don’t brood,” Will cut in. “Or sulk.”
“I’d love to see this,” Marcus insisted. “It sounds very entertaining.”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Bringing two reapers would be pushing it.” But then again, my friends would love it. Marcus could have an alias similar to Will’s. In truth, I didn’t think I’d be able to babysit two reapers at one party, and I remembered from my past lives just how rowdy Marcus could get.
“You’re certainly no fun,” Marcus mused.
“You must have me and Will mixed up.”
He laughed, but I wasn’t kidding.
6
ON THE DRIVE HOME, WILL WAS IN A GOOD MOOD. He was proud of me. But there were things I needed to know, and I was pretty sure asking him would upset him.
I broke the silence between us with an easy question. “Marcus was born in the eighteenth century, right? I remember he was about two hundred years old when I knew him last.”
“Right,” Will confirmed. “He’s not that old for our kind. It doesn’t mean he’s weak, though.”
“How old is Ava?”
“A few decades older than I am.”
I chewed my lip. “Is she demonic?”
“Ellie …” At least he didn’t laugh.
“No, I’m dead serious.”
He glanced at me and frowned. “I’m very sure she’s not.”
“How sure?”
“Positive.”
“Could you be wrong?”
“No,” he said firmly. “She’s not demonic. Why would you ask?”
I shrugged. “Well, she’s not very nice and she didn’t want me to use my swords with her. And the way my power burned her? I know I’ve only ever tried that on Ragnuk, but it made me wonder. Angelfire only burns the demonic, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s not completely the same,” he said. “You’re an angel, an archangel. Your power is virtually limitless, and we don’t completely understand it. Whatever it is about your power that is able to burn, it may not even be angelfire at all. You spent decades of mortal years in Heaven, training, before you were reincarnated this time. Maybe this is one of the results of that training. Once your memory returns fully, then perhaps more of your new powers will as well.”
I let his words sink in, wanting so much—so, so much—to remember everything that I’d forgotten, and not just bits and pieces. Most of it had come back to me, my past lives and such, but the deeper, darker things still eluded me. It felt like something evil pulsed at the very root of my strength, feeding on it, even though I was supposed to be divine. Human emotion was supposed to make me stronger, but it seemed to just make me crazier. Maybe it was the humanity getting to me, the evil of humanity contaminating my power the way the frailty of humanity made my body weaker than my enemies’. My power may have been greater than theirs, but this body was mortal, and mortality was synonymous with death. Will had never died, because however much he resembled a normal guy, his body was not human. He was a reaper, and they happened to be difficult to kill, for many good reasons.
My lips grew tight as I thought hard. “But how do you know the difference between a demonic reaper and an angelic reaper? Like, really know without testing with angelfire. It’s not like it’s tattooed on their foreheads or anything. Do they feel different to you? A vir reaper is just a vir reaper until it tries to kill me, and then I know it’s demonic.”
“It’s the darkness,” he explained. “The evil that fuels them. The brutality they’ve known since birth and that runs through their veins. Violence is the only thing that makes sense to them. When their power and emotion grow, they begin to feel very different from my own kind. The wickedness of the demonic has a powerful effect on the angelic.”
“So you can’t tell just by looking at them?”
“Evil is deeper than just what’s on the surface. Something can look frightening and be pure and innocent.” Then he grinned. “Unlike shoes, evil doesn’t have designer labels.”
I scowled at the metaphor, completely aware that he was making fun of me. However, I did remember the strange things that’d happened to me since my powers were awakened. The feeling of darkness in my power, the black spidery lines that I’d seen on my own skin—a vision I still to this day didn’t understand the meaning of. Was I mistaken in thinking it was evil in me that made me experience those things? How distinct was the line between good and evil, and how much of