That’s what you get when you mess with the Grim Reaper’s family.
Yeah, he’d brought his punishment on himself, but fuck, he’d made that mistake thousands of years ago. Hadn’t he paid his debt by now? He’d asked Azagoth that very question just recently. As it turned out, Azagoth had a long memory, held a grudge, and wasn’t the forgiving type.
Shoving thoughts of past mistakes aside, he changed the topic. “So what made you think you could enter the Inner Sanctum and find the human?”
Disappointment at the subject change flashed in Cat’s jade eyes, but she covered it with a casual shrug. “I possess a particularly powerful ability to sense good and evil.”
“You still have it? Even after you lost your wings?”
She glanced around the room, and instead of answering, she asked, “You got anything to drink? You know, that isn’t made from snakes?”
“Sure thing.” With a flick of his wrist, the wall behind the TV slid open, revealing a small kitchen that looked like something straight out of The Flintstones. Except he had demon-installed electricity. Yay for refrigeration and hot stovetops.
“Huh,” Cat said. “I did not expect that. You got a secret bathroom, too?”
“Other wall.” As he walked to the kitchen, he heard the wall behind him slide open, heard her murmur of approval.
“Happy to see the shower. Not so happy to see a...what is that, a toilet trough?” Her dismayed tone amused him. “That looks like something pigs would eat out of.”
“I’m old-fashioned.” His amusement veered quickly to shame as he reached into the cupboard for his only two cups. As he plopped them onto the pitted stone counter, he cursed his stark living conditions. They’d never truly bothered him before, but now, seeing how he lived through Cat’s eyes had lifted the veil a little, and he didn’t like it at all. So instead of going for the rotgut moonshine made right here in the Inner Sanctum, he reached for his prized bottle of rum that Limos, one of the Four Horsemen, had given him three decades ago. “Rum okay? And you haven’t answered my question.”
“What question? Oh, right. Um, yes, rum is fine, and as far as my ability, it’s not as strong as it was before I lost my wings, but I can still feel the difference between good and evil from a greater distance than most haloed angels or True Fallen.”
As he splashed a couple of fingers of rum into each cup, he realized that for all of the times he’d seen Cat and asked questions about her during his visits to Azagoth, he knew very little about her. Oh, he’d heard the story of how she fell from grace, how she’d associated with Gethel, the turncoat angel who sold her soul to have Satan’s child. He also knew Cat had been brave enough to admit to her mistakes instead of trying to cover them up.
Admirable. Not the route he’d have gone in her situation, but hey, he’d never been a shining beacon of light even when he’d still rocked a halo.
Swiping up the cups, he turned back to her. Damn, she was beautiful, standing in the middle of his living room, barefoot, her jeans ripped in several places, a narrow strip of flat belly peeking between her waistband and her top. But the real showstopper was her hair, that glorious, wavy ginger mane that flowed over her shoulders and breasts in a tangle of wild curls. She looked like a warrior woman plucked from Earth’s past, and all she was missing was a sword and shield.
And all he was missing was a brain because those were thoughts he shouldn’t be having. He strode back to her and handed her a cup.
“So, with that kind of specialized ability,” he began, “what did you do in Heaven?”
“You mean, what did I do before I started working for a traitor who got me booted out of Heaven?” Her voice was light, sarcastic, but there was definitely a bitter note souring the soup.
Of course, if he’d been tricked into nearly starting an apocalypse, he’d be bitter, too.
“Yeah.” He raised his sad little bone cup in toast. “That.”
She gave him an annoyed look. “I’m a Seraphim. What do you think I did?”
As a Seraphim, who Hades knew was one of the lower angel classes despite what human scholars thought, she would have been required to work closely with humans. “Guardian angel stuff?”
She snorted. “Seraphim don’t work in the Earthly realm. We mainly do administrative work for humans who are newly crossed over.”
He hoped it wasn’t too rude to cringe, because he did. “Sounds boring as shit.”
“It is,” she admitted. “But because my ability to distinguish good and evil was so strong, my work was a little more interesting.”