“He put a gun to you,” Egan said grimly. “Not acceptable.”
I stumbled and he pulled me closer, not slackening his pace.
“Stop.” I dug my heels in, bringing us to a halt. “I’m not leaving with you. I’m not going anywhere you want to take me.”
Egan turned to face me, running one hand across his head. His hair was stiff with sweat and plaster dust. “I’m not…taking you,” he said, hoarse with exhaustion. “Forget that. Forget Rome. I just want to see you safe.”
“Please,” said another voice querulously. “Please don’t leave.”
We looked back down the corridor to the door we’d just come through. Father Velimir stood there. He was holding a gun—the gun maybe; I’d seen Egan cast it aside. The old priest didn’t look comfortable with it: his hands shook as he raised the muzzle and pointed it straight at me.
And then Egan rammed into me, knocking me against the wall. The gun barked. Egan fell.
Father Velimir had the grace to look shocked at what he’d done. He even paused to cross himself. And when Azazel’s hands appeared from the darkness behind him, descending upon his shoulders to lift him from his feet, Father Velimir’s expression remained appropriate.
Even as he burned.
The gun broke from his ashy fingers and smacked to the ground. Black cinders kissed the stones, smoking.
Azazel stepped into the corridor, dusting off his hands, and smiled with dark satisfaction.
I couldn’t look at him. I looked down instead. Egan sprawled across the floor at my feet, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. There was a red hole in his chest, just right of his breastbone.
“Egan?” I dropped to my knees.
Blood was bubbling out of his mouth. He was trying to breathe, and not succeeding. The hole in his chest was making a wet sucking noise instead.
“Egan!” I didn’t know what to do. I grabbed his face between my hands, babbling in my panic. His pupils had contracted to pinpoints. “Egan! Don’t! Stop it! Stop it!” Like it was his fault. “You can’t do that!”
Can’t die.
Can’t step in front of the bullet meant for me.
It makes no sense. We are on different sides here.
“Milja.” Azazel stood over us, stinking of smoke, looming like a pillar of fire and shadow. “Is this the one you wanted me to save?”
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what Egan meant to do to me. He doesn’t know Egan was working to entrap him. That the Holy Nails were his plan. Azazel doesn’t know.
I nodded.
With a flick of his fingers, Azazel motioned me aside and hunkered down over Egan’s supine form. I crawled backward, out of his way, shaking. Egan looked up into Azazel’s face. There was no expression on either one of them that I could read. Azazel put his hand on Egan’s chest.
“Be healed,” he said.
There was a smell of frankincense.
I flinched as Egan convulsed and began to cough—great racking coughs that spat a spray of blood. His back arched, and then he rolled onto his side, and then with one final gory eructation a metallic blob shot out of his mouth.
A hand slipped around my throat, gentle as feathers.
Azazel nodded, seeming pleased with his work, as Egan, gasping, groped for the tiny object he’d just coughed up, and held it before his streaming eyes.
The bullet.
“You are whole again,” Azazel said. “Everyone else here, all your enemies, they are dead now. You are safe.”
Egan blinked hard, trying to focus on the angel squatting over him. I’ve no idea what he was feeling. Relief? Gratitude? Resentment? I’m pretty sure fear was in the mix. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he nodded without speaking.
“So,” said Azazel, standing. “I leave you to sort out the fine detail. We are going.”
“No,” said Uriel. “You’re not.”
Azazel looked up to see me staring at him mutely, clasped from behind in Uriel’s arms, the archangel’s hand round my throat. I saw the satisfaction melt from Azazel’s face, leaving a cold darkness behind.
“Let her go,” he whispered.
Egan grasped the new situation and began to shuffle backward across the floor, out of the firing line.
“An interesting standoff, isn’t it?” said Uriel. He was holding me with my back to his chest and my carotid artery under his hand, without any roughness or cruelty, but with absolute control.
