“I see you, Azrael,” I said quietly, staying on my side with the covers pulled up beneath my chin. Every little boy and girl believed their sheets and blanket could be armor against the monsters in the dark. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true? “You think death has never come for me in the night before? That I wouldn’t recognize it?”
He stepped out of the corner, although his wings and his hair stayed part of the darkness. His eyes I could see. They didn’t look any different than a demon’s. “Your kind did this, nearly destroyed us all. Who are you to think you can walk away from that? Who are you to think you do not deserve punishment?”
Cronus had been pa?en, but that didn’t make him my kind. He hadn’t been anyone’s kind in the whole of reality. Azrael knew that, but it was a good excuse to do to me what the Angel of Death was meant to do. If Cronus hadn’t been pa?en, Heaven’s own would’ve found another justification for what curled dark within him. Demons killed with a hot passion and Azrael killed with a cold satisfaction. Hot or cold, they both enjoyed their work far too much not to let it spread. Work, hobby, life. They lived to kill. Azrael wasn’t Eligos, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t good at what he did, only that he wasn’t the best. Now that I was human, it didn’t take the best to kill me. It didn’t take much at all, I’d discovered.
“Are you going to hide under the covers like a child?” Azrael stepped closer. “It wouldn’t make a difference if you were. I have pity for no one, least of all you.”
No, he had pity for no one, certainly not for me. It made it easy to have no pity for him in return.
“Eligos was right. You can’t begin to fill his shoes,” I said with a dose of contempt Azrael would find difficult to swallow and impossible not to react to. Releasing my hold on the covers, I shifted onto my back. As Griffin had risen, I thought it was time for an angel to fall. “And you’re not half as smart as you think you are. You’re certainly not half as smart as I am.”
He was on me then, without a word. It was the same when he impaled himself on the sword I pulled from beneath the sheets. Not the Lethe sword, as that was gone, but Leo had let me borrow a nice steel one. Heavy and brutal in battle, those Norse roots couldn’t be denied. “Heaven must be so disappointed in you.” I looked up into the cold, sculpted face that hung above me and found nothing worth saving. “I know I am, and I know they are too.”
They were the other angels who appeared out of the corner. Four more archangels, and they’d brought Ishiah with them, the only one still right with Heaven that I trusted. I’d told him Azrael would be coming, and he’d told others. Azrael had helped to save Heaven, but he’d done it without risking his own life—only the lives of his brothers. It was his way, self-serving, which I didn’t think had gone unnoticed in the past. I thought his was a reckoning that was a long time coming, the battle the final straw. It helped as well that Ishiah had dropped a word in the right ears, pointed out that while Azrael had helped to sacrifice others in the service of Heaven, in the end I was the one who had destroyed Cronus. Killing me, that lowered Azrael to pa?en behavior . . . or worse, the demonic kind. Azrael had rank, but he had no friends among his fellow archangels, ones with the most will on high. With that will, they could make decisions Azrael wasn’t going to like.
“You don’t deserve to live,” he hissed. “Life is wasted on the filth that is you.”
“Is that any way to be?” I tsked. “You deserve to live, Azrael, for all time, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
The hands of the other archangels fastened onto his arms as he reached for my throat. They pulled him up and off the sword. I dropped the weapon to the floor; I waggled my fingers at him in a mocking good-bye. “Send me a postcard from Down Under, that is if Eligos doesn’t eat you.” It didn’t take the best to kill me anymore, but you at least had to be good. Azrael didn’t meet either definition of the word.
The angels left, taking Azrael with them . . . Ishiah too, although I assumed they’d drop him someplace nicer, such as home back in New York. Other angels, Ishiah had assured me when I’d told him what Azrael would do, had been watching over Zeke and Griffin, as little as they’d liked it. That was Heaven’s problem, not mine. If I saved reality, including their feathered asses, they owed me one. Keeping my boys safe had been that one. At least it had turned out to be only one night under the crystal eyes of Heaven’s guardians. Trying to sleep knowing they were hanging around . . . It was worse than sneaking in past curfew when you had a mama with a hand quick to swat trickster butt.
Long-gone days.
I hit the pillows to plump them up and watched as Leo came out of his closet, leaving his shotgun behind. I trusted Ishiah . . . some, but trust or not, it was always smart to have a backup plan.