Chapter 6

Zoe

Shovelingunicorn shit was an excellent way to mull things over, provided the stable box in question was currently empty, which—thank Heaven—it was. Tabris and his ilk had hoofed it out onto the pasture, leaving me blissfully alone to stew in my thoughts without running the risk of being skewered. I just had to keep an eye out for his return, but that wasn’t a problem.

I emptied the shovel full of droppings into the waiting wheelbarrow, wrinkled my nose at the intense stink, and then went back to look for more crap.

If I made it up a rank from virtue to dominion, I wouldn’t have to do this anymore. I’d probably get reassigned to household duties in the main mansion, or maybe be put on messenger runs. I was a fast flyer, and chances were good that talent would be taken advantage of. Not that I minded. I loved flying, and if I got a job that let me spend a lot of time in the air, all the better.

Thinking about moving up in the hierarchy brought my rumination back to the topic that had occupied my thoughts since I’d stormed out of the cave yesterday—that fateful meeting and the inexplicable, unnerving thing that had happened between me and Aziel.

I’d been so mad, so shaken, that I hadn’t even noticed I’d managed a vertical takeoff until after I’d gotten home.

The intensity of my anger and the violation I’d felt had hijacked my mind to the point where it had taken me much, much longer to realize that my mental shields—the ones I’d accused Aziel of breaching—had not been tampered with in the slightest. I’d lain there in bed, fruitlessly chasing the oblivion of sleep, when it had dawned on me that angels couldn’t invade each other’s minds.

It was an indisputable fact that our mental shields were so strong that anything but a violent attack couldn’t penetrate them—and such a brutal shattering of the barriers of the mind would leave the affected angel reeling, mentally broken and bloodied. There were stories from the first war between Heaven and Hell of how prisoners on both sides had had their minds invaded to glean information, only for the investigators to discover that aggressively breaking through an angel’s or a demon’s shields destroyed not only those shields, but also the minds behind them, rendering them useless for finding relevant information.

My mind was very much intact, as were my shields.

There was no way Aziel had somehow snuck beneath my barriers and plucked that memory of the dream from my thoughts.

Which left me with the disconcerting question of what the fuck else had happened last night.

I hadn’t simply imagined that scene between me and Aziel playing out exactly like my dream sequence. Somehow, we’d ended up in that same position, with the identical thrum of power between us, with that dagger and the same actions, and Aziel speaking the exact words as in my dream.

Granted, not every detail matched, and Mysterious Stranger in my dream had said more, but the part that was the same? It was eerily exact.

And if Aziel had not picked that scene from my memory and acted it out—and why would he do that in the first place? For shits and giggles?—what other explanation was there for his actions uncannily echoing my dream?

I’d been puzzling over this question for the better part of the night—or what passed for night here, since the light never changed. The habit of clinging to structures of time only found on Earth had to be a remnant from my human life.

The fact was, when I’d come home from the canceled training session, I’d had a few hours of free time left that I typically used for sleeping before I had to head out to my next work shift again. And usually, those few hours would allow me to sink into the dreams I sought as if they were the nectar of life. Instead, I’d lain awake and let my thoughts ramble as they were wont to do.

Some people had orderly thoughts, all nicely lined up and waiting their turn like well-trained dogs patiently sitting still for a treat.

I didn’t have dogs. All I had was squirrels, and they seemed to be on drugs.

I couldn’t make sense of it. How had Aziel acted out my dream without knowing it?

What were the chances that this was just a coincidence?

I shook my head while pushing the shovel underneath another heap of unicorn poop. No, that was pretty much impossible. Being in a certain position that was the same as in a dream, yes, I could see that. If the only thing resembling the scene in my dream had been the fact that Aziel had pressed me against a wall, sure, I could chalk that up to probable coincidence.

But the dagger? Those words?

No, that went beyond just happenstance.

So why had that scene from my dream hauntingly come true?

My eyes widened.

I dropped the shovel.

Holy shit.

Could I—did I—have a vision of the future?

I clapped a hand over my mouth and realized too late that the glove I wore was covered in unicorn fur. Snorting and sputtering, I spewed white hairs and tried to spit them from my lips before I accidentally swallowed any.

A few seconds of coughing—with watering eyes and all—and I had the wherewithal to return to this epiphany I’d just had.