Azazel clenched and unclenched his hands, slowly. I expected him to blaze up—but he’d gone dark and still instead. “No,” he said. “You have already lost this battle, Uriel. And you know it.”
“I have your lover.”
“What good does that do you?”
“You want her. You need her. You will do just as I command, to keep her safe.”
Azazel shook his head. I could feel the hair stirring all over my scalp as an electric charge swept the room.
“Take her from me, and I will hunt you down. I swear this, Light-bringer. I will hunt you down, if I have to burn Heaven to ashes to do it.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
“I will find you and tear you into pieces—and I will eat each bloody shred. I will devour you, Uriel. No one will recall your beauty or your grace: you will be only a noisome thing lodged in my bowels, forever. But you will keep me fed, so that I won’t even need her. Is that how you want to spend eternity?”
“Big words, from the last rebel left standing against the Heavenly Host,” Uriel said, but I was close enough to him to feel the quiver of his breath as he spoke.
Azazel snorted. “You have no host. If you were able to call upon backup, you’d have done it long before now—and not had to rely on some mob of witless humans.” He shook his head, a sneer twisting his lips. “You’ve finally dicked them all off, haven’t you, Satan? Not one of them’s prepared to help you out, are they? Not Raphael. Not even Gabriel.”
“Satan?” I squeaked through my constricted throat. I was so shocked I forgot to keep quiet. “Uriel—Satan?”
Azazel frowned, distracted. “I already told you,” he growled. “The Archangel Uriel—the Adversary. Satan.”
Uriel’s lips brushed my ear.
“I. Never. Fell.” He strung each whispered word like a bead on a wire. “Think about that, Milja.”
Then he stepped away, his hands slipping from me so gently that it was almost a caress. I staggered sideways to a wall, grabbing at the stonework, setting my back against the strong, simple, unchanging rock as I looked from face to face. Azazel, dark and smoldering with menace. Uriel, silver and wry and just a little wary. Egan, blood-spattered and wide-eyed.
Uriel raised his hands. “You’ve got her. For now.”
“Come here,” Azazel ordered me.
“No, Milja.” To my surprise, it was Egan who spoke. He was trying to push himself to his feet, and he looked pale with shock still, but I couldn’t fault him for lack of courage. “Please. You don’t have to do what he tells you.”
Azazel raised an eyebrow.
Uriel folded his arms and looked impressed by this ape-man’s bid at suicide.
“You have a choice,” Egan persisted. “You’re a human being.”
I hesitated.
“Does she have a choice?” Uriel asked Azazel, whose mouth was thinning into a line of displeasure.
Do I?
“You want to go with me,” Azazel told me, as if it were an axiomatic truth.
I do… But still I hesitated.
Egan spread a bandaged hand—bandaged, but no longer hurt. “He cannot love you. He’s not human. He is cut off from the grace of God, and there’s no true love left in him. Just darkness and lust and a need for dominion.”
I swallowed. “He came to save me.” When he was weak, and dying, and I’d told him I did not want him. He risked everything. He risked eternity. “He saved my life.”
“Well, we’ve all done that,” said Uriel dryly. “We’re practically on a roster.”
“Please,” Egan repeated. “Think what you’re doing. He will destroy you. It’s his nature.”
He looked so lost and hurt that it made my heart ache.
I looked at Azazel, my eyes full of questions.
“You are mine,” he said, slowly, as if he could not comprehend the alternative Egan was trying to present.
“She is not,” insisted the Irishman. “We belong to our Creator, and to no one else.”
I took a step from the wall, impelled mostly by the instinct to get between Azazel and the sweet idiot who was practically begging for cremation.
“Milja,” said Uriel, urgently; “if you go with him, you are putting yourself on the losing side of history. They lost last time, and they will lose again. And the punishment that will fall upon you will be beyond anything you can imagine.”
I glared at him. “You think threats are the way to a girl’s heart?”
“It is simply fair warning. Can you doubt that, after everything you’ve seen? But it’s not too late for you to change sides.”
