“I’ll do it.”
AZAZEL WATCHED THE CONFUSION ABOUT him with a calm he hadn’t felt in years. He wasn’t going to think about when, or how, or why. He distrusted prophecies. But he knew this was meant to be.
The assembly room had emptied quickly after Rachel’s blunt announcement, with Allie and the women spiriting her away and the other Fallen heading off. Only Michael and Raziel remained. Michael, the warrior, the loner, who seldom mated and subsisted on the bare minimum of the Source’s blood. He had that lean, hungry look, his hair shaved close, his muscled, tattooed arms tight with anger. Raziel was looking equally disturbed, ready for another kind of battle. Azazel knew what was coming.
“You needn’t bother trying to talk me out of it,” he said. “The decision has been made.”
“You can change your mind,” Raziel said. “We’ve barely made do without you for most of the last seven years. I don’t know what we’d do if you died.”
“You have a death wish,” Michael said in a rough voice before Azazel could argue. “We’ve all seen it.”
Denying it would be useless, even if he could. And these were the two men he trusted most in the world. “
“Don’t change the subject,” he said. “Battle is in my nature; it’s my purpose in life. Yours is to rule.”
“Not any longer. Raziel rules, and rules wisely. I have another role to play, and I no longer fight it. As for my death wish—it would be useless to deny it. Sarah’s death was … too much. I had no warning, no preparation, and I was tired of it all. But I’ve changed my mind.”
“Because you’ve fallen in love with a demon?” Raziel arched an eyebrow. “Forgive me if I find that difficult to believe.”
“She’s no more a demon than I am. Which I suppose is a possibility, if you read certain scrolls,” he added with uncharacteristic humor. He had begun to find certain things oddly amusing recently, which still managed to astonish him.
“That still begs the question. Are you telling us you’re in love with the woman whose death you’ve been seeking for the last seven years?”
“No. Of course not. But there remains a connection, for good or ill, and it’s our only hope.”
“And if you die?” Michael said.
Azazel shrugged. “Then I die. I’ve lived an endless life; I’ve been on earth for millennia. I am not afraid of death, even if I no longer embrace it.”
“What if death is some eternal damnation we haven’t figured out?” Raziel demanded.
“Even then. But I doubt that will be the case. I think for those of us who are cursed, our fate will be an eternal nothingness. With just enough awareness to recognize it.”
“It sounds like hell to me,” Michael grumbled.
“It sounds peaceful,” Azazel said. “But it is not my time, and won’t be. We will mate and bond, and Uriel will know, and it will drive him insane with worry.”
“And you’re willing to put up with her being your bonded mate? Even if your feelings are, shall we say, lukewarm, you know as well as I do what bonding does to a female. She’ll be tied to you, and there won’t be any escape.”
“I know.”
“She’ll be taking Sarah’s place,” Michael said with devastating bluntness, going straight for the heart, the warrior whose arrow was true.
“I know,” Azazel said again. “But she will not serve as the Source. As far as I can tell, she has no powers left to her—she’s fully human. And if we find we are not compatible, there are endless jobs I’m needed for away from Sheol. I don’t anticipate her being a problem.”
“All right,” Raziel said finally. “Just make sure you don’t drain her. It would solve my problem, but Uriel might think it would get in the way of a happy marriage.”
“The corpse bride,” Michael said with a dark laugh. “Why not?”
Azazel said nothing.
THE PROBLEM WITH EAVESDROPPING WAS that you never heard good stuff, like someone talking about your intelligence and beauty, or hell, even something boring like the weather. You were more than likely to hear something you’d be better off not hearing. Otherwise they would have said it to your face.
I was being ridiculous, of course. Why should I think he’d fallen in love with me, simply because he’d announced I was his chosen? I imagined a chosen mate in this clearly patriarchal society was simply whomever he fancied who would hold still long enough. The whole thing about poisoned blood was bogus. In fact, the whole thing about blood was probably bullshit. It had nothing to do with us.
Except that I remembered in the darkness, in the rain, I’d bit him, tearing his skin, licking at his blood. Why? I was no blood-eater. It apparently was a curse for the Fallen alone, yet I’d sought his out. Maybe I was simply kinky when I was so aroused that I couldn’t think. Anything was possible, considering I had never been so aroused in my life.
It would serve him right if I bit him again, but I doubted he’d care. In fact, I thought, bored forbearance was the way to deal with things, since that was most likely how he’d handle it. So what if I’d experienced astonishing pleasure with his lean, beautiful body? I could control my own reactions. He could do anything he wanted, and I’d simply think about something else.
It would drive him crazy.
“What are you grinning at?” Allie demanded, coming up beside me. “You look positively wicked.”
“We all have wicked thoughts,” I said serenely, moving away from my listening post. In truth, it hadn’t been my fault. I’d simply gone in search of some quiet, finding it in the low-slung chairs out on one of the decks. I hadn’t
