Chapter 2
Two
Lilith
The Next Afternoon
A storm was rolling in. I could tell by the smell in the air and the way the wind whipped through the long grass and beat against the windows and doors. Let me in, let me in, it seemed to cry.
Let me out, let me out, I wished to answer. But I was stuck in a moldering manor on a barren moor with near-strangers. Earlier that morning I’d spied a grand display of stained glass windows in one corner of the Great Hall. Shock stuck my feet to the ground when I recognized the scene.
“What’s that?” I had pointed to the round alcove at the edge of the Great Hall, the walls filled with stained glass from floor to ceiling.
The angel raised one eyebrow at me. “I’m not certain, Lily, but…bear with me…I believe those odd little holes in the walls are called windows.”
I’d pretended not to be angry at his needling, which I found disturbing for a holy being, and focused on the display.
It was a landscape with an ancient church in the center, a gray steeple pointing high in the pre-dawn light.
Trees and meadows surrounded the building, but the most fascinating was the image in the center: a Herald of Death with black wings Falling, his face etched in agony.
“I’ve seen this before,” I breathed. “In the reverend’s study, I think. In an old manuscript several years ago.”
For whatever reason, this had shocked the two angels—seraphim, I supposed—and the leader, Gabriel, had ordered that I lead them back to my home to find the manuscript so they could learn more.
It was strange. Nothing made sense. Shouldn’t they know everything already?
And now I was surrounded by near-strangers and two dead bodies.
I stared down at the body of my dead brother.
“By the four gods, would you cover him up?” Eve, a couple of years older, glared at the seraph who had shown me my brother. She placed a hand on my shoulder and gripped it in sympathy.
Which was odd, because I knew she hated my brother. Most people had, to be honest. I needed to say something. I needed to react. I shouldn’t stand here like a stone statue.
“How…how did it happen?” I forced my gaze up and away from Absalom’s bruised and pale face.
Gabriel, the seraph with snowy wings, grimaced and folded the bedsheet back over Absalom’s face.
“Forgive me. I was once a warrior, and I did not consider how civilian death would be shocking.” His brilliant white wings folded tightly against his back, the arches nearly hidden behind his head when he faced me.
There was another body, under another white bedsheet, lying on the smooth stone floor of the creaky manor, but I couldn’t think about the reverend yet.
Something shifted behind me. I turned to see Castiel frowning at me, arms crossed. “Maybe you should sit down. You look like you’ll faint.” They both had faint accents I couldn’t place. They must’ve learned our human tongue ages ago.
My lungs burned, a reminder to breathe again. I forced myself to take a breath. “I’m fine,” I answered sharply, trying not to glare at the three other living people in the room.
Our reverend was…well, lying dead under the second bedsheet. I put a hand over my eyes and tried not to shudder.
A thin vine of anger slipped through the walls I had built around my heart, cutting a chink in the mortar. “How did this happen?” I demanded.
One week ago I was working for the elders of the Church of the Love of His Divine Saints.
Then I was chosen to join the men on their journey, likely for the same reason I’d been chosen to keep track of elders’ work in the church, and the same reason Eve Lovejoy and I were not friends.
I was beautiful. At least, the most beautiful woman in the small congregation of the Church of the Love of His Divine Saints.
So my pretty face was hustled aboard a public coach and traveled two days north to where the reverend’s betrothed had found a Herald. The one with the white wings rather frightened me, though Eve liked him.
The other one….I didn’t want to think about him, especially while he stood at my back. I had no idea what sort of powers he possessed as a direct messenger and servant to Erlik, the God of Death and Beyond.
It had all unraveled. I thought the most daring thing I’d do on this trip would be sneaking a volume of poetry in the bottom of my valise, since secular books were forbidden.
Instead, Eve turned her back on our entire church and tried to run.
I couldn’t fathom it.
And I did not like the angel with bronze wings—Castiel.
He’d asked me all sorts of questions, tossed me in an empty room with a dusty old mattress on the floor, and this morning started his barrage of questions again when he found me trying to slip away through the shadows.
And now…now…my brother and my reverend were dead. It didn’t make sense. Only a few moments ago Eve found me searching the kitchen for an escape and gently let me know the Herald with the white wings—her seraph, she called him—had brought back two bodies.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t know whether I was trying to force tears away or force them to come. My heart became a dull, limp thing in my chest and my limbs were stiff and numb. It didn’t seem possible.
