Chapter 2 #2
I dart my eyes between Adam and the wadded-up napkin. "See, now that's how you throw something at a person who's sitting two feet away from you."
Eve looks between us questioningly.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Adam mutters, refusing to meet my eyes.
I blow out a breath, shaking my head mournfully. "Denial. So sad."
“There’s news!” Adam says, flashing an amused grin at Eve and flipping me off at the same time, clearly about to use the knowledge of Azrael’s existence as revenge against me. Eve’s gonna be so pissed.
Eve frowns at him, rightfully suspicious. She slides a wary glance at me. “What’s happened now?”
“Our sister has decided to adopt a pet Angel,” Adam tells her with exaggerated excitement. “What joy this way comes.”
Eve whips her head between us, her mouth open in shock, disbelief written across her face in a furious scrawl. “What the fuck? Seriously, an Angel? Where is it?” She turns her head, searching the flat for some sign of my new guest as if she thinks Azrael will be hiding behind the sofa or something.
“She’s not an ‘it,’” I say sternly. “Her name is Azrael, and she’s lying down in my bedroom, so keep your voice down, for fuck’s sake.”
Eve shoots me a scowl of confusion. “But Angels don’t sleep.”
I shrug. “They dream, though.”
“So … what,” Eve says slowly, a horrified look dawning on her face, “you have an Angel daydreaming in your bed right now?”
I bob my head. “Pretty much the size of it, yeah.”
“Have you gone absolutely bonkers?” Eve hisses at me, darting a fearful glance towards my closed bedroom door.
“That’s what I said,” Adam chimes in unhelpfully, and I make a face at him, which he promptly ignores in favour of sipping away at his tea. I resist the urge to knock it out of his hands. Barely.
“Chill out,” I soothe Eve. “It’s not that big a thing.” Except it really, really is, to be fair.
Eve does not chill out; if anything, she becomes even more irate in response to my blasé attitude.
“You can’t keep an Angel here, Lil. Michael and his cadre of feathered bellends will come storming in, all righteous and stupid and stabby.
” She makes a stabbing motion with her fist. “I don’t want to get stabbed by Michael. ”
Adam raises his hand. “I second not wanting to get stabbed.” He screws up his nose. “Especially by Michael. That prick.”
“No one’s getting stabbed.” I wave them off. “They won’t come for her yet. At some point, Michael or Gabriel will contact me, asking for her back first.”
“And you’ll tell them …?” Eve prods.
“To take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, yeah.” I tap out a quick rhythm against the table edge, flashing her a jaunty grin.
“Lilith!” Eve and Adam both yelp with varying degrees of shrillness. They’re looking at me with despair on their faces, so identical it takes real effort not to take the piss out of them for it. This is not the time for jokes. I’ll only get hit, and Eve is strong for a human.
I don’t know if Azrael was waiting for the chance to interrupt, or if she just has the best accidental timing in the world, but her trepidatious wandering from my room to the kitchen couldn’t be more welcome.
Azrael, despite her quiet demeanour, comes off as relatively menacing in the light of day. Or that might just be the distrustful scowl she’s aiming at Eve and Adam as if they’re the ones who are intruding and might have suspect motives for being here.
She’s still wearing the same clothes from last night: a simple halter top, the only sort of shirt she could wear to allow for the wings without getting creative with the sewing scissors, and some combat trousers stuffed into similar military-style boots.
All black, like Heaven had a Charlie’s Angels movie night and decided to develop a sense of humour, finally.
Azrael, despite the wings protruding out of her back that I will never be able to view as anything but obscene, is beautiful enough to have been cast in one of those films. I noticed that last night, but it didn’t strike me until now, seeing her standing here in my kitchen with the sunlight filtering through the windows to bathe her in a faint glow.
I’m the last person to believe in the divinity of Angels, but Azrael is stunningly beautiful, with her white-blonde hair down to her slim waist and genuine, no-shit heart-shaped face.
