The Prison of the Angels

by Janine Ashbless

  “No!” Egan snapped.

  “Milja,” said Azazel softly, his black irises simmering with silver. “No.”

  “Why not?” My voice was shaking. “I’m not your blood, but that’s not for want of you trying. I’m the next best thing. Plus, I owe you for Roshana, don’t I? If I hadn’t killed her you’d have a daughter left.”

  He frowned. Sweat was beading at his brows.

  I went on before he could speak. “And it’s my fault, all this. You can’t deny that. It was my choice to free you. I started…all this. The War. The deaths out there. The goddamn nuclear missiles. Thousands already. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe more. Oh…shit. It’s my fault, so I should pay. Nobody else.”

  It was a strange relief to say it.

  Azazel caught my face in his hands. “I don’t care about any of those people,” he said with fierce, amoral honesty. “I care about you!”

  I laughed, brokenly. It was the nearest I could get to crying. “But I care,” I said. “I can’t help it. And I care about you, and I need you to be free. That’s what it was all about from the very start. I love you and I want you to be free.”

  “No—I will not permit it, Milja,” he groaned, iridescent tears of anger spilling down his cheeks.

  “Please don’t be soft, Azazel,” I chided gently, running my fingers down the contours of his face, glutting my sense of touch on his brows, his stubble, his lips. “I’m only human. Hey, I’ve only got a few more good years in me. You’re immortal. It’s got to be worth it, hasn’t it?”

  He shook his head wildly.

  “And all your brothers—are you going to give up on them?” I pressed. “Wasn’t this all about them? Are you going to let them rot in their prisons forever? Just for me? Just for some dumb monkey-girl?”

  “No!” he roared in anguish, pushing me until my legs crumpled and I hit the floor with my ass. “No!” Panting, he stomped into the center of the circle and crashed to his knees. “Take me,” he snarled. “I offer myself for my brothers.”

  My heart fell into my stomach.

  “Accepted,” said Michael triumphantly, his crystal sword flaring as he unsheathed it from the dry air.

  “Not you!” Azazel stabbed a finger at him. “I will not give you the satisfaction, Dragonslayer. One of the others.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Egan in a flat voice, walking forward.

  I thought I was hearing things. I literally couldn’t believe his words, or that I was seeing him pass behind Azazel and draw his handgun from his waistband. My heart seemed to have stopped. My lungs emptied.

  Azazel curled his lip in a snarl, but didn’t answer. His gaze drifted back to me and pinned me where I sat. His hungry, aching, wounded eyes locked on mine as if I were the only thing left in the world.

  “That weapon won’t work,” warned Gabriel.

  “How many Nephilim do you think I’ve killed with it?” said Egan, racking off the safety and pointing it between Azazel’s shoulder blades. His face was shuttered and hard. “Straight through the heart, right?”

  Azazel’s lips shaped my name silently. His eyes swirled to molten silver, one last time.

  Azazel! I wanted to cry out.

  And yet at the same time as I stared hopeless and horrified into his face, there was a part of my mind that was not paralyzed with shock, and that part worried on Egan like a dog on a bone, saying Why? Why would he do that? Does he still hate Azazel so much?

  That is not the Egan I know.

  He is not that vindictive.

  He must know how much it will hurt me.

  Will new bullets even work? Why is he using a gun, not Saint George’s spear?

  Why would he kill Azazel, knowing that I’ll never be able to look at him without remembering it, for the rest of my life? That I will never be able to love him like I did?

  Is that how he wants to thrust me away for once and all?

  Is that how he means to punish himself?

  He’s not cruel. Not deliberately. He’s much more the sort who would—

  And as I understood I reached out and tried to scream, but my lungs were empty and I couldn’t make more than a wheeze on the inhale. I couldn’t shout a warning. Nothing more than a gasped, “Pen—”

  And she did not know Egan the way I did. I doubt very much that she understood his intentions. Luckily, her reflexes were lightning fast, and she did not need to understand. She only needed to see the gun lifting, his arm crooking, the muzzle lining up with his temple.

  She hit him, arms outstretched, just as he squeezed the trigger.

  The report nearly stopped my heart forever. I managed a scream at last.

