by Vivi Andrews
“Not as you expected how?”
Was this some kind of test? “I didn’t think Hell would smell like lemon Pledge, okay? I expected fire and brimstone. The classics.”
His wings rose and fell slightly—an angelic shrug. “It is both.”
“So I’m just lucky you didn’t send me into the inferno part, is that it? Can you redeem Jay now?”
“You are very human,” the angel said, displaying the first hint of emotion—a mild, impersonal surprise.
Sasha glared at him. “You might have told me about the angel blood thing.”
“No,” he said softly, with a low ache that made Sasha’s eyes tear up just hearing it. “I could not. This, giving you this chance, is all I am allowed to do.”
Sasha studied the angel with a growing sense of familiarity. Something about the eyes. Suspicion took root in her thoughts. “Why?”
“Ordinarily your Jay would be banished to Hell for the length of your time on earth and you would never see or hear from him again, but I wanted you to have the chance I—”
“The chance you didn’t have with my grandmother,” Sasha finished for him. He seemed so cold, but now she saw fissures in his wintry shell and beneath the angelic hauteur lay an echoing sadness. “Why did you leave her?”
“When you are called back to Heaven, angelic duty is not something you are allowed to shirk. It was not choice as you know it, but it was my first and only regret. Leaving Maeve.”
“She never married. She said she never stopped loving my mother’s father.” This was her mother’s father. This angelic creature who didn’t look old enough to run for public office. Oddly, the thought wasn’t as disturbing as it might have been. There was something paternal in Zacharael.
“I know. I did not want her daughter’s child to be alone as she was. This was the only chance I could give—to allow you to stay with the one you love.”
“So Jay can stay now? He’s redeemed?”
“That is in your hands. Forgiveness and love are yours to offer, not mine. If you can embrace the good in him and he is truly more good than evil, The Cleanse will not harm him. He will stay on the mortal plane, no longer a demon, but not truly human either, released from his demonic obligations. But if you cannot truly love the demon, then it is best to send him back now, so that he may live out the rest of eternity below.”
“Can’t you do something? You’re an angel.”
“It is not my choice,” Zacharael explained gently. He glanced at the sky. “You have some time yet, before the dawn, to decide.” Then the angel actually smiled. “I’ll need my sword back, though.”
Sasha nodded, relieved to have something else to focus on for the moment, pushing the decision back a bit more. “Thanks for the loan.”
She extended the two Desert Eagles butt-first to Zacharael. He reached out and lifted them from her hands. The second they left her fingers, the metal shimmered and shifted, transforming back to the long, wicked sword she’d seen him wearing when he appeared in her kitchen.
“What are you angel of anyway, that you need a sword like that?”
“Surrender,” Zacharael said with a soft smile.
“As in surrender or else?”
“As in the surrender of meaningless cares. I help to release the attachments to physical things. I think He sent me Maeve so I would be gentler in my commission, to give me an understanding of the pull of the mortal world.”
“You’re never angry with Him? For making you give her up?”
Zacharael smiled sadly. “My anger is never greater than my fear of the Fall. Better a slave in Heaven than a king in Hell.”
“Hell didn’t seem that bad. At least the part of it I saw.”
“It is that bad,” Zacharael and Jay said simultaneously.
“Even the part of it you saw,” Zacharael continued. “You are human. You see only one thing when really it is all.”
“Is this one of those theological issues where we’re supposed to ignore the contradictions and evidence of our own eyes because of faith? Like how angels always say they don’t see the differences between the religions? They can’t all be true.”
“We see things differently,” Zacharael said simply. “Contradictions coexist within the truth because they do. You think if A and B oppose, it must be one and not the other, but I see both. We do not say in God anything is possible. We say in God all things are possible.”
“All things except good loving evil, right?”
“Do not mistake the possible and the permissible.” He glanced again at the eastern sky. “And if you truly believe he is evil, he’d best be going. Dawn approaches.” His wings stretched out, angling to test the air. “It was my pleasure to meet you, even if only for a moment.”
