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Would I be able to go see my mom?
I hadn’t really thought about the time after the rescue at all, my entire thought process revolving around freeing Azazel and making sure he got out and back to Hell. But of course, there was the question of what my future, our future, would look like.
Now that I remembered him, I wanted to be with him again—staying in Heaven while he was back in Hell wasn’t an option. Aside from the legal and official complications of an angel having a relationship with a demon, I didn’t really want to live apart from him. A whole dimension apart, to boot!
So, obviously, my getting back together with Azazel would somehow involve leaving Heaven, and while there wasn’t all that much holding me here, this new realization that my mom’s soul was in Heaven and I could find her and get the closure I hadn’t been able to have meant that I needed to think about the how and the when of me leaving Heaven…
I sucked in a breath and met Naamah’s eyes. “I’ll have to fall, won’t I?”
She nodded slowly. “If you want to be with him, there’s no way around it.”
“How...?”
She hesitated. “You’ll take the blame for the demon prisoner escaping.”
My brows shot up to my hairline, and my voice came out as a squeak. “What?”
“You’ll confess and admit to liberating the demon,” she said quietly, “and they’ll charge you with treason for it.” At my strangled protest, she raised a hand to silence me. “Your life will not be in danger. The punishment for this kind of offense is to strip an angel of their grace, take their wings, and let them fall from Heaven. You’ll plummet to Earth, but Azazel will be there to claim you for his territory immediately. He’s an archdemon now, and he has the power to recruit fallen angels for his domain.”
I stared at her in utter shock. “This was always part of the plan, wasn’t it?”
She nodded, her auburn hair glinting in the light of the eternal sunset streaming in through the window.
“So, Azazel getting caught wasn’t a coincidence? An accident?”
“It happened sooner than we’d planned,” she said, “and the way it went down wasn’t staged. He really did lose control without meaning to, and—against our intentions—before you’d regained your memory. Fortunately, you still remembered in the end. Otherwise, this all would have been for nothing. However, his being discovered at some point was not just inevitable, but—ultimately—necessary for the whole of our strategy to work.”
My mouth fell open, my chest and face flushing with heat. “I can’t believe it. You Hans Gruber’d me!”
Naamah blinked. “Pardon?”
“Like in Die Hard!” I gestured wildly, my left hand accidentally hitting the windowpane. “You know, that movie with Bruce Willis, where he’s at this Christmas party at the Nakatomi Plaza building, and then these bad guys show up and shoot up the place and take hostages, and everyone thinks they’re terrorists, and then the police show up and start negotiations, and one of the bad guys complains that the interference of Bruce Willis’s character has brought the cops in, but then Hans Gruber, the leader of the bad guys, says that the police stepping in is actually part of the plan, because they’ll call in the FBI if they think they’re dealing with terrorists, and the FBI will shut down the power grid for the entire city block because it’s standard procedure when handling terrorists, but that’s exactly what Hans Gruber wants, because only shutting down the power on a large scale like that will disable the last locks on the vault of the Nakatomi Corporation, which is what Hans and his gang are actually interested in because they’re not terrorists at all, they’re just thieves!”
For a long moment, Naamah just stared at me as if she wasn’t sure whether I had lost all my marbles. Then she cleared her throat and said, “Yes, it appears we Hans Gruber’d you.”
“Unbelievable,” I mumbled.
“However,” she added softly, “you won’t need to surrender yourself to the authorities right away. This has all been a lot for you, and I—probably better than anyone—understand what it’s like to change identities and home realms. When I spoke with Azazel as we made this plan, we agreed that it wouldn’t be a good choice to initiate your fall from grace immediately after the rescue, but to instead to give you time to come to terms with the incumbent change and to settle your affairs up here as much as possible. This is why we’re taking every care during the rescue to keep your identity hidden and avoid anyone recognizing you as you help him escape. That way, you’ll have time to get ready and then initiate your fall on your own terms.”
The breath I took was trembling. “So, I’ll have time to look for my mom.”
She gave me a smile tinged with sad understanding. “Yes.”
I exhaled, my chest aching a bit less, relief loosening the band constricting my throat. As much as I wanted—needed—to be with Azazel again, I also craved to see my mom one last time. Because that was what it was—the very last time I’d ever get to see her. Once I fell from grace, she’d be forever lost to me, and I was still not ready to accept that.
Not when my last interaction with her had been tainted with my trying to trick her into selling her soul just so that I could hold on to her a while longer. I hadn’t been able to tell her how incredibly sorry I was for that, how much I regretted making that request and putting her on the spot like that. I had to let her know that I had realized how selfish I’d been in that moment, and that I didn’t resent her for the choice she’d made, and that I understood that the terms of a deal like that weren’t really a choice at all, not when it robbed her of eternal peace.
I needed to tell her how much I loved her, needed to erase the soul-shredding sadness of our last interaction with one that would leave us both on good terms.
And now, with me being here in Heaven as an angel, and her being here as a soul enjoying her afterlife, I’d actually have the chance to achieve this positive closure. I didn’t really need much time to “get my affairs in order” or to “come to terms” with leaving Heaven—I knew what I was getting into when going back to Hell—but this, finding and seeing my mom, this was the one thing I absolutely needed time for before I made the move to fall from grace.
And thinking of which… I frowned. “But won’t it be strange when I show up with a confession after however much time has passed? Depending on how long it will take to find my mom, there could be quite a bit of a delay between Azazel’s rescue and my confession.”
Naamah shrugged. “That won’t be a problem. You’ll simply tell them that your guilty conscience has been eating at you and you cannot stand it any longer, and now you need to confess to clear your conscience. It happens occasionally with criminals; they’d actually get away with their crime, with the authorities none the wiser, but the part of them that still has a moral compass can’t deal with the weight of what they did, to the point where they need to turn themselves in to receive punishment in order to clear their conscience.”
I nodded. That actually made sense. I’d seen a few news reports here and there of criminals surrendering themselves without the police being anywhere close to catching on to them.
“It will all be fine, Zoe.” She patted my hand.
