a cramp. He licked his full lips, frowned some more, and then cast his gaze around the gilded room before starting a rather open examination of Gabriel’s face.
Gabriel allowed that and simply waited.
“Gabri…el?” Jaoel said weakly, sounding unsure or maybe just tired.
Gabriel leaned forward, raking his fingers through Jaoel’s silky hair and reveling in the hum of the angel’s still-tattered but very-much-alive soul.
It was a blessing, a sight unseen for an angel to be put through the soul strain Jaoel had sustained and live. Heavenly beings rarely survived encounters with demons, with the death of both their body and soul awaiting those that fought in the war between Heaven and Hell.
Yet Jaoel, one of Gabriel’s youngest, lived.
Itwas amiracle. God Himself had proclaimed it so.
“Jaoel,” Gabriel said sternly, listing his head slightly to the side so he could study Jaoel from a different angle. “What do you remember?”
Jaoel shuddered, his eyes filling with fear. The reaction was to be expected. Demons were cunning creatures, violent, merciless, the freedom their Master bestowed upon them consuming them until there was nothing left of their former selves. Until they were utterlybroken. No longer servants of God, they had lost His love and forgotten His vision they had sworn to uphold, turning into a black plague that poisoned everything it touched.
All because ofhim. Because he had appeared one day millennia ago and asked for the forbidden. Questioned God’s ways. Refused to bow his head before the Creator and accept His will and blessing. To this day, neither Gabriel and the other Archangels, nor the all-knowing God Himself understood howhe,the Demon King,had done what no being should have ever been capable of—defy God’s will.
“I…” Jaoel shivered again, his teeth dragging along his peach-colored lips. “The rest?” he muttered, his voice barely a whisper.
Gabriel shook his head. “Dead.” It was his job to find out how Jaoel had survived, while also supervising the lengthy recovery.
Gabriel retracted his hand and took to tracing the smooth edges of the golden plastic card he used to get around the Church’s facilities below the old headquarters in Rome. He had been meeting with the Cardinal in Florence for months in Jaoel’s stead, waiting for the angel to wake up or succumb to his injuries, both bodily and spiritual.
Jaoel trembled once more and Gabriel took pity, returning to carding his fingers through the angel’s gray-gold locks of hair. “What can you tell me about the attack, Jaoel?”
Gabriel needed to know exactly what had happened to the six angels while they’d been collecting souls, where the demon had come from, how it had found them. Demons rarely targeted the souls Heaven was after, tended to avoid being anywhere near where angels hunted, yet this one had acted against the norm and in doing so killed five of God’s subjects as well as brought upon its own demise, reducing itself to a rugged body that now lay lifeless in the catacombs.
“I…” Jaoel lifted one hand, splaying his fingers to shield his eyes from the living light of the chandeliers. The scars from the demon’s claws had long healed, leaving behind only ivory skin laced with faint silver patterns to signify Jaoel’s new rank. “There was something wrong with him…” he muttered, the recount of the attack evidently taking a toll on him already. “His eyes and his body… the way he moved… it was all wrong. So…unnatural.”
Gabriel frowned. A male then. Haditbeen rabid? There were stories that the most deprived of demons eventually lost any lingering sanity if they approached Heaven too often. But this was a mid-rank at least, not a lesserdemon, so it would’ve known better even if it was in its nature to want to haunt its prior home.
Gabriel narrowed his eyes further. “How did he die?”
Jaoel’s mouth pressed in a line, his long lashes fluttering closed as his chest rose and fell in quickened breaths. “I don’t know. He jumped Lelial while we were extracting a soul, slit his throat and beheaded him before any of us could react. Then he went for Teniv and… I tried to help, but—” Jaoel clasped the area above his left shoulder. “He bit me, Gabriel. I felt my soul as it tried to leave me. I fought. I screamed and then I couldn’t see or feel anymore… Are you sure the rest are all…?”
Gabriel replied with a nod of his head, the silent confirmation making the angel swallow hard.
Jaoel had passed out, and that was perhaps the sole reason why he’d lived. If the demon had been rampaging, then it wasn’t unlikely he’d mistaken Jaoel for dead. It also explained how he’d not made it back to Hell; there had been remnants of angel essence coursing through his veins when Gabriel and Uriel had found him. Without an angel’s soul to consume, angel flesh was poison to the demons, not lethal typically, but perhaps so when coupled with a mind too far gone.
“How long have I been out for?” Jaoel asked, a raspy quality present in his hesitant voice.
“Four months.”
Jaoel opened his mouth to say more, but Gabriel halted him with a hand. “God is expecting you in the antechamber.” For questioning needn’t be said, they both knew their Lord could coerce minds and bodies to remember what they might have chosen to forget. Even if Gabriel wasn’t sure it would do much, considering Jaoel seemed to have been unconscious for most of the encounter.
“And my duties?” the angel whispered as Gabriel helped him sit up.
“I have taken over and will be assisting you for the time being. We’ll be paying a visit to the Cardinal soon so we can inspect the new batch of angel candidates. There’s also been a new development, a promising one, but I will tell you more once you have recovered sufficiently.”
Jaoel nodded and let Gabriel assist him change into an appropriate set of robes so the two of them could ascend to the highest level of the Heavenly Palace and meet with God.
13
Noah was buzzing as he stepped off the elevator at floor forty of the Lisbon office building and headed toward the main conference room. Sleep… hadn’t really come to him at all last night, his mind and body too agitated, too wound up because he was leaving the Empire in less than forty-eight hours.For the first time ever in his life.