  “NO!” she howled into his face, crouched over his supine form and pinning him like a lioness over her prey. She tore the pistol out of his hand and crushed it between her fists into a twist of metal. “No, you do not! I forbid it!”

  Azazel glanced around behind him, curious. Egan blinked up at her, open-mouthed. There was a little blood leaking onto the sand, I saw as I staggered to my feet. I think the muzzle had scored his scalp as she’d knocked it away.

  That’s so you, Egan. Sacrifice yourself without a thought as to how much it will hurt others. Stupid, selfish man. He’d stepped in front of Father Velimir’s bullet for me. He’d drawn Roshana’s ire even with both his legs broken.

  “Why did you do that?” asked Michael.

  Penemuel seemed to catch herself, as if she’d been spotted doing something shameful. She looked around at us all, her chest heaving. “No,” she said, more uncertainly.

  “He would have sufficed,” Gabriel remarked, with what sounded like regret.

  “So do you mean to offer yourself in his place, now?” Michael sneered.

  She lurched to her feet. “No,” she whispered again, dusting off her frockcoat with clumsy hands.

  Egan rolled onto one elbow, coughing. He looked gray. I was so relieved that, truth be told, I wanted to vomit.

  “There must be a sacrifice,” Raphael warned. “We must have the Covenant.”

  “What about Samyaza?” I asked. “Would you take him?”

  They all looked at me.

  “Samyaza is not here,” said Gabriel, frowning. “Nor would he be willing.”

  “He is.” I folded my hands over my stomach. “I have him here. Inside me. I took him from his prison in Norway. And he told me that he wished to die. He begged me to kill him, but I didn’t know how.”

  And this is all his fault. All of it. Right back to the dawn of human evolution.

  “You sneaky little…” Uriel muttered. It almost sounded like admiration.

  Michael huffed. “That’s not possible.”

  “She’s not lying,” Raphael said. “I have seen him in her eyes. I heard him and smelled him.”

  “Would you accept him?” I looked at Azazel, who was up on one knee now, and frowning. I will murder Samyaza for you, if that is what it takes.

  He licked his dry lips. “Why did you not tell me this?”

  “You were never around long enough for us to have that conversation.” My voice shook.

  He looked over at Penemuel, not answering. She was wide-eyed.

  The four archangels withdrew to confer. Penemuel put her arm around Azazel, bending her head to talk in a low voice. Excluded, I scrambled over to Egan. He climbed to his feet, touching his scalp wound gingerly and examining the blood on his fingers. The awkward tilt of his head suggested that his ears were still ringing from the gunshot.

  “You’re an idiot,” I told him, stretching up to kiss his lips. He tasted of dust and copper. My voice shook. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

  “Hey, you went first,” he muttered. “You scared even your big man there, Milja.”

  That gave me pause. I’d been so busy trying to save Azazel, I hadn’t given any thought to Egan’s feelings. Or I’d assumed he was tough enough to take it. Hardened all the way though, like a soldier was supposed to be.

  No. No he’s not.

&n
bsp; “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He brushed back my hair and kissed me again, wrapping an arm around my waist. For a long moment there were no words, just a sharing of breath. There was nothing left to say.

  “We will accept the offer,” came Gabriel’s voice from behind Egan’s back.

  I blinked my eyes open. The four archangels had lined up together like, I thought bitterly, the world’s most sociopathic aging boy-band.

  Azazel stood with Penemuel, his black gaze upon me, his arms folded across his bare chest. “We too. He planned all this from the start, you say. Well, it is time we gave the Devil his due.”

  No mercy from the Fallen you betrayed, Samyaza. No mercy from Heaven either.

  I nodded. Nor from me.

  “Bring him forth,” Michael said with a wave of his hand.

  I wet my lips. “Okay. Yeah. I…” I stood under their blistering gaze for a moment, groping about within myself for a green serpent that somehow eluded my grasp. “I don’t know how.”

  Gabriel nodded reassuringly, and closed upon me. “I will do it, Daughter of Earth. The rest of you, be ready for when he comes out. You,” he told Egan, “step back as far as you can.”

  “Will this hurt her?” he demanded as he reluctantly obeyed.

