out of Heaven when he couldn’t stand his own creation turning on him.
A thousand chains, a thousand links all leading to the same point in time. And Gabriel had carried the Sword of Light straight to me, the one person who linked together everyone who wanted Satan dead.
I shivered, thinking of how far the Chain extended and how much time it encompassed.
“Are you cold?” Tascius murmured in my ear, tightening his arm around me.
I shook my head. “No. You can go train. I’m going to lay this out before we bring it to Wayland tomorrow.” I rose up on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek, feeling oddly shy about displaying such open affection in front of Michael. There was a time when kissing someone in front of an archangel would’ve been a whipping with steel barbs.
But Michael just took a swig of whiskey and ambled off, jerking two fingers in a come-hither motion over his shoulder. “Let’s do this, kid.”
Maybe I’d made a terrible mistake in asking him to teach Tascius, but… my mate looked happy at the prospect.
I managed to smile despite all my worries. “Have fun, kid.”
“You’re younger than me, and shorter,” he said with a snort. “Small fry.”
“Whippersnapper.”
“Shrimp.”
I made a mock frown. “Low blow, friend. Low blow.”
He made as if to turn away, then reached out and grabbed me for one last, deep kiss. “We’ll come back to this later,” he said in my ear, his voice husky.
I nodded in agreement, wishing I could pull him away for just a little bit, but we’d have all night.
Besides, I needed to look over my broken Sword and fix it if I wanted to have something to ram down Satan’s throat.
The prospect made me smile with anticipation.
14
Tascius
“Your woman. Is she always so…” Michael made a face, searching for the right word. “Grumpy?”
Not the right word. Determined, maybe. Unstoppable, yes. Hellbent… absolutely.
I didn’t turn to look at him. The archangel gave off light like the sun to my newly-sharpened eyes. It seemed that every day I woke up, my vision was brighter, clearer, and it was a Hell of a headache trying to adjust to seeing all the tiny details that had been invisible to me before.
“She’s not grumpy,” I said, determined to keep Melisande from false accusations of poor temperament. “She’s lost a mate, her best friend, and her wing is broken. Would you be cheerful after all that?”
Michael raised a mug and waggled his eyebrows. The bitter scent of beer wafted after him. “Cheer-juice.”
He was fucking incorrigible. This was the guy who could’ve saved humanity from the Apocalypse? The guy who was supposed to teach me how to be a ‘proper’ archangel, whatever the Hell that meant?
My own foul mood threatened to rise to the surface. No matter my bloodline, or that the primeval forces driving the universe had chosen me to take my father’s place, I felt that I would never be one of them: the archangels, the supposed divine lights of the cosmos… my Nephilim side was too strong. The darkness of Hell and Acheron were completely ingrained in me.
It was like being a fish that had suddenly found it had wings, and was expected to join the hawks.
And there was no way that was happening. For a moment I felt a touch of despair that spiraled through me, threatening to choke out any of the hope that Melisande had instilled in me- she was putting all her faith in the wrong person.
How could I, of all people, possibly be the one to bring the light down here? My whole history was checkered with nothing but blood and pain.
I was no archangel. The universe had chosen wrong. Melisande’s faith in me was unwarranted and undeserved.
“Are you coming, kid?”
Michael’s voice echoed down the hall. I looked up, realizing I had slowed to a halt halfway to the training rooms. The archangel disappeared into the room and I forced myself to walk after him.
Wallowing in self-pity wasn’t going to help, but it wasn’t really pity I was feeling. Just because I hadn’t completely snapped and lost myself to Nephilim rage since murdering Gabriel didn’t mean anything… that dark power could just be lying in wait for the wrong moment, and now that I was taking on the same sort of energy that imbued the Princes, it could be catastrophic.
It’d already been too close once. I couldn’t let it happen again.
Michael had left his beer on a table and was already sitting cross-legged on the cold stone floor, his