Chapter Four
Gabriel
I rubbed the ache in my chest, gritting my teeth.
Brown. Her eyes were brown. Framed by brown lashes on a milky face. Topped with that mousy brown hair.
Just brown. It wasn’t an abnormal color among humans—or seraphim, for that matter.
How long is her hair? Would it cover her breasts if she unbound it?
Grimacing, I stalked through the dry, yellow grass and into the row of trees.
The bare soles of my feet felt every dry twig, every knob of root sticking out of the earth.
I hadn’t felt desire in a long time. Since before I took my sedge on our last mission, before the fracture in the sky.
And now I felt it for a human? It made no sense.
But the memory of my hand over her breast made my cock thicken in my trousers in ways I’d forgotten it could.
I couldn’t feel this way.
I didn’t want to feel this way.
I had too many things I should do, too many people I should be caring for. I couldn’t afford a distraction. Move past her.
I stopped by a tree and pressed my forehead into it, ignoring the itching at the base of my wings.
Focus, Gabriel. You don’t like her. You don’t know her.
She’s just the first female you’ve seen in decades who hasn’t treated you like a monster or a god.
But if that was all, why did I feel like I needed her? Why did she entrance me?
I was even more pathetic than I thought—moldering away, useless to everyone—and desperate for even a glance from this human housekeeper. And what have you been doing besides moldering away?
What did I need to be doing? I kept trying to find a way home, but hadn’t had any breakthroughs there in roughly ten years.
Several of my warriors had volunteered for missions to fly over this Earth, searching for any signs of other cracks in the air we could slip back through.
I hadn’t heard any updates in a long time. Perhaps I should reach out to them.
Castiel still lived nearby. I could fly to him and see if he was in more consistent contact with our people.
Was there anything else?
My housekeeper’s wide chestnut eyes filled my vision again. Her hair, a soft brown, curled around the corners of her forehead. Skies, she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.
She was hungry. That’s what I was feeling the urge to do.
She needed to eat, and I had no idea the food stores at the manor were so low.
I needed to find food, but I hated going to the village.
All those…odd humans in groups and families chattering and living their lives made me feel all the more trapped in mine.
Castiel. He tolerated humans better than I. Or perhaps humans tolerated him. I hadn’t cared much either way before now.
I flexed my wings, bent my knees, and soared upward.
The muscle pull in my wings reminded me that I should exercise more.
Just another thing I was failing at. I hadn’t held my sword in years, either.
I hovered above my balcony, embracing the sting from the difficult vertical lift, then dropped gently.
My bare feet hit the cold stone. I strode into my chambers and dressed quickly in shoes and a leather vest made for seraphim, then returned to the balcony and threw myself into the wind.
The moorland spread out below me and the gray clouds above me. For the first ten years I had felt claustrophobic, trapped between earth and clouds whenever winter weather rolled in. I yearned for the bright blue of the summer sky and carpet of heather because it reminded me of home.
Now I’d grown used to the weight of the sky above me and had learned to use it to my advantage in hiding from humans, often flying above the cloud cover.
It took almost no time at all to arrive at the little cottage on the outskirts of the village.
I glanced toward the stone and thatch cottages, and, seeing no one staring at the sky, landed on the rough ground and strode to the two-bedroom cottage.
I pounded my fist on the door in the pattern ingrained in all of us by our military training nearly two hundred years ago.
The door swung open to reveal Castiel, the seraph who’d once been my third in command. Surprise flashed in his brown eyes, and his brown wings hitched high above his shoulders. “Captain.” He wore gray trousers and white socks, but his broad chest, a darker and warmer brown than my skin, was bare.
I scowled. “I told you to call me Gabriel. We’re not in a sedge anymore.”
He shrugged easily, stepping back and letting me in. “As you say.”
I ducked my head to not hit it on the stone lintel—humans were shorter than us—and tightened my wings to my back.
The cottage was small, and a fire roared in the hearth. I eyed it, as well as the two stools nearby and the cooking utensils hanging from the rafters. “Turning human, are we?”
Castiel smiled, never one to take offense easily, and shrugged wings and shoulders. “So I like it warm.”
Seraphim kept a higher body temperature than humans so we could fly at great heights without problems, as well as extra blood and ayim in our body to keep us strong and conscious when we had little air to breathe. Castiel didn’t need the fire.
But the housekeeper probably does. The thought struck me. I liked my house cool with a breeze, but she was more delicate than me. I probably needed to keep it hotter. Or buy her a coat.
What if she’d been freezing, and I hadn’t noticed? Weren’t humans susceptible to frostbite? Oh, fuck, what if my housekeeper lost her fingers because of me? Panic stirred in my belly.
Why had I never cared about my previous butler’s warmth?
Castiel turned in a tight circle—the cottage was even smaller now that two seraphim and their wings filled the room—and went back to the tea kettle hanging over the fire. “I haven’t seen you in several seasons.” One of his warm brown feathers fluttered loose, hitting the ground.
He was of common birth. One of the fastest ways to judge a seraph’s social class was by the color of their wings.
