The Prison of the Angels

by Janine Ashbless

  Without fanfare, a shimmer of green flowed in a skein across the heavens. I caught my breath as it widened, dancing. It looked like a transparent veil undulating across the jeweled stars, and it made the faintest of whispering, crackling noises.

  My hair unwound itself from its braid and spread out on the air, a dark cloud.

  “Milja?” It was Egan’s voice, all resonance flattened by the snow. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just fine! Over here! Look at the aurora!”

  He waded into sight between the small trees, looking around himself in confusion; up at the laden branches, down at his hands. “I can see every flake,” he said wonderingly. “I could see where you danced in the snow. Three thousand, two hundred and eight steps; that’s how many you took here.” He finally caught sight of me properly. “Ah.”

  I came to him through the snow, feeling the squeak of its compression beneath my bare soles. He was muffled up in all his outdoor gear, and I recognized my discarded clothes in his gloved hand.

  “You’re not cold then?” he said faintly.

  “I’m hot,” I giggled, pulling the garments out of his hand and dropping them aside, then catching his gloves and drawing them off to discard too. I put his hands on my waist so that he could share my body-heat; they felt cool to me.

  “I can count your eyelashes,” he whispered. His pupils were hugely dilated, making his eyes look black and empty.

  “I’m impressed,” I laughed, drawing his hand up to cup my bare breast, where it belonged. “My eyes aren’t even down there.”

  He made a valiant effort to lift his gaze back to my face, but failed. He seemed hypnotized by the sight of my naked body, by the in-curve of my waist and the swell of my breasts. “Oh God. That mead was spiked. There was something in it—I don’t know what.”

  “Angel blood.” I quivered as his fingertips found my erect nipple. “It’s made with blood.”

  “Ah. Kvasir. Shite. What’s it doing to us?”

  “Don’t worry.” I’d been bodily possessed by Azazel back in Ethiopia; I knew how disoriented Egan must feel. I stretched up to brush my face against his, and the press of my body forced him to move his hands around to my back and my ass, skin gliding over skin, testing the slopes and curves like they were snow mounds he dare not deface. “Just enjoy.”

  He made a broken noise in his throat, but his hands were everywhere.

  I brushed my cheek against his, teasing his lips with the promise of my own. His frozen breath had formed a crust of rime on his stubbled jaw and I kissed it away.

  “Milja.” The word was thick with desire. “No.”

  “Don’t you like it?” Pouting, I pulled away just enough to taunt him and he captured my nipple instantly between two knuckles, the tug making sure I could retreat no further. A whimper of pleasure escaped my lips.

  “Don’t,” he warned.

  “Don’t what?” I stoked my fingers across his cold-parched lips, and the memory of Loki’s torn ones rose out of the depths to intoxicate me.

  “Don’t make me…” Egan caught my flowing hair, his touch cold on the back of my scalp and hot all the way down to my aching core. “Christ, you’re beautiful.”

  Oh, you make me beautiful, when you look at me like that. When you touch me like that.

  “Now I know you’re stoned,” I giggled.

  He admonished me for that by pulling me in for a lingering kiss that tingled all over my bare skin and flowed out to join the starlight. My heart leapt.

  “Do you want me now?” I growled as we broke for breath.

  “Now, and forever.”

  Oh, if only. “That’s a long time.”

  “Not long enough.” He stooped to kiss me again but I turned my face away so that his lips found my cheek and my ear and my throat. His breath was the only part of him that felt warm. His winter clothes were padded and bulky so I couldn’t feel the hardness of his body no matter how I pressed up against him. All I had was his hands and his lips and my own bare and slender form beneath them. And I was all but writhing now with frustration.

  “Please, Egan.”

  I turned in his arms, not letting his heavy grip or the pull on my hair stop me, letting it inflame me instead just as my intransigence provoked him. I pushed my ass back against his armored crotch and wriggled, dragging his grasp around to the softness of my exposed breasts. He seized the opportunity in both hands and I arched against him, my giggle half groan.

  “Oh no,” he growled, his hands harder now. My nipples were solid pebbles and he didn’t seem to be able to stop touching them, rolling them, pulling them. Until I writhed my legs apart, that is—when he suddenly loosed one hand and sent it down over my belly, fingers stretched to invade my dark fleece.

