want something in return.”
“Such as?”
“A favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“You want an unspecified favor from me?” I laughed. “That’s a dangerous proposition.”
“So is asking me to pull your file, so you can read it. That is a serious breach of protocol. What if the First Angel found out?” He pretended to look frightened. “She might scold me.”
I snorted. “You don’t need to pull my file, Damiel. You already have it memorized,” I pointed out. “You can just recite its contents to me.”
“I suppose I could. But I really am going to need something in return.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “You’re impossible.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘sensible’, Princess. Every good angel is sensible, yourself included. You wouldn’t make a deal without securing something in return.”
“You are securing something in return: my gratitude.” I fluttered my eyelashes. “Isn’t that valuable enough?”
He was obviously thinking it over. “Very well,” he finally said. “I accept.” He extended his hand.
I shook it.
He held to my hand. “An angel’s gratitude is, in fact, very valuable.” His smile was as sweet as a mouth full of candy. “I’m surprised you gave it up so freely. I will enjoy your continued, eternal gratitude. After all, why win a single unspecified favor, when you can have them all?”
“Just wait one moment…”
“No need to thank me, Princess. Your undying gratitude is all the thanks that I need.”
“I never agreed to this, Damiel.”
“Sure you did.” He winked at me. “We even shook on it.”
I scowled back at him. “You tricked me.”
“You wanted to be tricked.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are highly intelligent and perfectly trained. You knew exactly what you were walking into. So that can only mean that you wanted to walk into it.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Stop psychoanalyzing everything that I do.”
He shrugged. “It’s not something that I can just turn off, Princess.”
“Try harder.”
“Very well. If it will make you feel less excitable in my presence.”
“I am not excitable.”
He opened his mouth, presumably to analyze my behavior again, but then he seemed to think better of it. “Of course not. No, you’re not excitable. Not at all.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Oh?”
“For someone who always puts on such a big show of scaring the hell out of everyone, making yourself out to be a frightening fiend, you sure are a lousy actor.”
“It’s not an act. I am a frightening fiend.”
“You don’t believe that either.”
“No, Cadence, you don’t believe that. I, on the other hand, know I am every bit the monster that everyone claims me to be—and then some.”
He really thought he was a bad person. He even thought he had chosen to be a bad person because someone had to fill that Master Interrogator role in order to keep the world safe. What had happened in his life to make him this way, to feel like he had to carry the whole world on his shoulders, to sacrifice everything? It had to be more than just Leon Hellfire’s betrayal. This went deeper.
I doubted I’d get the answer to that out of him. He was pretty tight-lipped about his past. It had been hard enough to convince him to tell me the story of Leon’s betrayal.
But I would find out what had happened. Somehow. I had to understand his history if I was going to help him get past it. If I was going to heal his broken soul.
Later. Right now, I had to focus on the mission.
“Yes, I am familiar with this area,” I said, pointing at the turquoise sea below. “This is one of the places my father conducted wilderness training with me. He said it was the perfect environment for training water elemental resistance. The monsters can be upon you before you know it.”
“As I understand it, the Sea of Monsters contains, in fact, only two monsters.”
“Kind of,” I replied. “There are two main monsters. The West Monster is formed from the same sand and mud that makes up the western shore, whereas the East Monster is solid rock, just like the east coast’s rocky cliffs.
“With every passing year, the two monsters grow larger and larger, as they eat away at the coastlines. Sometimes, they chew off chunks of land. Other times, they nibble away in dainty little bites. When they need to sharpen their teeth, they grind them against the land like a wedge of cheese against a grater; the resulting tiny, rocky particles stream into the sea. The monsters swallow up these particles, and so the