by Larissa Ione
“I’ll inform my bosses, but don’t expect an answer you’ll like.”
Even now, after he’d made clear that he held all the cards—or the souls, as it were—she continued to think she had the better hand. Amusing. Mildly amusing, of course.
“You’re still not getting it, are you? I’ll get what I want. There’s no other choice.” He halted in front of her, so close she was forced to look up at him. “And tell them that the next angel they send better be prepared to stay, because I’m keeping her.”
“How nice,” she said snottily. “Are you going to keep her in chains? Rape her if she refuses to bed you?”
Suddenly, his hand was clamped around her throat, almost of its own volition. Angels did that to him, made his body parts act independently of his brain. He felt her reach for her angelic ability to strike at him, but this was his realm, and here he controlled the use of power.
“Send someone willing.” He bared his fangs, giving the angel an up-close-and-personal look at one of the things that made them so very different despite their angelic origins. “I’m warning you. Because the next angel who steps through that doorway won’t be leaving. Ever.”
Chapter Two
Lilliana scurried through the pristine white halls of the massive Archangel Complex, her heart beating like a hummingbird’s. She’d only been here once, several hundred years ago, and it had merely been to deliver a message from her superiors in the Time Travel Operations Department.
This time, she was here because she’d been summoned, and that could only be bad news. Her direct supervisor, an angel humans would describe as nerdy and shy, had warned her that after her latest screw-up, she might earn more than just a suspension from TTO.
She broke out in a sweat at the thought. Her work was her life. The only connection she had with her dead mother. If the archangels took that away from her...she shuddered. Sure, she’d committed a grievous offense, but there had been extenuating circumstances. She’d been kidnapped, held captive, and forced to do things she hadn’t wanted to do. Her nerdy supervisor understood...but he didn’t think the head honchos would. Besides, rules were rules, and Heaven’s tolerance for rule breakers was notoriously nonexistent.
Stomach churning, she entered the garishly maroon and gold offices of Raphael. The Raphael. She might vomit on his robes.
A petite, flaxen-haired female looked up from her crystal tablet, a device that was the human equivalent of an electronic tablet device...if human tablets had advanced by about ten billion years. She gave Lilliana a bored once-over, pausing to wrinkle her nose at Lilliana’s unfashionably loose brown hair. Lilliana could change it with a mere thought, maybe piling it on top of her head like a giant ostrich egg the way the other female wore it, but she’d never cared about current fashion. She did, however, care about looking stupid.
“To your left.” Egghead went back to tapping on her tablet.
Lilliana turned down the hall, which ended inside a room with walls that seemed to be made of white smoke. A marble fountain, an extinct palm tree, bronze statues...the room was filled with the most eclectic mix of objects from different time periods.
An angel appeared before her from out of nowhere, and although she’d never seen Raphael before, she knew him instantly. He stood a full foot above her five foot eleven inches, and his golden hair fell in a shiny curtain around broad shoulders draped by a lush, purple velvet mantle. Jewel-encrusted rings circled every finger, and a gold sun-shaped pendant hung halfway down his chest, standing out starkly against his snowy white suit.
If she had to describe the style of his outfit, she’d go with royal-retro-pimp.
“You’re late.” His deep, dark voice rumbled through her, jangling her already unsteady nerves. “Late to a meeting with an archangel.”
She was most certainly not late, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to argue. “Ah...I got lost—”
He cut her off with a savage sweep of his bejeweled hand. “Your excuses don’t interest me. I have a proposition for you.”
Wow. What everyone said about archangels was true.
They were giant douchebags. With terrible fashion sense and taste in decor.
“What kind of proposition?”
“I understand that you’re curious about the underworld.”
Her pulse picked up a notch. Most angels nursed a deep hatred for anything related to demons and their realm, Sheoul, and one never knew how much trouble you could get into by being too inquisitive. Plus, too much curiosity threw up a red flag for those who watched for signs of potential defection to Satan’s camp.
“I wouldn’t say I’m overly curious,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “but I do find it interesting that many ancient human structures are replicated in Sheoul and vice versa, and I’d love to study the links between them.”
“What if I said I could give you that opportunity?”
She cocked an eyebrow. “I’d say...what’s the catch?”
“The catch is a big one.” He gave an ominous pause she suspected was calculated to make her lungs seize. It worked. “You’ll have to take a mate.”
What little air she had in her lungs whooshed out in a rush. “A mate?” she choked out. “Why?”
“Because this particular male wants a mate, and we need him, so he gets what he wants.”
In other words, this particular male, clearly a standup guy, was using blackmail to get what he wanted. She licked her dry lips, buying herself time to speak without sounding as if she’d run a marathon. “And what about what I want?”
The archangel regarded her with disdain, as if what she wanted was of no consequence. “How about we go over all of the terms of this deal before you decide what you want.”
“Of course,” she said tightly. She had a feeling the terms were going to be pretty one-sided, and that side wouldn’t be hers. “Who is he?”
“Azagoth, collector of souls.”
Her heart stopped. Just quit beating. “The Forgotten One? The Grim Reaper?” Holy shit. He had to be kidding. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“I have no sense of humor.”
