Black Wings
Page 19

I eased my legs out from under the blankets and started to scoot down the bed. Gabriel’s eyes snapped open immediately and his head came up. He pinned me with a glare.
“Where do you think you are going?” he asked.
I felt guilty, like I’d been caught doing something wrong. “I’m getting out of bed.”
“You need to rest,” he said. He stood and grasped my shoulders, trying to push me back to the pillows. “You have been through an ordeal.”
“You’re the one who needs to rest,” I snapped back, feeling a little annoyed at his peremptory attitude. I swiped at his hands and he released me. “You look like the walking dead.”
“My health is no concern of yours. However, your health is of utmost concern to me. If you had suffered lasting harm today because of my inability to protect you ...” He trailed off, looking grim.
“What?” I asked.
“Lord Azazel’s rage would be a terrible thing to behold.”
“And wouldn’t his rage be a terrible thing to behold if you managed to get yourself killed because you didn’t take proper care of yourself?” I asked.
“No,” he said, and smiled briefly. “My life is nothing to him.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because of who I am,” Gabriel said.
There was something in his eyes, and I knew that if I asked the question now, I would finally get my answer.
I took a deep breath. “Who are you?”
The words hung in the air between us like wisps of smoke. I could feel tension radiating from his body.
“You promised me that you would tell me,” I reminded him.
“I did.”
“Are you a fallen angel, like Azazel?”
He looked wary. “Why is it relevant?”
“Because I want to know,” I said. “Because you’ve saved my life.”
“I am . . . not exactly like your father,” Gabriel said.
“Are you half-and-half, like me?” I pressed. “You’ve got starshine in your eyes, like I had when you showed me in the mirror.”
“Madeline, you must understand. I want to tell you. But I fear what you will do when you have the information. You need to trust me. I cannot fulfill the charge that Lord Azazel has placed on me if you do not trust me.”
“And I do.” I didn’t think that there was anything Gabriel could say that would make me trust him less.
“Before I tell you this, you must understand that Lord Azazel, your father, trusts me absolutely. He would not have put you in my care if he did not. There is nothing in all eternity that is more precious to him than you, his daughter.”
I nodded slowly, and I was ashamed to feel tears prick at the backs of my eyes. I had never known my father. If I was so precious to him, why had he left me here all alone? Why had he chosen to leave rather than stay with my mother? If he had been with her, would she have been protected from Ramuell?
“I understand,” I said.
“My mother,” Gabriel said, “was an angel. Not fallen. She was still a child of paradise when she came to Earth to deliver a visitation upon a human. While she was here, a nephilim found her.”
I could read between the lines without any further coaching. “She was raped.”
“Yes,” he said without inflection. “Violently. Even as a divine being with divine powers, she barely survived. When it was discovered that she had gotten a child from the nephilim, she was cast out of Heaven. By this time the Grigori had also fallen, for the sin of coupling with human women. My lord Azazel sheltered my mother until I was born.”
Why? I wondered. From everything I had heard about fallen angels so far, they weren’t exactly models of altruism. Azazel must have had some ulterior motive for sheltering Gabriel’s mother.
“After my birth, my mother left. She wanted no truck with a thing born of such a monster. The Grigori would have had me destroyed—it is forbidden for the nephilim to reproduce—but Lord Azazel argued on my behalf. He swore that if I ever became a danger, he would destroy me himself. So Lucifer consented, and I was allowed to live as Lord Azazel’s thrall.”
“My father kept you as a servant?” I said, a little offended. Why hadn’t he raised this lost half angel as his own?
“Of course,” Gabriel said, surprised. “What else would I be? And I am grateful to him. He taught me to understand my powers. And now he has sent me to you, so that I could use those powers to protect you from Ramuell.”
His face was braced, expectant. He thought that I was going to explode now that I knew he was part nephilim. But instead of being angry that he’d deceived me and hidden his identity from me, I could feel only pity. Pity for his mother, who lost Heaven through no fault of her own. Pity for this lost child, who was abandoned to death by his mother and lived as an outcast because his father’s magic was inside him.
“So Ramuell is . . . what? Your cousin?” I asked.