  “Yes,” I whimpered, heaving up on tiptoes to let him reach, “yes.”

  “I can’t…”

  “Can’t?” I gasped, as the brush of his fingertip found my burning clit.

  “Can’t stop. When you. Ah, for the love of Christ, Milja.” His groan was ragged. “God help me.”

  “Help you stop?” I folded forward at the waist, plunging my hands out to catch at a fallen trunk masked in snow. My hands sank through the soft chill and gripped the frozen bark beneath, bracing my torso against the push of my spreading thighs. I arched my spine, ass upthrust and trembling. Stop now, Egan, if you can.

  He mumbled an incoherent oath, grabbing my hip with one hand. The other reached for the invitation he could not refuse, the velvet folds and the hot impossible wetness between my open legs. I felt his fingers slide into me for a moment, icy in my tight grip, and I cried out in delight. His thumb brushed the sensitive whorl of my ass and I pushed back hungrily on the broad, callused digit.

  “Ahhh,” he said.

  “Yes—please, Egan, yes.”

  He didn’t say another word, but I felt him fumbling frantically with his own winter clothes.

  “How is it that you are alive?” said a man’s voice.

  I think that, given the circumstances, Egan might be forgiven for his—for once—sub-par survival reactions. I straightened up and looked straight at Harald from the bar, flanked by three other guys. They were all wide-eyed, and I can’t blame them for that either.

  “It’s twenty below zero,” Harald said, using the European Celsius scale of course. His expression was unreadable. “It’s so cold my nose has frozen shut. But here you are with no clothes on. How are you not dead?”

  I was peripherally aware that Egan was desperately scouting around for his dropped gloves, probably so that he could draw his gun without freezing his hands to the metal. I took a stride forward through the snow and my hair rose, crackling about me.

  “Because I am beloved of the gods,” I said, baring my teeth. This was no moment to hold back. “I am under their protection, don’t you doubt that.” At the sound of my voice snow shivered down from the sagging branches all around us, hissing and thumping.

  “Argri konu,” muttered one of the men at Harald’s ear with some anxiety, and two of them took a step back despite the bad footing.

  Harald dipped his head tersely. “You are a völva. That is what I thought.”

  “Is that why you spiked her drink?” Egan asked in a harsh voice.

  “The Suttungmjaðar is for all of our brethren. You are welcome here, völva.” He nodded approvingly.

  I had no idea what the term meant, except that it sounded blatantly feminine. “You drink his blood?” I demanded.

  “The mead of poetry is still brewed by those who know how, as in the days of Kvasir.” He smiled. “Tomorrow we will take you up to the hof, so you can see for yourself, Lady Milja.” For a moment he went down on one knee in the snow—and to my astonishment, his friends all followed suit. Then, signaling them to follow, Harald turned and led them away.

  I watched them go, nonplussed. “They seem to like me,” I said when they were out of earshot. “What’s a völva?”

  “A witch-woman,” said Egan as he appeared at
my elbow. “Like, a seer.”

  Well, it makes a change that someone thinks of that as a good thing.

  He thrust my sweater at me. His face was still flushed. I stared, disappointed.

  “We’re going back to the lodge now,” he growled. “Put your clothes back on before everyone else gets an eyeful.”

  “I don’t think Norwegians worry about that sort of thing.”

  He wouldn’t look at me at all now. “Yeah well, I do.”

  I could have cried. Well, I couldn’t—but the feeling was the same. I took the soggy woolen garment from his hand. “Is it safe letting them take us to their temple?”

  “Safe, no. Safer than trying to make it on our own? Probably.”

  “I saw him, you know. The mead gave me visions. I saw Loki being imprisoned by the gods.” He promised the End of the World, but I’m not telling you that.

  “He’s somewhere close, then?”

  I nodded. “And still alive. Enough for them to be using his blood to get high on.”

  Egan nodded grimly. “That’s just what we need. A bunch of acid-head neo-Vikings.” He stamped his numb feet. “Come on, Milja. Just…go to bed and lock the damn door and try to get some sleep. It’s all going to hit the fan tomorrow.”

