lab coat and bearing a slight smile. Carrying a tray with a pitcher and half-filled glasses, she looked more harmless geek than killer demon.
Eve leaned back to make room for the refreshments. “Will you join us?” she asked the lili.
“I can’t, but thank you.”
Hank’s gaze followed his assistant as she retreated. “She’s worried that she’ll die at any moment. She never relaxes because of it.”
One hundred him died every day. Eve couldn’t imagine living with that hanging over her head.
“Okay, back to the layers,” she redirected. “The layer that you and I occupy most of the time is tricky to navigate for both Jehovah and Sammael. As you know, they don’t play well together. So when they want to function here with the full range of movement that mortals have—to touch, to taste, to lust—they need emissaries.”
Understanding hit her right between the eyes. “Like Jesus Christ.”
“And the Antichrist. You may feel the hand of God or the claws of Sammael in a figurative sense or through secondary beings such as demons and mal‘akhs, but you can only feel them literally if they gain access to this earthly layer through an emissary.”
“So let’s say—hypothetically—that Satan wanted to give me a gift. Not a power, but an actual thing, like a necklace, he would have to do so through an emissary?”
Hank wrapped a hand around his drinking glass, but didn’t pick it up. “Or he would use an emissary as a gateway to do it himself. If the emissary was strong enough, perhaps Sammael could even manifest separately and the two could occupy the same plane at the same time.”
If the emissary was strong enough...
Eve wondered why the room didn’t spin. She thought it should, considering how shaky she felt on the inside. “Is Cain the gateway?”
How else could Sammael have known that the original Eve would be visiting this layer?
Hank’s gaze lifted from watching his thumb draw lines in the condensation on his glass. “Now, you’re starting to ask the right questions.”
***
“Why won’t anyone give me a straight answer?” Alec rolled his shoulders back, fighting fatigue when he shouldn’t be tired to begin with. “You’ve kept me cooling my heels for hours, then you talk in circles. It’s a simple yes-or-no question.”
Uriel handed him a bottle of chilled water and sat in the wicker chair opposite him. The head of the Australian firm was shirtless and barefooted. His long, sun-bleached hair fluttered gently in the ocean breeze coming through the open French doors of his office. He was considered one of the foremost yacht builders in the world, but had recently diversified into wine making. The world economy was unhealthy, curtailing luxury purchases.
“Yes, there are only seven of us,” the archangel finally answered, after twenty minutes of evasion. “And yes, it might be by design. Is that better?”
Alec snatched up the water and downed the contents in a few greedy gulps. His body grew more feverish by the hour, leaving him with a dry throat and perspiration-damp skin.
“You really don’t want to fuck with me now,” he growled, returning the empty bottle to the glass- topped wicker coffee table with a hollow thud.
“I hope, for your sake, that you do not think we are evenly matched,” Uriel warned. “Or assume that my easygoing nature gives you an edge.”
Alec took deep, measured breaths, carefully reining back his temper.
Why can’t I feel Eve?
He hadn’t been able to feel her since they’d found the two guards. As the archangel responsible for Abel, he could sense that his brother wasn’t alarmed, but that only spurred Alec’s envy. The damned thing inside him was costing him the only thing that mattered to him anymore.
“Whose design?” he bit out, returning to his previous question. “Did you and the others practice a little sibling winnowing to get to a manageable number?”
Uriel’s brilliant blue gaze narrowed. “You tread dangerous ground with your accusations.”
“How did you convince Jehovah that seven of you were enough?”
“We have no control over Jehovah. You know that. As with anything, the pros and cons were weighed.”
Alec couldn’t help but wonder if he was experiencing the cons. Despite the cool evening air gusting in from the balcony, he was sweating. There was no doubt the chaos within him was escalating. “I’m not.. . well.”
“I can see that,” the archangel murmured, his casual pose unchanged.
“Did the others—the archangels who aren’t here anymore—experience similar. . . problems?”
“What problems are you experiencing?”
“Let me rephrase,” Alec said tightly. “Have you ever had to put down another archangel because he was