She’d heard that about Raphael. About most of the archangels, actually. “But you want me to mate Azagoth?”
Raphael inclined his head in an impatient, curt nod, as if this wasn’t something to get all worked up about. How could he be so calm?
Because it’s not his head on the chopping block, that’s how.
The ex-angel, sometimes known by those in Heaven as The Forgotten One, was occasionally spoken about with respect, but most often, contempt. He’d been a hero in Heaven, the person who first identified Satan as a rotten apple who was planning a coup against his angelic brethren. Because of Azagoth, Satan had been stripped of his wings and cast out of Heaven to create his own realm known as Sheoul, where he’d set up shop breeding evil minions.
Too late Heaven realized they should have put Satan down when they had the chance, because centuries later, his demonic creations began to die, and with nowhere to go, their disembodied souls wreaked havoc on the Earth. Azagoth volunteered to create Sheoul-gra, a holding tank for the souls, but why he volunteered was the topic of hot debates and wild conspiracy theories.
The only thing anyone agreed on was that he’d been corrupted by evil and was one of the most dangerous and powerful beings outside of Heaven. Fortunately, he was contained inside his own realm...but his reach extended far beyond it, and that had always been a concern for The Powers That Be in Heaven.
Raphael let her stew in her thoughts for a moment before adding, “And full disclosure; you can never leave his realm once you get there.”
Her jaw dropped. Closed. Dropped again. Unable to leave Sheoul-gra? She’d be trapped. Imprisoned, just like she’d been when she was kidnapped by a crazy angel bent on getting revenge on an archangel, a situation that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.
Finally, she managed a squeaky, “Never?”
“Not...in the traditional sense.” Raphael pro
duced a cup of nectar from out of thin air and held it out to her, but she refused. She doubted her stomach could hold anything down right now. Plus, refusing something offered by an archangel gave her a sinful feeling of satisfaction. “But according to my intel, he possesses a chronoglass.”
Surprise flew through her. “I thought we had the only two in existence.”
“Apparently not.”
“So he can time travel?”
Raphael shook his head. “He wasn’t born with the ability. We believe he uses it to view current events in the human and demon realms.”
What a waste. Angels with the ability to time travel could do so only under limited circumstances and with the assistance of a handful of very rare objects. Chronoglasses were the most versatile and powerful of all the time travel objects, and Azagoth’s would be invaluable to Heaven.
“Wait...you said he can view the events of the demon realm too? How?”
“His chronoglass, unlike ours, is double-sided. One side allows a view of the human realm, and the other shows the demon realm.” Raphael sipped the nectar she’d refused. “With his chronoglass, you can escape his realm once per day for an hour. But you will be restricted to the past, and as always, contact with anyone you know is not permitted, and so is any manipulation of events that could change history.” He angled his body closer, putting on the pressure without saying a word. “So. What say you?”
I say you’re insane. “As, ah...generous...as this offer is, I’m going to have to refuse. I have a job here.”
He casually took a drink of the nectar, and she got the feeling that he was stringing a noose. “Do you.”
She swallowed. Which wasn’t easy, given the invisible rope tightening inexorably around her neck. “Excuse me?”
“Did you think we could let your recent transgressions slide?” He waved his hand, and one of the smoky walls became solid ivory.
Against the white backdrop, in perfect, high-def 3-D, a movie started up. A movie that showed her, three months ago, as she traveled through time to various locations to gather objects.
An angel named Reaver had asked for some special gifts for his five-thousand-year-old children, items from their childhoods. It was against the rules to bring objects back from the past, but he’d pulled her butt out of trouble once, and she’d owed him.
But holy crap, had she paid for what she’d done. Fifty years of time travel with supervision only, plus a hundred years of listening in on human prayers, sorting them, and presenting the most urgent ones to the Prayer Fulfillment Department.
So. Freaking. Boring. Humans could pray for really selfish, stupid stuff.
The movie jumped ahead, and she watched herself handing the items to Reaver. “I’ve already been punished for that.”
“And clearly, you didn’t learn your lesson,” he snapped, suddenly and inexplicably irritated. “Because not a month later, you broke one of the most important time travel laws and caused an imbalance in Heaven that we’re still trying to correct.”
“I had no choice! If you’d just listen—”
“Silence!” He hadn’t raised his voice, but the echo of his command circled the room a dozen times before fading away. “You say you had no choice, so now I’m giving you one. You can go through the dissection trials to have your ability removed. You will then be assigned to menial labor for the rest of your existence, or you can mate Azagoth and be able to time travel once a day. Which is it?”
She shook with a combination of rage that the circumstances of her crime were being disregarded, and terror that both punishments were not only horrible, but permanent. Losing her freedom was her greatest nightmare, and now she was facing it in a lose/lose situation.
“I need time to think about it.” Even her voice trembled.
“I’m not giving you time,” he said. “But I’m in a generous mood, so I’ll tell you what. Go now to Sheoul-gra, and you’ll have thirty Earth days to change your mind. At the end of the thirty days, the realm’s exit will be sealed to you, and you will never again be allowed to leave except for an hour a day when you use the chronoglass.”
