“I think…I think I would have loved you one day.” My eyes pricked, and I leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth.
“Ah, you choose the celestial.”
I carefully released Uriel and turned to face the man, this guardian of the thing our worlds needed the most.
“No.”
He ground his teeth. “You must choose.”
The spirits closed in, and the air crackled with menace.
“Choose now,” he ordered. “Or I will take you all.”
What I was about to do might end another life, but then it might not. All I knew was that if I did anything else, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. There was only one choice.
“I choose me.”
The man stared at me for a long beat. “What did you say?”
“I said, I choose me. Take my soul and let the others go. Let them take the power to the Beyond, please. Just do it quick. Now.”
I fell to my knees and closed my eyes, blood thundering in my ears at the enormity of what I’d just done.
I pictured Azazel’s smile. Imagined Mal’s laughter and felt Grayson’s arms around me. Cora would be so pissed. I knew she would, but she’d understand eventually. Hot tears pricked my eyes, but I squeezed them tight.
I would not cry.
I was going to miss them all so fucking much, but this was the only way to keep them safe.
I swallowed the lump of twisted emotion in my throat. “Please. Just do it.”
There was a whoosh. His blade, no doubt, arcing toward my neck. My insides twisted, and terror grabbed me by the neck. I was about to die. I was about to—
My eyelids bloomed pink as if the world beyond my closed lids had lit up with bright light. Was it about to happen? Why was it taking so long?
“Open your eyes, child,” the man said.
“What?”
“You can look now.”
I stared up at the man. He was taller now, bulkier and no longer dressed in rags, but in a neat brown tunic and black pants. His dark hair was pulled back off his pleasant face, and his dark eyes were filled with tiny slivers of mercury.
“Seraphina Dawn, please stand.”
He held out his hand to me, and when I took it on autopilot, an overwhelming feeling of belonging rushed through me—the conviction that everything would be all right.
“What is going on? Who are you?”
“I am what you came for, and your choice has set me free.” He turned his hands over, and the veins glowed with inner light. “I am the first.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sit.”
Huh?
He pointed to my left, and there was a chair waiting for me. “How did you… Never mind.”
I sat down, and when I looked at him, he was also sitting, and there was a table between us laid with tea things. I looked over at Keon still passed out on the ground and then to Uriel asleep tied to the tree, and then at the spirits that hovered around us as if eager for story time.
The man smiled. “Don’t worry, your friends will be fine. Drink your tea.”
He handed me a cup. The tea was strong and sweet, just what I needed after the shock of almost dying. Shit, I was so confused, but I was alive, and this man was…He was the power, and my gut told me he was about to explain everything.
He watched me for a long beat before picking up his own cup and drinking. “I am one half of the divine,” he said finally. “The older twin. Although we may have looked alike, our ideals were very different. It’s why we disagreed so often, even as we worked together to create worlds. Our last disagreement resulted in my being incarcerated here, although back then, this was not Limbo, and the fallen hadn’t made this world their home.”
A twin? Another divine? “Your brother trapped you here?”
“Yes. I made it easy. I was…naïve. We quarreled about the nature of man even as we forged them. I believed in humanity’s ability for self-sacrifice while my brother thought them to be ruthless survivalists that would do whatever it took to live.”
I snorted. “Well, humans have done some pretty awful things to each other in the name of power and resources.”
He nodded, his eyes suddenly sad. “I know. My brother was right, but I’d created man in my image just as he had done so in his, and I was convinced of my philosophy. So much so that when he suggested a test, I