  I obeyed his instructions. Well, partly. I locked myself in my pine cell, and hung all my horrible wet clothes up to dry. Then I knelt naked on the rug, bracing my hands flat on the knobbly weave. My shoulder blades were all angles, my head bowed as I whispered to my demon lover. “Azazel, we’re going to Samyaza’s prison in the morning. If you mean to take a ride there inside me, you probably ought to get on board now.”

  He drained the light out of the little room as he arrived behind me. Creeping tendrils of darkness swirled across the floor, climbing the furniture and lapping around my splayed fingertips.

  “Is that your plan? As we did in Lalibela?” His voice was sooty-dark, and if it didn’t sound exactly friendly at least he was talking. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder but I could feel the heat of his body right behind me. I felt his hand too, just the lightest pressure resting on the nape of my neck, and that touch made shivers chase up and down my spine.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “I will not do that.” His fingertips began to descend my back, infinitesimally slowly.

  “Why not?”

  “I had to tear myself out of you. Don’t you remember?”

  “It hurt,” I admitted.

  “It came close to killing you.”

  I was surprised, because I hadn’t thought that Azazel had noticed. He’d seemed to have eyes only for Penemuel at the time, and then we’d been separated and I’d fallen unconscious for hours. I felt a faint clutch of gratitude, even though it was hard to focus my attention on anything but his touch. “Then what do we do? We have to sneak you in somehow. There’s a whole cult up there, and if we don’t have you… But you can’t risk being seen by the Host.”

  “That I know. But I will not risk possession again. You and Avansha…you were the only ones. The ones I thought truly mine. Now only you remain.”

  My heart leapt.

  “And I was wrong about you both,” he added with a cold growl.

  “Oh, Azazel,” I panted miserably. He had been at his lowest ebb when he’d discovered that she’d turned on him and that I’d been unfaithful. No wonder he’d reacted so badly, and no wonder it was still eating a hole in his heart. Angels have a tendency to see everything in black-and-white.

  “Why did she betray me? I was her father. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.” His voice did not rise, but just for a moment the air became too thick to breathe. The inner pane of the triple-glazed window cracked across loudly. Then he asked a question I’d never expected: “Was I a bad father?”

  You were a terrible, useless, absent father. But you’ll never understand that. You nearly burnt her to death when you rescued Penemuel, and you didn’t even notice. “Sometimes you do everything you can and it still doesn’t help,” I said, which was true as far as it went. “Humans are messed-up, Azazel. Nephilim too, for all the same reasons. They do stupid things, and self-destructive things, and sometimes really awful things, and they will always have what seems like a really good reason, to them.”

  “You are insane, all of you.”

  I thought of Roshana, abandoned into a childhood of unimaginable abuse, unloved, afraid, and fighting for her life every step of the way. She had never stopped fighting for more life in over five thousand years. She probably never would have been able to stop.

  “We’re not created beings like you. We’re not just ourselves—we’re everything that ever happened to us too. Everything we’ve ever done. So we can’t see the world clearly, because there’s too much stuff in our heads. We look out at it from inside that mess, and it’s like the hole we’re looking through is so tiny that we can’t even use both eyes at once. We’ve got no perspective. I once had a huge row with my roomie because I hadn’t had any coffee or breakfast that morning. I thought it was because she never washed up the dishes.”

  “But that is a stupid reason to have a row anyway.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What do I do with you?”

  “You forgive us, I guess. Because the only alternative is Noah’s Flood or rains of fire or whatever. And Roshana is dead, so there’s no alternative as far as she’s concerned; if you don’t forgive her it will poison you.”

  “I meant, what do I do with you.”

  I whimpered under my breath. Oh, that touch. That caress—too soft, too slow, too cruel. His fingertips had made their tormenting journey all the way to the small of my back. My spine arched and my hips lifted as the shivers flowed across my skin. I was offering my ass to Azazel just as I’d offered it to Egan, my need so great that it overwhelmed all dignity.

  “He has left you unsatisfied,” Azazel observed. “I can smell his desire and his intent, but not his seed. Not this time.”

  “He had other things on his mind.”

