FORTY-THREE
“Don’t worry, Zarek, I’m not here to hurt Angela. You can’t hurt me either—none of you have that kind of power over me.” Father Michael held the unbothered ease of a man who had never once needed to raise his voice to fill a room. “My daughter has inherited some of my traits.”
It did nothing to convince the Sworn Exarchs to stand down.
“It’s okay. Really, it is.” Angela held up both hands, hoping they’d lower their weapons.
But then Lord Gellar eased off, just a bit, and the others did the same. But not Zarek.
What was worse, Father Michael ignored them, turning to Angela while nodding in Zarek’s direction. “So, this is the non-friend you were talking about.”
The heat crawled up the back of her neck. “What happened to confessional confidentiality, Father?”
Father Michael’s eyes lit with a telltale spark of amusement, which she’d always found irritating when younger.
“He doesn’t look old enough to be your father,” Martar muttered somewhere behind her.
“Of course, he doesn’t. It seems my dear old dad has this non-aging thing well in hand, don’t you, Father?” The sarcasm was loud and clear. While underneath, she was furious, fighting the urge to scream: how long have you known? And why didn’t you tell me sooner?
Angela didn’t. She’d save the screaming for later, usually inside her car, on a deserted street, when having a terrible day. She certainly wasn’t about to scream or rant in a room that resembled a war zone.
“Who are you?” Zarek still held her hand, and through whatever impossible thread the Claiming had stitched between them, she could feel him—not panicked but drawn taut. Ready to protect her.
But there was also an extra layer to him, something that hadn’t been there before she’d entered that dreamscape.
He was still Zarek, but different. It wasn’t just that the staves were gone from his armor, something else had happened.
She wanted to ask, but not in front of this crowd, not with everything else going on.
“Angela.” Zarek’s voice dropped.
Didn’t that just relight the fuse on her anger.
“This man is Father Michael. A priest at the church my mother went to.” She looked at the perfect composure of the priest she had always known. Many said he was handsome, but she never got the attraction. “He has been in my life for as long as I can remember.”
Trying to remember all those stories she’d been told about her absent father by her mother, where most people, including herself, had assumed he had passed on.
Which then opened the door on a different load of evidence to assemble, all those times she’d once filed under coincidence. There were a multitude of times in the local coffee shop where Father Michael would be reading a newspaper two tables away whenever she needed coffee and answers.
How he’d drive past on the street when she had taken the long way home after a bad day at school and given her a lift home. When she’d missed the bus home, or got stuck in some storm, and that time she got her first flat tire when he’d just shown up in his car to help her.
He’d appear at the bookshop as one of their regular readers, chatting with Aunt Claudine and staying for tea. Where, of course, Angela would wander from the office and somehow the conversation would end up being about whatever Angela was quietly worried about that week.
Father Michael was her responsible adult, the one they’d call to the school because Aunt Claudine had argued with the principal so badly security had to be called.
Twice. So, Father Michael had become her parent by proxy and would arrive on time every time, as if he’d been expecting the call.
Which, in her defense, wasn’t that often.
But then again, being a victim of bullying for being different, or just having different colored eyes, it was more often than she’d like to admit.
And let’s not forget the simple passage of life that every child goes through: learning to ride a bicycle.
For her, it had been the patient Saturday afternoons in the car park behind the church, where Father Michael’s steady hand held the back of the bicycle he’d built for her out of spare parts.
Her mother laughed from the nearby garden bench, while Angela insisted she didn’t need either of them, right until she did.
But then her mother was gone.
And yet Father Michael still showed up. School sports days.
Debate finals. The regional moot competition in the second year of college, when she’d stood at the podium so nervous she’d gone blank for three full seconds.
She’d found one face in the crowd to anchor herself, the way you were taught to face a jury, and found his.
All he did was nod—just once—like always, and the words came back to her.
It was Father Michael who’d found the scholarship and helped her fill out the paperwork.
He’d sourced the second-hand legal textbooks she couldn’t afford.
