“In time, I’ll allow you some access to your powers.” His expression was still doing an imitation of the marble effigy on his desk, but his green eyes smoldered with intense heat. “But not until I’m sure you want to be here.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” She sounded breathless and wanton, as if he’d been talking about sex, not getting her powers returned. Idiot.
He dropped his hand, and she felt the loss as a sudden chill on her skin. “Not the same thing.”
No, she supposed not. “Is there any place that’s off limits to me?”
“As my mate, what’s mine is yours. You can go anywhere except the Inner Sanctum, where the souls are kept. It’s a dangerous place for anyone, especially an angel.”
“Gotcha.” Sheoul-gra’s Inner Sanctum didn’t sound like a place she’d like to see anyway. Ever.
“Good.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to go, but I’ll catch up to you soon. I think we might have a lot to talk about.”
She nodded, watched him leave, and then wondered what he’d meant by that. She didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to be here.
Worst of all, she didn’t want to be attracted to him.
Sadly, it was too late.
The cloaked, hooded figure waiting inside Azagoth’s office turned as he entered. The male angel, whose features were concealed by shadow, bowed his head in greeting.
“I hope you have some information for me, Jim Bob,” Azagoth said, using the code name he’d given the angel over a century ago when Jim Bob had agreed to be Azagoth’s spy in Heaven.
One of his spies, anyway. Azagoth had several, each useful in different ways. Some, like Jim Bob, came to him of their own free will, their reasons ranging from wanting the best for the Heavenly realm to having some secret, personal agenda. Others were unwillingly recruited thanks to intel Azagoth gained from the souls who came through Sheoul-gra. Azagoth didn’t give a shit how his spies came to him, as long as they didn’t screw him over.
Jim Bob, whose real name Azagoth didn’t know, inclined his head again. “I was able to ferret out some background on your mate.” He gathered the plain brown cloak more tightly around him, as if his jeans and German flag T-shirt would reveal his true identity. The paranoid moron.
Azagoth didn’t give a shit who the guy was in Heaven. Mighty archangel or lowly desk-jockey Seraphim, it didn’t matter. Still, Azagoth would bet his right wing that Jim Bob was a high-ranking motherfucker, maybe of the order of Virtues or Principalities. The male radiated impressive power even here, where all power but Azagoth’s was diminished.
“Lilliana is of the order of Thrones.” Jim Bob’s gravelly baritone took on a disdainful note, and the fact that he looked down on Thrones confirmed Azagoth’s suspicion that the guy was very high-level, since Thrones weren’t exactly serfs. “When she was an infant, her mother died in a time travel incident. Her father refused to take her in, and she was sent to the battle angel academy to be raised until it could be determined whether or not she possessed the time travel ability.”
Interesting. The ability to travel through time was so rare as to be almost nonexistent. “And?”
“She tested positive.” Jim Bob began to pace, his long strides carrying him across the room in a dozen steps. His heavy-ass work boots didn’t make a sound. “At the age of fifty, she was taken out of battle angel rotation and sent to Time Travel Operations, where she worked for almost four centuries. She had a clean, if unremarkable, record of service until recently, when she was punished for stealing items from the past. Shortly after that, she went AWOL and didn’t show up for work for months. No one could find her until she broke out of the shrowd in medieval England.”
Azagoth was rarely taken by surprise, but that news did it. When angels traveled to the past, they did so within an impenetrable bubble known as a shrowd. The shrowd rendered them invisible and limited their ability to interact with the residents of the era. One of the most important and heavily enforced rules for time travelers was that they never leave the shrowd.
Maybe her infraction was what got her sent here. But why had she done it in the first place? Had she been running from something? He knew it was possible for angels to leave the shrowd in order to reside—or hide—in the past, but he didn’t know how they avoided getting caught. Apparently, Lilliana didn’t know either.
“Why did she break out of the shrowd?”
“No idea.”
Disappointing. “What about lovers?” he asked. “Does she have any? Did she have to leave a male in Heaven to come here?”
Please say no. Not that he personally gave a hellrat’s ass, but if he was going to have to put up with a crying, broken-hearted female for all eternity, he’d like a heads up and a lot more rum.
Jim Bob shrugged. “If so, she kept it quiet. The only relationship I found was with a male named Hutriel, but that ended decades ago.”
Excellent. Azagoth stared into the fire as he contemplated everything he’d learned. When he looked back over at Jim Bob, the angel stopped pacing. “You look puzzled,” Jim Bob mused.
“I’m just wondering why she wasn’t destroyed for breaking out of the shrowd. Was mating me her punishment?”
“Perhaps.”
How not helpful. Azagoth ground his molars in frustration. “Can you at least tell me if her ability to time travel was removed before she was sent here?”
“It was not.”
Well, wasn’t this all unexpected. He recalled how Lilliana had seemed so amazed by his chronoglass, so clueless about what it was and what he did with it, all the while knowing she possessed an ability that could activate the device.
It seemed as if his new mate had been keeping important information from him. Time to find out why.
And, perhaps, remind her that he dealt in death. Not forgiveness.
Chapter Five
Lilliana had no idea how she was going to get that giant chronoglass out of Sheoul-gra. For a few minutes after Azagoth left her alone, she’d tried to lift the thing, but it soon became clear that without her powers, she was going to have to drag it out. Which was going to take time and was going to make a lot of noise.
She’d have to plan this heist well.
She always thought best when she was walking, so she’d gone out to explore the buildings Azagoth had said were empty.
And they were...of people. Hellrats and other strange little demonic critters scurried around, and the pulsing, maggoty-pale vines had climbed walls and penetrated windows and doorways. As she wandered through structure after structure, she found evidence of what must have, at one point, been a bustling community.
One entire building had been dedicated to living quarters complete with private bedrooms. In another building, she found several long-empty community baths. There was even a huge hall filled with long tables and chairs. Wooden and stone food trenchers still sat at some of the seats, as if waiting to be filled.
Who had lived here? And why had they left?
It was all so eerie, and that was before she reached the Roman-style colosseum, its sandy basin littered with demon bones. Ancient weapons, none newer than about two hundred years old, hung from racks on the walls.
The soft thud of footsteps echoed through the structure, and it took all her years of training not to make a run for the nearest scythe. Panic in a strange place never ended in anything but death. In a controlled spin, she whirled around, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw Azagoth, his long strides eating up the distance between them with effortless grace.