you think that I could stand before you as a lover, knowing that I am always below you, that I must submit to your will above my own? Could you accept me thus, never knowing if I was telling you what was in my heart or just what you wanted to hear?”
The anger ran out of me in a rush, my temper deflated. I hadn’t thought about Gabriel’s status in those terms, or really thought about it at all. I’d been so focused on getting him back, and yes, I’d pictured a lot of happy canoodling once we were reunited.
But I didn’t think I would be his mistress. I didn’t think that he would be my slave. It didn’t matter if I treated him as an equal. The fact of his thralldom would always stand in our way.
“Now do you see? You may have kept me from Amarantha, but now my status is a bigger impediment than before. At least before I felt I could speak my feelings to you freely, even if I was unable to act upon them,” he said bitterly.
“You still can,” I said fiercely. “Nothing is going to change between us.”
“Everything already has,” Gabriel said. “And I would advise you not to become too attached to Samiel, for the Grigori will come for him, sooner or later.”
“They won’t take him from me,” I said, and I looked at Samiel as I said it. It was a promise from my heart. “They won’t take you from me. You’re safe here.”
“Do not make promises you cannot keep,” Gabriel advised, and then he walked out of the kitchen.
I rubbed my eyes with my hand. “Really, how many problems can one girl have in a day?”
“Yeah, you totally made an enemy of Focalor and Amarantha, and you broke a bunch of rules by taking in Samiel like a stray dog,” Beezle said.
I turned to see him hanging in the hallway with the phone is his hand.
“Enjoy the show?” I said.
“Not particularly. Contrary to what you may think, I don’t enjoy seeing you hurt,” Beezle said, then he cleared his throat. “So are we having barbecue or what?”
I held my hand out for the phone.
The deliveryman had looked at me funny when he delivered the food, and I realized afterward that while I’d made sure Gabriel was healed by Nathaniel I hadn’t done the same for myself. Most of my aches and pains had cleared up while I slept, but my face was still bruised and my clothes still covered in blood. And my fingers were still missing. I wondered if anything could be done about that, or if I would be a three-fingered lefty for the rest of my life.
After dinner I settled Samiel in for the night on the pullout couch in my living room. He seemed completely overwhelmed by the trappings of civilization. The food—and its method of delivery—was amazing to him. The toilet got flushed about four hundred times in a row once he figured out what purpose the handle served.
He couldn’t stop touching the lightbulbs, the face of the microwave, lifting and lowering the phone from its cradle. His immense pleasure in the sheets and blankets that made up his bed was apparent. I wondered how long he had been living in that cave in the desert.
I turned out the light, resolving to devise some better method of communication with Samiel tomorrow. He could understand pretty much anything, but he had no way of telling me what he wanted. And I wanted to know more about him, about his life before.
Beezle fluttered up next to me. “I’m going to sleep in my nest tonight.”
“Okay,” I said, a little surprised. I’d thought that after my near-death experience he’d want to stay close to me.
He flew out the front window without another word, and I walked slowly down the hall to my own room. I shut the door in deference to Samiel and sat on my bed.
In the past week I’d lost Gabriel, lost Beezle, survived two attacks by Samiel, discovered the bodies of three wolves, found Beezle and Gabriel, killed a giant spider and a leviathan, lost my magic several times, totally screwed up my assignment as faerie ambassador but had averted an uprising in Lucifer’s kingdom, made a new enemy in Amarantha, been assaulted by my fiance, lost part of my left hand, taken on the new responsibility of Samiel and defied all expectation and survived the horrors of the Maze.
I was tired.
I was also alone, and I hadn’t expected to be. I curled up on my bed in my bloodied and torn clothes and waited for the tears to come. But my eyes stayed dry all night long.
18
I MUST HAVE SLEPT FOR A WHILE, BECAUSE THE NEXT thing I knew my eyes were open and my heart was beating a thousand miles a minute. The digital clock on my bedside table showed me that it was past three in the morning.
I wondered if a nightmare had woken me from my sleep. I was sure that I would be carrying the events of the Maze around with me for quite a while.
But I didn’t remember a nightmare. Maybe a noise had woken me. Maybe Samiel had gotten up to use the bathroom and I’d registered the sound unconsciously. I wasn’t used to another living being besides Beezle in the house.
I listened for a moment, but didn’t hear anything. I tried to close my eyes again but now that I was awake my brain was whirling. I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Lucifer’s sword winked at me. It was leaning in the corner of my bedroom next to my closet. I didn’t remember leaving it there, or in fact carrying it into the house at all.
A second later I saw a strange burst of green light outside. I stood up and went to the window. The light was coming from the alley behind my house. I couldn’t see its source from the angle that I stood at, but it flashed once, twice, three times. And it didn’t look like the kind of light that occurred naturally.
I didn’t relish the prospect of yet another paranormal encounter when I’d just gotten home from my big faerie adventure, but I needed to see what was going on in the alley. A lot of normal people lived in my neighborhood and as far as I knew I was the only person equipped to deal with supernatural weirdness.
“Maybe it’s just some witch’s teenager playing at spellcasting,” I mumbled to myself, but I didn’t really believe it.
I pulled on my boots and a sweatshirt, then started for my bedroom door. The sword winked at me again, and I picked it up. As before in the Maze, the snake on the hilt writhed reassuringly under my palm.
I opened the bedroom door quietly and peeked down the hallway. Samiel was a motionless lump under the blankets in the living room. Beezle was outside. Gabriel was downstairs.
I thought briefly of waking Gabriel to come with me, but our recent conversation suddenly put any request that I might make of him in a mistress/thrall light. I didn’t want him to think he had to come at my beck and call. So I left him alone, and went down the back stairs by myself, wincing every time the wood squeaked. I felt like I was a kid sneaking out of the house while my parents slept.
The new door eased open without a sound—thank you, Nathaniel—and I stepped onto the porch. The light was concentrated directly behind an eight-foot-high wooden fence that surrounds my property, and it was almost blinding now that I was right in front of it. I am constantly surprised by the fact that my neighbors never notice all the really obvious signs of magic generated around my house. It just goes to show that people are adept at seeing only what they want to see.
I swung the sword up, both hands wrapped around the hilt, and crept forward carefully through the yard. The dried and frost-tipped grass crunched under the soles of my boots. I sidled up to the fence and peeked through the slats.
There was a . . . thing in the alley. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was a monster, for sure, but like no monster I’d ever seen before. Its skin was a translucent greenish blue. I could see the play of muscle and bone underneath, the pulse of blood as it rushed through its veins. Its face was turned away from me but large batlike ears protruded from the back of its bare, oblong skull.
It squatted on elongated, froglike legs that ended in slender primate feet tipped with sharp claws. The curve of its spine was long as it bent over something on the ground. Wings nestled against its ribs, and the skin