  “I hope not.” He put one hand on my shoulder and looked over at Azazel. “With your permission?”

  He didn’t bother asking my permission, I noted, my stomach clenching. His hand felt warm and heavy. Angels are all jerks.

  “Harm her,” growled Azazel, “and there will be no Covenant. Do not think to fool me.”

  Gabriel nodded, and put his other hand on my stomach as if feeling for the kick of an unborn child. “Give him up to me, Milja.”

  I felt the warmth of him seeping under my skin like light, or—no, more like color, golden-ruddy like a low winter sunset. The sensation was weirdly uncomfortable, not because it was unpleasant but because the pleasure felt so invasive; sweat jumped out on my crawling skin. The light sank into my body to where Samyaza’s green coils lay wrapped about my entrails, and the emerald fire writhed and knotted and suddenly flared. My head filled with green flames.

  I heard a scream of rage that I could not at first recognize as my own voice.

  I blinked and saw Gabriel fall back from me, his robe torn by great claw-marks across the chest, blood welling up into the costly fabric. I looked down at my hand and saw blood painted to the second knuckles. Then Azazel put his hand on my shoulder and I whirled around.

  He grabbed my wrist and stopped my hooked fingers an inch from his face.

  “What is this, Milja?” he said softly, teeth bright in the swarthy stubble of his face. For a moment I thought in my confusion that his eyes were an uncanny, poisonous green—and then I realized that his silvery gaze was only reflecting my own viridescent glow.

  I went slack in his grip, dropping my eyes in shame.

  “Samyaza is not so willing after all,” Michael observed.

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped, mostly to Gabriel. “I didn’t know he’d do that!”

  “I told you,” Raphael said hotly. “He is taking possession! He is consuming you!”

  “No,” replied Azazel, pulling my chin back around and gazing searchingly into my face. “It’s not Samyaza. I know him. It is his power, for sure, but not his will. Hers.”

  Penemuel, leaning in on his shoulder, nodded. “She’s the one who doesn’t want to let him go. She’s holding on.”

  “What?” I sputtered. “But I offered!”

  “Oh dear, Milja,” said Uriel, grinning as he paced around us. “Angelic power and your mortal ego? That’s a heady mixture. A hard habit to kick.”

  Blood flooded my cheeks. Was it true? Was I rebelling against the loss of the coiled dragonish might I carried within me? I’d lashed out at Gabriel’s touch, and right now even Azazel’s familiar grasp made me shudder with discomfort. I could feel the malachite rage longing to rise. Bone deep, belly deep, I did not want to surrender the thing within me to any angel.

  “I can rip the Serpent from her,” Michael offered, and I snarled without thinking.

  “And I can rip you a new asshole,” Azazel said. “No. I will do this.” He let my numb hand slip from his fingers. I rubbed my wrist, looking up at him through my lashes, moistening my lips in trepidation. “After all, she is mine,” he said. Touching me again under the chin to lift my face, he brushed my lips with his. “Isn’t that right, my love?”

  “Yes.” I’d never sounded so reluctant, I suspected. But he kissed me properly, his lips and tongue drawing out my soul until I grew dizzy. I felt the familiar response in my core, that kick of desire I had no control over. His smile when he finally released me was darkly intimate. He knew.

  Of course he knew. He knew every inch of my flesh, inside and out, and all my weaknesses. He could bend me to his appetite with the slightest effort.

  “You want to please me, don’t you?” His breath was hot and sweet, like a caress on my cheek. His fingertip traced the pulse in my throat down to my breast.

  “Of course.”

  “So if I ask you to surrender Samyaza to me?”

  I shivered. His voice was a soft and tickling torment in the whorls of my ear, but I could hear the teeth behind the honeyed lips. “I know I have to,” I whispered, hoping the angels couldn’t hear but knowing it a vain hope. “I really do. It’s the right thing. It was my idea. But…I…don’t…can’t…want to…”

  “That’s alright, my love.” He ran a finger down my breastbone, and the poor abused fabric of my clothing shredded at his touch and sprang apart. “I know what you want. I always do.”

  I blushed despite myself. “No. Not here.”

  He smiled; I felt it more than saw it. “Don’t you like my brothers?”

