Chapter 2

“Hello, Chaya.” Naamah inclined her head, then wrinkled her delicate nose. “Is that unicorn manure I smell on you?”

I cringed. Of course, on the day I got covered in shit, I’d get a visitor. Plenty of days went by without anyone coming to see me, but trust my luck to make sure I’d be as uncomfortable and unpleasant to behold as possible when a friend stopped by.

“Sorry,” I said with a grimace. “There was a shitcident.”

Naamah held one elegant finger under her nose, her eyes glittering. “Tabris, I presume?”

“He’s the worst,” I ground out.

She laughed, then coughed and scrunched up her face.

I shied back. “Ugh, sorry, I’ll just go hop under the shower and get rid of the stink.”

“Please do,” she pressed out, obviously caught between suppressing more laughter and trying not to breathe through her nose.

I hurried into the small bathroom. Spartan and functional, its walls were pristine white stone, the floor gray marble, and the amenities simple but sufficient—shower, toilet, sink. The shower stall wasn’t quite big enough to get in there with one’s wings out. Should one of us be unlucky enough to soil our feathers somehow, we’d have to get them hosed off outside in the courtyard.

I peeled myself out of my clothes and then stared at the foul-smelling heap with a sneer. I’d never get the odor out of it, would I? Might as well incinerate it all.

Damn it. I liked those pants. They were my best pair. And that was my tunic with the fewest holes in it. I stomped my foot, gritted my teeth, and then accepted my fate. With a deep breath, I called on the power running though my veins and brought it forth.

Lightning erupted from my fingertips, aimed straight at the pile of clothes.

Unfortunately, my aim was shit, much like those clothes now.

The flash I’d summoned bounced off the tile a foot to the left of the pile, cracking the floor in the process, streaked right at the wall, damaging the stone, and ricocheted off it toward the mirror on the opposite wall.

The mirror shattered into hundreds of shards that hit me like a volley of knifelike missiles.

I screamed and jumped, pain slicing through me in dozens of places. My bare feet stepped on the sharp pieces littering the floor, and I howled.

“For fuck’s sake!” Leaning against the wall, I held on to my right foot and gingerly extracted a mirror shard from my sole. The wound closed right before my eyes, but the pain sure lingered.

“Everything all right in there?” Naamah called out from the bedroom.

“Perfectly fine!” I hollered back.

With a sigh, I threw open the window, tossed the soiled clothes outside, and shut it again—though not before I heard a streak of curses. Biting my lip, I peered out through one of the tiny clear panels within the design of colorful frosted glass.

Oh, yikes. I’d thrown my shitty clothes right onto an unsuspecting angel outside.

Cringing, I ducked and turned away.

I cleaned up the mess of shards on the floor, only cutting myself three times, and then finally stepped into the shower to get the poop off my face and out of my hair.

What felt like an hour later, I emerged clean and relieved from the bathroom, properly dressed and with my hair doing wild, wavy things while it dried. I paused at the sight of Naamah rifling through Bifiel’s drawer on her side of the room.

“Snooping is frowned upon, you know,” I said with a half-suppressed grin.

“Eh.” Naamah shrugged with one elegant shoulder, squinting at Bifiel’s diary. “Let them frown. It’s not my responsibility to fix others’ faces.”

I chuckled under my breath. Naamah was…odd, in a refreshingly good way. She seemed to operate a bit outside of the usual angel hierarchy. A seraph in terms of power, she apparently had no interest in acquiring and holding lands or territory, commanding others, or supervising lower-ranking angels.

Nominally, she belonged to Archangel Gabriel’s domain, but she didn’t appear to be bound the same way that most other angels were. She came and went as she pleased, flitting from one territory to the other, and she didn’t seem to have any tasks or work assigned to her.

I blinked and glanced around, then eyed her. “Did you ditch your guards again?”

A wicked little smile stole onto her face. “Not my fault if they can’t keep up.”

“Those poor guys,” I said with a low laugh. “They’re going to get an earful from Gabriel. Again.” At the last word, I shot her a dark look.

