“You don’t even know why I’m here.”
“There is only one reason a Dominion visits a Power, Verchiel. Why any of the others would visit us, either, if they bothered at all.” Aramael ran his finger down the title on the spine of a massive volume, paused, and moved on.
Too heavy—in the literary, as well as the literal, sense. “So, yes, I do know why you’re here.”
Verchiel fell silent for a moment, then admitted, “I’d never thought of it quite like that. I suppose it is rather obvious.”
“Rather.”
“You’re right, of course.”
“Of course. And I’ve told you, I’m not doing it. I’ve only just come back from the last hunt. Find someone else.”
“There is no one else.”
Aramael met the other angel’s serene, pale blue gaze for a moment before he turned away. “Ezrael is in the garden. Send him.”
“There’s more to it this time. Mittron wants you to go.”
Aramael caught back an unangelic curse and pulled a book from the shelf. “I’m tired, Verchiel. Do you understand? I’m tired, and I’m empty, and I’ve just finished four consecutive hunts. I’m not doing it. Send Ezrael.”
“There’s a woman—”
“A what?” He pushed the book back into place without glancing at its title and eyed her narrowly. “What does a mortal have to do with this?”
“She—well, she—” Verchiel floundered, avoiding his eyes. Her hands fluttered in a way that reminded him of a trapped bird. Any hint of serenity had vanished. “She’s important to us,” she finished.
“And?”
“We think the Fallen One might attack her.”
He wasn’t sure if he found it more unsettling or annoying that she seemed to have lost her capacity to give him a straight answer. “And?”
“We’d like you to watch over her.”
That was straight enough.
“You want me to what?”
“To look out for her. Make sure that the Fallen One doesn’t reach her—”
“I’m not a Guardian.”
“I know.” Verchiel’s hands fluttered faster. “We know.
“We don’t expect you to protect her in any other way, just to keep . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“I am not a Guardian,” he repeated. He turned his back on her and glared at the row of books, but their titles had become a meaningless jumble of letters.
“We know that.”
“Then you shouldn’t be asking.”
Verchiel muttered something that sounded like “I know that, too,” but when Aramael glanced over his shoulder, she had closed her eyes and begun massaging her temple. He regarded her, toying with the idea of asking her to repeat herself, but decided to let it go. Whatever she’d said had no bearing on a conversation he would prefer not to be having in the first place. A conversation he now considered finished. He turned his attention to the bookshelf once more.
She didn’t leave.
Long seconds crawled by.
Aramael’s impatience surged and he rounded on the Dominion. “I don’t know why this woman is so important to you, Verchiel, and I won’t even pretend to care. But I will not be sent on another hunt right now. Especially one where I have to act—without explanation, I might add—as a Guardian! Now, if you don’t mind —”
“She’s Nephilim.”
Aramael almost choked on the rest of his outburst as it backed up in his throat. He stared at the Dominion. “She’s what?”
“Nephilim. The bloodline is very faint at this point, of course, but—”
He held up a hand, cutting off her words, and narrowed his eyes. “You want me to act as Guardian to a Grigori descendant.”
The Dominion slid her hands back into the folds of her robe. She nodded.
Aramael left the bookshelves and began pacing the room’s perimeter. His mind raced. Nephilim. The very name tasted bitter on his tongue, as it would on the tongues of all those who remained loyal to the One. He paused at the window, bracing a hand on either side of the frame, staring out without seeing.
Nephilim. Seed of the original Fallen Angels, the Grigori, who were cast from Heaven for interference with the mortals they were to watch over. Reminder of all that had been lost in the ensuing exodus from Heaven, and of the enduring, irreconcilable split that remained between angel-kind.
And now Mittron wanted one of those reminders protected from a Fallen One? His belly clenched. His fists followed suit. He knew of only one former angel who would target a Naphil, who could raise the concern of Heaven’s administrator, the highest of the Seraphim.
“It’s him, isn’t it?”
He willed Verchiel to acknowledge that he was right without speaking the name. If she didn’t say it, if he wasn’t named, maybe Aramael might still escape. Deny the hunt. Retain his soul.
Verchiel cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said.
Aramael closed his eyes and braced himself, knowing what would come next.
“It’s Caim.”
Ugliness rose to engulf him, a dark fury as timeless as the One herself. A pulsing, nearly living thing that wanted to consume him, to become him. The harder he fought it, the more he struggled, the more of himself he lost to it.
The rage was as familiar to him as it was hated. It was what set him apart—set all of the Sixth Choir apart—from the others. What made them Powers. Hunters. Now it had awakened in him and would drive him, relentlessly, until he found the prey that had been named to him.
And not just any prey.
Caim.
No other name could have triggered a wrath of quite this depth; no other Fallen Angel could have aroused this passion. He knew that, and in a blinding flash of clarity, he understood that Verchiel and Mittron had known it, too. More, they had counted on it.
“Then you’ll do it,” Verchiel said, her voice seeming to come from a very long way off, hollow and flat. “You’ll accept the hunt and protect the woman.”
Aramael wanted to deny it. He wanted with all his being to tell Verchiel that she and the Highest Seraph had misjudged him, that he didn’t care in the least about the hunt, and that he cared even less about the woman.
But he wanted Caim more.
More than anything else in his universe.
His voice vibrated with the anger that now owned him. “You knew I would.”
“Yes.”
“You promised I would never hunt him again.”
Verchiel’s hands disappeared into the purple folds of her robe with a soft rustle. “I know.”
He wanted to shout at her. To rage and yell, and fling himself around the room. To demand that she release him from the hunt; that she hold to the promise she had made four thousand years before. But it was out of her hands now. She had already inflicted the damage: she had designated his prey, and he had no choice but to complete what had begun, even as his every particle rebelled at the knowledge.
Caim had escaped. After all that pain, all that torment, he walked the mortal realm as if none of it had ever happened, as if it had not torn Aramael nearly in half to capture him in the first place and would not destroy him