Could it be possible? Could my dream have been infused by some sort of foresight?

Those squirrel thoughts of mine all jumped over each other in their haste to create the utmost chaos. Staring unseeing at the wall of the box, the shovel lying forgotten at my feet, I went down the rabbit hole—squirrel hole?—that was the theory that I could have second sight.

The next thought came careening in on the heels of that, crashing into my already shaken composure.

If that dream of mine had indeed been a vision and it had come true with Aziel yesterday, and if Aziel was, in fact, the mysterious stranger I’d been seeing in my dreams, did that mean all of those dreams I’d had of Mysterious Stranger would come true? With Aziel?

A tiny squeak escaped me, half terrified and half embarrassed.

Because some of those dream sequences had been explicitly sexual.

Heat rushed up to my face, and my body tingled in all the places those nightly visions had shown me would be happily touched by…Aziel.

SeraphAziel, who was the most magnificent male I’d ever laid eyes on.

Fuck me sideways.

Which…he would do. According to my premonitions.

Oh, God. I had to stop. I buried my face in my hands.

And that, of course, covered my face in unicorn fur.

“Ugh!” I spit and sputtered and wiped my eyes, nose, and mouth on my arms.

My sight impaired, my attention elsewhere, I didn’t notice the impending danger until it was upon me.

Sharp, lacerating pain tore through my midsection, and then everything turned topsy-turvy as I was yanked off my feet and hurled through the air. I crashed onto the floor outside the box a second later, wheezing at the impact, at the pain shooting out from my back—that had kissed the stone floor—and at the piercing agony of the wound in my abdomen.

I lay there, gasping for breath, trying to regain full vision again, while a triumphant nickering echoed over from the box. With a groan, I turned my head to see Tabris’s bloodied horn stick out over the half wall of his enclosure.

“You Heaven-cursed, spear-headed, fucking bastard of a horse!” I yelled, having found enough air to fill my lungs to properly insult him.

His response was an affronted neigh.

“That’s right!” I barked. “You’re just a fancy horse! An overgrown pony with an ugly horn stuck on its head!”

He snorted, turned around, and kicked the wall with his hind legs. The titanium-enforced barrier rattled but held.

My grin was full of teeth. “You just stole the idea from narwhals, but it’s a bad copy and paste. They look great with their horns, whereas you look ridiculous!”

“Some might say,” a familiar female voice came from somewhere behind me, toward the entry to the stables, “that arguing with a unicorn is ridiculous.”

Still lying prone on the ground, I craned my neck to glance behind me and spotted Naamah sauntering closer.

“Not me, of course,” she went on. “I’m a fan of civilized debate with mythical monsters.” She came to a halt right next to my head, peering down at me with something akin to resigned pity crossing her face. “How do you always manage to let him poke you?”

“I’m a sucker for flesh wounds,” I gritted out, then took her outstretched hand and let her pull me to my feet.

The already half-healed injury where Tabris had skewered me twinged at the movement.

“You know, you’re an angel now.” Naamah gingerly tugged at the rip in my clothing. “I don’t think you need to be chasing more holiness.”

My rough laugh made fresh blood pulse out of the wound. I clamped a hand over it and grimaced.

“Here, let me.” She gently lifted my hand and laid hers over the injury.

A tingle of warmth spread out from her touch, her power whispering through me. I felt how the tissues and muscles and flesh knitted back together, a lingering pulse of heat now in place of the sharp pain from before. The wound would have healed completely on its own in a matter of minutes, but being mended by someone else’s magic was a way to speed healing up even further.

“Thank you,” I said as she withdrew her hand and went to wash off the blood at the nearby sink.

“Don’t mention it.” Toweling off, she faced me again, her auburn hair sliding over her shoulder. “Speaking of evading pointy things, I heard you stormed out of the training lesson yesterday.”

I made a face, cringing inside and out. Naamah had gone to the trouble of using one of her favors to set up these meetings for me, and here I was, running off at the first opportunity and turning my back on her help. Guilt pricked at my stomach. “Yeah…there was a…misunderstanding.” I chewed on my lip. “Did he say anything to you?”

“Just that you were upset. Something about him reading your mind?”