Supplied the reference letter, written in that unhurried, careful hand she’d read so many times it lived rent-free in her memory: Miss Duboise demonstrates a quality of thinking that is rare in students far beyond her years…
There were those lunches where she’d needed to argue a case out loud and needed someone with an in-built confidentiality clause.
Someone to practice her closings or openings for court, because she got little help as a junior lawyer.
Who better to see than the man who gave weekly speeches on a podium?
Father Michael had never once told her she was wrong.
He had only ever asked her what the other side would say.
And even when she’d quit and lost her belief in law, magic, love, and so many other things, she’d still visit the graveyard to see her mother, and he’d be there, either simply passing through the garden paths or sitting on the bench nearby, but always present without intruding—which was, she now understood, an extremely specific skill set.
Cunning was nowhere near the right word for it. Especially if he’d been her father, who she’d called Father all her life. And he would call her little one.
She hadn’t seen it then, but the illusion of being deceived so cleverly was shocking on so many layers. Here she was, a woman who could smell a lie in a deposition from across a conference table.
It was right in front of me. This entire time.
She didn’t know if she was angrier at Father Michael or at herself for not asking the right question sooner.
“You’re a priest?” Zarek’s warrior’s tone carried that razor edge. He had not lowered his guard and wasn’t going to soon.
Father Michael smiled. “Well…”
“No, he’s not.” Angela held the medallion out from her chest, the one Father Michael had pressed into her hand.
She now understood it had never been a gift but more of a signature as a direct link to what he was.
“This is the Archangel Michael. Protector. And the Angel of Death.” Her favorite angel. Go figure.
“Angels can’t—can they?” Bellus reached instinctively for his spectacles that were no longer there. “Have children?”
“Bullshit,” said Condorr.
“Watch your tongue.” Father Michael’s voice didn’t rise. It simply expanded, filling the space from floor to rafter, and with it came the rest of him.
The room’s shadows leaned away as his form grew; the priest’s suit dissolved into leather, blade, and armor.
From behind, a pair of vast and unmistakably real wings expanded that had nothing soft about their feathers.
He was no Renaissance painting, but an ancient and lethal warrior, clearly capable of making the remaining walls tremble with the simple act of just appearing as himself.
Angela swallowed as she craned her neck to look up at the man she had known her whole life, was an Archangel.
To think she’d argued with him over the theology of justice.
She had complained about the injustice of her mother being taken.
Told him that certain religions were nothing more than a structurally organized loyalty program with better marketing.
All while telling him that angels did not exist, like so many other things she did not believe in. And yet—
Father Michael had laughed at her then, with that same irritating shine in his eyes, which now she understood as the humor of someone who always had the upper hand, and someone who could see the bigger picture of a game that no one else knew they were playing.
She recognized that look from others she’d dealt with in court, but this time it was much more, and she knew it.
She just had to ask the right questions.
Now she finally understood why he’d say that. It was the rules.
But where did she even begin? Especially when most of his answers were in riddles.
All she could do was grasp on to what was happening right now.
“Leave Condorr and the rest of the Sworn Exarchs alone; they’re only being protective over me, and well… They have a right to be angry, considering what happened to this room.” She frowned at the mess. “Wait? Did I do this?”
That irritating, slight smirk, along with the amused shimmer in the archangel’s eye, told her a different story.
“You know I swear worse than that, so can we dial this back a little?” Especially the lethal power coming off Father Michael.
But the room held its breath, that if someone so much as sneezed, shots would be fired. She may have been good at negotiating deals once upon a time, but negotiating this kind of stand-off…
Then, almost imperceptibly, Lord Gellar and Father Michael shared a nod.
Gellar must have recognized who and what the Archangel represented, but as a man who commanded warriors for centuries, he knew when he was in the presence of something that outranked him in a way that had nothing to do with politics.
Gellar didn’t kneel; he nodded, and that was enough to calm the rest of the room. The men sheathed their weapons, and the Archangel settled. Not deflated. He simply contained himself, somehow tucking all that ancient power back into the shape of the priest she recognized.