My white ones signified my noble lineage, and pure black heralded those of royal blood.
Browns, grays, and sometimes blues, pinks, and other colors displayed common status among our race.
Castiel, although he had enlisted in the war as a common winged warrior due to his birth in a low echelon, had quickly become an officer through his quick mind and genial nature that never took offense.
I was lucky to have him, and before the Fall I’d secretly planned to petition the king to honor his heroism by raising his status.
“Why are you here now? You never visit.”
Guilt twinged in my chest. “You are always welcome at the Hall. It’s much more spacious. No knocking into furniture or feeling like the ceiling will collapse on your head.”
Castiel smiled. “I always love visiting, as does everyone else. But we’re all trying to make the best of this, and some of us need different things.”
Bitterness tasted like ash in my mouth. They were making the best of it because I hadn’t found a way to get my sedge home. Hadn’t even found a way for them to recover their magic, either. I never should’ve been their captain.
“Besides, the humans aren’t so bad. At least these ones aren’t.”
I snorted in amusement. The villagers weren’t so bad because they’d gotten used to us over the last forty years.
I didn’t collect rent and in return they kept quiet.
Most of humanity knew seraphim and our enemies flew over the earth, but they rarely knew exactly where we were. And I liked it that way.
The last thing I needed was some group of humans intent upon worshipping me as a messenger of a god.
Or a god myself. As far as I understood it, humans believed in four gods, but I knew little of them.
We seraphim worshipped the natural and magical world around us, not powerful people.
But now Fallen from our world, I had little use for worship of anything.
I didn’t even have my magic left anymore.
“I’ve a new human,” I announced. “A housekeeper. She wants me to get food. And I need to collect her trunk from the inn.”
Castiel’s eyebrows rose. “What’s her name?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. I had no idea.
How did I not know my own housekeeper’s name?
I knew she had eyes the color of oak leaves turning to autumn with flecks of gold.
I knew if she leaned into me her lips would press below my collar bone.
I knew her breasts were full and sweet, even though her horrid dress tried to conceal them. But I didn’t know her name.
Castiel waited. His eyes lightened and he threw back his head in laughter. “Captain, do you not know your human’s name?”
“She’s not my human,” I growled. “She’s a human employed as a housekeeper.” My chest pained me. I pushed past the ache to focus on my conversation. “Will you help me?”
He sobered immediately. “Captain, I will always help you. We are bound in blood and ayim.”
“If you wanted to help me you’d call me Gabriel.”
He cocked his head. “Do you still blame yourself for what happened?”
I glanced away, face hot and stomach sick.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said bluntly. “No one could’ve predicted a hole would appear in the sky in the middle of a skirmish. Our enemy fell through, too. You have worked so hard to keep us together, alive, and hopeful.”
Odd, because I’d lost hope decades ago. I didn’t even know where I’d tucked my sword away, it had been so long and so dark.
“Some of us have learned to like this world,” Castiel told me earnestly. “Haniel and Michael regularly travel to observe human culture.”
“Azrael hates this world,” I said flatly. “Hates it.”
Castiel rolled his eyes. “Azrael hates everything. Always thought he flew on a higher wind than everyone else. Keeps saying his wings were black, when we all knew they are dark gray.”
A reluctant smile tugged at my lips. “He still says that, does he? The closest he comes to the royal family is hoping to be part of the king’s private guard. That seraph’s wings are gray.”
Castiel smirked. “I’ll tell him you said that.”
There were twelve of us total, though I doubted all twelve of us still survived.
We had fallen out of the sky and into a field in this world with grievous injuries—it took over a year for Turail’s arm to grow back, and I hadn’t been able to count how many of Zadkiel’s bones had been crushed on impact.
Only the ayim pulsing in our bodies healed us.
After the initial Fall I had sent everyone on missions to search for a way home.
Year after year, mission after mission. We had discovered seas and oceans, humans and other enemies.
Until I finally, officially disbanded our sedge.
A few continued to search on their own, and I hadn’t seen them in many years.
The rest I only saw periodically, save for Castiel and sometimes Azrael.
“You can gather food and the trunk for me?” I reminded him.
He nodded. “You could come into the village with me, you know.”
“One seraph in the village is enough,” I decided. “Two might start a panic.”
Disappointment crossed Castiel’s face, but he mastered it quickly. “Very well. I’ll bring the trunk and food here for you. Skies, I don’t think I’ve been this excited about meeting a woman since our general found his mate right before the Battle of Furro.”
“She’s not my mate,” I snapped. “She’s a human.”
Castiel rolled his eyes, such a human gesture it took me aback. “I know. I’m just saying I’d like to meet her.”
Fierce protectiveness burgeoned inside me, making my heart throb and my ribs ache. No, I wanted to say. Stay away. It made no sense to act this way. I trusted Castiel with my life. We had bled together, Fallen together. Survived together. I swallowed my first impulse and nodded. “I’ll allow it.”
He grinned. “I look forward to it!”
I grunted. That made one of us.