I rubbed my nose. “Um, yeah, no, total misunderstanding, that. I mean, I know that mind reading is not a thing we can do, so…” I shrugged, helplessly rooting around for a way to explain this without explaining it. Because while I was almost sure I had indeed dreamed a vision of the future that had then become true yesterday, I felt awkward voicing that theory just yet. “I was just…confused there, for a moment. Mixed something up.”

Naamah tilted her head. “What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I waved the question off.

She regarded me for a moment, then softly said, “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

I swallowed hard. Naamah really was the closest thing to a best friend I had here, and I’d told her plenty of personal stuff in the past. For some reason, though, I hesitated to let her in on my assumption about the dreams.

“I know,” I murmured, then immediately launched into a change of topic. “Um, is he…mad?”

I’d accused him of violating my mind, which, apart from being impossible, was a hefty allegation to throw at someone. I sure would be miffed if the person I was trying to help slapped me in the face with the accusation of what amounted to mental rape.

Naamah narrowed her eyes, but let my change of topic slide. “Not mad, no. But definitely bewildered.”

I grimaced again. “Is he still willing to train me?”

“Do you still want to go?” There was a glint in her eyes I couldn’t quite place.

“Yes! Absolutely. That is, if he’ll have me.”

“Oh, he will,” she murmured with a smirk. She added at a normal volume, “He’ll be there tonight, same place, same time.”

“Great! Thank you.”

I would have some apologizing to do, and somehow manage to explain what had happened without giving away the fact that I’d had a dream about it—about him.

Because if I was reluctant to tell Naamah about these dreams and my theory, then it went double for Aziel. I could just imagine his face if I told him I’d had a vision of him with the dagger and all that.

In all my time up here, I hadn’t heard of an angel with prophetic powers, and while that didn’t necessarily mean it was entirely impossible, it definitely meant there weren’t any precedents for this. I could probably ask Naamah if she knew of any other angels with foresight, but I had the feeling that bringing this up right now would give her too much information. Naamah was astute, and I could just imagine her putting two and two together and figuring out that it was related to what had happened yesterday.

As for Aziel, I had no idea how he would react if I told him this theory—because at this point, it was just a theory. I didn’t have proof beyond the events of one single dream becoming mystifyingly true. So, before I told him of a wild theory that might as well be total unicornshit and have him likely think I was making things up, I’d have to see if more of my dreams eventually came true.

And since all of those dreams featured Mysterious Stranger, I’d have to spend a lot of time with Aziel.

My cheeks warmed at that thought, my heart fluttering in my chest like a bird trapped in a cage. Before, I’d looked forward to training with him because I’d wanted to finally get better at combat in order to climb up the ranks, but now the anticipation making my stomach fizz and my pulse race had nothing to do with the prospect of gaining more privileges and everything to do with the breathtaking male who’d be waiting in the cave for me.

My unfounded anger at him last night had temporarily overlain the attraction I felt toward him, but as I’d come to realize that he couldn’t possibly have read my mind, all the small things that made up my rapidly growing interest in him had pushed back to the surface.

The way his forearms flexed when he handled the sword.

The fluid grace with which he moved, confident and powerful, with natural, predatory ease.

The velvet touch of his energy, with a delicious hint of darkness underneath.

The timbre of his voice.

The way he seemed to see me whenever he looked at me.

His smile, and, oh—his laugh!

Just remembering that gorgeous sound and how it had transformed his already beautiful features into something out of this world, not to mention the unvarnished, genuine light of mirth in his eyes, made my chest constrict with deep longing.

And now I knew why his energy had felt so familiar, why I hadn’t been able to shake the impression that there was some kind of connection—because there was, through my dreams.

My stomach did a cute little flip, and my breath caught.

“That look on your face,” Naamah drawled, “is that for Aziel?”

“What?” I flinched, drew up straight, and surreptitiously schooled my features into something that hopefully wouldn’t betray my besotted musings.

“I’ve never seen you with that expression before,” she said with an amused smile. “Don’t tell me you have a crush on him?”

“Who—me? Him?” I laughed awkwardly and was about to fumble for a good lie when a vibration disturbed the air behind me, and I noticed Naamah’s gaze tracking to a point over my shoulder.

