Page 24 of Property of Prophet

“Not even a little.”

“Good.” She opens it anyway.

We work through the pages of angels painted with halos, white robes, and pretty fucking wings, men with peaceful faces staring down from clouds while Lily reads names and ranks aloud. Seraphim. Cherubim, Thrones. Dominions. Half of it sounds made up, and the other half feels wrong enough to piss me off.

“Anything?” Lily asks.

I shake my head. “Nothing.”

She turns another page. Moe wings. More halos. More men who look as though they’ve never thrown a punch in their lives.

“If I looked like any of these assholes, don’t tell me.”

Her mouth twitches. “I think you’d look lovely in a robe.”

“Careful, Doc.”

That gets a quiet laugh out of her, and for a few minutes we keep going, her reading while I wait for something inside of me to move.

Nothing does.

Page after page, name after name, and I’m starting to think we’re chasing bullshit while I reach across to turn another page and find the plate.

I know the formation before I know why, and my hand begins to shake.

Not a tremor. A fucking shake hard enough to rattle the page between my fingers, and Lily’s hand comes down over mine before I can get it under control.

The second her palm covers my knuckles, some of the violence goes out of it. “Prophet?”

I stare at those wings. At the men, no angels, fuck! Whatever they are. They are standing shoulder to shoulder. Something inside of me is pulling toward them so hard it hurts.

“I know them.”

“You remember them?”

“No.” I swallow. “That’s the fucked up part. I don’t remember a single one of them, but I know what it feels like to stand there.”

“With them?”

“Yeah.” My fingers tighten beneath hers. “With my brothers.” I continue, “It’s not a memory. A memory gives you something you can use. A face, a name, something that happened. This is...”

I look down at the engraving again. “My body knows it, but my head doesn’t.”

“That’s still something.”

“It’s not enough.”

“No,” Lily says, softly. “But it’s more than you had yesterday.”

Her hand comes up and cups my jaw, and before I’ve worked out what she’s doing, Lily closes the last few inches between us. Her mouth hits mine soft and warm, and every thought in my head disappears.

I don’t move at first. I’ve spent weeks holding myself back from this woman, weeks making damn sure I never took something she wasn’t ready to give, and now she’s the one kissing me.

Then her fingers slide into my hair.

Fuck... careful.

My hand closes around her waist, and I pull her against me, not hard enough to scare her, but enough for her to know exactly how badly I’ve wanted this. She makes a small sound into my mouth and something buried under weeks of missing memories wakes up hungry.