Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

Azazel

T he sunset painted the sky in hues of orange and burnished red as I stood atop the building near the border with the Vatican. Below me, the hustle and bustle of Rome continued on, the humans unaware of the supernatural entities in their midst. I spotted the soul of a recently departed woman milling about the entrance to the building on the opposite side of the street. My power pinged in recognition of the mark for Hell that she carried, yet I didn’t move.

Reaping souls wasn’t what I was here for.

Someone else would find her soon and then collect her.

My eyes scanned the street for the sign I was waiting for, my stomach cramped in anticipation of the confrontation that was about to take place.

If she even came, that was.

She might just ignore my call, knowing full well what it was about. Then again, she’d never been one to shy away from conflict.

A flash of turquoise caught my gaze, and I zeroed in on those eyes glowing with an unnatural inner light. If humans could have seen her, they’d have known immediately they were dealing with a being that defied their scientific logic.

Naamah locked eyes with me for a second, then continued on down the street, weaving in and out of the crowd.

I extended my wings and flew the short distance down to the sidewalk, the pedestrians unconsciously making way for an obstacle they couldn’t actually see. Tucking the wings away again, I followed Naamah on her meandering path, checking the area for signs of surveillance.

Satisfied that she’d indeed shaken her guards, I ducked into the open doorway she’d vanished into. Cool, slightly musty air enveloped me immediately, the building old and constructed to keep the stifling summer heat at bay. I tracked her up the shadowy stone staircase to the topmost landing, where she waited for me. Her auburn hair was braided over one shoulder, a dark purple sari wrapped around her small form.

My anger was a vicious, snarling beast in my chest as I faced her. I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I remained silent, trying to get a handle on my emotions. Seeing if she would cave under the silence and take the first step.

She did.

“Azazel,” she began, her features pinched as if apprehensive. “I know you’re angry.”

My power vibrated like a struck tuning fork, the air turning heavy and biting. I reeled it back in with utmost effort. “Do tell me how I feel.”

She pressed her lips together and crossed her arms. “Get it out.”

I stared at her.

She waved with one hand. “You have things to say that lie heavy on your chest. Until you hurl them at me and relieve yourself, you won’t hear what I have to say in turn.”

I took a deep breath, that phantom weight on my chest she mentioned pressing down on me, damn it. “I trusted you,” I bit out through clenched teeth. “ Zoe trusted you. She thought you were her friend, thought you cared for her, yet all the while you were planning on delivering her to the person who’d publicly humiliated and mentally tortured her !”

By the end of my outburst, my voice was loud enough to rattle the old building. Naamah glanced at the shaking walls, then calmly reached forth a hand and sent out a pulse of power to stabilize the stone.

“Go on,” she said, bringing her gaze back to me. “There’s more. Let’s hear it.”

I sucked in a breath through my nose, my nostrils flaring. “You stole her chance to say goodbye to her mother. It was the one thing she asked for, and it meant the world to her. You took away her choice, uncaring of the consequences. I thought you were different.” I curled my lip. “But in the end, you’re just like him. Callous and ruthless.”

That one hit home. I could see it on her face, in the way her lids twitched, her composure cracking.

“And there’s the part of him in you,” she said quietly. “That temper. Those quick conclusions, that hotheaded judgment, when you don’t know the whole picture.”

“I am nothing like him,” I snarled, and flames shot out to lick over the floor and walls, burning the doormats on the landing to ash.

Naamah waved her hand and put out the fire before it struck the wooden doors.

“Too alike for your own good,” she said with a sigh. “Part of the reason you two butt heads so much is that you are so similar—but the both of you only see the worst traits of yourself reflected in the other. And that mirror image drives you to lash out.”

“I am not here,” I snapped, “to have you play therapist.”

“But are you here to hear me out? Are you ready, or do you need to vent some more?”

I clenched my teeth and balled my hands into fists. “Speak, then. What is it you have to say about this? Why did you double-cross me? You know how much she means to me. Yet you made sure I wouldn’t be able to claim her.”