All warmth fled from her eyes. Her features froze in their current expression, her power giving a single, biting pulse.

I whipped around and did a double take at the sight of the angel who’d facilitated my entry into Heaven.

“Chaya,” Azrael said in greeting, then his gaze fell on my friend behind me. Infinitesimally, his eyes widened. His throat worked as he swallowed, and when he spoke, his voice was gravel-scraped. “Naamah.”

“Azrael,” she said tonelessly.

A beat of silence, heavy with things unspoken.

My eyes flicked between the two, my breath stuck in my lungs at the tense undercurrents in the room. I’d had no idea that they knew each other—I’d never seen them meet before, and neither of them had ever mentioned the other, but it was obvious there was some sort of history here.

“Well,” Naamah said blithely, flashing a carefree smile. “Guess I’m going to take my leave, then.” She strolled past me, stopping briefly next to him. Leaning closer, she murmured, “Far be it from me to keep you.” Power humming softly around her, she continued on her way, turning to walk backward a few paces, her gaze on me. “See you soon, Chaya. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“That gives me permission to do anything, you know.”

“Exactly.” She winked at me, laughed softly, and then sauntered out.

Azrael looked over his shoulder, watching Naamah leave, his expression pinched, almost as if in pain. He stared after her long enough that all sorts of questions popped up in my brain, but then he finally faced me again.

“Lord Azrael,” I said swiftly, going to one knee to give him the proper greeting for his rank.

He might be a weird, special case among our kind, what with him being the Angel of Death and sort of everywhere and nowhere at once, blessed with the power to transcend laws of time and place and not bound to a particular territory in Heaven, and we might have a casual mentor-mentee relationship, but nominally, his status was that of a seraph, and he seemed to be a stickler for rules.

He acknowledged my show of respect with a nod, the light of the overhead lamps glinting on his black hair. As his silver-gray eyes studied me, I realized with a start that he and Aziel looked quite a bit alike. I’d only seen Azrael maybe a dozen times over the course of the past years, and his last visit had been a while ago, so last night, when looking at my new combat coach, I hadn’t noticed the similarities. But now, with the memory of Aziel fresh in my mind, the resemblance between them was glaringly obvious. Was there some kind of relation?

“Do you have a son?” I asked before I had time to think. “Or a brother?”

Azrael froze. He always held himself with a certain rigidity, his poise reflecting the rather austere nature of his character, but now he became inhumanly still. Which, duh, he wasn’t human. All of us had this uncanny ability to go even more unnervingly motionless than the most skilled cat in hunting mode.

“Why?” he asked with lethal quiet.

Too late, I realized that bringing up this question would lead to inquiries from his side, which would then lead to Aziel. And I had promised not to tell anyone about the fact that Aziel was training me.

Eep, now it was my turn to freeze.

I scrambled for a response that would save my ass. “I just…I thought I saw someone the other day who looked a lot like you.”

His probing gaze made me fidget. “Who?”

“Um, I didn’t catch his name. I only, like, saw him in passing.”

“Where?”

Oh, God, I felt like I was strapped to an interrogation chair. “Uh, while I was…doing that…messenger run, uh, to the border.” I waved my hands in the general direction of the neighboring territory.

Of course, I hadn’t actually done a messenger run, but Azrael didn’t know that, and I just hoped that saying so would direct his attention to somewhere else than where I’d truly been. Seeing unknown angels in passing was a common thing—there was always loads of traffic between territories, and we honestly couldn’t know every single angel in Heaven.

“So, about my human life,” I said with emphasis, not so skillfully deflecting from the topic at hand. “Any insight? Revelations? Wanna finally tell me who I used to be?”

He considered me for the span of two heartbeats, maybe weighing whether to continue his interrogation. “We’ve been over this,” he said eventually, settling on letting my change of topic slide. “I’m not at liberty to tell.”

I grumpily kicked at a pebble on the floor. It was his standard answer to my standard questions. Years upon years of him coming to check in on me, and he steadfastly refused to talk about my human past. “Can’t blame me for asking,” I murmured.

“I don’t,” was his pragmatic reply.

I couldn’t recall how many times I’d asked him whether I’d someday remember my life before ascension, but his response was always the same—no angel-made had ever regained their memories, the transformation did a complete mind wipe, and I shouldn’t hope for something that went against the laws of nature.