  “They don’t like me.” I hunched my shoulders, trying to hold my shirt together over my breasts as Azazel’s finger headed inexorably south.

  “Which one scares you most? Which one do you trust least?”

  I swallowed, not answering. I was working hard not to focus my eyes beyond him. There was some meager safety in his presence after all.

  “It’s Michael,” he guessed.

  Top two, anyway, I thought. “Mmm.”

  “But if I told you to let Michael touch you, you would let him.”

  I whimpered. His fingertip circled my navel.

  “Because it gives you pleasure to please me. It gives you pleasure to obey me against your own judgement.”

  “Azazel…”

  “Shush.” He bit my earlobe gently. “Don’t you trust me?”

  I nodded faintly. The serpent was writhing in my belly, a slick twisting ache, part fear, and part defiance, and part anticipation.

  He chuckled. “You know you can trust me, my love.” And that definitely was a threat—because yes, he’d always keep me safe, but he loved to violate my complacency. He liked to play with my shame like a cat playing with a ball of thread. He knew my darker desires.

  “Penemuel,” he said, his words like velvet, both hands on my bare waist beneath the shreds of my clothes. “Reassure her.”

  I gasped in relief. Not Michael then.

  She crossed behind me and put a hand on my back, her fingertips chasing shivers down my spine. The cloth there fell to dust under her touch; my top and my shirt and my bra strap. Her hand was warm on my bare back, stroking softly and very slowly.

  I had no particular reason to fear Penemuel. I had no reason to dislike the unhurried caress she bestowed on me as Azazel kissed me again. It felt good, my body told me; it was gentle and sure and it felt like comfort. It went nowhere more intrusive than my back and shoulders. The shivers it provoked were pleasurable. Her bronzy light seeped into my spine, sheened like topaz and tiger’s eye, filling me with warmth.

  I felt myself relax, just a little. Enjoy it, almost, despite the humiliation.

  “See?” Azazel whispered.

  I smiled, uncertainly, and felt his hands slip
beneath the ragged remnants of my clothes to stroke my breasts. I quivered as he caught my left nipple. It was hard and sensitive, and it enjoyed the rolling pinch of his fingers. When he squeezed, little lightning stabs of silver and black coursed through my nerves, forcing a moan from my lips. I blushed, hoping that no one could see what he had done. Knowing that they all knew.

  “You are mine,” he said gently. Then, “Michael, now.”

  I didn’t see Michael; he was behind me. What I felt was his big hand slide around my throat, and I gasped in shock, heat flooding my skin. His light was smoky red, the color of venous blood and burning cities, the color of God’s wrath. But Penemuel had both hands on my back, stroking and holding me, and Azazel had my nipples caught in a sharp, sweet pull that robbed me of all fight, and somehow that wave of shock broke over me and I came out the other side gasping, but still obedient.

  And oh so very wet.

  “Yes,” said Azazel hungrily, watching my face. “Quiet, my love. Yes. Submit to me.”

  It was hard to think of alternatives. It was hard to think at all. Michael’s hand under my jaw constricted my breath a little and drew me up on my toes. I was shaking, but Penemuel was there supporting the arch of my back, and the brush of Azazel’s hand across my breasts felt like it was filling my whole body with his quicksilver lightning.

  Then he smoothed the last of my clothes off my torso, baring my breasts for everyone to see, and even as he kissed me again I writhed in shame. Not because of my nudity—which, in truth, the majority of those here had already glimpsed one way or another—but because it was now impossible to hide my arousal, however unwilling that might be. The stiff jut of my nipples betrayed beyond all doubt my indefensible eagerness to be seen, and touched, and coerced.

  “Gabriel. Raphael. Take her arms.”

  They moved up on either side, but I couldn’t see them properly because Michael was holding my head back. From the corner of my vision they seemed to have changed; effulgent now, less human, their faces blurred by the brilliant light that burned within them. They took my wrists and drew my hands from Azazel’s biceps out to the side, holding them wide. Any illusion that I might still push him away blew away as dust. I was held and bound. Again, the green rebellion kicked within me, but it was weaker this time. Not even rebellion, truly; just an urgent helplessness that was painful in its sweetness.