Raziel

by Kristina Douglas

  “Lovely,” she said sarcastically. “So do I get married? Have kids? For God’s sake, at least have sex again?”

  “Again?” It always managed to startle me, the way women of the current times simply gave their bodies when and where they wished. Two thousand years ago they would have been stoned to death. A hundred years ago they would have been outcasts. The human women who came to Sheol had been the same over the ages. They had never known anyone but their bonded mates. Azazel had seen Sarah when she was a child and known she was going to be his, and he’d watched over her, keeping her safe, until she was old enough to be his bride. The same was true for all the others.

  She was looking at me, clearly annoyed. “Yes, again,” she said. “Women have sex, you know. They find a man, or a woman if they prefer, and if they’re attractive and there’s no reason not to, they have sex. Are you totally unconnected with modern reality?”

  “I know people have indiscriminate sex,” I said irritably, feeling foolish. I didn’t like the idea of her with another man. I wasn’t about to consider why; I just didn’t. “And I should have known you’d be one of them.”

  “Yes, I’m the Whore of Babylon.”

  “Not even close,” I drawled.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Are you always so literal?”

  “What other choice is there?”

  She was fuming. This was good—I was annoying her as much as she annoyed me. I could keep this up for a while without any difficulty. We struck sparks off each other.

  I decided to sum things up. “All right, we’ve decided you can cook, which might be a valuable skill elsewhere. Anything else?”

  She looked at me as if considering something, and I had no intention of trying to divine what. That brief glimpse of her sex fantasies had been disturbing enough. And then she smiled, a slow, wicked smile. “You don’t want to know,” she said in a lazy, totally sensuous drawl.

  This was a waste of time. In a short while the Council would convene, and they would decide what would happen to her. I could argue, but in the end there wasn’t much I could do to save her. I knew what their decision would be.

  It shouldn’t bother me. But it did. And the sooner I got away from her, the easier it would be.

  “You’re right,” I said. And I ran.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I WAS ALONE AGAIN IN THE STARK white apartment. The relief mingled with anxiety—it was easier being alone. I knew I’d basically driven him away; all I had to do was mention sex and he ran like a terrified virgin. Though if anyone was a virgin around here, it was me.

  No, not literally. I’d had tons of lovers. Well, four, but you couldn’t really count Charlie, who had performance issues, and the one-night stand with what’s-his-name was more the result of too many cosmopolitans and a fit of self-pity. It hadn’t been a pretty sight.

  Still, two relatively decent relationships hardly made me a virgin. But compared to Raziel’s thousands of years of sex and marriage, I most assuredly came up short. So how dared he have that “You’ve had sex” attitude? Typical of this patriarchal place, but I had no intention of putting up with it.

  At least sex was a weapon I could use when I was feeling far too defenseless. I could get rid of Raziel simply by envisioning having sex with him, and he wouldn’t linger to see the truth behind the erotic fantasy, see just how pathetic a lover I really was. Not that it mattered—I was getting the feeling that I was looking on an eternity of celibacy, just like Raziel. Except in my case, it wouldn’t be by choice.

  Who would I have here if I could have anyone? That was a no-brainer. Azazel was nasty, and I’d learned to avoid self-destructive relationships.

  Sammael was too young, even if he was millennia older than I was. I just got a wrong feeling from him. There was Tamlel, who seemed quite sweet, but I didn’t want him either. If I was forced to have sex with anybody I’d met so far, I’d choose Raziel. Like it or not, I felt bonded to him, even if it only went one way. He was my man, the only connection with my old world, and I was holding on for dear life.

  That bond was going to break, of course. It was temporary, just long enough to get me through to the other side. Hey, maybe I’d get to go to heaven after all, despite what he’d said, a sunny, happy place with angels who actually played harps. I could live among the clouds, visit my dead relatives, and look down on the poor foolish mortals with compassion.

  Though an eternity of that could get old pretty fast. This was no trip to Hollywood, but the alternatives weren’t that appealing. As long as I could keep Raziel out of my brain, I’d be able to figure out a way to deal with all this. Or a way to get out of it. There was always some kind of loophole. These things weren’t written in stone.

  Well, come to think of it, they probably were, literally, somewhere. And my efforts to keep Raziel out of my brain had only resulted in his abandoning me, which wasn’t particularly helpful. I was probably going to need him if I wanted to get out of here, and making him crazy might not be the smartest thing to do. He might get pissed off enough to agree to the Grace, which was more like a curse. If he was really motivated, he might be able to return me to the one place he said he couldn’t. Home.

  Oh, I wasn’t picky. It didn’t have to be the same life, the same job, the same face. I could go back as anyone. I just wanted, needed, to go back.

  On the other hand, my only defense was thinking about having sex with Raziel, and I found it . . . distracting. Disturbing. Arousing. Okay, I had to admit it.

  He was inspiring some wickedly lustful thoughts, whether he was around or not. I could spend a perfectly delightful afternoon doing absolutely nothing but indulging in sex fantasies about my beautiful, angry kidnapper and enjoy myself tremendously.