“Are you well?”

His question pulled me out of my morose musing.

He always asked me that when he came to see me, but this time, his gaze lingered on the blood-tainted hole in the fabric of my shirt.

I glanced down at my body. “Oh, this? Yeah, no, that’s nothing. Regular work-related injury, already healed. No biggie.”

He frowned. “You are prone to accidents.”

“The way I see it, accidents are prone to me.” I laid a hand on my chest.

He just stared at me. Not much for humor, that one. “This injury aside,” he said, “you’ve been feeling well?”

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Just a happy little angel doing angel things.”

He nodded. “Good. Have you had any trouble, mentally or emotionally?”

“Besides wanting to strangle my roommate?”

He didn’t even look fazed, the aloof android. “That wouldn’t kill her.”

“But it would be satisfying.” I raised my index finger.

His eyes glinted silver. “Revenge is a short-lived pleasure.”

“Not when it’s served cold.”

“Which would preclude the notion of exacting it by strangulation, which is usually done in the heat of the moment as a crime of passion.”

I kind of wanted to strangle him right now.

“Have you had moments of dizziness,” he went on, oblivious to my violent musings, “blackouts, intrusive thoughts?—”

“I mean, my thoughts are all kind of intrusive, the meddlesome bastards. Absolutely no manners at all. But you can’t really expect anything else from squirrels on drugs.”

His eye twitched, the involuntary reaction breaking through his stoic mien.

Inwardly, I grinned. Disrupting his unshakable composure was a sport of mine. I did like him, reserved though he might be, and it was precisely because he’d been a friendly if distant presence in my life that I felt the urge to needle him.

Others might have found his inquiries strange, maybe even invasive. Me? I’d long ago stopped wondering about Azrael’s weirdness level. The dude had the shittiest job among angelkind—okay, yeah, maybe not literally the shittiest. That distinction would fall upon the task of shoveling actual feces out of unicorn boxes.

But the Angel of Death virtually had no life. And that was a weirdly philosophical turn of phrase. Ha!

What I meant was that as the angel tasked with ferrying deserving souls to Heaven, he had to be in a million places at once. People died every second of every day, all over the world, hundreds of thousands dying at the same time in different locations, and the Angel of Death needed to personally check in with every single soul.

Azrael, through a special “blessing”—some would call it a curse—was able to split himself, or maybe just his awareness and presence of mind, into thousands of smaller pieces, scouting the world for recently deceased souls. I didn’t know if he got a notification about each soul that died—geez, the mental noise from that would drive me insane—but he would know where to go to check on a soul and either confirm that they were slated for Hell or rubber-stamp their mark for Heaven, then take them to a gate.

If someone died, and Azrael couldn’t come right away, the soul would simply kind of hang around, unmarked and unsupervised, until Azrael had time to come check on them. Apparently, a tendency for whether a person would go to Hell or to Heaven was already evident in the soul even before Azrael officially marked them, but demons were only allowed to reap the soul after Azrael had confirmed the damnation.

In any case, he was busy. He didn’t really get time off, he couldn’t take a break, and he wasn’t allowed to rest. As far as I knew, he didn’t even have any sort of home base up here in Heaven, like a room or a suite. He wasn’t truly part of angel society, occupying this weird position just outside of it. He’d interact with others here and there, but those had to be short moments, carved out of the mentally taxing task of keeping up with the steady influx of deaths all over the world.

Some of the monitoring and managing of the recently deceased souls he could apparently do subconsciously, or concurrently to doing something else, like talking to an angel. But it seemed like it took effort to stay present in one spot and focus on a conversation for longer than a few minutes. I could always tell when the strain of pooling most of his mental resources in one place when he visited me started to become difficult for him—he’d get a faraway look in his eyes and seem distracted, then his expression would show tension seeping in.

So, was it any wonder that the dude had no social skills to speak of? Thousands of years of being constantly on the job, no time to actually hang out with others—that would certainly leave its mark. If he was blunt and gruff and kind of robotic, that was just par for the course. I thought he was doing quite well, considering the toll his task must have been taking on him.

And to be fair, I really shouldn’t be one to talk, what with my own pronounced social awkwardness. It gave us a strange kind of kinship.