Even her starkly Angelic white eyes can’t detract from her full mouth and sharp, model-esque cheekbones.
She would have looked more fae princess than human in her Before state.
Plus, she’s the same height as me, long in the legs and torso, which rarely ever happens.
None of that matters, obviously. Azrael could be the most hideous creature on this earth for all I care, and in some ways, she is, because even looking at an Angel can make me feel vaguely disturbed.
I know too much about where they come from to ever be entirely comfortable being in the vicinity of one.
But still, I can’t help thinking that if I’d seen her in a bar when she was human, I’d have taken her home with me for a completely different set of reasons.
Eve and Adam are staring at Azrael in a mix of outright dismay and, in Eve’s case, mild hatred.
Azrael, sensing Eve’s decidedly hostile reception, turns the full power of her scowl on my sister.
I think she even hitches it up by a couple of notches.
Whoever taught her how to convey her dislike via bitchface deserves at least three gold stars because wow, that shit is genuinely intimidating.
Even my sister seems cowed by it, which is no small feat because that woman is an equal combination of both formidable and spiteful when she wants to be.
When Azrael continues to scowl her little heart out, Eve purposefully scoots away from her and drops her gaze to the table.
Score one for Azrael.
“Okay.” I try not to sound joyful about Azrael’s defeat of my sister.
“Intro time. Azrael, this is Eve and Adam.” I lean towards her and lower my voice to stage-whisper, “Don’t worry, they already know all about your dark past, and they absolutely want to be your new best friends.
Just don’t smite them; they don’t like that shit. ”
Eve cuffs me over the back of the head and rolls her eyes. Adam, my fairer sibling, snorts out a laugh.
“Does anyone like to be smote?” Azrael asks, speaking for the first time in her low, melodic rumble. She seems perplexed by the idea.
Adam makes a thoughtful humming sound. “Depends on what ‘smiting’ is a euphemism for.” He waggles his eyebrows like a tosser and gets a flick to the forehead from me as punishment. He jerks backwards, slapping a hand over his own face and serving me a look of betrayal through his fingers.
“Don’t be crass to our guest, please,” I say primly, ignoring his whinging about violent sisters and who the fuck’s idea it was to invent them, turning my attention to Azrael again. “Do you want some tea?” I hold up my cup, brandishing it at her like I think she won’t know what I’m talking about.
Azrael still seems puzzled by the back-and-forth between my siblings and me, but she rallies fast enough. “No, I don’t need it.” Then she adds as if she thinks I won’t know, “Angels don’t need to eat or drink to survive.”
“I didn’t ask if you needed it to survive, Az,” I say slowly, my heart clenching inside my chest at the idea she doesn’t understand there’s anything other than survival that matters. “I asked if you wanted some.” I tap my ear with two fingers, winking at her. “Gotta listen, babe.”
“Oh, blimey,” Eve groans, wrinkling her nose like I’ve just done something truly distasteful. “She just gave it a nickname and a pet name. It’s only been here one night!”
“Don’t call her an ‘it,’” I scold more fiercely than I thought I felt about it. Uh-oh.
Eve shoots a beseeching look at Adam, smacking her hands down on the table.
“This is how it happens, then. This is how we all finally get murdered by Michael and his fan club, all because somebody”—she glares daggers at me, like we wouldn’t all have clarity over who she’s talking about—“wants to fuck an Angel.”
Adam sighs dramatically and bobs his head in agreement. “We’re doomed.” Although he can’t be that cut up about it, because he took the opportunity of my distraction to nab a piece of my brownie, the blasted fiend.
“I don’t know if I want tea,” Azrael interrupts, her mind still caught up on a whole other plain of conversational existence.
She’s frowning now, which is less severe than her scowl but not by much, her pretty mouth tugged to the side like she’s resisting the urge to gnaw on it with those perfect teeth.
She must have been a regular at the dentist in her Before life or something.
No human just has teeth that straight and white without any sort of dedicated intervention.