“I won’t be seeing you again?”
“Not in this life, but I’ll be watching over you, Sasha. I always have.”
He launched himself into the sky, his wings beating hard as they raised him higher, a white shadow on the deep grey sky. As she watched him fade from view, Sasha felt the last of her delaying tactics diminishing with him. She looked down from the sky to find Jay watching her, his expression guarded.
“Interesting guy, your grandpa.”
It was decision time. The moment of truth.
Sasha looked at Jay and knew what she had to do—even if he would hate her for it. She had promised him redemption if it was within her power, but now she knew she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t take the chance that she would fail. Jay was trusting in her angelic nature, but she was too human. There were too many shades of grey in her white light. She knew herself well enough to know there just wasn’t enough good in her to save him. She couldn’t let him take that risk.
So Sasha forced herself to meet Jay’s eyes squarely and say in a voice that was smooth and ice-cold, “You need to leave now. I can’t help you.”
Jay’s black eyes narrowed. “Coward.”
Chapter Twelve
Dawn of the Damned
“Excuse me if I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to risk an eternity in the deepest, darkest pit of Hell,” Sasha snapped.
“I’m glad to hear you aren’t itching to have me smote to the nth circle of Hell, but this isn’t about The Cleanse and you know it.” Jay shook his head angrily. “You and your goddamn walls. You can never let yourself lean on anyone, can you?” He stalked toward her, using his size to loom over her. “Explain something to me. How is it a woman can march into Hell, fight off hordes of demonic minions, argue with the Devil himself and still be chicken-shit scared out of her mind at the prospect of letting herself love someone?”
“This isn’t about me.”
“Are you sure about that? Ever since we met you’ve been holding me at a distance, keeping a part of yourself hidden from me.”
“I’ve been hiding things from you?”
He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I know you think you can’t trust anyone, that everyone is trying to use you—”
“You were trying to use me!”
“But I didn’t. I never have. You can crucify me for my shitty intentions, but what have I actually done that was so terrible?”
“Besides the lying?” And repeatedly saving her life, and making her feel more alive and special than she ever had.
“I left a few things out,” he snapped. “Are you honestly telling me you don’t have secrets? You never tell me anything about your family, your upbringing—”
“I wanted you to meet my mother.”
“As a test. To see if I would react the way you wanted me to react. To see if I would prove myself to you. Not because you trust me. Not because you care about me.”
“How can I trust you?” she shouted. “How can I care about you when you’ve been lying to me since the day we met?” But the truth was she did care. And she trusted him. How idiotic was that?
“Everything wasn’t a lie, Sasha. We weren’t a lie.”
“Yes, we were. You were. How could I fall in lo
ve with someone if I don’t even know who he is?”
“You know me. I’m still the same guy. I was just trying not to be quite so…demonic around you. I can still be that guy—”
“No, don’t.” Sasha huffed out a bitter laugh. “The truth is I like you better as yourself than when you were trying so hard to be good. There was always something missing in the sterilized version of you. But how could I ever trust a demon?”
“You want me to prove myself? Fine. I’ll go back to Hell. God forbid you think I want to use you to stay here. But you are going to listen to me before I leave. You are going to hear every damn word.”
He caught her by the shoulders, cupped the back of her neck roughly and stared down into her face with an intensity that was both terrifying and thrilling. Superman on fire. Sasha’s breathing quickened.
“Being a demon was everything I knew. When I met you, I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. At the time, all I saw was how useful you could be to me, but in my world love is a vulnerability we mask with practicality. If you hadn’t been useful, I wouldn’t have been able to let myself love you—falling in love with you, independent of how you could be of use to me, was a foreign concept. I didn’t lie when I said love is different to angels and demons. Humans laud it and cherish it, but in our world it’s a weakness to be exploited.