Her belly twisted, and again, she was glad she’d refused the nectar. “Will I lose my wings?”
“No. You’ll be like Azagoth...a fallen angel, but...not. He is like his realm; unique.”
This could not be happening. She searched Raphael’s handsome face for any kind of sign that despite his claim of having no sense of humor this was just a big joke, but the archangel’s expression was all business.
“What about the Memitim? Will you still be sending angels to him to...breed with?”
She could hardly get the last part out. Azagoth was the father of all Memitim, and she seriously doubted Heaven would just let him stop producing little baby Reapers. Or maybe he wouldn’t want to stop. Maybe he was like her father, donating baby batter for the greater good and not giving a shit about his offspring.
“He won’t be creating any more Memitim. We’re reversing their sterility and changing Memitim from a class of angel to an ability any angel can be born with.”
How easy it all sounded. She wondered how the Memitim felt about the fact that their inability to reproduce was by design and could have been reversed at any time.
She closed her eyes and considered her options, crappy as they were.
The removal of an angel’s time travel ability was brutal. Agonizing. And in some instances, fatal. Even if one survived, the process and the loss were traumatic, and the angel was never the same. Lilliana had encountered two angels who had undergone the process, and their empty eyes haunted her to this day.
As if having her ability taken away wasn’t bad enough, she’d then be stuck doing menial tasks for the rest of her life...but on the bright side, maybe she’d be so lobotomized from the time-travelectomy that she wouldn’t care.
And didn’t that sound like a wonderful life?
Her other choice was to become the mate of a depraved angel, a male who was the keeper of demon souls. A male who had volunteered to be booted from Heaven...or, if the rumors were true, he’d not so much “volunteered” as been volunteered.
Sort of like what was happening to her right now.
Except that after she mated the Grim Freaking Reaper, she’d be stuck in his realm, which, by all accounts, was a shadowy, dreary place that resembled Athens—if Athens was drenched in darkness, overrun by creepy demon things, and had been decorated via an unholy alliance between Guillermo del Toro and Anne Rice.
Really, though, there was a clear winner here. Between the choices of suck and suckier, suck won out.
Opening her eyes, she gave in to the inevitable. “I’ll go to Sheoul-gra,” she muttered. At least she had thirty days to change her mind once she got there.
“I’m happy to hear that. You leave immediately.” Clapping his hand on her shoulder, he leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “Now, if one were to somehow get out of Azagoth’s realm with his chronoglass within that thirty days, one’s past transgressions might be forgiven. Especially if one were also to destroy the spying stone we believe he’s using to spy on us.”
She nearly tripped over her own feet. He was giving her a way out of this crappy deal?
Raphael stepped back and finished his nectar. “Oh,” he said, as he tossed the empty cup to the floor and strode toward the exit, “and good luck. Azagoth is an asshole.”
Chapter Three
Lilliana’s skin crawled as she took in the massive palace before her. True to her intel and research, the building, and all those surrounding it, were fashioned after ancient Greek structures. Great pillars rose up from the ground to support walls that went on forever. But unlike the bone-white framework that typified Greek construction, everything here was blackened, as if polluted by centuries of smoke buildup. She wondered what would happen if she scraped her fingernail down a wall.
Everything here felt...wrong. Even the air buzzed with a low-level sinister energy, as if she were standin
g next to a leaking, demonic nuclear power plant. Instinctively, she reached for her angelic power, but it was as if she struck a barrier. She could feel her power inside her, but it was trapped somehow, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t reach it.
Raphael had warned her that her powers would be all but useless here, but she’d hoped that somehow he was wrong.
Not so much.
Shuddering, she inhaled the air that stank of decay and filth, and climbed the seemingly endless steps to a landing that was as sprawling as a football field. The doors before her, large enough to allow a pair of elephants inside, opened up as if by magic.
No one was standing at the threshold to greet her. She hadn’t been sure what to expect, but silence and a warehouse-sized room filled with gruesome artwork and fountains that ran with blood wasn’t it.
Lilliana walked inside, her pristine white gown dragging on the polished obsidian floor. She hated the stupid dress, but it was what Raphael had insisted she wear, as if she were some sort of child bride being offered up to a sleazeball who’d paid for her.
Which probably wasn’t far from the truth.
At the far side of the room, a lone figure appeared through another set of double doors. Male. Tall. Blond. Handsome. Evil.
Fallen angel.
He gestured for her to approach, and although she’d been conditioned since birth to despise fallen angels, she obeyed. What choice did she have, after all?
“I am Zhubaal,” he said, when she was a few yards away.
Up close, he was obscenely good-looking in his black leather pants and wife-beater that revealed a massive, muscular upper body, but the malevolence in his gaze made her shiver. Relief that he wasn’t Azagoth was tempered with fear that her soon-to-be mate would be hideous...or that his eyes would be filled with something much worse than cruelty.
“I’m Lilliana,” she replied as steadily as she could, but she cursed the slight tremor in her voice.
“I know.” Zhubaal smiled, and if she’d thought his gaze was fiendish, his smile was a hundred times worse. This was not a male she’d want to piss off. “Tell me, do you feel like a sacrificial lamb?”