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He nodded and muttered something under his breath that I didn’t catch, then threw over his shoulder as I raced past him, “Tell her to leave the drapes alone!”
Drapes? What was she up to now? The image of a cat climbing up curtains crossed my mind, and I barely suppressed my snicker.
A minute later, I skidded into the wing of the palace that Naamah had appropriated for herself. I followed the sound of voices and barged into what appeared to be a sitting room.
Naamah stood in the center, surrounded by swaths of fabric pooling on the rugs, currently holding something like a large sheet up in front of her, the ends trailing down to the floor. With a calculating gaze at the floor-length mirror opposite her, she threw one end of the long piece of cloth over her shoulder and smoothed the rest down her chest.
“What do you think?” she asked the female angel hovering nearby. “Too much purple?”
“Um…” the angel said with a grimace.
“You’re right.” Naamah tossed the drape aside. “Never been my color. Go get me the curtains from his library, those russet ones with the light blue pattern worked in. Should go well with my eyes.”
The angel did a curtsy and then hurried from the room, leaving Naamah to pick up another pilfered curtain from the floor. “Chaya,” she said with a smile, acknowledging me. “So good of you to stop by. Do you think this one would make a good pillowcase for this sofa?”
“They caught him,” I blurted. “Azazel.”
Naamah froze. For a moment, her gaze pinned me to the spot, then she flicked her hand. A spark of power, and the door behind me fell shut.
“You remember,” she said softly.
I gave a shaky nod.
“All of it?”
“Yes.” My voice was hoarse.
She closed her eyes briefly, heaving a sigh. “We didn’t know if it would ever happen.” When she looked at me again, her smile was filled with brilliant warmth. “It’s good to have you back, Zoe. Though, I suppose you remember our first meeting far better than I. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you since then.”
“They caught him,” I repeated with a crack in my voice, ignoring what she’d said because—hadn’t she heard me the first time? Whatever else there was to say between us, this took precedence! “I’d just figured out that he was a demon, and I had him at sword-point, and then these angels showed up, and they arrested him, and they think I apprehended him, and they even gave me a promotion for it, and I feel so sick, and I had to watch how they beat him up in front of me, but I couldn’t do anything, and then my memories came back, and now he’s in a dungeon somewhere, and they’re going to torture him, and when they’re done with that, they’ll kill him, and we have to get him out, we have to make a plan, you have to help me because I don’t know how?—”
“Zoe,” she interrupted me. “We don’t need to make a plan.”
I shut my mouth with an audible click and stared at her.
“I already have one,” she added with a smirk. At my no doubt baffled expression, she added, “Did you honestly think I’d set up my son’s infiltration of Heaven without making a contingency plan for the possibility he might be discovered and taken into custody?”
“Uh…” I swallowed. “That makes sense.”
“First, you need to sit down and calm yourself.”
She took me by the elbow and steered me over to one of the divans. With a flick of her hand, she summoned a bottle with golden liquid and a glass. I blinked as she poured me some and handed me the drink.
“Amrit?” I asked, staring at the swirling amber in the tumbler.
“For your nerves.”
Eight years up here as an angel, and I’d never tasted it. My one and only experience with the potent liquor had been that fateful moment at the Fall Festival in Hell, when Lucifer had made me drink an entire cup—as a human, for whom this drink was most definitely not intended.
My hand shook as I kept regarding the contents of the glass as if eyeing a snake.
“Ah,” Naamah said from where she sat on the sofa opposite me. “Right. I heard you had a rather unpleasant experience with it before.”
“Because your father thought it a good joke to drug me in front of his entire court,” I said with a clear undercurrent of resentment in my voice.
Naamah grimaced. “I won’t excuse his behavior. There is a streak of cruelty to him that I don’t condone. I’ll just say that he…was different in my youth. I know you might find it hard to believe, but he was a good father. Attentive, loving, with a penchant for mischief that was much like my own. We’d often laugh together.”
The way she talked about Lucifer echoed how Lilith had once described him, pointing to a less vicious version of him in the past. Not for the first time, I wondered what he’d truly been like back then, before eons of ruling Hell and having to kill all softer aspects of himself had warped him into something darker. I simply could not imagine him as anything but the cruel Devil he was now.
