It did. Everything about Raziel made a great deal of difference to me, but admitting that only made things worse. “No reason at all,” I said brightly.
I looked past her toward the bank of windows overlooking the fog-shrouded Pacific Ocean. At least, I assumed it was the Pacific—for all I knew, we could be on Mars. The windows been left open, and a strong breeze tossed the sheer white curtains into the air, sending a little shiver of some unnamed emotion down my backbone. “Is everything white in this place?” I demanded, feeling cranky. Being dead would do that to a girl.
For a moment I thought I saw something just beyond the windows—the breathless shimmer of iridescent blue wings, the sun sparkling off them. I narrowed my gaze, but there was nothing out there, just a few seagulls in the distance, wheeling and cawing. No seagulls on Mars, I thought.
Sarah looked around as if noticing for the first time. “I suppose so. Raziel tends to see things as either black or white—never shades of gray. He’d probably really hate it if you painted anything.” She grinned, suddenly looking mischievous. “Just let me know if you want some help.”
The idea was irresistible, and I laughed. “Do you want to make his life a living hell?”
“No, dear. That’s going to be your job.”
Another odd fluttering. I rose and crossed the living room to peer out into the bright sky, the rolling mist on the ocean. There was nothing in the sky but the seagulls—I must be imagining things.
Or was I? I was stuck in the sterile aerie of a creature who could fly—why would I assume that mysterious dark wings were a figment of my imagination?
I turned my back on the windows. If Raziel was out there buzzing the building in an effort to spook me, I wasn’t going to let him. Though the sight of him dive-bombing the place would have been pretty damned funny.
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you before Sammael gets here. Apart from welcoming you to Sheol,” Sarah said, “I wanted to warn you about Raziel.”
Oh, great. As if things weren’t bad enough, now I needed to be warned about the only man I slightly, somewhat, minimally trusted. “He’s an ax murderer?” I suggested cheerfully.
Sarah’s responding smile was a token. “Don’t be fooled by his kindness. Raziel has shut himself off from all human feeling, from caring about anyone besides the Fallen and their wives. I will speak for you at the meeting today, but if you’re relying on Raziel to protect you, you’re wasting your time.”
I was still trying to reconcile the term kindness with the bad-tempered Raziel I’d been saddled with. Though more likely Raziel would consider he’d been saddled with me.
“Oh—there’s a meeting?” I said, feeling doomed. “I suppose they’re going to decide whether I live or die, and I’m not going to have any voice in the matter. Of course, I’m dead already, so I guess it doesn’t really matter. I just don’t feel like I’m dead. And I really don’t want to go back to that place.” I shivered. I couldn’t remember much, just heat and noise and the pain of thousands of souls reaching out. . . .
“I’ll speak for you. I’ll do anything I can to stop them. Right now they’re more worried about the Nephilim and whether Uriel will use your presence as an excuse to move against us. I just don’t want you to count on Raziel. He’s sworn off caring about anyone, and I’m afraid he’s not going to make an exception for you.” She tilted her head sideways, assessing me. “At least, I don’t think so. But I’ll fight for you. And sometimes they listen.”
And if that didn’t sound like a rock-solid guarantee, I figured it was the best I could expect. If I was going to get out of this mess, I’d have to figure it out on my own.
Sammael appeared at the door just as Sarah was leaving, and he didn’t look any happier to see me than he had before.
“Are you ready?” he asked politely.
I suddenly remembered all those flights of stairs, and groaned. Once a day was enough. “I don’t suppose you have an elevator hidden anywhere around here?”
“No.” Sammael moved past me to push open a section of the windows that I had blithely assumed was solid wall. The wind was rising, swirling into the apartment, but in Raziel’s sterile environment there was nothing loose that could be blown away. “Come with me—we’ll take the shortcut.”
I looked from Sammael’s calm face to the wind and ocean just beyond those doors to nowhere. He was an angel, wasn’t he? Albeit Sarah had said he was one of the angels of death. He wasn’t going to toss me out the window, was he?
You can only die once, I thought, not knowing whether it was true or not. Taking Sammael’s hand, I stepped out into a nothingness that was blindingly bright.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT SEEMED AS IF A MOMENT HAD passed, or an hour. I found myself standing on a cliff, much higher up than the house had been, and I’d never been crazy about heights. I could see out over the vast ocean, and the sun beginning to sink lower on the horizon. Pacific Ocean, then. The ground was wet beneath my feet, and there was no sign of my missing mentor. I glanced at Sammael. I couldn’t remember holding on to him, soaring through those misty skies. But clearly I hadn’t walked.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“In the cave. Just go straight—you’ll find him.”