Gabriel, the seraph with white wings, and Eve exchanged a look I didn’t like.
Castiel cleared his throat and stepped closer. I shied away from him. But before he could speak, a loud banging echoed throughout the Great Hall.
I jumped, looking around the massive, three-story stone chamber with soaring, exposed beams. Candles had been lit and set nearby, but shadows swathed most of the room.
“Someone’s at the door.” Eve started toward it.
But the seraph with white wings put a hand on her shoulder, staying her.
Eve rolled her eyes. “Gabriel. Let me answer the door.”
Under normal circumstances, my mouth would’ve fallen open in surprise at the irreverent way she treated a messenger of the gods. They still were messengers from Erlik, weren’t they? Even if Castiel spoke the truth when he said he was a seraph? But right now I didn’t feel much of anything at all.
“I’ll get it.” The seraph behind me hitched and relaxed his bronze wings, then stalked to the door.
All morning he’d been annoying and irreverent—traits that had shocked me, for the god Erlik was not known for levity.
But now he moved with otherworldly grace and a menacing posture that made the hair on my nape stand up.
He opened the ancient, large wooden door. “State your business,” he snapped.
“Please.” Elder Tomes’s voice drifted in, thin and wavering compared to the rush of wind behind him. “Have you seen the reverend?”
Castiel glanced back at Gabriel, one wing sort of cocked behind him, a seraphim gesture I didn’t understand. Then he stepped back, and with a grand sweep of one wing, allowed the middle-aged man into the Great Hall.
Elder Tomes stepped in, hat in his hand. He was in his late 40s with cropped gray hair, a clean-shaven face that betrayed the long frown lines around his tight mouth, and sharp gray eyes.
My stomach twisted, as it usually did when one of the elders entered the room. He was tall and reed-thin. Fingers, long and delicate, clenched the brim of his hat as he peered around the darkened room. His shoulders tightened and his nostrils flared.
“I am looking for my travel companions. Are they here?” His rough tenor voice stretched across the room, growing thinner as it fell onto the stone floor.
Strange. I’d always seen him as an imposing man.
Quiet, but powerful and with harsh tones and scalding punishments for the wicked among us.
But when he stood next to the seraph, he looked thin—not in a slender way, but insubstantial, more of a smudge than a physical person.
His voice did not boom like it did back home.
The seraph with the beautiful bronze wings and the wicked mouth crossed his arms over his bare chest again, his muscles bulging. He wasn’t trying to look intimidating, but there was no comparison between the seraph and the human males.
I scowled. Why did I care what he looked like?
Gabriel finally spoke. When he did, it was like shards of ice cutting the air. “Lilith Meadows is here, unharmed, as you can see. It seems you left her alone in the village.”
The elder stiffened. He wanted to protest, I could see. But a mere human contradicting Erlik’s voice?
I sucked in a silent breath. Maybe having an angel at the Church of the Love of His Divine Saints wouldn’t be terrible. Some of those elders needed to remember they served Lord Erlik too, just like the rest of us.
“And Reverend Zorababel Grimshaw? Elder Absalom Meadows?”
Gabriel stepped away from the shrouded bodies.
Tomes gasped. He glared at Eve, then myself. “What happened?”
Eve opened her mouth as if she were about to speak. I glanced over in time to see Gabriel’s hand, still on her shoulder, squeezing.
She shut her mouth.
“There was an accident,” Gabriel said severely.
I had no doubt he was the leader of the seraphim that had fallen to our earth fifty years ago.
“Eve was leading them to me, up through the moorland. It’s treacherous during storms and nightfall.
Both your reverend and your elder tripped and fell off the side of a low cliff. ”
My eyes narrowed. I didn’t know Gabriel or Heralds at all, but his tone of voice was too measured. What he said might be the truth, but it wasn’t the complete truth. How had my brother died? And how was the church going to withstand the heavy blow of our reverend dying?
At least we have the Heralds, I thought, watching the others in the room.
We shan’t go back empty-handed. Though the how and why still eluded me, because nothing I had seen of the seraphim so far suggested they wanted to be worshiped in a stone building, surrounded by mortals and mundanity.