Naamah brushed that off. “If he wants to keep an eye on me, he needs to train his people better. Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to shake them so easily if they were actually good.” She sighed and dropped Bifiel’s diary back into the drawer. “Besides, I need some privacy every now and then.”

Naamah’s unasked-for bodyguards—usually a team of two angels—trailed her around Heaven wherever she went, a fact that had to do with her odd status in angel society. From what I’d heard, she was kind of a big deal. A pardoned demon, ascended from Hell and turned into an angel, all part of a deal struck with Lucifer, her father, in order to stop Armageddon.

Apparently, Lucifer had gone ballistic after his beloved soul mate, Lilith, a human woman he’d made his queen in Hell, had been killed by a conspiracy of rogue angels and demons. The details were a bit fuzzy, as I’d had to piece all this together from hushed accounts by other angels, but rumors had it that Lilith had been the linchpin of a contract for a truce between Heaven and Hell, and once she’d been killed, all bets had been off and Lucifer had unleashed his forces onto Earth in retaliation.

Until Heaven had offered him a new deal—a pardon for his favorite daughter, Naamah. Her entry to Heaven would heal her broken mind, and in exchange for that, Lucifer would accept a new truce and call his forces back to Hell.

So here she was, living among us like some kind of celebrity. She enjoyed more freedom than other angels and wasn’t constrained by duty and expectations, but her being integral to the truce between Heaven and Hell meant that the authorities had a vested interest in her safety.

Hence the bodyguards.

The concept had been weird for me at first. Why would she need bodyguards in Heaven? Shouldn’t this place be safe for her? After all, angels didn’t kill each other. We might bicker and quarrel, but in general, any conflicts were solved by either a fight—bloody but nonfatal—or a competition.

But then I’d found out about the rogue angels who’d murdered Lilith…in order to provoke Lucifer and restart the war between Heaven and Hell. The authorities had weeded out and exiled the angels involved in the conspiracy, burning off their wings and throwing them down to Earth, where—so the rumors went—they’d been quickly picked up by demons sent by Lucifer, to be hauled into Hell to face a fate that would make them wish they’d simply been executed.

Lucifer was notorious for the kind of bloody and cruel revenge he liked to exact.

On Heaven’s side, apparently the whole conspiracy incident had made Metatron and Shekinah—the angel pair sitting at the top of the hierarchy—paranoid enough to make sure that Naamah wouldn’t be unprotected. Just in case they hadn’t found and neutralized all the angels who might like to try to repeat history.

Of course, the guards also served as a means to keep tabs on what Naamah was doing, where she went, whom she met. It was clear that Heaven didn’t fully trust her, and viewed from a security standpoint, she was indeed an uncertain liability.

Part of the deal with Hell was that Naamah got to meet with a proxy of Lucifer’s on Earth once a month as a way to prove her continued well-being. Naturally, this meant there was a somewhat uncontrollable information leak between Heaven and Hell. Naamah could be passing on knowledge to her contact from Hell, which was why she wasn’t privy to classified information and remained under such tight surveillance.

Surveillance she strained against and broke free of quite regularly.

Her ability to lose her security detail was remarkable, as was the lack of consequences she faced for it. As much as Heaven wanted to control her, no one dared lay a finger on her. Given what I’d heard from others about Lucifer’s wrath during the almost apocalypse, I could well imagine that the higher-ups would rather not risk his fury by harming the one person who ensured the continued truce between Heaven and Hell.

Naamah, on her part, was fully aware of how much she could get away with. She flouted Heaven’s rules and social norms with a streak of mischief and a fascinating disregard for propriety, which had earned her a reputation for being eccentric and unpredictable. She’d managed the feat of being simultaneously admired and regarded with suspicion.

In short, no one in Heaven really knew what to do with her.

“Your roommate is the most boring angel,” she now said, shutting the drawer. “No deep, dark secrets? No forbidden desires? Never stepping a toe out of line? Just a perfect facade with nothing of interest behind it.”

“That’s Bitchiel for ya.” I shrugged.