“Hm.” She nodded. “And without me, you wouldn’t have had the chance to court her again as an angel, win her love a second time, and help her regain her memory at her own pace.”

“That doesn’t make up for handing her over to Lucifer!”

“It does when the alternative was him seizing her years ago!” she yelled, her own temper now flaring.

I narrowed my eyes. “What?”

“If it weren’t for me,” she said with a hard gesture, “he would have taken her as soon as he had located her in Heaven, before you ever made your way to her.”

That struck me silent for a good minute. “Explain,” I rasped eventually.

“Do you think I’m the only connection he has in Heaven?” Her eyes glittered, her features tense. “I’m simply the one he can rely on the most, which is why he turned to me first. But if I had refused his request to deliver Zoe to him, he’d have managed it some other way. I am the reason she remained in Heaven for you to find and woo— because you wished it so. ”

Taken aback, I stared at her, my mind reeling.

“When we first talked about getting Zoe back to you,” she continued, “I told you that I could make her fall right away. That you wouldn’t even have to enter Heaven and put yourself at risk. But you were adamant about it. You wanted to give her the chance to remember who she was, who you were, before her fall, and to grant her the time necessary to get to know you under good circumstances before she’d be wrenched out of her normal life and thrust into Hell.”

The recollection of that conversation came back to me now, as did my conviction that I wouldn’t put Zoe through the stress and trauma of falling from grace and becoming a demon when she had yet no idea who I was to her. Just the thought of what that would have felt like for her, to be dragged to Hell and claimed by a demon who was a stranger to her but declared himself to be her long-lost lover, put a sour taste in my mouth.

No, I hadn’t wanted to restart our relationship from that place. I wouldn’t have wished that for her, nor for me. The way we’d first gotten to know each other had been contentious enough, and everything in me had rebelled against the idea of having to convince a traumatized, scared, and very likely pissed-off Zoe who didn’t remember me or herself that we’d had a shared past full of love and trust.

And trying to trigger her memory to resurface while we would’ve been at odds like that would have been beyond difficult.

Which was why I had rather put myself at risk by sneaking into Heaven, all in order to win her heart even before she remembered me, to build a strong foundation for our love. That way, even if triggering her memory took longer and I was discovered before she remembered, which would prompt her fall from grace, at least she’d arrive in Hell knowing the why—knowing me.

“When Lucifer found out Zoe was in Heaven,” Naamah broke through my thoughts, “he contacted me to request that I help him bring her to Hell. By that time, you’d already confided in me about your plans to infiltrate Heaven to approach her. I knew how important it was for you to have the chance to get close to her in Heaven and court her, to try to see if you could trigger her memory. So I talked him out of it, Azazel.” She firmed her jaw, her eyes hard. “He wanted her right away, and I talked him out of it. I convinced him to allow you to get to her first, to grant you both that time together. Otherwise, you would have lost her before you were ever even ready to set foot in Heaven.”

“And you didn’t see fit to warn me?” I hissed, teeth bared. “To make me privy to this grand scheme of his?”

“That’s right. I didn’t.” She looked daggers at me, every inch the Princess of Hell, no give or remorse in her stance. “Because you would have pitched a fit if you knew, and you wouldn’t have let her go.” When I wanted to counter something, she raised a hand and cut me off. “ You wouldn’t have let her go. You would have moved Heaven and Hell— literally —to keep Zoe from ending up with him, even risk a war you would never be able to win, especially before you became an archdemon.”

I thrust a hand through my hair and turned away, frustration and fury making for an explosive cocktail of emotions within me. I pivoted back to her with a snarl. “And you just took his side, didn’t even think to look for other solutions. You could have told me, and we could have made her fall without his knowing so I could have claimed her. It’s not what I wanted for her, but at least she’d be with me.”

