AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I cleaned up the mess of shards on the floor, only cutting myself three times, and then finally stepped into the shower to get the poop off my face and out of my hair.
What felt like an hour later, I emerged clean and relieved from the bathroom, properly dressed and with my hair doing wild, wavy things while it dried. I paused at the sight of Naamah rifling through Bifiel’s drawer on her side of the room.
“Snooping is frowned upon, you know,” I said with a half-suppressed grin.
“Eh.” Naamah shrugged with one elegant shoulder, squinting at Bifiel’s diary. “Let them frown. It’s not my responsibility to fix others’ faces.”
I chuckled under my breath. Naamah was…odd, in a refreshingly good way. She seemed to operate a bit outside of the usual angel hierarchy. A seraph in terms of power, she apparently had no interest in acquiring and holding lands or territory, commanding others, or supervising lower-ranking angels.
Nominally, she belonged to Archangel Gabriel’s domain, but she didn’t appear to be bound the same way that most other angels were. She came and went as she pleased, flitting from one territory to the other, and she didn’t seem to have any tasks or work assigned to her.
I blinked and glanced around, then eyed her. “Did you ditch your guards again?”
A wicked little smile stole onto her face. “Not my fault if they can’t keep up.”
“Those poor guys,” I said with a low laugh. “They’re going to get an earful from Gabriel. Again.” At the last word, I shot her a dark look.
Naamah brushed that off. “If he wants to keep an eye on me, he needs to train his people better. Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to shake them so easily if they were actually good.” She sighed and dropped Bifiel’s diary back into the drawer. “Besides, I need some privacy every now and then.”
Naamah’s unasked-for bodyguards—usually a team of two angels—trailed her around Heaven wherever she went, a fact that had to do with her odd status in angel society. From what I’d heard, she was kind of a big deal. A pardoned demon, ascended from Hell and turned into an angel, all part of a deal struck with Lucifer, her father, in order to stop Armageddon.
Apparently, Lucifer had gone ballistic after his beloved soul mate, Lilith, a human woman he’d made his queen in Hell, had been killed by a conspiracy of rogue angels and demons. The details were a bit fuzzy, as I’d had to piece all this together from hushed accounts by other angels, but rumors had it that Lilith had been the linchpin of a contract for a truce between Heaven and Hell, and once she’d been killed, all bets had been off and Lucifer had unleashed his forces onto Earth in retaliation.
Until Heaven had offered him a new deal—a pardon for his favorite daughter, Naamah. Her entry to Heaven would heal her broken mind, and in exchange for that, Lucifer would accept a new truce and call his forces back to Hell.
So here she was, living among us like some kind of celebrity. She enjoyed more freedom than other angels and wasn’t constrained by duty and expectations, but her being integral to the truce between Heaven and Hell meant that the authorities had a vested interest in her safety.
Hence the bodyguards.
The concept had been weird for me at first. Why would she need bodyguards in Heaven? Shouldn’t this place be safe for her? After all, angels didn’t kill each other. We might bicker and quarrel, but in general, any conflicts were solved by either a fight—bloody but nonfatal—or a competition.
But then I’d found out about the rogue angels who’d murdered Lilith…in order to provoke Lucifer and restart the war between Heaven and Hell. The authorities had weeded out and exiled the angels involved in the conspiracy, burning off their wings and throwing them down to Earth, where—so the rumors went—they’d been quickly picked up by demons sent by Lucifer, to be hauled into Hell to face a fate that would make them wish they’d simply been executed.
Lucifer was notorious for the kind of bloody and cruel revenge he liked to exact.
On Heaven’s side, apparently the whole conspiracy incident had made Metatron and Shekinah—the angel pair sitting at the top of the hierarchy—paranoid enough to make sure that Naamah wouldn’t be unprotected. Just in case they hadn’t found and neutralized all the angels who might like to try to repeat history.
Of course, the guards also served as a means to keep tabs on what Naamah was doing, where she went, whom she met. It was clear that Heaven didn’t fully trust her, and viewed from a security standpoint, she was indeed an uncertain liability.
Part of the deal with Hell was that Naamah got to meet with a proxy of Lucifer’s on Earth once a month as a way to prove her continued well-being. Naturally, this meant there was a somewhat uncontrollable information leak between Heaven and Hell. Naamah could be passing on knowledge to her contact from Hell, which was why she wasn’t privy to classified information and remained under such tight surveillance.
Surveillance she strained against and broke free of quite regularly.
Her ability to lose her security detail was remarkable, as was the lack of consequences she faced for it. As much as Heaven wanted to control her, no one dared lay a finger on her. Given what I’d heard from others about Lucifer’s wrath during the almost apocalypse, I could well imagine that the higher-ups would rather not risk his fury by harming the one person who ensured the continued truce between Heaven and Hell.
Naamah, on her part, was fully aware of how much she could get away with. She flouted Heaven’s rules and social norms with a streak of mischief and a fascinating disregard for propriety, which had earned her a reputation for being eccentric and unpredictable. She’d managed the feat of being simultaneously admired and regarded with suspicion.
In short, no one in Heaven really knew what to do with her.
“Your roommate is the most boring angel,” she now said, shutting the drawer. “No deep, dark secrets? No forbidden desires? Never stepping a toe out of line? Just a perfect facade with nothing of interest behind it.”
“That’s Bitchiel for ya.” I shrugged.
The corners of her mouth twitched up, and her eyes sparkled. “Bitchiel,” she mused, then chuckled. “Is she still giving you grief?”
“Only every time she manages something I don’t, or whenever I ‘besmirch the name of angel’ with my clumsiness.” I made appropriate air quotes. “So…pretty much every day.”
“Want me to tie her shoelaces together? Or cover her bed with itching powder?”