“You taught me to be human, taught me how to love the human way and live in the moment. When we met, I wanted to use you as my ticket out of the Underworld, but that isn’t why I’m here now. I’m yours, Sasha. I can’t imagine spending an eternity without you.”
Her heart pounded, feeling like it might burst out of her chest at any moment. “That’s some speech.”
“I’m not giving up,” he growled, the words a dark promise. “I’m going back to Hell, but I’ll spend the next hundred years fighting my way back to you, if that’s what it takes.”
He kissed her, a hard, fast invasion of her mouth that exploded like angel fire on her tongue. She could taste his hunger, desperation and the press of urgency as he memorized her mouth. A last kiss.
He released her and turned away, leaving her swaying on her feet as he strode quickly toward the black hole smudge that was the Hell portal.
He was right. She’d told herself that she couldn’t offer him redemption because she was scared she wasn’t good enough to save him—and there was some truth in that—but she wasn’t afraid of him being hurt so much as putting herself out there and having her heart crushed.
She was a coward. She kept herself safe behind a barricade of mistrust. She rationalized it with a lifetime of proof—everyone tried to use her, everyone wanted something from her—but that didn’t change the fact she would never be able to love anyone if she couldn’t get past her own issues.
An aching certainty lodged in her chest—the certainty that she would never be able to love anyone the way she loved Jay. Who was walking away from her. Steps away from disappearing from her life forever.
No.
***
“That’s it?”
Sasha’s shout was aggressive. A challenge that stopped him in his tracks. A slow smile began to curve his mouth.
“You give a whole big speech and just march off into the sunset?”
He heard her footsteps rustling the grass behind him as she closed the distance he’d put between them. Her next words came from just behind his shoulder, but he didn’t turn. Not yet.
“Isn’t that just like a man. I bet you think those love stories where somebody dies at the end and the other schmuck spends their entire life wallowing in grief are romantic, don’t you?” A finger poked his shoulder. Hard. “Unending angst isn’t romance, dumbass. It’s a fucking cop-out.”
Jay turned. Her expression was fierce and utterly beautiful—for the first time there was no reserve, no cool, protective shell wrapped around what she was feeling. His heart stuttered and he smiled, but it didn’t change anything. He shot a pointed glance at the lightening eastern horizon. “I’m not trying to badger you into redeeming me, Sasha. I’ll probably end up a smudge on God’s thumb if I try. I have to go back.”
After six months living as human, he’d finally figured out love wasn’t about what you got, but what you gave, and he didn’t have anything to give her.
“I guess I’m following you into Hell then.”
“You’re three-quarters human and you don’t have a Champion’s contract and an angelic sword protecting you anymore. You’d never survive it.” He cupped her jaw, needing to feel the brush of her skin just one more time.
“I don’t care. I’m coming with you.”
“I knew there were some angelic tendencies in there somewhere. Martyrdom is a real favorite of theirs.”
“Jay.”
“Just wait for me. I’ll be back.”
“You don’t have to go,” she insisted. “There’s so much good in you, you have to be able to survive it. It could work, the redemption thing. Couldn’t it?” She fisted her hands on his belt-loops. “Because the thing is, I’m never gonna find another guy who’ll argue with Lucifer and fight his way through an army of lesser demons for me. Let alone someone who sees good in me even I don’t know is there.” She swallowed nervously but her eyes never left his. “I love you, Jay.”
This must be how angels feel when they fly. His heart took off, but his feet were still firmly grounded. “I love you too.”
“Really?”
“Really. Sasha. Baby. Where else am I going to find a woman who will march into Hell itself for me?”
She smiled and he thought he could see a blush in the gathering dawn. She was so beautiful, so fiercely independent and confident, it was easy to miss the quiet insecurity she kept hidden.
He lowered his head, kissing her softly, a lingering promise. A kiss to tell her he would be back for her, no matter what it took. She answered him urgently, slipping her arms around his shoulders and holding on tight. “Please, Jay,” she whispered against his lips. “Stay.”