“Do not presume to know what I did or did not think of.” Her own power vibrated in the air, a hint at the massive amount of strength she’d inherited from her father. “He would never have budged on having her under his direct control. There was no talking him out of that. He’d have come for her in Hell, and all of you would have suffered for it. Early on, you weren’t an archdemon yet, didn’t even have the power to claim her should she fall, and by the time you’d made it and were ready, he’d already delayed his quest to get her for so long— at my behest —he’d have snapped the instant she came to Hell and would have tried to seize her with no regard to consequences. You do not wish to measure your strength against his, boy.”

The pressure in me boiled so violently that I wanted to raze an entire city block just to relieve this feeling.

“This,” she said, cutting the air with her hand, “was the best option.”

“The best?” I choked out, trying very hard not to strangle my own mother. “That she’s back with the monster who still has a bone to pick with her? Who now has uncontested control over her? He is well within his rights to torture the fuck out of her if he so wishes!”

“But he won’t!” she snapped.

“You must not know him very well for you to speak with such confidence,” I said through clenched teeth.

She lifted her chin. “I know him well enough to know he will not break a promise he made to me.”

I stilled and stared at her.

“I made him swear it, Azazel. He will not harm her. She is to be given accommodations suited to the highest rank, her status and treatment that of an honored member of the inner circle of his court. He is oath bound.”

I exhaled a shuddering breath, some of the tight knots in my chest unraveling. Not all of them. Just the ones stemming from my concern about Zoe coming to harm at Lucifer’s hands, if not by physical violence, then maybe by mental torture.

“I advocated on her behalf,” Naamah added with emphasis. “Believe me when I say, I am the reason she is being treated with anything akin to kindness and respect right now. You think me callous, uncaring for her as a friend, as a daughter-in-law? It is quite the opposite, son. I used every last bit of influence I have over him to make sure she will be well.”

My eye twitched. “Yes, so caring you are as to rob her of her chance to have closure with her mother. All your professions of tenderhearted generosity for Zoe, yet you knew exactly how much it meant to her to find her mother in Heaven, to be able to say goodbye, and you still sabotaged her fall so much sooner and took all that away from her.”

“That,” she said, her voice dropping, genuine regret pinching her features for the first time, “is the one thing I wish I could undo. It wasn’t cold-blooded disregard for her feelings that caused me to orchestrate her fall before she could find her mother. My hands were bound.” She wrung said hands in front of her. “In my negotiations with Lucifer, I had to promise him to make her fall right after your rescue. We made those plans, had those negotiations, years before I ever found out that Zoe would want to stay in Heaven a bit longer to see her mother. I’d managed to talk him into waiting all this time to claim her, but as a concession from me, he demanded that I swear to bring her to Hell with no further delay in the case you got caught and we broke you out. It was a binding promise, Azazel. I could not break it, as much as I wanted to.”

I rubbed a hand over my face, my thoughts whirring in my head, my body brimming with too much agitation that I didn’t know where to put.

“I know you will have to chew on this,” she said quietly. “And maybe you won’t ever see my side. It will be just as well. Paint me as the villain all you want; it does not anger me. Not when I know I did what I could to help you both. But know that it was my pleading with him that made him swear to transfer his claim on Zoe to you once she finds Lilith’s reincarnation. He will not keep her. As soon as she completes her mission, she will be free.”

I barked a dry laugh. “In other words, never .”

She tilted her head. “Are you so sure the search will be fruitless?”

“There is no precedent for this,” I ground out.

“And there was none for a human turned angel who kept her memories and was able to access them years later, yet Zoe did so.”

“That is different.”

“Is it, though?” She shrugged. “There was no precedent for Lilith, ever. She was the first of her kind, in everything. There is no reason to think she wasn’t reborn as a human like one of us upon their death.”

“That,” I said and pointed a finger at her, “is the least implausible part of all this. I’d be inclined to believe she was indeed reincarnated, given the way she’d changed over the millennia. It’s the rest of this unhinged theory of his that I have a problem with. Zoe might carry a part of Lilith inside her, but that doesn’t mean she can locate her with it.”

“Like calls to like,” Naamah murmured. “And lost pieces of ourselves tend to find their way back to us.”

Hands on my hips, I turned away, shaking my head in utter frustration.