It was a disguise. One he had been wearing her entire life.
She pushed past Zarek because she had questions.
But Zarek caught her hand again, not only to protect her but to let her know she wasn’t alone.
Now that she thought about it, she’d never truly been alone.
“Come, little one.” Father Michael extended his hand. “Walk with me. Ask your questions. You’ve been carrying them long enough.”
She had taken his hand a thousand times before. But this time, it was so different that she hesitated.
“The answers to your questions are for your ears only, Angela. Don’t worry, Zarek,” Father Michael said warmly, “we won’t go far. I’ve navigated this young woman’s temper more times than I can count. Though I’ll admit, her teenage years set a standard that’s been difficult to surpass.”
“Only because I have questions.” Angela took his hand.
“How did you know?” Zarek tugged on her other hand, not letting her go. “You told me you never knew who your father was.”
She turned back to Zarek, then to Father Michael.
Two men on either side of her.
On one side, her father—the Archangel who had been in her life for thirty years, never once sharing the truth. He was the past she thought she’d never have, handed to her now, here, in the ruins of the Keep in a realm she hadn’t chosen to visit and wasn’t allowed to leave.
On the other side, Zarek—the warrior who had pulled her out of her happy single life, only to break his own laws, the scale of which she had yet to fully understand. But he too had kept the truth of the Claiming from her because he’d been afraid of what she’d do with it.
Both of them reached for her.
Both of them, in their own ways, with their own reasons—that she had no doubt came from a place of genuine care—had made decisions about her life without asking her first.
Her mother had kept secrets from her. Father Michael had kept secrets from her.
Even Zarek had kept secrets from her. And Bellus, without even meaning to, had just confirmed in passing that she was something that technically shouldn’t exist, a fact that this entire room seemed to be absorbing more calmly than she was.
Was any of this her choice?
Had anyone, at any point, simply asked her?
Well, she was done being the last person in the room to be consulted about her own life.
She looked at Zarek. Then at her father. And pulled her hands free from them both.
Remembering something important—she was her own woman, who lived in a world where she’d worked damned hard to be that person. Making her own choices, taking responsibility for her own actions, because she’d made those choices. For herself.
“I didn’t know he was my father,” she said with a coldness of simply presenting the facts, “Not until the dreamscape. It was the first question I asked when Father Michael showed up as my guide.” She held Zarek’s gaze a moment longer, letting him read the link between them: I’m not running. I’m just not being handled anymore.
Then she turned to her father, with a stack of questions she’d been carrying her whole life sitting right behind her teeth.
“Walk with me.” Father Michael gestured toward the garden.
She nodded because it was her choice to go.
But Zarek took a step closer, glaring at Father Michael with absolute mistrust. “If you were there, why didn’t you protect her in the dreamscape?”
“Angela was never in any danger,” Father Michael replied.
“She simply needed you to bring her back.” His expression wasn’t quite a smile, but the near cousin of one.
“The Claiming you two share is the strongest I have ever witnessed. Nothing will come between you. You might want to consider the ancient binding ceremony, Zarek—the marriage rite.”
“Excuse me?” Angela arched her eyebrows at both men. Was this now going to be some sort of an arranged marriage?
“A marriage would give you both more control over the Claiming’s influence before it escalates further,” explained Father Michael.
“Ignore him,” Angela said to Zarek. She could feel the difference in him, now that his staves were gone. “Hey, are you all right?” she asked quietly.
Zarek nodded. But he didn’t look away from Father Michael. “Are you?”
No, she wasn’t, because all her beliefs and disbeliefs were being tested. Especially when she’d spent thirty years not believing in magic, or in angels, and systems that claimed to protect her. Maybe it was time to try something different.
“We did the dreamscape for answers, and I got one.” She just hadn’t expected the answer to be Father Michael in his black suit and white collar, who again held out his hand to her.
So this time, she wasn’t negotiating. She was deciding for herself and took it. Standing here, in Paradox, holding the hand of Archangel Michael, that may be the beginning of finding out who she really was underneath.