  “Then he is twice the fool.”

  Don’t. Please don’t. “He’s just trying to be a good man.”

  “Oh, I can see you need one of those.” He stooped over me, and my heart leapt as I felt his blunt nudge against my sex. I was wet; so wet. That was Egan’s doing, I thought, as Azazel soaked himself. The two of them were working together, like it or not, realize it or not, to keep me in a state of unbearable, near-constant arousal.

  “Please,” I whispered.

  “Do you think you deserve it?”

  “No,” I sobbed. I don’t deserve it. I just want it so bad.

  He slithered from me, pulling up to threaten my other entrance. “What about this?”

  I changed tactic, in my desperation. “Yes.”

  He pressed for further admission. “Yes what?”

  Oh God. “Yes. I deserve that. I deserve. Gaah… Anything. You want. To do. To me.” I clawed at the rug and groaned again, biting my knuckles. The sensation of being stretched and invaded was incomparable to any other pleasure I craved. My skin felt wet, hot, cold, alive—like a mains current was shorting through it. “Oh shit. Oh. Oh. Yes. Azazel.”

  He felt vast as a planet and he moved with the majestic, inexorable deliberation of worlds colliding. I couldn’t resist. No human flesh could have resisted that. I was being taken, and all I could do was go with him, pushed before him on the bow wave of his surge. His continental thrusts threatened to push my soul out of my body. His breath burned between my shoulder blades. His clutch was spasmodic, his muscles hard and quivering.

  Finally, he left me awash in his great tidal spill.

  But he didn’t make me come. I’m guessing he might have deliberately denied me.

  “Oh please, please, keep going, Azazel, please,” I grunted into the fold of my elbow.

  “Do you deserve pleasure?” He stooped to bite the back of my shoulder. Then I heard a growl. Not a human growl; the noise of a beast, followed by the words, “I can taste S
amyaza on you. How is that?”

  He was still panting from his climax, and I could hardly breathe.

  Oh God, not this. Not now. “They gave me his blood to drink. I didn’t know—I’m sorry. They’re bleeding him.”

  The light in the room tinted an ugly red. “Who did that?”

  I pulled my consciousness up from the depths. “Please, Azazel, don’t go looking. If you start killing people here the Host will see you, and you’ll never get anywhere near Samyaza.”

  “This is an abomination,” he snarled.

  “But he’s alive! We can reach him! Just wait, please.”

  He inhaled harshly, and for a long moment there was silence. “You tell me, then: what is their human ‘reason’ for doing that to him?”

  “Poetry. Inspiration. Vision. I saw him, Azazel—he’s a bit…muddled, but he’s conscious, and he’s here. We will find him.”

  He raked both hands slowly across my ass, and I thought I would fall out of my own skin. “If you say so, then.”

  Thank you. Thank you. Inch by painful inch, we seemed to have crawled back to some sort of accord. An acknowledgement on his part that I could still be trusted, mostly. On my part, a deeper understanding of how lost he was in the world of human emotion. It seemed to be a lesson I had to learn over and over again. “Okay,” I whispered.

  “What do you want now, Milja?”

  “Now?”

  “If I were to do any one thing for you, what would you ask for?”

  “You mean sex?” Just take me again and make me come, I don’t care how.

  “I mean anything. Your paramour was right.” The words were grudging. “I owe you my life—even if you took my daughter’s. It is just that I pay that debt.”

  Then forgive Egan.

  Forgive me.

  I cleared my throat. “There is a debt that I owe.” That’s how you weigh these things, right? “Would you help me repay it, if I asked?”

  “I might.”

  “In Ethiopia. There’s a woman called Deborha, in a prison near Sokota…”

  Left without fulfilment, as soon as I pitched into bed I fantasized that I was back in the snowy dell with Egan; that I was bending over and wriggling my ass in invitation once more. Only this time, we were not interrupted. This time he took me, above and below—and it was everything I’d wanted, everything that he and Azazel had both denied me. I slid into the shallows of sleep, my fantasies becoming dreams, but never quite losing awareness of my body. As my fingers stirred I rose and fell through the surface of consciousness, sometimes directing my imagination, sometimes falling through its rainbow imagery.