She placed a couple of sugars in each cup, then gently stirred the tea. "We're talking about the dead here. Their minds are not what they once were, especially those who have been murdered."
"I didn't say he'd been murdered."
"You didn't have to. Trouble, my dear, darkens your steps, and it's not such a leap to think that if you want to speak to a ghost, it's because he died before his time. Otherwise, your reaper would have been able to find out whatever you needed." She handed me a cup of tea, then glanced over my right shoulder. "I would prefer it, by the way, if you'd just show yourself. It's impolite to skulk on the edges of the gray fields like that."
Heat shimmered across my skin as Azriel appeared. Of course, he wasn't strictly a reaper, as they were soul guides. He was something much more—or, if you believed him, something much less—and that was a Mijai, a dark angel who hunted and killed the things that broke free from hell.
But what he hunted now wasn't an escapee demon, daemon, or even a spirit—although we certainly had been hunting one of those. We'd gotten it, too, but not before the fucking thing had almost killed me. Which was why I was moving like an old woman right now—everything still hurt. I might be half werewolf, but fast healing was one of the gifts I hadn't inherited enough of. In fact, I couldn't shift into wolf shape at all, and the full moon held no sway over me.
Of course, I could heal myself via my Aedh heritage, but shifting in and out of Aedh form required energy, and I didn't have enough of that, either.
"That's better," Adeline said, satisfaction in her voice. "Now, would you like a cup of tea, young man?"
"No, thank you."
There was a hint of amusement in Azriel's mellow tones, and it played through my being like the caress of gentle fingers. Longing shivered through me.
Adeline picked up her own cup, a frown once again marring her homely features. "Why do you wear a sword, reaper? There is no threat in this house."
"No, there is not," he agreed.
When it became obvious he didn't intend to say anything else, Adeline turned her expectant gaze to me.
"He wears a sword because he's helping me hunt down some—" I hesitated. For safety's sake I couldn't tell her everything, yet I couldn't not explain, either. Not if I wanted her help. "—rogue priests who seek the keys to the gates of heaven and hell so they can permanently close them."
That raised her eyebrows. "Why on earth would anyone want that?"
"Because they're not of earth." They were Aedh, energy beings who lived on the gray fields—the area that pided earth from heaven and hell. Or the light and dark portals, as the reapers tended to say. While the reaper community had flourished, the Aedh had not. They'd all but died out, and only the Raziq—a breakaway group of priests—were left in any great numbers. "And they've decided it would be easier to permanently shut the gates to all souls than to keep guarding against the occasional demon breakout."