The last time I felt anything at all.
Gods help me. We are flying, but I feel more like I am falling.
I should not have agreed to this.
One hour, he’d said. What harm could be done in one hour?
I am a fool. I should know better than anyone that immeasurable harm can be done in an hour. Hell, it can be done in seconds, and quite often very much is.
I squeeze my eyes shut once more and bite back a shudder, and it has nothing to do with the altitude.
10
6:45 p.m.
When he sets me on my feet, I have to grip his arms to keep from stumbling.
One side of his mouth pulls up at this, and I do my best not to let the expression capture me.
The nausea helps. I wasn’t aware I could still get the sensation. For once, it’s a feeling I certainly do not miss.
Once I have leveled myself out, I glance around at where he has taken me. The breath I just caught dances away from me again.
We must’ve gone halfway across the world in a matter of minutes. The amount of power it must take him to travel that fast boggles my mind, and I clench my jaw to keep the awe from appearing on my features.
Golden sands roll away in every direction, shimmering under a sun likely hotter than any I’d personally known in my mortal life. A warm wind whispers over the dunes, stirring the sands and perpetually rearranging the landscape. In the distance, a city grows up from the desert, ancient and imposing.
“Where are we?” I ask.
Samael is looking down at his feet, at the sands around his boots, the grains shifting over the toes of them. “This is where I landed,” he says. “When I fell.”
As I stare at him, at the handsome lines of his face and the sadness that occasionally flashes within the ruthless depths of his eyes, I am slow to put the story together.
Samael was an archangel before he became a reaper. I knew this from the stories whispered about him. It is part of what makes him so fearsome, so powerful. There are no other reapers I’ve heard of that started out as angels.
So when he says this is where he landed when he fell…
I do not know what to say, and my throat constricts as if it won’t allow words, anyway.
“The sands have long since erased the crater,” he says, still looking down, not directly into my pitiful soul, for once. “But I can still feel it. Can feel the impact I made upon the earth.”
He is silent for long enough that I think I should speak, but still cannot find words.
He looks up at me now, and I forget what words are altogether.
“This was the last time I remember truly feeling something,” he admits. “Before the years of reaping washed the ability away.”
I wonder not for the first time why. Why tell me all this? Why try to intervene in my affairs at all? Just… why?
Before I can ask, he scoops me up in his arms, and once more, we are shooting into the sky, rushing through the air like a rocket. The sensation is no less thrilling the second time, my stomach rising in a way that makes me giddy.
We are traveling through time and space, crossing the world in single bounds, and yet, all I can see is the former angel holding onto me, all I can hear is the rapid pounding somewhere near the space that once housed my heart.
My brain has barely processed the leap before we are once again upon the ground. I glance around. Now I know exactly where we are.
I pull myself out of his grasp, suddenly defensive and suspicious. “Why are we here?” I snap, taking a step back from him.
He counters my retreat with a step forward.
“Why did you bring me here?” I repeat, voice trembling on the words. I was a fool to have trusted him.
“This is where—,” he begins.
“I know where this is,” I snap, cutting him off.
I could not forget if I tried. This was where I lost my sister, where I traded my immortal soul in order to save my niece. This was the last place I’d been truly human, seven short but endless years ago.
I have not been back here since.
I do not want to be here now.
I don’t know whether to stomp away or take a swing at his face. I opt for the former. Self-preservation and all that.
Samael catches my arm. It shocks me both because it is strange to be near someone who can actually touch me and because I am too angry to think straight.
I yank out of his grasp. “Don’t,” I say, and go to make my escape.
This time, his words are what stop me. “I was here that day,” he says.
My shoulders tighten. I pause in my tracks.
He moves around me, so that I have to look at him. “Seven years ago. When you made the deal that spared your niece and imprisoned you… I was here… I saw what you did.”
I blink at him. Then I blink again.
“You…what?”
“In all my years, I’d never seen anything like it. Never been personally witness to such a selfless and reckless act. I… I’d forgotten people could be so kind…so good.”
I am trapped between the flood of memories from that day and the confession he is making. I see my sister, as I had for the last time. I see the resignation in her hazel eyes, the sure and sudden acknowledgement that she was not long for this world.
I remember how I’d felt the presence of the bloodsuckers before I saw them. How the hair on my arms and