The corners of her mouth twitched up, and her eyes sparkled. “Bitchiel,” she mused, then chuckled. “Is she still giving you grief?”

“Only every time she manages something I don’t, or whenever I ‘besmirch the name of angel’ with my clumsiness.” I made appropriate air quotes. “So…pretty much every day.”

“Want me to tie her shoelaces together? Or cover her bed with itching powder?”

I sighed. “No, that’d only get me in trouble because she’d think it was me.” I paused and frowned at her. “Wait, where would you even get itching powder?”

She leaned against the dresser with a smug smile. “I have my ways.”

A strange ache shot through my heart at the sight of that smile, like an echo of something I once knew, something precious that was now lost to me.

Before I could dwell on it, Naamah spoke again, breaking my inward focus. “I’ll think of something that won’t be traced to you, then.”

She straightened and summoned something with a flick of her hand. Usually, summoning objects was limited to items in the territory an angel directly belonged to. In my case, I could make objects appear that were within Derdekea’s domain. Naamah, however, was somehow able to call something to her no matter where she was, as long as that object had been claimed by her previously—undoubtedly a sign of her immense power.

“Here,” she said and handed me a large picture book titled History of the World. “Got it for you from Earth.”

I grabbed it with greedy hands and marveled at the high-quality photos illustrating a condensed historical timeline of humanity. I collected and hoarded every scrap of information about Earth and humans in particular that I could find. The walls on my side of the room were plastered with photos and posters of the beautiful variety of Earth’s landscape, ranging from snowy mountain peaks to sunny beaches, as well as pictures of animals and humans.

Among us angels, I wasn’t alone in my fascination for the mortal realm and its inhabitants. Visits to Earth were a coveted privilege awarded only to higher-ranking angels, and as a virtue, I was far from being allowed to go. So all my knowledge had to come from photos and books and other angels’ stories.

Naamah knew about my obsession, and she regularly supplied me with pictures and other Earth paraphernalia.

Like the small electronic device she now handed me.

“Is that…a phone?” I exclaimed. I held it this way and that and jumped when the screen lit up.

“It has movies on it. Here, let me show you.”

She tapped on the screen, and I watched with rapt fascination as she navigated through incomprehensible-looking displays until a video started playing.

I gasped and flailed at it. “Turn it off, turn it off.” My heart hammering in my chest, I glanced around. “If anyone finds this with me, I’m in trouble.”

Like visits to Earth, possession of certain items was tightly controlled and only permissible to those who’d earned the privilege through a higher rank. Technology like this from Earth was definitely above my pay grade.

“Relax,” Naamah said. “I can ward it for you, so anyone snooping through your stuff won’t see it.”

I leaned a bit away and squinted at her. “You can do that?”

She waved a hand. “Piece of cake.”

“For a seraph with a shitload of power,” I muttered.

Naamah laughed and winked at me.

I still marveled at the fact that this powerful angel with a penchant for troublemaking had chosen to befriend me. I just couldn’t make sense of it. I was a lowly virtue, should barely be a blip on the radar for someone of Naamah’s rank, yet she’d breezed into my life one day and decreed that we should henceforth be friends.

Not that it wasn’t par for the course for Naamah to ignore hierarchy and go with the flow of her whims. She did indeed hang out with other angels of lower rank as well. Her network of contacts here could best be described as eclectic, and at worst it resembled the random seashell collection of a four-year-old, where one might find a rare, beautiful conch among ordinary shells and pebbles here and there.

I was most definitely a pebble.

When I’d asked her once why she was interested in being friends with me, she’d only smirked and said, “Because I work in mysterious ways.”

And that had been that. I hadn’t been able to dig any further.

So I’d just shrugged and gone along with it. She was fun to be around, and for some reason I hadn’t been able to figure out, she felt familiar. As if I’d known her in my previous life, which was ridiculous, of course. I’d been a human and she’d been locked away in Hell, and there was no way I’d met her.

I guessed she simply reminded me of someone I’d known as a human, maybe.