And his line of questioning me did have its purpose, as he’d explained to me at the start when he’d come to check in on me a few days after my ascension. He’d told me it was his responsibility as the only angel capable of making humans ascend to ensure that those newly made angels didn’t exhibit any short- or long-term side effects of their transformation.

“Any headaches?” he asked, drawing me back to our current conversation.

I opened my mouth to negate that question, like I always did, but then I remembered the dull, throbbing pain I’d felt in my temples yesterday. It’d happened a few times, whereas before, I’d never experienced anything similar.

Azrael zeroed in on that second of hesitation. “Elaborate.”

I frowned. “I just…I had a bit of a headache yesterday.”

“What were you doing?”

Pressing my lips together, I hesitated yet again. This came uncomfortably close to talking about my meeting with Aziel. I opted for a half-truth. “I was chatting with a…friend.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Who?”

Think, think.“Naamah,” I blurted out.

As expected, that made him back off a little. A flicker of some deep emotion cracked his immovable composure, and his eyes darted away.

With whatever was going on between those two, I figured he was unlikely to ask Naamah for confirmation of what I told him, meaning my lie would go unnoticed. It was just a hunch, but I had the distinct impression that he’d be reluctant to talk to her. And even if he did ask her, she’d cover for me, making sure Azrael wouldn’t find out about me and Aziel meeting.

A slight crease appeared between his dark brows as he stared at the floor. “Can you describe what you were thinking of or talking about when you had the headache?”

I bit my lip, recalling the context of the situation and trying to word it in a way that wouldn’t give too much away about the meeting with Aziel. “I was looking at an object and wondering if I’d seen it anywhere before.”

“What was the object?”

I hesitated. “A dagger.”

He seemed to ponder that for a moment.

“Can angels have visions?”

The question was out of my mouth before I could reconsider. For some reason, I dared to ask him, whereas I had balked with Naamah, probably because she might immediately make the connection between my question and the way I’d been “confused” about Aziel reading my mind. And I just wasn’t ready to let her or Aziel know about my theory, not when I still needed to figure this all out for myself. Both of them were too involved with that possible vision—Aziel as the one featured in it, and Naamah because she knew him well and had set up the whole training thing.

Azrael, on the other hand, was a completely neutral party to this. And over the course of our acquaintance, he’d answered all of my sometimes naive inquiries about Heaven and angels and whatnot to the best of his ability and without judgment.

At my question, he whipped up his head and gave me a thoughtful look. “Do you think you are having visions?”

He was sharp; I had to hand it to him.

“Maaaaaaybe,” I said with a small grimace.

“Tell me.”

“Okay, so.” I huffed out a breath, blowing a strand of hair out of my face. “I’ve been having these dreams, like, ever since I can remember, which, as you know, is only as far back as my ascension. Because someone wiped my memory.” I gave him a good side-eye.

“That happens automatically during the transformation,” he said with his usual calm. “It’s not something I do.”

“Right, anywho. These dreams, they always seem to feature the same…person.” I opted for keeping this gender-neutral. The more anonymous I could make my account of my dreams, the better. I did not want Azrael to be able to figure out whom I was talking about.

Infinitesimally, he stood straighter, his focus turning laser-sharp.

“But I never see that person’s face,” I continued. “Like, not really. But I know it’s always the same one. And yesterday…I think I met hi—that person.” Dammit, I’d almost slipped up. I plowed forward, hoping Azrael hadn’t noticed. “And a scene from one of my dreams came true, almost exactly down to the details.”

His eyes widened just the slightest bit. He caught himself quickly, though, his features smoothing out into his regular mask of aloofness. “Who is it? The…person you met?”

I bit the inside of my mouth. “That’s not relevant. It’s not about who I saw, but rather the question of whether that could have been a vision. Is that possible?”

“It would be a unique gift,” he said carefully.

“But it’s possible?”

“It’s not impossible.”

Ha! There! That was as good as a confirmation.

“I would suggest,” Azrael added, “that you wait and see if perhaps more of your dreams come true. As it stands, this may have been a coincidence.”

I saluted him. “All right, then. I’ll be waiting and seeing. Oh, do you think the headaches could be related to this?”

The look he gave me was unfathomable. “That could well be the case.”