Epilogue Something’s Coming
Epilogue
Something's Coming
The first thing I noticed was grass against my cheek.
The second was sunlight warming the back of my neck, birds chirping somewhere overhead, and the faint sound of water nearby.
For one stupid second, I wondered if I had somehow woken up in the Garden of Eden, which would have been impressive considering the last thing I remembered was being perished out of existence.
A bicycle bell rang close enough to make me jerk upward, followed by somebody shouting, “On your left!”
I rolled onto my back just in time to see a man jog past wearing sneakers, headphones, and absolutely nothing else. I stared after him for a second before groaning and dragging a hand over my face. “Get it together, Uriel. Clearly not Eden.”
Saying my own name helped more than it should have. I was still Uriel, or at least enough of him to remember exactly who I was, what had happened, and why waking up in the middle of a mortal park made absolutely no fucking sense.
I pushed myself upright, bracing one hand against the ground when everything tilted around me.
People moved along the paved path nearby without paying much attention.
A woman pushed a stroller while arguing with a little boy about whether rocks counted as treasures.
Two men were bent over a phone. A dog stopped long enough to stare at me before its owner tugged it away.
Then something heavy slammed into my chest.
I sucked in a sharp breath and folded forward, palm pressing against my sternum as memories came with it. Ariuk screaming. Dante sitting across from me while I tried to find one last way around Heaven. Jophiel at the altar. The knowledge that I had failed to warn God before everything went wrong.
The emotion was overwhelming enough that I almost mistook it for pain, except I knew pain. This was guilt, sharpened until every regret I had ever carried felt fresh again.
Worse, it wasn’t only mine.
One of the men nearby looked down at his phone, and a pulse of regret struck me hard enough that my head snapped toward him. The woman with the stroller lost her patience with the little boy, then immediately softened, and I felt the guilt roll off her before her expression changed.
I stared down at my hands. “No fucking way.”
The sensation only grew clearer the more I focused on it. Regret. Shame. The weight people carried after wishing they had done something differently. I could feel it around me like another layer of sound.
“This must be fucking karma for trying to warn God that Chaos was in Heaven, and now I’m an IDEA. Just my fucking luck.” I tipped my head back toward the sky, squinting through the branches overhead. “But Guilt? Really? You couldn’t have made me something else?”
A bird chirped above me.
“Very helpful.”
I leaned back against the tree and tried to make sense of what I remembered. Jophiel hadn’t killed me in any ordinary way. The condemnation had been meant to erase me completely, essence and all. There shouldn’t have been anything left to wake up here.
Apparently, something had survived anyway.
I didn’t need a lecture on cosmic balance to recognize what that meant. Somewhere between being erased and opening my eyes in this park, whatever remained of me had become something else.
I closed my eyes and reached instinctively for God, just as I had before I stalked toward the altar as a last resort. No matter how many times I reached out through the direct connection all archangels shared with the man on the throne, he hadn’t answered.
But this time… the connection hit something.
I tried again, slower, concentrating harder in case whatever had happened to my essence was interfering. The prayer rose, caught against something I couldn’t see, and snapped back into me hard enough to make me flinch.
“What the fuck?” I muttered, glancing around when a woman passing nearby gave me a worried look. “Not you.”
She hurried away, which was probably fair. I closed my eyes again and reached more carefully. The connection itself wasn’t gone. I could still feel the old thread, except something about it had changed.
It no longer ended with me. I followed it outward and froze when I recognized the essence waiting at the other end.
Ariuk.
For several seconds, I just sat there beneath the tree while the realization worked its way through me. When I had been erased, my direct connection to God hadn’t disappeared with me. It had passed to my creation.
I couldn’t reach God anymore but she could. I just hoped she’d trust me when I came to explain the truth because Chaos was still somewhere up there, no doubt reaching for God’s seat.
I pushed myself to my feet, using the tree for balance when my legs objected. The naked jogger chose that moment to come around the path again, and I looked pointedly in the opposite direction.
“Earth is absolutely strange.”
At least I knew what I needed to do next.
I had to find Ariuk.