“What do you mean?” I ask, intrigued by her strange response.
Azrael tilts her head at me like a confused puppy, and I refuse to think of it as cute. Re-fucking-fuse, I say.
“I haven’t had it before,” she tells me.
“Not even once in all this time?” I ask, stunned. Angels are creatures of order and service, but they do have free will as proven by Azrael’s defection.
Azrael shrugs her shoulders. They’re slimmer than mine although I wouldn’t call her skinny by any means.
She has defined muscle in her biceps that I absolutely do not want to bite into, leaving a claiming mark on her creamy skin, thanks for asking.
Bruises and bite marks would look good on her, but that’s inappropriate, so we won’t think about that, will we? Nope.
“Never needed it,” she explains haplessly, “so I didn’t have it.” And there’s no point asking about her Before, because she wouldn’t know it if she discovered the original tea leaf, let alone ever drank the stuff.
“Ah, okay, gotcha.” I nod. Then I peer at her consideringly and ask, “Do you wanna try it, though?”
I’m not sure why this is turning into such a thing, or why I seem to give a shit if this random Angel wants tea or not, except it really feels like a big thing.
Angels have so much taken from them; the second they’re chosen, everything they were or could have ever been ceases to exist, all of it drained away like water disappearing down the drain of a bath.
If I can just give this one small bit of humanity back to her, even if it’s something as small as her opinion on tea, then, at least to me, that’s worth doing.
Azrael hesitates at the question, seeming more than a little unsure of how to answer as if she’s forgotten what it’s like to feel desire in any capacity.
After a silence that is far too heavy given the fact we’re talking about bloody tea, Azrael dips her chin slightly. “Alright.” Then she seems to gain confidence in her decision, and she nods again, more firmly this time. “I want to try it.”
I can’t help the smile that spreads across my face. It’s such a tiny act of defiance, but that’s exactly what it is, and I was the original rebel, so I would know. Unless you count Lucifer, I guess, if you want to be all pedantic about it.
Azrael doesn’t smile back at me, but there’s a softness to her expression that feels like a win anyway.
“Brilliant!” I get up from my stool and go around into the kitchen to make Azrael her tea.
She watches me for a moment before I beckon her over.
Whilst I fill the kettle, I tell her to get a mug for herself, pointing out where to go.
She ambles across to the right cupboard and spends an insane amount of time choosing one, which probably, to be fair, just means I have too many mugs.
Adam and Eve watch on wordlessly, giving in to my madness as they often do.
When Azrael is sitting down next to me at the counter with a cup of tea in hand—she chose the one shaped like a duck; I approve—we all wait as she takes her first sip of tea.
She keeps it in her mouth for a bit, properly tasting it, then swallows it down.
“So what do you think?” Adam asks her, looking at her with sincere interest, and I love him for it.
Azrael takes a handful of seconds to give us her verdict. She makes a humming sound with her lips still partially pressed to the mug’s rim, then says, simply, “I like it.”
I resist the urge to brush my arm against hers in some show of silent camaraderie, but Azrael beats me to it anyway, leaning into my side to press up against me from arm to hip to thigh.
I should pull away, but I don’t. She feels warm, more so than I thought Angels were capable of.
They’re usually such cold creatures, like ice sculptures trapped inside human skin.
After that first accomplishment of the day, things between the four of us ease up a bit.
Eve makes a peace offering, getting out a tin of biscuits and pushing them towards Azrael, who in turn gives Eve another one of those intensely hostile scowls and keeps it up even when she picks out one of the chocolate digestives to take a big chomp out of.
Another first-time experience although Azrael seems far less unsure about her opinion on this one.
Apparently, biscuits most definitely fall into the “like” column.
Big surprise there. She polishes off at least five before she finishes her cup of tea.
Adam and Eve still aren’t happy about this; I can tell by how many significant looks they keep shooting at me, but I’m happy to let it be until Michael and his bastards inevitably show up to ruin things.