My gaze snagged on the gold filaments catching the candlelight in the bronze wings.
No, they were made to fly free and wild, to ride the storms without fear.
They might be Heralds of the gods, but the reverend’s plan to tame and venerate their leader didn’t seem like something either Herald would agree to.
Tomes blanched, his pale facing turning white as bone as he stumbled forward. His knees didn’t hit the stone floor, his shoulders didn’t quake with suppressed sobs, and he didn’t reach for the makeshift shrouds to glimpse their faces.
But, then, neither did I. What did that mean? In surviving, was I becoming like them?
He just stared. Like I did.
“We are sorry for your loss,” Eve said gently.
Tomes seemed to come alive again at her voice. He turned to Gabriel. “Reverend Grimshaw would have considered his sacrifice worthy of finding and claiming someone as holy as you, Herald.” He bowed.
Emotion rippled across Gabriel’s face, gone in an instant before I could read it.
“I am not going to your church,” he declared. And I knew that no force on earth would make him go. He was as immovable as the moorland around us. “And Eve Lovejoy will be staying with me.”
Tomes struggled to hide a frown. “But, my lord—”
Gabriel glared at him. “If you require something of the god Erlik, you will invite him to your church as a prophet, messenger, and high priest.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of the bronze-winged angel behind me.
“This is Castiel of Aerie, a worthy seraph who deserves your veneration and honor.”
We all looked at Castiel.
Castiel stared back, arms still crossed over that broad, muscular chest. His wings flared up and back, as if half-cocked and ready to burst into flight.
His amber eyes stared Tomes down. Gone was the laughing, annoying man from this morning.
In his place stood a fearsome warrior. My whole body prickled at the sight of this deadly being, both so intensely physical and a creature of great spirituality.
For almost all my life I’d listened to Zorababel Grimshaw, now dead behind me, rhapsodize about the might and glory of these Heralds of Death.
I didn’t really know what to expect—it was all a hazy image, no matter how many times people recounted the story of the Falling fifty years ago that brought these Heralds to our world.
But I supposed I’d envisioned something insubstantial, wraith-like, perhaps shrouded and eerie.
Castiel was as solid and real as my own hand, with more life coursing through him than any being I’d seen before.
He’d terrified me when he swept me in his arms and jerked me in the air—I’d never forgive him, even if he was a Herald of Erlik—and the same tight control was still there in his posture, his still wings, the daring glint in his eyes.
My heart beat faster just looking at him.
“Erm, yes, I believe we will be grateful for Sir Castiel’s presence.
” Tomes hesitated. “We understand that it is the white feathers that draw Lord Erlik’s attention, a way to call out to him during prayer, to request his will be done.
Will…” He licked his lips. “Does Lord Castiel also have this close connection to our god?”
Castiel’s expression didn’t change.
Gabriel growled in frustration. “You dare question one of the Heralds, you mortal man? Which of us in this room Fell from the heavens? Which of us comes from Erlik’s throne room?”
Eve coughed.
I glanced at her, noting the odd look on her face. She caught me eying her and immediately turned away. Interesting.
“Enough,” Castiel said suddenly, voice cold. I shivered. Was this truly the same angel who had mocked me? “This is my charge. We will depart today. Ready your things, Elder Tomes. I shall survey this temple you have set aside for our Lord Erlik and tell you if he is pleased with your efforts.”
“Church,” I whispered under my breath. “Not temple.”
Castiel’s eyes cut to me, and I suppressed a jolt of surprise. No one should’ve been able to hear me. I didn’t like how his eyes examined me, as if searching for edges and cracks in my mask. I shivered under the weight of his gaze, but not from cold. From the heat inside me he stoked.
Tomes nodded, his face still paler than usual. “Yes, Herald Castiel. I…” His gaze drifted back to the two bodies lying beneath the shrouds. “It may take a few hours to find what we need. And it is two days’ travel back to Lownden City.”
Castiel sneered. “I shall fly. I would not deign to ride in a cart.”
Ugh, another man full of his own importance. Unless…he was playing a part? Like I sometimes did?
Again, his eyes cut to my face. I held my placid, soft expression. It was never good to show men how quick your thoughts were, especially if they thought it was critical of their actions. I’d already slipped, showing him pieces of my anger this morning. I needed to get back on the path. Quickly.