“Zoe will be by your side again, sooner or later.” Her sari rustled softly as she moved. “And in the meantime, she will be cared for. I have tried talking to him about allowing her more freedom of movement when she is in Hell, but he is reluctant due to safety concerns. She is his only means of finding Lilith again. Should anything happen to Zoe, it would destroy his plans, his future…would destroy him.”

I speared her with a dark look, unable to keep the words from slipping out. “And what a loss that would be.”

She hissed with bared teeth. “Have a care, Azazel. He is still my father.”

“And I am your son.”

And there it was, the point of contention between us. The thing that had loomed, unmentioned but ever present, over every conversation, over all those moments of bonding and making up for lost time. For as much as she’d shown love and support for me in the years since she’d ascended and healed, it had been evident that she cared for her father as well, despite the strife between him and me.

“Do you wish for me to tear myself in two?” Her eyes glinted hard. “To give you one half of my soul, bleeding and broken? I am trying to balance the love I hold for you both, though it claws me to shreds on the inside.”

“I wish for you to stand by me!” I thrust a finger at my own chest. “To choose me . It shouldn’t be that hard!”

“And now you’re being selfish.” Her features tightened. “To demand I turn my back on the one person who’s never given up on me. He was there for me, through it all, through millennia of debilitating darkness that ate away at my mind. He cared for me, gave me every comfort, made sure I never lacked for anything when I wasn’t even able to get out of bed because I was so numb. You have no idea how much it hurt him to see me that way, to do so much for me and yet never feel like he was helping me enough. To see his own daughter wither away or try to tear herself to pieces to escape the pain.

“And yet he never wavered. He never stayed away or pushed me off to be taken care of by others just so he wouldn’t have to witness my struggle. When my mother couldn’t bear to be with me often because the sight of my suffering destroyed her, when my own children had to keep their distance because I might be a threat to them, he came to visit every day. Every day, Azazel. He would sit with me, keep me company, read to me. Hundreds of thousands of books and stories over thousands of years. He’d even tell me the tales passed among humans that weren’t yet written down. All to keep my darkness at bay, to fill my mind with something other than the whispers of ill or the bleak memories of how I’d failed my own children.”

Her voice broke, and it broke something inside me, too.

“He was my rock,” she said, her power vibrating in the air, “unyielding in his support. He’d talk to me, relentlessly, even when all I could do was stare at the wall and wonder why I couldn’t just die. He is the reason I never succeeded in taking my own life. And you wish for me to spit on that?” Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, her voice cracking.

My chest felt like someone had punched a hole in it and filled it with acid.

“I know he failed you,” she continued, shattered sadness splintering her voice. “I know you suffered at his court, that he didn’t protect you as he should have. And I castigate myself every single day because I wasn’t there to protect you either, because I was too lost in the darkness to be there for you as I should have been. I am sorry.”

Her breath hitched, and so did mine. My lungs hurt so much that I could barely draw in air,.

“And I am deeply sorry that he wasn’t good to you,” she said in a broken whisper. “I will never forgive him for it, will hold that pain within me for eternity. But please understand that he has shown me such love, such loyalty, as I’d never received from anyone else. And so I hold my love for him, my gratitude for how he has been there for me all my life, right next to my love for you and the sorrow over how he failed you. I hold all of it.” She thumped her hand on her chest, her features fierce and anguished. “All of it, no matter how much the clash of these emotions torments me. To dig out only one to release would ravage all of me. I cannot extricate one love in favor of the other. And my affection for either of you is not diminished by my care for the other. I am walking the tightrope of not choosing between you or him, because you hold equal parts of my heart, and to choose one would destroy both.”

I closed my eyes and rubbed both hands over my face. Every breath seemed wrought with spikes that serrated my chest. “Be well, then,” I said after a moment, sending her one last look as I walled up my heart. “Take comfort in that love you’ve got for me, for you will have no more of mine.”

Her face crumpled as I turned away, her devastation following me down the stairs.

And I told myself I did not care.