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“Why?” I choked out, equally quiet.
“I promised him,” was her soft answer, and it struck me like an electric shock. “I owe him that much.”
“Wha—” I was about to ask, but she’d already let me go and retreated back to her place next to Gabriel, her eyes downcast and her expression pained.
She’d promised him? But I’d thought she and Azazel had agreed to give me time! I’d thought I’d explained it to him. He’d said he understood. That I could take all the time I needed, that he’d wait for me.
Confusion and hurt churned within me, hot pokers of betrayal once more lancing my heart. My eyes burned, and the shapes of Naamah and Gabriel blurred.
Metal clinked as someone unlocked the manacles around my wrists, but I barely noticed. A shove between my shoulder blades pushed me toward the gate, now glowing with that telltale shimmer. Before I climbed the steps leading up the dais, Raphael approached me, his face mercilessly cold.
“Wings out,” he said with lethal quiet.
Trembling all over, I resisted the instinct to disobey and keep my wings hidden and protected. I remembered with crystal clarity how Azazel had forced Inachiel’s wings out when he’d refused to make them show. I had no doubt that Raphael would do the same and that it would hurt like hell.
They’d be taken from me anyway.
Tears spilling from my burning eyes, I extended my wings, casting one last look at the sparkly white that I’d never get to see again. I’d grow new ones in Hell, yes. It wasn’t like I was losing the ability to have wings entirely.
But these…these were the ones that had marked, more than anything, my transition from human to more. They’d defined my identity for the past years, the promise of immortality in those snow-white feathers, of strength and speed and power. They’d given me the means to fly, to soar through the sky like I’d always fantasized about when I’d been a human. They were mine, as much a part of me as my legs, my arms…my heart.
A sob racked my body as Raphael reached out, his hand glowing with power. “I hereby take from you, Chaya, the spark of divinity that binds you to the Lord. I excise from you the light of His love, His warmth, His protection. You are no longer welcome in His realm. I revoke your right to draw strength from His power, and I take from you, with His might, the wings with which He has blessed you.”
His hand glowed brighter and brighter, and then a flash of light shot out of his palm and directly into my chest. Pain seared through me, and I screamed, my back bowing. It felt like acid pouring through my veins, stealing all warmth, all light, every shred of happiness within me.
My lungs seized, my muscles spasming, and then my wings went up in flames.
My screams turned to shrieks, the pain so debilitating that I couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t feel anything but the horrible, corrosive burn scorching all the nerves in my wings and down into my back.
The acrid smell of seared flesh and smoldering feathers permeated the air, filling my lungs with every hurting breath. I fell to my knees and wept, the sudden lack of weight at my back like a knife to the heart.
Someone hoisted me up to my feet again, and my tear-blurred gaze swung around without focus. Horrifying pain still throbbed between my shoulders, echoed by an emptiness within me that hurt on a soul level.
I couldn’t feel this realm anymore. Before, there’d always been a subtle connection to this world, to every single part of this land, from the stones to the trees to the animals that wandered the plains, not to mention to the steady flow of divine energy underneath it all, but now I only felt a hollow distance.
It was as if someone I loved had just thrown me out into the cold, leaving me to watch them through a tightly sealed window, yearning for their warmth.
I shuddered, and my stomach turned over.
“Go now,” Raphael said, “and bear the penance for your crime.”
And before I could take another breath, the angel behind me shoved me through the gate.
Cold darkness rushed in from all sides, along with pressure so intense I screamed again, yet no sound came out of my mouth. A second later, light flashed, and I hurtled out of the gate—though not to stumble onto the ground on the other side, no.
I fell.
Because there was no ground.
A startled cry escaped my throat as I whirled through the air without any sense of direction, glimpsing high above me the shimmer of the gate that got smaller and smaller as I plummeted.
What the fuck?!
That gate hung in the sky! None of the other portals I’d seen had ever been like this, all of them anchored to the floor in some way, like a regular door.
This gate opened directly into the air hundreds of feet above the ground.
The ground that was rapidly coming closer.