We were three-quarters of the way up a mountain that I hadn’t even realized was nearby. Its top was enshrouded in mist, as was the rocky shoreline below, and I could see the great yawning mouth of a cave closer than I would have liked. I waited for the familiar panic to set in. “I’m claustrophobic when it comes to caves,” I finally admitted, glancing nervously at the rough-hewn entrance, worn smooth by centuries of scouring winds. In fact, I didn’t like heights, closed-in places, places that were too open—give me a phobia and I embraced it enthusiastically.
“Not anymore,” Sammael said in a colorless voice. “You should watch what you say. You’ll be lucky if the Council simply decides to grant you the Grace.”
“The Grace?” That sounded almost pleasant.
“Your memory would be wiped clean. I promise you, it wouldn’t hurt, and you’d be perfectly happy. You’d be able to do simple tasks, perhaps even learn to read and write a few simple words.”
I stared at him in absolute horror. “No,” I said flatly.
“It won’t be your choice.” He seemed unmoved by my reaction. “Do you want me to take you to Raziel?”
“I can manage,” I said, not sure that I could, but I really didn’t want to hear any more of Sammael’s awful possibilities. The inhabitants of Sheol seemed to have mixed feelings about me. Azazel, Sammael, and Raziel clearly thought I didn’t belong, and I was happy to agree with them. Tamlel, Sarah, and the Stepford wives were welcoming, but that would probably mean nothing once they held their council meeting. “But I thank you for the offer. I think I need to figure out how to get what I need on my own, don’t I?”
He barely registered my question. “I’ll come back if there’s a problem.”
“How will you know?” I asked suspiciously. Raziel had been able to read my mind—if it turned out the whole place knew what I was thinking, then maybe I wouldn’t mind getting a lobotomy.
“Sarah will know. Sarah will tell me,” he said simply, as if he expected me to know something so basic.
Clearly Sarah was a force to be reckoned with. It was a good thing that she seemed to be on my side. “I’ll be fine,” I said firmly, and before I could add to it, Sammael had disappeared into the wind.
“Well, damn,” I said out loud. I’d been hoping to see wings. If Sammael came equipped with them, I hadn’t had time to notice. Which made travel convenient, but still a little bit puzzling.
I turned to look at the cave, waiting for the icy fear to set in, but I felt nothing but an entirely reasonable nervousness at the thought of bearding Raziel in his den. Sammael had told the truth—the claustrophobia had vanished. Whoopee, I thought with a suitable lack of enthusiasm, walking forward.
I still wasn’t crazy about enclosed spaces. The wide
corridor into the mountain looked as if it had been a mine shaft, if they had mine shafts in the afterlife. It narrowed a little too swiftly as I made my way down it. Normally I’d be curled up on the ground, covered with a cold sweat. The fact that I could keep moving, deeper and deeper into the mountain, was more proof of how different things were. A proof I could easily have done without.
I wasn’t quite sure what I expected. The corridor took a couple of sharp turns, shutting out the daylight at the entrance, but I managed to keep going without stopping to hyperventilate. Where the hell was Raziel? I had the sudden fear that Sammael had pulled a Hansel and Gretel on me, luring me to this mountain to abandon me, thereby getting rid of a messy problem. Sarah wouldn’t let him get away with that, would she?
I’d almost given up trying to find him when I turned one last corner and saw him sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of a huge stone cavern, his eyes closed.
I had planned to be a smart-ass and say something like “Yoo-hoo, imaginary creature, I’m here,” but I thought better of it. He was sitting at the edge of a great yawning hole in the center of the cave, and it looked like some of the walls had collapsed inward. He was at the very edge, too close for comfort, and as I looked he seemed to sway toward the opening.
I tried to stifle my instinctive scream, but he heard me anyway and jerked, startled. He fell backward, away from the pit, and the chair went over. I could hear it splintering against the stone walls as it fell, and I shivered. He rose, focusing on me, and I tried for a cheerful smile.
As I expected, he wasn’t the least bit pleased to see me. “How did you get here?” he demanded, not moving any closer.
“Sammael,” I said.
He grunted. “You’re wearing my clothes.” “It’s better than all that white,” I said. “Were you frightened by an albino when you were a child?” “I was never a child.”
Another of his flat, incontrovertible statements. At least he was talking to me. “You mean you were born this way?”
“I wasn’t born.” He stayed where he was, on the edge of the pit, and it made me nervous. Though I supposed if he fell, he could probably fly out of there, couldn’t he? “Why are you here? I told Tam and Sammael to keep you busy. This is no place for you.”
“I don’t belong in this dank little cave? I can agree with that,” I said. “Not that it’s actually dank or little, but you get the point. Or I don’t belong in Sheol at all? Because I’m willing to agree with you on that one as well, but apparently it’s your fault I’m here and not back in New York dodging buses, and I really don’t feel like having a bunch of men get together and decide what’s going to happen to me, particularly when one of the options includes the equivalent of brain damage. And I don’t like white.”