It could work. For the first time, Jay let himself consider the reality of it. Sasha brought out the best in him, noble qualities he didn’t even know he had. The promise of redemption had always been a formless fantasy, but with Sasha in his arms, it took on a new sense of possibility. He could stay, with her, and live a human life. A life rich with love and laughter and the amplified urgency of the mortal world. A life with Sasha.
“If an angel can love me,” he said, hearing the faint stirrings of hope, “there might be something worth redeeming in me after all.”
Sasha grunted, unimpressed with that logic. “I don’t feel very angelic.”
Jay cupped her face. “Trust me on this. I know an angel when I see one.” He grinned. “Crankiness and misanthropic tendencies included.”
“Do you really think it would work?”
“You’re the best in me, Sasha. Why would He want to separate us?” Jay bent and brushed a tender kiss across her lips, then another. “Let me stay with you for the dawn. Let me love you, even if it is the last time.” If he was smote to the lowest circle of Hell, he would climb out again. He had reason to now.
He kissed her again, lingering in the feel of her mouth. He barely heard her next words, spoken so softly against his lips.
“Don’t go.”
***
Sasha must have been infected by some passionate insanity. She knew she should be sending him away, guarding against the chance that he would be banished to a depth of Hell so far she would never see him again. But her arms refused to let him go and she couldn’t stop kissing him. Each touch seemed more acute, sharp in the knowledge that it could be the last.
Ho-hum Clark Kent and his by rote foreplay were a distant memory. Jay consumed her. His mouth owning hers in a merciless possession. His hands stripped her of her weapons, tossing them on the ground at their feet and the more he took off, the warmer she got.
He was fire. His lips scored a path down her throat and his teeth dragged over the soft upper curve o
f her breast above her tank top. Sasha tested his muscles with her fingertips, firm and deliciously strong. She went breathless—but who needed oxygen anyway? Jay wrapped an arm around her ribs, lifting her just enough to set her off balance and wedging a thigh between hers so she was forced to cling to him, straddling him for stability. His hard thigh rubbed against the seam of her jeans and Sasha’s head fell back with a low moan, as liquid warmth rushed through her core.
Sasha clung tight. She couldn’t lose him. He thought she was the angel, but he was all the best parts of her. He had to be good enough. If he wasn’t, she would go into Hell again to find him—no matter how deep and dark a place he was sent to. She was finally risking her heart. She’d given him every molecule of it and she wasn’t going to lose him without a fight.
He stroked down her back and her nerve endings thrummed like a strummed guitar. Every physical sensation echoed an emotional conversation. Adoration in the way his lips caressed her breast, possessiveness in the almost too tight grip of his hands on her hips, a promise of protection in the strength of his touch, and beneath it all the fear that at any moment it could be taken away.
Jay dropped to his knees and Sasha knelt as well before pulling him down with her to the ground. The coarse grass was rough against her shoulders, but she didn’t care about the minor irritation. She needed his weight pressing her into the earth, the feel of him real and firm over her.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she whispered, the words turned into breathless gasps. “Sinning while we’re trying to have you redeemed?”
“I’m never a better man than when I’m with you. I think God will understand.”
Jay returned to her mouth for a quick kiss that turned into an epic. His hair was silk between her fingers even as his were busy with the fastenings on her jeans. He worked the zipper open and she lifted her hips to help him drag her jeans down. There was a momentary awkward tangle and then they both broke away, quickly stripping out of their clothing.
The pile of their clothes didn’t make much of a cushion on the hard ground, but Sasha wouldn’t have traded it for a feather bed. She wanted to bask in the immediacy, the urgency of this moment, but when he slid high inside her, in a slow, toe-curling stroke, all that urgency receded. There was no rush, just the lavish exploration of each minute feeling, each lingering touch.
