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“Good luck with that,” I muttered. “She thinks I infiltrated her mind. You saw her—she’s livid. And you don’t know her like I do. She holds a grudge better than a dragon.”
She tapped the tip of the dagger against her lips, a calculating gleam in her eyes. “Well, did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Invade her mind?”
I made a disparaging noise. “Of course not. I’d never violate her like that. And you know that’s not even possible among our kind.”
Angels and demons usually couldn’t play mind tricks on each other since our natural shields were so strong. The only being I knew of who could truly get past shields without violently shattering them was Lucifer.
“Mm-hmm,” she hummed in assent. “I know that. You know that. But does she?”
I frowned at her. “She was aware of it when she was human. I’m not sure if that knowledge made it past the transformation. You should know.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “You’re the one who’s spent years getting to know her up here.”
Naamah cocked her head, grinned, and did a little shimmy. “So I do know her better than you do.”
I buried my face in my hands. Thousands of years of wishing for my mother’s presence in my life, only to be wholly unprepared for how much she liked to poke fun at me. At least now I knew where Azmodea got it from.
“In any case…” Naamah said, drawing my attention back to her. “She’ll come to realize that you didn’t actually read her mind, which will leave her with more questions than answers. And knowing her”—she had the audacity to send me a smug look—“she won’t be able to stop thinking about it, so she’ll decide to investigate. So, yes, she’ll be back, and if she needs a little push, I’ll give it to her.”
“Thank you,” I muttered, caught between irritated and grudgingly grateful.
“No need.” Her smile was brilliant, and I saw echoes of both mine and Azmodea’s in the flash of mirth on her face. “You know I am fully invested.”
“On that note.” I pointed a finger at her. “While I appreciate your dedication to my cause, you will be dedicated from a distance. No more lurking in the background while Zoe is here. You can check in with me later.”
Her smirk was all things unholy. “Prudish, are we?”
“You will respect my privacy,” I growled.
She gave in to outright grinning. “Too easy,” she said with a low laugh, patting me on the cheek. “Riling you up is simply too easy. Azmodea was right.”
I glared at her, but my annoyance was tempered by deep-seated gratitude for all that she’d done for me, for all that she was still doing.
Without her help, none of this would have been possible. If she hadn’t volunteered to be my inside man—or rather, inside angel—in Heaven, facilitating my sneaking in, using her network of contacts to smooth the way for hiding me up here, scouting for the perfect place for me to stay while I “trained” Zoe, and last but not least befriending her in order to keep an eye on her, help her, and, of course, set up our meeting, I wasn’t sure I could have accomplished any of it on my own.
Even before she’d agreed to help, I’d already set my mind on infiltrating Heaven, knowing it was unlikely that Zoe would be allowed on Earth as a newly made angel and I would therefore have to meet her where she was, and I’d started preparing for it—fully aware that it would take me years to get everything set up just right.
For to be able to enter Heaven, I would have to learn to turn myself inside out, to bring to the fore that which I had suppressed for thousands of years, and in turn, repress all the power that had come as naturally as breathing to me.
The idea was as simple as it was difficult. If I could enter Hell and live there among demons, even though only half of me was actually demon, shouldn’t the same be true for Heaven, with regard to my angelic half?
Once that possibility had taken root in my mind, I’d become a man obsessed. Every free hour of every day was spent on nurturing the heretofore dormant side of my angelic heritage, while at the same time relegating the dominant demonic nature of my power to the deepest depths of my being. I had to succeed in suppressing any hint of my darker energy to the point where I would pass as an angel, at least under superficial scrutiny.
And, just as important, my angel side had to be powerful enough that the gates of Heaven would allow me in.
I’d been working on my desperate plan for a while already when I’d mentioned it to Naamah during one of our stolen meetings when she’d visited Earth.
We’d been talking for almost as long as she had first been allowed to come to Earth as part of the deal between Heaven and Hell, Daevi having taken me and Azmodea along on her mission to meet with her daughter.
It had been an unforeseen kindness from Daevi, the fact that she’d insisted on being able to transfer her right to talk to Naamah to me or Azmodea. A way, perhaps, to continue making up for her complicity in keeping our mother from us for two thousand five hundred years. These meetings, then, had been the only way for either of us to catch up with Naamah, to mend old wounds and rekindle a relationship that had been torn apart by tragedy lifetimes ago.
And it had been during one of those talks, after I’d revealed to Naamah what I intended to do, that she’d hit me over the head and glared at me, asking in a reproachful tone, “And you didn’t think to ask me for help? Have you lost all brain cells to grief?”
At my careful reply that I hadn’t wanted to put her at risk, she’d scolded me, “I am your mother. I’d gladly risk my neck for you.”
“Even if it’s only to help me reunite with Zoe?” Because while I could understand her maternal instinct to throw herself between danger and her son, this was not about that. My life was not threatened. Assisting me in this endeavor went far beyond any reasonable wish to see one’s child safe.