Gabriel’s face was very white in the darkness, and he seemed almost unable to speak. “He is my father.”
The ground beneath me shifted a little. “Ah,” I said, feeling lame. “Your father.”
I wasn’t really sure what else to say to that. This beautiful half angel sitting before me, this man who had already tangled up my feelings every which way from lust to fury since the moment I’d met him, was the son of the creature that had murdered my mother. But it did explain why Beezle insisted on calling him “the devil.” He was the grand-son of the one and only Morningstar himself.
“My lord Azazel sent me to you because my father’s magic lives inside me, and only I have hope of containing him alone. When the Grigori first bound the nephilim to the Valley of Sorrows, it took the combined might of all of their magic to contain them. But now that I have reached maturity, my magic is enough to disable Ramuell until he can be bound again.”
I remembered something then, something that I’d nearly forgotten in the revelations of the last day. “That first night, when I faced Ramuell at the overpass . . . I remember that I was half-conscious after I bolted him with nightfire. Somebody chased Ramuell from me, and then picked me up and carried me home.”
Gabriel nodded his head in acknowledgment.
“You also bathed me, and dressed me, and braided my hair, just like tonight,” I said thoughtfully. “That’s the part that I think I’m annoyed about.”
He looked stunned for a moment, then let out a sharp bark of laughter. He seemed surprised that the noise had come out of his mouth. “I tell you that I am a monster, that I am kith and kin to the creature that wants to destroy you, and you are worried that I kept you from sleeping in the stench and filth of that overpass?”
“See, when you put it that way, it sounds unreasonable. I’m just not sure how I feel about the fact that you performed such an intimate service when I don’t know you that well,” I said, and the air suddenly seemed charged with another kind of tension.
I couldn’t read the expression on his face clearly. I was a little confused by his revelation, but there was something that I wanted him to know, and something that I had wanted to do from the moment I first saw him.
I stood and approached him, stopping in front of where he sat in the chair. He looked up at me, his face revealed in the moonlight.
He didn’t back away from me, but he watched me cautiously, unsure of what I would do. I wasn’t really sure what I would do, either.
I stopped when there were just a few inches between us, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his body. I laid my hands very gently on his cheeks, and looked into his starlit eyes. “But what I do know, what I can see, is that you are no monster.”
He said nothing, but the muscles beneath my fingers jumped. His skin was hot, like he was running a temperature.
“Why are you always so warm?” I wondered aloud.
“Because angels, even fallen ones, are born of the sun, and we carry a tiny piece of it inside us. You do, too, but it is tempered by your humanity and your inexperience. When you come to the full maturity of your magic, you will not be as aware of the differences between us.”
I had leaned closer to him without realizing it, mesmerized by his eyes and his voice. His breath was sweet, like cinnamon and cloves, and it brushed across my face, featherlight.
My lips touched his, for an instant, and then I stepped away and smiled down at him. I wasn’t ready yet for whatever else might come, not ready to answer the tension I’d felt thrumming through his body. He watched me warily as I stepped away.
I sat on the bed again, and we just watched each other for a few moments. I considered what Gabriel had said about being born of the sun, and it reminded me of my dream.
The magic inside me surged up, warning me not to tell Gabriel. I wondered why my magic was so vociferously arguing against sharing the dreams with anyone else. It was almost like the power inside me was its own being.
“Gabriel, do you remember when the nuvem attacked me?”
He raised an eyebrow. “How could I possibly forget such a thing?”
“Well, you asked me what happened when the nuvem was inside me.”
“And you never answered me.”
I gave him a dirty look. “I wasn’t the only one around here keeping secrets.”
He lifted his shoulder in acknowledgment and indicated that I should continue.
“It was weird. I had a kind of vision, or a dream, about a girl named Evangeline,” I said. “It was like I was there, in her body. I saw her in love with a fallen angel, and she was pregnant.”
“Evangeline,” Gabriel whispered, and he said it like her name was holy.
“What about her? Is this something else I should know about before another demon shows up to kick my ass?”
“She is the Lost Mother,” Gabriel said.
“Refresh my memory?” I said, giving him an exasperated look. “Just because you’ve decided to let me into the club doesn’t mean I know all the secret passwords.”