AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My eyes flicked between the two, my breath stuck in my lungs at the tense undercurrents in the room. I’d had no idea that they knew each other—I’d never seen them meet before, and neither of them had ever mentioned the other, but it was obvious there was some sort of history here.
“Well,” Naamah said blithely, flashing a carefree smile. “Guess I’m going to take my leave, then.” She strolled past me, stopping briefly next to him. Leaning closer, she murmured, “Far be it from me to keep you.” Power humming softly around her, she continued on her way, turning to walk backward a few paces, her gaze on me. “See you soon, Chaya. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“That gives me permission to do anything, you know.”
“Exactly.” She winked at me, laughed softly, and then sauntered out.
Azrael looked over his shoulder, watching Naamah leave, his expression pinched, almost as if in pain. He stared after her long enough that all sorts of questions popped up in my brain, but then he finally faced me again.
“Lord Azrael,” I said swiftly, going to one knee to give him the proper greeting for his rank.
He might be a weird, special case among our kind, what with him being the Angel of Death and sort of everywhere and nowhere at once, blessed with the power to transcend laws of time and place and not bound to a particular territory in Heaven, and we might have a casual mentor-mentee relationship, but nominally, his status was that of a seraph, and he seemed to be a stickler for rules.
He acknowledged my show of respect with a nod, the light of the overhead lamps glinting on his black hair. As his silver-gray eyes studied me, I realized with a start that he and Aziel looked quite a bit alike. I’d only seen Azrael maybe a dozen times over the course of the past years, and his last visit had been a while ago, so last night, when looking at my new combat coach, I hadn’t noticed the similarities. But now, with the memory of Aziel fresh in my mind, the resemblance between them was glaringly obvious. Was there some kind of relation?
“Do you have a son?” I asked before I had time to think. “Or a brother?”
Azrael froze. He always held himself with a certain rigidity, his poise reflecting the rather austere nature of his character, but now he became inhumanly still. Which, duh, he wasn’t human. All of us had this uncanny ability to go even more unnervingly motionless than the most skilled cat in hunting mode.
“Why?” he asked with lethal quiet.
Too late, I realized that bringing up this question would lead to inquiries from his side, which would then lead to Aziel. And I had promised not to tell anyone about the fact that Aziel was training me.
Eep, now it was my turn to freeze.
I scrambled for a response that would save my ass. “I just…I thought I saw someone the other day who looked a lot like you.”
His probing gaze made me fidget. “Who?”
“Um, I didn’t catch his name. I only, like, saw him in passing.”
“Where?”
Oh, God, I felt like I was strapped to an interrogation chair. “Uh, while I was…doing that…messenger run, uh, to the border.” I waved my hands in the general direction of the neighboring territory.
Of course, I hadn’t actually done a messenger run, but Azrael didn’t know that, and I just hoped that saying so would direct his attention to somewhere else than where I’d truly been. Seeing unknown angels in passing was a common thing—there was always loads of traffic between territories, and we honestly couldn’t know every single angel in Heaven.
“So, about my human life,” I said with emphasis, not so skillfully deflecting from the topic at hand. “Any insight? Revelations? Wanna finally tell me who I used to be?”
He considered me for the span of two heartbeats, maybe weighing whether to continue his interrogation. “We’ve been over this,” he said eventually, settling on letting my change of topic slide. “I’m not at liberty to tell.”
I grumpily kicked at a pebble on the floor. It was his standard answer to my standard questions. Years upon years of him coming to check in on me, and he steadfastly refused to talk about my human past. “Can’t blame me for asking,” I murmured.
“I don’t,” was his pragmatic reply.
I couldn’t recall how many times I’d asked him whether I’d someday remember my life before ascension, but his response was always the same—no angel-made had ever regained their memories, the transformation did a complete mind wipe, and I shouldn’t hope for something that went against the laws of nature.
“Are you well?”
His question pulled me out of my morose musing.
He always asked me that when he came to see me, but this time, his gaze lingered on the blood-tainted hole in the fabric of my shirt.
I glanced down at my body. “Oh, this? Yeah, no, that’s nothing. Regular work-related injury, already healed. No biggie.”
He frowned. “You are prone to accidents.”
“The way I see it, accidents are prone to me.” I laid a hand on my chest.