  Unfortunately, that might leave me a bit too vulnerable, and I couldn’t afford to let him see that. If he saw weakness, he’d exploit it without hesitation.

  At least I was alone, with no one watching me. I didn’t have to make conversation, be perky, put on a cheery face. All I had to do was try to make sense of what had happened to me. I didn’t need to be distracted by a blood-sucking angel with the face of a . . . well, of an angel and the personality of a puff adder. Whom I somehow, inexplicably, longed for.

  There, I’d admitted it. The 12-step groups were right—admitting it was the first and hardest part of owning a problem. Raziel was most definitely a problem, as far as I was concerned.

  He didn’t like me. I shouldn’t find that particularly distressing. Yes, I was counting on him to protect me when my case was brought before the tribunal or whatever the hell it was, and he’d promised he wouldn’t let them Grace me. Still, he’d made it clear that he thought women should be seen and not heard.

  Fat chance of that. I’d never been the silent, docile type and even the fear of God, or Uriel, wasn’t going to get me started now.

  If it weren’t for Sarah, I’d be feeling completely defeated. I liked her, even if her husband seemed like an even bigger asshole than Raziel. Azazel was tall, dark, and grumpy, his body radiating a kind of bleak disapproval that made Raziel seem warm and fuzzy in comparison. Even Sammael hadn’t been a barrel of laughs. I didn’t know the names of the others, except Tamlel, of course, though I’d seen several of them. There had been at least a dozen men in the room where I’d seen Raziel at Sarah’s wrist. Would Sarah and Raziel and maybe Tamlel be enough to sway them?

  Suddenly I could see that strange scene all over again, the odd, unearthly light, the chanting, the smell of incense and something more elemental: the coppery scent of blood. I shuddered, feeling warm and slightly faint. I would have given a lot not to have walked in on that. Knowing about it would have been difficult enough; seeing it gave me a strange, edgy feeling. Like I’d watched someone having sex, or accidentally witnessed something slightly perverse but . . . arousing.

  Slightly perverse? He was drinking the blood of his friend’s wife. No wonder I was left with an unsettled feeling every time I thought of it. It felt almost as if som
eone had touched me.

  I wouldn’t make that mistake again. No flinging open doors—I’d knock first and wait for someone to open them. What these . . . these people did in the privacy of their own rooms was fine with me. I just wanted to get the hell away from here.

  Though not literally. Being a reasonable, twenty-first-century woman, I had never believed in hell. It seemed to me that there was enough horrific punishment meted out on earth to satisfy the most vengeful god, and why should the universe duplicate efforts? Hell was warfare, children who died before their parents, drug addiction, poverty, violence. It always seemed to me that if someone screwed up big-time, it was simpler just to send them back for another go-round.

  Then again, I’d never believed that people who suffered had brought it on themselves, so that sort of shot a hole in my cosmic theory of justice.

  Nevertheless, some fiery pit with a chortling devil holding a pitchfork had seemed more of a twisted Disney fantasy than anything else.

  Apparently I was wrong.

  Though no one had said anything about Satan. Come to think of it, some of the biblical propaganda posited that the first fallen angel, Lucifer, was Satan, king of hell. Which didn’t really jibe with what was going on here.

  I was curious, but truth be told, it wasn’t just intellectual curiosity that made me determined to stay right here.

  Raziel had something to do with it.

  Okay, he was way too gorgeous, and gorgeous men made me feel like a troll. I could make an exception. Whether I liked it or not, I felt drawn to him, tied to him, turned on by him; and while I was putting out a lot of energy fighting it, I was losing the battle. It didn’t matter—he was more than capable of resisting me, and I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself. It wasn’t the first time I’d suffered the adolescent pangs of unrequited, er, lust.

  The sun was already setting, sinking into the dark green ocean, the golden color streaking toward me with greedy fingers. I looked down, and I could see Raziel walking on the beach, with Azazel and some of the others beside him. They were deep in conversation, and from such a distance I could barely see their expressions, much less hear what they were saying. But whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  Of course there were no women walking and talking. No women angels. It really annoyed me—the patriarchal control extended millennia, apparently.

  I turned away. Apparently the only way to make baby fallen angels was to have female angels in the first place, and someone had neglected to create them.

  I was starving. How had he gotten that food up here last night? Was this some kind of fairy-tale world, where all I had to do was wish to make it happen?

  I closed my eyes and tried to visualize a quart of Ben & Jerry’s, then opened them again. Nothing on the coffee table in front of me, but on a whim I slid off the sofa and went to the freezer, looking inside to see . . . absolutely nothing. Crap.

  Maybe it needed Raziel’s magic touch.

  I started moving around the apartment, restless, trying to keep my mind off my stomach. One bedroom—his, with the king-size bed in the middle of it.

  Looking at it made me start thinking about points south of my stomach, and I quickly elevated my mind to purer matters. Someone had made the bed, so maybe the place came with maid service, which was a good thing. I wasn’t about to start picking up after him, though chances were he was neater than I was. Most people were.

