“I’m afraid.”
I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until J.B. put his arms around me and pulled me close. His lips touched the spiky strands on top of my head before he rested his chin there.
“I don’t know how to keep you safe,” he said.
“I don’t think you can.” I sighed. “And it’s not your job, anyway.”
“I can’t stay here. I have too many duties,” he said. “You need more help than just Beezle and Samiel.”
“Jude’s coming back for a while. And… Nathaniel’s staying with Samiel.”
“What? Why the hell are you letting him stay instead of sending him back to Lucifer?”
I pushed lightly on his arms so he would release me. Then I explained what happened that day while I put an omelet together. I split the omelet in half and plated one for each of us along with buttered toast. Despite his earlier protestations, J.B. seemed happy to eat once the food was in front of him.
After a while he spoke.
“Whatever Azazel’s doing, it sounds like it’s a lot bigger than rebelling against Lucifer. Does he have some kind of agreement with the vampires? What could he possibly be making that they want?”
“Those better be rhetorical questions, because I definitely do not have the answers. I was hoping Chloe would look at the notes in the binder and see if they made any sense to her.”
“Good idea,” J.B. said. “I’ll send her over here tomorrow.”
“You don’t want to take the binder with you?” I asked, surprised.
“There is some flak coming down from upper management about using Agency resources for non-Agency problems.”
“When have you ever abused your authority?” I asked. “You’re the straightest arrow I’ve ever met.”
“The official decision on the memory-stealing episode is that it was a fallen matter and I should not have gotten the Agency involved.”
“That’s stupid,” I said. “The presence of the lost souls should have automatically made it the provenance of the Agency.”
“I’m getting the impression that the higher-ups want to avoid entangling the Agency any further with outside courts. Especially after the attack in November.”
“More politics,” I said disgustedly.
“Like I said, you can be as contemptuous as you want, but it affects you, too,” J.B. said. “They can’t avoid the fact that you’re the child of a fallen angel, but they can punish you if you step out of line.”
“What are they going to do? Fire me?” I asked. “I’ve been looking for a way out of this crappy gig ever since I was fourteen.”
“If you push them hard enough, they’ll send the Retrievers after you,” J.B. said.
“Don’t tell me you believe that fairy tale about Agency bogeymen,” I scoffed.
“It’s not a fairy tale,” J.B. said.
I stared at him. “Are you trying to tell me there really is a superspecial team of assassins for Agents gone bad?”
J.B. nodded. “And since you’ve already got plenty of enemies after you, let’s not give the CEO an excuse to sic the Retrievers on you.
“So, the first thing is that you’ve got to pick up your workload again. I could get away with giving you a week off because you were grieving, but I can’t keep passing your soul pickups to other Agents. A few of them are already grumbling, and if the grumbles get too loud, it will attract attention.”
“Okay,” I said. The last thing I felt like doing was escorting the souls of the dead, but I didn’t want J.B. to get any more grief than he was already getting.
“And if you want Chloe to help you, it’s going to have to be on her off-hours.”
“I think she’s been spending a lot of her off-hours time here, anyway,” I said, smiling.
J.B. gave me a questioning look.
“Apparently she’s been pursuing Samiel,” I said.
J.B. blinked. “Really?”
“Yes, very aggressively.”
He smiled, and that smile transformed his face. He was under so much stress that I hardly ever saw him without knit brows and downward mouth.
I was reminded of how handsome he was, and hard on the heels of that thought was the memory of Amarantha’s servant Violet pursuing J.B.
He was king of the court now, and he probably had faeries throwing themselves at him to be the next queen. I felt a little jealous, and then I reminded myself that I was in no position to feel that way. I’d never considered J.B. as a lover, and even if I did, it would be impossible to avoid feeling like I was betraying Gabriel.
My life was complicated enough.
J.B. watched me very soberly, and I wondered how much of what I was thinking was evident on my face.
Quite a bit, it seemed.
“You know,” J.B. said carefully. “Someday you will stop missing him quite so much.”
“I’ll never stop missing him no matter how much time has passed,” I said.
“Okay,” he conceded. “But one day you might realize you don’t want to spend the rest of your life alone, or that maybe you’d like your baby to have a father.”
“I don’t…” I started.
J.B. held up his hands. “All I’m saying is when that day comes, whenever that day may be, please consider me.”
I shook my head. “J.B. You can’t wait forever for the possibility that I might choose you.”
“I’m hoping I won’t have to wait forever,” he said steadily.
“I don’t deserve you,” I said.
“Probably not,” he replied, and he put his hand over mine.
Which was how Nathaniel found us when he knocked on the back door and walked in without waiting for an answer.
7
“EXCUSE ME,” NATHANIEL SAID TIGHTLY, TURNING BACK to the door.
I felt guilty, and I didn’t know why, which made me angry. I pushed away from the table and stood.
“What did you want?” I asked.
Nathaniel paused at the door, not looking at me. “Only to see if you were well.”
“I’m well,” I said. “And in the future, please wait for me to answer the door before coming in.”
“I apologize. Everyone else is permitted to come and go. I presumed it would be acceptable for me to do as well.”
“It’s not.”
“I understand,” he said, and went out again.
I slumped back into my chair, my adrenaline crashing.
“Never mind the stress of being hunted by all and sundry. I may not survive the stress of having Nathaniel in the house,” I muttered.
Beezle pushed the back door open and flew in. He gave an exaggerated double take when he saw my hair.
“Speak and you die,” I said.
“What?” Beezle said. “I was going to ask if you made an omelet for me.”
“Really?” I said skeptically.
“Well, no, I was going to say it looks like you took a hacksaw to your head, but I suspect such comments would be frowned upon in your current condition.”
