Grace and Glory (The Harbinger #3) - Jennifer L. Armentrout Page 0,73
he wasn’t. Obviously. I already knew that, but it was still a shock to the system.
“Good call,” I murmured, and then got back on track as we started walking down the path. “Is it possible? What Gabriel claimed? That Bael and the souls would infect Heaven and that God would close the gates?”
“Yes, which basically means any human that dies would no longer be able to enter Heaven. All the souls would be trapped on Earth, either becoming wraiths or tortured by demons,” Zayne finished with a sigh. “With the spheres of Heaven closed off, demons would have no reason to stay hidden. Earth would become Hell, and parts of Heaven would be lost. What Gabriel plans is possible.”
“I was kind of hoping he was just delusional.”
“Unfortunately not,” he said. “Some of the Alphas and other angels already want to close up shop.”
“The Throne said as much.” I wondered if my father was one of them as my gaze swept over the dense, shapeless tree line. Anger flashed through me. What had become of Gabriel couldn’t have been such a complete shock to the other archangels. He had to have showed signs of being out of control, with homicidal, world-destroying tendencies. That kind of stuff didn’t just appear out of the blue. None of them had done anything. My own father hadn’t even told me that Gabriel was the Harbinger, let alone remotely prepared me to come face-to-face with an archangel.
Angels were virtually useless.
Well, except that Throne. He’d been helpful. I peeked over at Zayne, who was technically an angel but not. He wasn’t useless, but any number of the angels, from the lowest class all the way up to the archangels, could’ve done something other than standing by, playing Animal Crossing or whatever it was that angels did in all their spare time.
“You have your phone on you, right?” he asked as we reached the mouth of the park. I nodded, pulling it out of my back pocket. “Want me to order a pickup?”
“Yep.” The entrance spotlights weren’t nearly bright enough to minimize the glare of the phone, so I eagerly handed it over.
As he opened up the app, I let my gaze drift over him. I wondered what the driver was going to think when he climbed into the car shirtless. My gaze got a little hung up on the breadth of his shoulders, the clearly delineated lines of his chest, and lower, to the hint of tight, coiled muscles mostly hidden by the night. Zayne had always been in the kind of shape that made me feel like I needed to add cardio or sit-ups to my nonexistent workout routine. I trained to fight. That was enough exercise for me, but his body was proof that it could cash whatever check his mouth was writing.
And I knew I was definitely staring at Zayne a little too intensely, but I wasn’t ogling him because he was pretty to look at. That was something I’d done a time or a hundred in the past, but I was staring at him now because he was here and he was okay. The disbelief wasn’t going to go away any time soon.
Dragging my gaze back to his face, I thought about how his features still were far clearer than they had been before. In this kind of light, I would’ve never been able to make out the slash of his brow or the set of his lips. That hadn’t been my imagination. It had to be because of what he was, of the grace inside him. Nothing else around me seemed more clear. I couldn’t remember what it was like when I saw my father. Those rare visits were all too brief, and I’d had other concerns when I’d been with Gabriel, like staying alive for example, and when I met the Throne. But when I thought about it, I had seen those creepy eyes in the Throne’s wings. I didn’t think I would’ve been able to see something that small at that distance.
Halfway through ordering an Uber, Zayne’s fingers stilled and he looked over at me.
“Sorry.” I flushed. “I was staring at you like a total creeper.”
“You should know by now that I have no problem with you staring at me.” He handed my phone over, and after I slid it into my back pocket, he caught my hand and tugged me against his chest, and I burrowed in like a barnacle. “I’m sorry.”