A man appeared in the mirror behind me. I looked again. Not a man. An angel.
Ace hissed. Azriel.
I gaped. As in, the Azriel who parted her immortal soul from her body? I spun around and backed up against the sinks. I needed Oz.
I opened my mouth to shout, but the angel grabbed my face and then I was rushing through time and space to somewhere else.
Central Park. I recognized the statues.
I leaned over to the left and puked onto the grass.
“Apologies. I needed to talk to you.”
“And kidnapping me was your answer?” I said between dry heaves. It felt like the worst hangover I’d ever had.
What do you want Azriel? Ace growled. But beneath the boiling anger, I could sense her hurt. The festering wound of her betrayal.
“I will speak out loud. I do not want to cause more distress to your host.” His voice was perfectly modulated. It was a nothing voice. Neither too low, nor too high. It was completely without character.
“I'm with Ace on this; what do you want?” I frantically willed my stomach to stop somersaulting.
“Merely to talk. To fill you in on some carefully omitted facts. For better or worse, Lucifer has set you up as the queen in his game of chess with the Father, and I believe the queen should be able to see all the pieces on the board.”
“I'm really getting tired on the chess analogies. You are talking about living human beings here. And their immortal souls.”
“Hardly living beings, are they? Your sinners?”
Jesus, Azriel, you didn’t get any less verbose in the last two thousand years.
“So eager for me to spill your secret, Acerezeal? So be it.”
I could feel Ace’s sudden apprehension.
I frowned. “What secret?”
Arcadia… Ace sounded cagey.
What secret? I asked her.
“It’s Acerezeal’s soul in your body that is making you sick. Her immortal soul inside you is literally killing you, like a parasite feeding off its host. A body was not made to house two souls. What Lucifer has done is an abomination, and nature, in all His glory, is trying to right the wrong by killing off the anomaly.”
I blinked, my mind suddenly filling with white noise as I struggled to grasp what he was saying. “But I have lymphoma?”
“Your body is attacking itself because it can’t find the foreign body that is feeding off you. The rapidly enlarging hole in your heart is because it is working twice as hard to sustain you both, even though you possess only one body.”
Ace? Did you know?
There was a long silence. I suspected after the doctors said that your cancer had come back. I didn’t think it could be a coincidence.
“I am here to save you, Arcadia. I can remove the parasite from your body, and you will begin to heal almost immediately. However, if you do not, I am afraid you will not last the year.”
I slumped to the ground. My mind was just empty. Ace had saved me so many times over the years. I couldn’t just abandon her. Let her soul be ripped from a body again. Her scream as she remembered that moment still haunted my dreams sometimes.
But keeping her was an inevitable death sentence. I would die, and any chance of the guys being redeemed would probably die with me. At the very least, I would break their hearts.
But at least they would move on. Ace would be gone forever, from the very fabric of existence.
I couldn't let that happen. Ace deserved to be saved as much as the guys did. I couldn't let Azriel have her.
“No. I believe that I can redeem the guys in enough time that Luc will win the bet and Ace will get her body back. You don’t sell out the ones you love when times get tough. Ace has been with me through the toughest times, and I won’t abandon her out now.”
Arcadia…
Why did Ace keep saying my name like that?
The Angel grinned, and it was disorientating. He was so beautiful, but his face was almost cruel in its perfection. His huge white wings sat high on his shoulders, the snowy feathers a whisper from the ground.
“Humans. Sometimes I can understand why Acerezeal fell, though it was mostly Lucifers doing. But you are so pure in your love. It's breathtaking in its innocence.” He was still smiling. “It is commendable that you would sacrifice your life for the Fallen Acerezeal. But are you willing to sacrifice the life of your unborn child?”
My world shrunk. Blood rushed in my ears. I ceased to breathe even as my heart thundered in my chest. “What?”
“The child that grows now in your womb. You cannot sustain both. Is Acerezeal’s life worth that of your child?”
To be continued...
A note from the Author
Hey, thanks for reading. Cliffhangers suck, I know. Sorry!
However, if you send me a picture of The Redeemable Part Two in your Kindle library along with your email address*, I will email you a copy of the first chapter of The Redeemable Part Three. Trust me, it clears everything up.
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The Redeemable: Part Two Page 9