My memories of my life before I’d been turned into an angel were little more than slivers of unconnected pictures and almost innate knowledge. While there were things I just knew—how to speak, how to move, general surface-level stuff about humans and Earth—I couldn’t remember any actual situations from my human life, couldn’t remember any of the people who surely must have been important to me.

I knew the melody and all the words to the “Happy Birthday” song, but I couldn’t recall myself or anyone else ever singing it.

More than once, I’d tried to find out who I’d been before I’d come here, to no avail. None of my superiors had a clue about my life before Heaven, and from what I’d gathered, that was the norm with new angels. Their human lives before their ascensions were of no importance. They never remembered anything, and no one cared.

The only one who knew my human identity was the very one who’d made me ascend—Azrael, the Angel of Death. And while he would sometimes show up and check in with me, getting any information out of him about me prior to my transformation was impossible.

He knew, and he wouldn’t tell me.

It made me want to punch him.

“You know,” Naamah said, derailing my rusty train of thought, “speaking of power. Why don’t you try again?”

“Because it would end in the same debacle as last time?” I groused, still remembering the way I’d utterly failed in the competition for more power and a higher rank. “I haven’t been able to improve my skills at all. I mean, I’ve been practicing, and I spar with others as much as time allows, but they’re not interested in helping me get better. They’re all mostly on my level, and all they want is to hone their own skills so they will come out on top during the next competition. I don’t learn anything when I spar with them. I’d need a real coach or teacher or whatever, but it’s not like anyone’s volunteering.” I pressed my lips together and exhaled heavily through my nose. “All the angels of higher rank with the knowledge and ability to help me improve my combat skills have better things to do than to perform charity work for an insignificant virtue.”

There were generally two ways to move up in rank and/or power. Either an angel matured over time, and their innate strength increased naturally to the point where they surpassed their current rank, and then superior angels would elevate their status to reflect their new abilities—which was usually an evolution of thousands of years, though. Or an angel could participate in a competition held precisely for the purpose of funneling deserving angels upward in rank and powers.

In these competitions, which were held regularly every couple of months, winning against an opponent bestowed additional power unto the angel. In a way, the victor kind of absorbed part of the defeated angel’s magic, supplementing their own. The increase in power warranted a higher rank for the winner, and along with it, more privileges, like the coveted visits to Earth, for example.

Lore had it that Heaven had set up these competitions as a way to keep angels hungry and ambitious, and, above all, well trained in combat for the inevitable, if far off, moment when war would break out with Hell again.

Which, looking at the not-too-long-ago incident with Lilith’s murder and Lucifer’s subsequent attempt at unleashing Hell on Earth, wasn’t that bad an idea after all. The Devil’s forces were formidable, from what I’d heard, and he might have even won the war if Heaven hadn’t offered to pardon Naamah.

So, obviously, Heaven was very interested in keeping their own forces battle-ready.

The competitions were a way to fuel that, and accordingly, combat skills played a big role in the tests.

Unfortunately for me, I could swing a sword just well enough not to take my own eye out.

“Yeah,” Naamah said, pulling me out of my musing, “most of the higher-ranking chaps are really stuck up, aren’t they?”

“Not you, though.”

“Maybe it helps that I wasn’t born an angel.” She wiggled her brows. “And it is much more fun to remove everybody else’s stick from their asses than to have one up mine.”

I choked on my breath and then bent over laughing.

“You know I’d teach you myself,” she said when I straightened again, “but I’m not that skilled at fighting, actually. I’ve got a lot of power.” She rolled her wrist and twitched her fingers, and magic sparked in the air, heavy and biting. “And I can blast any opponent from here to Earth. When it comes to fighting technique, though…eh. I’ve never had need of it.”

“I know, and I wouldn’t expect you to train me.”

She sent me a sly look. “I could still help you, though.”

I raised a brow.

“Turns out there is an angel with enough knowledge to properly train you who just so happens to owe me a favor.”

I raised the second brow.