I looked from angel to man to demon. Azazel, who had said least of all, stood with hands clenched together before him.
He looked so unhappy.
“I don’t know,” I told the other two. “I’m in the dark about so much. I don’t know if he’s right about God and stuff. I don’t know if he’s on the right side, and I don’t know if he’s a good guy. But I know you two both deceived me. And given the choice between him and you two liars, I’m going with him.”
I stepped into Azazel’s reach.
chapter sixteen
WHAT WILL YOU DO?
Uriel rolled his eyes and vanished, in a flash of light.
Egan bit his lip and bowed his head.
Azazel’s embrace furled about me, soft as soot, strong as iron chains.
We went.
We went to a place of blue shadows and darkness, a place that smelled of stone and damp and incense. But I didn’t have time to look around me, because Azazel turned me to his face and kissed me. I felt his mouth press my blistered lips, and I winced.
“You’re hurt?”
“Just—”
I broke off as he kissed me again. It was like balm: a sweet cool tingling flowed through me as my blisters shrank and vanished. He swept his hands over my face and shoulders, smoothing away scratches and bruises, and the smoke-scraped rawness of my throat. Then he ran his hand down my left arm. I couldn’t help gasping in warning as his hand approached my wrist, but he took my crooked swollen finger and caressed it gently back into place, and all the pain ran out of me like water.
I curled my fingers, testing their strength, and laughed.
“What?” he murmured.
“Nothing. I just didn’t know you had that kind of power. I thought…”
“What? That I’m only good for fire and brimstone?”
Something like that. I pictured Egan again, coughing out that bullet from his lungs, the flush of life returning to his ashen skin. I put my hand on Azazel’s cheek. Stubble rasped my palm. “Thank you. For saving Egan.”
“And for saving you?” he asked.
“Yeah. For that too.” I smiled in a wobbly way. “You came back for me even when I told you to stay away.” I stretched up and planted a kiss on his cheek. He steadied me by slipping his arms around me, his hands on my waist and back to pull me against him.
“I’m not good at taking orders,” he reminded me.
Our lips were so close that our breath was tangled. It made me light-headed. “You walked into a trap.”
“For you.”
“That’s not a good enough reason.”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
I ran my hands tenderly over his beautiful, drawn face. “Don’t do it again.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.” There was laughter in his growl.
Unable to hold back any longer, I brought the conversation to a halt by kissing him full-on—my lips to his lips, my body rubbing hungrily up against the hard wall of his. Oh how I wanted him: the touch and the taste and the strength of him, the rough stubble as well as the smooth skin, the fear and the might of him.
His mouth was like the first sip of strong spirits, taking my breath away with its sweetness, sparking a burn that flared through me from head to toe. His hand caught my ass in a heft that nearly lifted me from my feet.
“Tell me,” he groaned, looming over me, pressing me off-balance. I had to cling to him. “Tell me, Milja.”
“I love you,” I admitted—and groaned as he caught my lip in his teeth, the pain tiny but exquisite. “Is that what you want to hear? I love you.”
“That’s what I want,” he agreed. One hand moved to cup my breast through the thin cotton dress. Thumb and fingers closed about my erect nipple, pinching it. “And this. I want this.” He tugged until I whimpered, arching. “And this.” His grip on my asscheek became entirely improper as his fingers delved into the cleft, bunching the cloth of my skirt. “I want all of it.”
He wasn’t lying—the grind of his erection against the softness of my belly was uncomfortable verging on painful. I whimpered.
It was all the invitation he needed.
Covering my mouth with his, filling me with ravening kisses, he backed me up through that shadowy room until my ass collided with a hard edge. A table of some sort, draped with a cloth, I noted dizzily, unable to see, unable to look down, unable to escape his hungry mouth. He lifted me up to sit on the table edge and thrust his hands up my skirt, stroking up my thighs with heavy, kneading pressure.
“Open,” he growled.