He blinked at the non sequitur. “Tough,” he said shortly. He started toward me, and I watched him, trying to put all the strange, disparate things I knew about him together in one package.
“Where are your wings?” I asked. If I was going to be stuck with angels, I should at least get to see some feather action.
He rolled his eyes. “Why is that always the first question? You don’t need to know.”
“If I stay here, do I get them?”
“You’re not and never will be an angel,” he said.
I was willing to put up a fight. “Oh, you never can tell. I mean, clearly I’ve been far from angelic so far, but I can always change my ways and become positively saintly.” I gave him a hopeful beam that left him entirely unmoved.
“People don’t become angels,” he said in a tone that said, Any moron knows that.
“How about heaven? Don’t people get wings there? Since I’m dead and all that, it seems like a good place to start.”
His laugh wasn’t flattering. “I don’t think you’ve reached that point yet.”
“Then you’re stuck with me. Get used to it.”
He halted directly in front of me. “For now,” he said. “I wouldn’t count on a lengthy stay. But for as long I have to put up with you, you can stop stealing my clothes. And you can stop talking—the sound of your voice is like fingernails on a blackboard.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, totally unmoved. “I have a delightful voice. It’s low and sexy, or so people have told me. You’re just being difficult.”
“I don’t care how glorious your voice is, I’d appreciate hearing less of it.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again. If I wanted to survive, I needed him on my side, and I was going to have to behave myself, at least a little bit. I stood perfectly still, saying nothing, waiting for him.
He tilted his head, letting his strange eyes slide down me, assessing. Odd, but it felt as palpable as a touch. “My clothes are too tight for you,” he said helpfully.
“You’re a man, I’m a woman. I have hips.”
“Indeed,” he said, and I looked at him sharply to see if there was an insult hidden behind his bland tone of voice. “I meant to have clothes provided for you.”
“You did. They were all white.” “You don’t like white? It’s the color of rebirth, renewal.”
“It’s not a color at all, it’s the absence of color,” I said. “I may be in limbo, having to get by on your charity, but I’m not going to let everything go a dull beige.”
“Limbo is a mythical construction,” he said. “And white is not beige.”
“Sheol is a mythical construction, and angels are part of fairy tales, and vampires are nightmares, and you don’t exist,” I snapped. I was getting a little tired of all this.
“Then where are you?” He wasn’t expecting an answer. “What did Sammael tell you?”
“Sammael’s a teenager. He barely said two words. Sarah was more forthcoming. She told me not to count on you for anything.”
“Did she?”
“She said that despite your great kindnesses to me—and I have to admit I have yet to see any evidence of kindness on your part—you wouldn’t speak up for me at the meeting and you’d let the others do what they want with me, and I wanted to make sure—”
“Be quiet!” It was spoken in a soft voice, soft but deadly, and I shut up.
Almost. “Are you going to let them melt my brain?”
He looked confused for a moment, before resuming his familiar exasperated expression. “Oh, the Grace. No.”
It was one small syllable, but I trusted him.
“In the future, you’re not to come up here,” he continued, his tone cool, “and I will make certain Sarah knows where you’re allowed to go and what’s offlimits.
There are dangerous places in Sheol, including the gates that surround us. This place is almost as dangerous.”
“Have you found Lucifer?” He opened his mouth to reprimand me, and I shot back, “It’s four words, for heaven’s sake. Deal with it.”
He looked annoyed. “Sarah’s been talking too much.”
“Everyone seems to talk too much to suit you. Or is it just women?” Sexist bastard, I thought with a peculiar lack of heat.
“No I’m not,” he said.
Not what? I thought.
“You are the only female around here who seems unable to control her tongue You don’t need the details of our fight with the archangel. It’s none of your —” “—business,” I chimed in with him. “And Sarah didn’t tell me much. Besides, I might point out that Lucifer fell because he dared ask too many questions.” I shot him a wry glance. “You should have some sympathy for the curious.”
“Don’t get delusions of grandeur. Lucifer’s questions were more important than whining about why there are so many stairs.”
“And that reminds me—judging by Sammael’s ‘shortcut,’ I shouldn’t have had to walk. You have wings—you could have flown me up there in no time.”
“I could have,” he agreed. “But you need to know where you are, what’s expected of you. There won’t always be someone around to transport you. And I don’t want to transport you if I can help it.”
“Why not?” He probably didn’t want to touch me, I thought, grumpy at the idea. He was treating me as if I had an advanced case of leprosy, which was both annoying and ever so slightly depressing. Not that I was attracted to him—he wasn’t my type.
“You know why,” he said shortly.
“What do you mean?”
His eyes met mine, and I had the oddest feeling I could see my own thoughts in them. Which was truly a horrible idea, because I’d had some thoughts that were decidedly warm, indecent, and embarrassing. This was hard enough without him knowing that I had feelings I was using all my excess energy trying to fight. If he could read my every thought, I was screwed.
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