Naamah and her favors… In the time since she’d ascended, she’d managed to build an impressive network of angels who were favor-bound to her in one way or another. Officially, everyone’s loyalty was to Heaven first, of course, then second to the higher-ranking angel someone directly followed, and then to that angel’s immediate superior, and so on.

Unofficially, a favor given had to be repaid, by magical right. Reneging on one’s word or refusing to settle a debt would be met with consequences that superseded even Heaven’s control. Promises and debts and favors among angels weren’t simply words; they were contracts enforceable by supernatural law, and we were bound to the conditions as if with physical force.

And somehow, Naamah had built a small empire within Heaven of those who were compelled to be loyal to her through the favor they owed her. When I’d asked her how she’d managed that, she’d winked and said, “I am my father’s daughter, after all.”

“You’d order this angel to train me?” I asked her now, staring at her in disbelief, my heart jumping at the prospect of maybe, finally, having a real fighting chance. Literally. “You’d give up one of your owed favors for me?”

Her slender shoulders rose and fell as she shrugged, a beatific smile on her face. “It’s just one of many. It’s not like I’d feel the loss. Besides, I do hate seeing you struggle in your current conditions. The only way for you to better your station in life is to win one of the competitions and acquire more power. If you don’t, you’ll be stuck at this rank and in this”—she waved uncertainly around the room, pity pinching her expression—“sad excuse for privacy.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What’s the catch?”

I’d lived here in Heaven long enough to know that everything came at a price. Exhibit A: Naamah’s network of favor-bound angels.

“No catch. We’re friends, and I don’t charge my friends.”

I pursed my lips, suspicion gnawing at my gut. She seemed so casual about this, but there was an undercurrent of intensity humming just beneath her placid facade. Like someone who’d laid a trap and was now closely watching their prey step in it.

“As much as I would like to unconditionally trust that claim,” I said, “I can’t quite believe it.”

She rolled her kohl-lined, turquoise eyes. “Well, all right, if you need a quid pro quo to accept this offer, how about this? You will owe me one small favor for my providing you with a skilled combat coach.”

“How small?”

She waved a hand, the bangles on her wrist jangling with the movement. “Something like serving drinks at one of my parties. Or delivering a message for me to someone.”

I considered it. “Okay. Deal.”

“Splendid!” She clapped her hands. “I’ll talk to him, and then I’ll get back to you with a time and place. In the meantime, best not to mention this to anyone—he’s from another territory, and I know for a fact that his superior angel won’t like him training someone who doesn’t belong to and benefit his domain. You know how the idiots in charge are.” She rolled her eyes again. “It’s all about jurisdiction, and liability, and all sorts of boring technicalities.”

“Yeah, sure.” I nodded eagerly. “I’ll keep this to myself.”

Not that I had many people to tell it to. Naamah was pretty much my only friend.

“Good.” She pointed at me with her finger, then winked and breezed past me to the door. “So, do you have time for a quick flight and possibly a few water bombs dropped on unsuspecting angels?” As if to underscore her point, she summoned a small balloon filled with water, threw it in the air, and caught it again.

I stuttered out a laugh. “I’ll get in trouble!”

Her eyes sparkled. “Only if they catch us.”

“Naamah!” I bit my lip to hide my grin.

“You’re a wicked-fast flyer, and I’m capable of illusions.” She tossed the water bomb again and caught it with a flourish. “They’ll never know it was us.”

“You’ll be my ruin,” I faux-grumbled, but I toed on my boots and followed her out the door.

“No, my dear,” she said and slung an arm around my shoulders. “I’m your saving grace.”

The angels in the sunset-lit hallway gave us a wide berth as we passed, and this time it wasn’t because I stank to the highest heaven. They all eyed Naamah with a healthy amount of respect and not a little longing.

“What’s his name, anyway?” I asked as we stepped outside and into the courtyard.

“Hm?” Naamah looked at me with raised brows, folding her hands in front of her to make a launchpad for me to take flight.

“The angel you’ll get to help me.” I unfurled my wings and set one foot onto her folded hands.

“Oh.” She gave me a serene smile. “Aziel,” she said and launched me into the air.