I obeyed, spreading my legs. He touched me between the thighs, and his hand actually felt cool against my own heat. I shivered and cried out softly as the thrill rippled through me. For a moment he went still—all but the slither and caress of his fingertips.
“Wet,” he murmured, his voice thick with pleasure. “Very wet.”
I think I was blushing, there in the darkness. I nodded.
“You want me.”
“Yes.”
“You want this.” He took my hand and pressed it against him through the cloth of his pants, making it very clear what he meant.
“Yes,” I answered, though my own voice sounded faint. It was one thing to be debauched by him in dream after dream. Here, now—in the flesh—was another proposition entirely.
He’d only had me once before. He’d been so rough.
His forehead was pressed against mine, his breath burning my lips with each word. His fingers were relentless in their slow, teasing caress. “Don’t be frightened.”
“I’m not frightened,” I lied. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Hurt you?” It was getting harder to tell through the red fog of my physical arousal, but I thought I felt a dew of perspiration on his upper lip. “Do I not give enough thought to your pleasure?”
“You’re too much,” I whispered. “Too big for me. Too strong. Too fierce.”
I wasn’t talking about his cock. Not entirely.
“Oh my love.” His voice was coal and darkness and soot-black feathers. “I can’t promise that. Not to hurt you.”
I kissed him, eyes closed, nodding.
“But you will take it. Because you can. And I will make pleasure from your pain. I will give it back to you as diamonds.”
I slid my hands up under his knitted top, wanting to feel the beat of his heart. My palm brushed the huge, ancient scar on his torso, and he groaned. Then he pulled away from me—long enough and far enough to wrench his sweater off over his head and cast it aside. He stretched his back, standing tall.
There wasn’t much light in here—a blue gloaming of a fading evening through grimy panes, that’s all. I could barely make out Azazel’s outlined form, pale against the deep shadows. I had to explore his torso by touch, running my hands over his ribs and his scar, up to the burr of hair on his chest and down to the hard V of his h
ips, over the vertical slit of his navel—yet he’d never been born, I reminded myself; never earned that umbilical mark—and the muscled planes of his flat stomach. I felt him shudder when I touched the ridged scar tissue, and I could not tell in this poor light whether it was in fear or pain or joy.
“Milja.” There was a gloss of sweat on his skin. He was rigid with tension.
Without a word I pulled at the buttons of his pants fly, releasing the thing I wanted, that I feared—the thing that had brought down angels and condemned mankind and drowned all the world in a Flood. Such a stupid, insignificant trigger for a war in Heaven, in the greater context. And yet…it seemed big enough in my hand.
“Stroke it,” he told me.
Hot and hard, like new-cast bronze. A weapon raised defiantly against God Himself.
Beautiful. I am not ashamed to say that.
“Kiss it,” he whispered, just as he had in my dream.
I bent forward from my perch and nuzzled it into my mouth. You see, that is the difference between me and Azazel.
I like to obey orders.
“Yes,” he said softly, as made I my throat into a sheath and took his length as far down as I could. “Yes,” as he wound his hands in my hair and pulled me tight to him. “Oh…Milja.”
At the corners of my eyes, light bloomed. Warm lamplight, point by point, swelling and filling the darkness. Candles, I realized, too busy with my task to look around me. He is lighting the dark.
But when I had him at my mercy and the slabs of his thighs were quivering under my hands, he surprised me once more. With a firm grasp of his hand in my hair, he pulled me up—openmouthed—and in one ruthless motion pushed me over onto my back upon the table.
Oh yes, his grip hurt, but it was a good, good pain. It gushed through me like a rushing storm. It sparkled like diamonds.
Now I could see properly. Now Azazel loomed over me, both illuminated and shadowed by the flickering candle flames all around us. His skin glowed golden and tiny reflected flames danced in his mirror-eyes. He drew up my legs, wrapping them about him, and then he took hold of the front of my awful frock and in three jerks tore the cloth all the way down from neck to hem, to lay me bare.
Cover Him with Darkness Page 24
