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Her warm, jeweled gaze had rested on me for a long moment. “She made you happy,” she’d said eventually, all teasing dropped from her voice. “What you’ve told me about her… When you speak of your time together, your soul lights up. And I can see that you’re suffering now that you don’t have her anymore. I don’t want you to go through eternity carrying that wound. So if I can help you get her back, I’ll do it, because your happiness means more to me than my safety.”
I’d wanted to argue, but she’d stubbornly refused to listen.
And so it had been decided. While I’d continued amassing more power in Hell, working my way up to the rank of seraph, then archdemon—so I’d be in a position to claim Zoe when she inevitably fell from grace—and honing my ability to switch between only showing my demon side or my angel side, Naamah had carefully laid the groundwork for my infiltration of Heaven. Using her vast network of favor-bound angels, capitalizing on her reputation for being eccentric and evading her “guards,” she’d managed to locate a gate where she could intermittently control security, and sourced this place in which I could hunker down while in Heaven as well as meet with Zoe.
All of this, the many moving pieces that made up this intricately planned and complex operation, was the reason it had taken years to see Zoe again. If I’d had the means to do it, I’d have stormed Heaven with an army to bring her back immediately after her ascension. Alas, I had to go for a more complicated, surgical approach.
And now I’d nearly ruined our carefully laid plans by brazenly rushing forward where measured steps were advised. As I’d just seen, confronting Zoe with her past—in her current condition—was a surefire way to alienate her. Her mind might not be human anymore, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do unnecessary damage if I shoved the truth of her identity and our shared past onto her without preparation, without subtly testing to see if her memories had indeed been erased…or simply buried.
On that note, some of the darkness of my mood cleared, and I half smiled as I looked to the cave’s exit, where Zoe had vanished.
“One good thing,” I said without taking my eyes off the light shimmering at the opening, behind which the waterfall roared, “came from my ‘ill-advised idea’ to reenact that memory.”
Naamah faced me from where she’d caressed one of the glowing crystals on the walls. “Do tell.”
“Now I know that she does remember,” I said softly, reverently. “That memory, it’s there somewhere. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have reacted the way she did, thinking I’d read her mind. Maybe she can’t put the memory into context, maybe it felt like a vague knowing or déjà vu to her, or maybe she’d dreamed of it, but it’s there. The ascension didn’t delete it entirely.”
And this was it, the big question I’d asked myself for the past years, vacillating between feral hope and abysmal despair, wondering if all that we’d had together, all that we’d been together, was irrevocably lost, its legacy lovingly held close only by me…or if it remained, buried and locked away deep inside her mind, a treasure that only needed to be uncovered, raised from the depths of oblivion.
“It’s all there,” I murmured, hope a flaring beacon in my heart.
And not just her repressed memories. The woman—or rather, angel—who’d walked into this cave to meet me was no stranger, no completely different person. The ascension hadn’t changed who she was in her heart of hearts, hadn’t altered her personality, all those facets of her character that I’d come to love.
She was still Zoe, even if she didn’t know it.
“That is a boon,” Naamah said softly, her expression weighted with gravity. “Don’t squander it.”
“I won’t.” An oath. A promise.
Her lashes lowered over eyes the color of Caribbean seas. “Of all the humans-turned-angels that I have heard of,” she said quietly, “none has ever remembered who they were before their ascension.”
I clenched my jaw, holding on to the spark of hope fueled by the fact that Zoe did remember already, albeit not consciously. “Then I will make her the first.”
CHAPTER 6
Zoe
Shoveling unicorn shit was an excellent way to mull things over, provided the stable box in question was currently empty, which—thank Heaven—it was. Tabris and his ilk had hoofed it out onto the pasture, leaving me blissfully alone to stew in my thoughts without running the risk of being skewered. I just had to keep an eye out for his return, but that wasn’t a problem.
I emptied the shovel full of droppings into the waiting wheelbarrow, wrinkled my nose at the intense stink, and then went back to look for more crap.
If I made it up a rank from virtue to dominion, I wouldn’t have to do this anymore. I’d probably get reassigned to household duties in the main mansion, or maybe be put on messenger runs. I was a fast flyer, and chances were good that talent would be taken advantage of. Not that I minded. I loved flying, and if I got a job that let me spend a lot of time in the air, all the better.
Thinking about moving up in the hierarchy brought my rumination back to the topic that had occupied my thoughts since I’d stormed out of the cave yesterday—that fateful meeting and the inexplicable, unnerving thing that had happened between me and Aziel.
I’d been so mad, so shaken, that I hadn’t even noticed I’d managed a vertical takeoff until after I’d gotten home.
The intensity of my anger and the violation I’d felt had hijacked my mind to the point where it had taken me much, much longer to realize that my mental shields—the ones I’d accused Aziel of breaching—had not been tampered with in the slightest. I’d lain there in bed, fruitlessly chasing the oblivion of sleep, when it had dawned on me that angels couldn’t invade each other’s minds.
It was an indisputable fact that our mental shields were so strong that anything but a violent attack couldn’t penetrate them—and such a brutal shattering of the barriers of the mind would leave the affected angel reeling, mentally broken and bloodied. There were stories from the first war between Heaven and Hell of how prisoners on both sides had had their minds invaded to glean information, only for the investigators to discover that aggressively breaking through an angel’s or a demon’s shields destroyed not only those shields, but also the minds behind them, rendering them useless for finding relevant information.
My mind was very much intact, as were my shields.
There was no way Aziel had somehow snuck beneath my barriers and plucked that memory of the dream from my thoughts.
Which left me with the disconcerting question of what the fuck else had happened last night.
I hadn’t simply imagined that scene between me and Aziel playing out exactly like my dream sequence. Somehow, we’d ended up in that same position, with the identical thrum of power between us, with that dagger and the same actions, and Aziel speaking the exact words as in my dream.
