Page 29 of Grim Tidings

“Didn’t want you to feel bad about that erection you kept digging into my thigh.”

His eyes flash. “You’re a shit liar, Darcy.”

This entire conversation has been a variation of a lie, so. No. I think I’m pretty good at it, actually.

“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” I tell him.

He huffs a humorless laugh and turns to look down the street. The wind dances through his curls, and the sun highlights all the sharp angles of his face. He really is unbearably handsome.

“How old are you?” he asks, his eyes faraway.

“I’m twenty-seven.”

He shakes his head. “No. How long have you existed?” He gestures toward me with his milkshake. “When did you die?”

I swallow around the ash that fills my mouth. It’s still difficult for me to think of that day. “I died in 1918.”

Gabriel exhales a harsh sound. It sounds like an expletive, in a language I don’t understand. “Are you serious?”

“What?”

He collapses back in his chair, the metal protesting against his weight. “There’s no way you’re this naive.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve only done this for a handful of decades, and you think you know how to outsmart the system?” He points at me with his man-gled milkshake. “The department has existed for millennia, Darcy. There is no changing the script. You don’t get a do-over. When they find out you’re deceiving them, they will find you, and they will punish you.”

“You’re only saying that because you haven’t tried.”

His face hardens.

“Ask me how old I am,” he says quietly.

There’s a demand in his voice. Raw power that scrapes its way out of his throat and makes my bones vibrate.

I keep my mouth shut. Maybe it’s some vague sense of self-preservation making a rare appearance. At long last.

“Ask me,” he says again.

Beneath the table, Tater Tot eases his head onto his paws, watchful and still. The air around us sparks with Gabriel’s magic, a powerful force that rises like the tide. It feels inevitable. All-consuming.

“How old are you?” I manage, my voice no louder than a whisper.

Behind him, the shadow of great, powerful wings rises against the brick wall. They don’t explode from his back the way they did in the alleyway, but I feel the sense of them. The knowledge that they could, with a simple roll of his shoulders.

“I was there when they built the temples,” he says, his voice low and rumbling. “When they brought their marble to the summit and carved their intentions into stone. I was there when men fell to their knees and begged the gods for salvation. But not even the gods could protect them from what was to come.”

His face is intense, his features severe like they’ve been carved from the very marble he speaks.

“The Mayans?” I breathe.

His face pinches. “What? No.”

“Mesopotamia?”

“No,” he says again. “I was—”

“Egypt, then.”