  One closet, and not much in the way of clothing. I’d already rummaged through and borrowed the stuff most likely to fit me. The rest would be impossibly tight on my far-from-coltish figure, assuming I could even get the clothes on. Besides, the black was almost as depressing as the white.

  I guess had to give up on the idea of ever being lithe or willowy. I was going to spend eternity being just this side of voluptuous, and I didn’t like it.

  On the other hand, I’d never get fat, so that was something.

  I wandered into the kitchen. The sun was flame red now, reflecting off the windows in front of me, and only a small sliver was left above the horizon.

  Once it dropped, everything would be dark, and I leaned against the counter, watching. If the sun rose and set here, surely this must be the real world, and I must be alive. Otherwise it made no sense. Why bother with all the trappings of normal life when reality was so far removed?

  The last shimmer of red dipped beneath the foamy surface, and I didn’t move, almost in a meditative state as I watched the water churn and splash, the air cool and damp against my face. I licked my lips and could taste salt, and I found myself smiling. My mother had told me to lick my lips when we went to the seashore—it was the souls of the dead babies giving me a welcome kiss, trying to drag me down with them.

  Hildegarde Watson had never been a bundle of laughs. Why she thought dead babies would end up in the ocean had never made sense, but I never tried to reason with my mother. It was always a losing proposition.

  But damn, the old lady would be tickled pink to know that her blasphemous daughter was consorting with angels. Sleeping with one, in fact, though it wasn’t quite the kind of “sleeping with” that I tended to think of. And it was safer not to let my mind go in that direction, not when it came to Raziel.

  Actually, it was much more likely to be Neptune or Poseidon who was going around kissing me with salt-chapped lips. The gods of Mount Olympus were always a lot more entertaining than the Judeo-Christian God, who tended to be obsessed with punishment and sin. Not that Hildegarde believed in any god but her own angry, moralistic one who’d somehow morphed out of a gentle, loving Jesus.

  I really should have hedged my bets, since it was my mother’s gloomy god who’d turned out to be the one with the power. Though it seemed he was even pre-Judeo-Christian. I wondered what Hildegarde would think of that. She’d flip.

  I should try harder to get the hell out of here, and I probably would if I knew where to go. I was on borrowed time with Raziel—sooner or later he was going to sneak into my brain and see the doleful daydreams I was trying to fight, see the unbidden, lustful feelings that were stronger than anything I’d ever felt in my life. And that would be humiliating. If I couldn’t control my—my crush, then I needed to escape. I just needed to know where.

  I was so hungry I could eat his pristine white sofa. Someone had cleared away my dishes from the night before, so I couldn’t scavenge for leftovers. The doughnuts were long gone, and I was bereft.

  I flopped down on the sofa, putting a hand over my eyes as I moaned piteously. Ben & Jerry’s, I thought longingly. Super Fudge Chunk or Cherry Garcia, to start with. If I hadn’t already embraced the motto “Life is uncertain, eat dessert first,” the last twenty-four hours or so would have convinced me. But Raziel’s refrigerator had been as stark and barren as this apartment. No help there.

  After that, lasagna, thick and gooey, with gobs of garlic bread and cheese, accompanied by a nice cabernet. At this rate, I’d settle for a can of Ensure.

  I moaned again, turning over on my stomach and hiding my head against the cushions. The thought of food filled me with such longing I almost thought I could smell it. Lasagna, which I’d assiduously avoided during my dieting years. In retrospect, that seemed to be my entire freaking adult life.

  “Allie.” Sarah’s soft voice penetrated my misery.

  I flipped over, rattled, to find Sarah standing in the living room beside a younger woman holding a tray. “I didn’t hear you come in,” I said, feeling embarrassed. Apparently Sarah didn’t hold with knocking.

  Sarah’s faint smile might have been an apology or it might not. “This is Carrie. She’s Sammael’s wife, and she’s one of our newest residents. I thought you two might like to talk.”

  I looked at the newcomer. Carrie was another tall one, with long blond hair, a sweet smile, and a shadow in her perfect blue eyes. Clearly the Fallen chose Aryan Amazons to marry, which let me out. Not that I wanted to be in the running anyway, I reminded myself. I even managed a welcoming smile.

  “That
would be great. That wouldn’t be dinner, would it?” I looked pointedly at the tray, my spirits rising.

  “I hope you like lasagna,” Sarah said cheerfully. “I’ll go put the ice cream in the freezer.”

  I recognized the Ben & Jerry’s packaging—who wouldn’t?—and I didn’t bother to ask what flavors. I knew.

  Carrie set down the tray and sat opposite me, pulling the covers off the plates. “No garlic bread,” she said with a faint smile. “It interferes with the blood flow.”

  A stray shiver danced down my backbone. I looked carefully at the young woman, probably five years younger than I was, but there were no marks on her neck or wrists. Then again, there had been no marks on Sarah’s wrist just after Raziel had fed from her. I squirmed, still bothered by the thought.

  Though far more bothered by the notion of Raziel at Sarah’s thin, blue-veined wrist than of anyone else feeding from her.