“Dealt with as in . . . ?” She made a slicing motion across her neck.

  He nodded. “It’s about a forty-five-minute drive down to the monastery, depending on traffic, and usually another fifteen minutes or so at the site. Figure at least an hour and a half minimum. I’ll dump the other fiends’ ashes down there as well.”

  For some reason that explanation triggered a yawn, one she tried to conceal.

  “Do you want to come with me to the monastery, or get some sleep?” he asked, which told her she’d failed at the “I’m not really yawning” coverup.

  No matter how interesting the trip might be, she was toast. “I vote for Master Stewart’s place. I need a nap.”

  “You got it.”

  The box kept shifting. “How do you get that big of a demon inside that small space?”

  “Do you want the long and highly religious explanation, or should I just say it’s a holy kind of magic?”

  “I’ll go with the ‘it’s a holy kind of magic TARDIS’, then.”

  He chuckled at the Dr. Who reference. “That’s what I do. Father Rosetti explained it during our training, but frankly I just accept that it happens. Works better that way.”

  “Can it hold more than one of them at a time?”

  “I’ve been told it can, but I’ve never tested that.”

  When Simon pulled up in front of Stewart’s house a while later, he delivered a weary smile. “I’ll send you a text when I’m back in town.”

  “Sounds good. Thanks. I mean it.”

  Katia waved as he drove off, wishing Simon had a chance to rest, especially since that wound troubled him. An old red truck was parked in the driveway now. Its rear window had a Georgia state flag decal and the official Guild emblem, along with the words “Kicking Hell’s Ass One Demon at a Time.” Demon decals lined the truck’s side panel indicating how many Gastro-Fiends its owner had trapped. She lost count at thirty some. Whoever this was, they were doing some serious damage to the Prince’s pack of monsters.

  Once inside she heard Grand Master Stewart talking to someone in the back of the house, probably the truck’s owner. Not wanting to interrupt, she headed upstairs where she found a large, hot pink sticky note stuck to her bedroom door.

  Katia,

  Hello! If you have any laundry you need washed just put it in the bag and leave it hanging on the door. I’ll have it back to you the next day. So glad you are staying with us!

  Cheers,

  Mrs. Ayers

  Katia pulled the large plastic bag free from the door handle, then read the note again. Clean laundry and she didn’t have to do it herself? Score. The bed looked like pure heaven, the towels were the fluffy kind, and these people seemed to like her.

  She owed Master Blackthorne bigtime.

  † ~ ‡ ~ †

  “Why are we here?” Serrah asked, unable to keep her annoyance hidden.

  Without any discussion, the Fallen had taken them a place in the city where all the signs of mortal life were present: rows of houses, small mortals on bikes, and more than one barking dog. Except the dwelling in front of them, which looked to be deserted. The religious symbol on the front door told her why.

  “This morning Simon Adler and I were here,” Ori said, “and this is where the fiend issued its challenge. I think I missed something during that exchange. Something important.”

  “Returning to this place will help you retrieve that memory?”

  He frowned. “It might.”

  They walked to the front door, and with a wave of his hand it unlocked itself. Once inside, Ori waited until the door closed behind them, then concentrated on the house’s interior. A nod of approval came next.

  “Simon has cleansed the dwelling of the Darkness. He did a fine job.”

  A Fallen praising an exorcist? That had to be a first.

  Serrah had been inside mortal homes in the past. As was often the case, there were framed images of various family members carefully arranged on one wall. A ball of brindle fur tumbled across the floor at her feet. A dog? Yes, there was such a creature in one of the images. The mortals looked so happy, and yet Hell had still come here.

  They often thought only those who had evil intentions were plagued by fiends, but that was not the case. Hell disliked tranquility, hated anything that made their presence unwelcome. In retaliation, Hellspawn would search out such happy mortals with every intention of ruining their lives. The fact that they did the same to the morally challenged, or downright evil, proved the fiends lived to spread chaos. Lucifer’s Eternal Revenge, as one of her fellow Divines had called it. In this house, that had most definitely been the case.

  When Serrah turned to see what the Fallen was doing, he was gone, and with an irritated sigh she tracked him to a larger room beyond. As she had expected, it displayed the usual hallmarks of demonic possession: overturned and damaged possessions, as well as scorch marks high on the walls.

  “They are an abomination,” she muttered, pushing a shredded pillow aside with a foot. No reply. “What are you doing?”

  Ori broke his concentration on the far wall. “I am looking into the past. At least I was until you distracted me.”

  Her frustration grew. “Then show me what you are seeing.”

  He thought about it for a moment, then closed his eyes and focused. Serrah did the same, hoping to view the morning’s events with him.

  “There were three fiends,” Ori said. “The first attacked even before Simon could raise his circle of protection.” In her mind’s eye, Serrah saw that ambush, and how the Fallen had swiftly dealt with the Hellspawn. He truly was a warrior angel, his reaction to the threat nearly instantaneous.

  “Then the strongest of them appeared,” Ori continued. “Azagar is on the verge of shifting to an Archfiend. At least that’s what the mortals call them.”

  Serrah now understood what had been bothering him. A fiend with that much power should have challenged the rogue Fallen immediately, if nothing more than to curry favor with the Prince. Especially a Fallen who had escaped Lucifer’s shackles. Instead, Azagar had focused all his efforts on the exorcist, taunting him, then displaying the three young mortals whose lives now lie in Simon Michael David Adler’s hands.

  Why? Destroying the exorcist would count as a worthy offering to Lucifer, but Ori was a far bigger prize. The exorcist’s superiors would just replace him, though the new one might not be as expert as Adler. If the fiend had captured a Fallen and thrown him at the Prince’s feet in Hell? Priceless.

  Ori ended their journey into the past, still frowning. “What am I not seeing?” he demanded.

  “You really think there’s something you missed?”

  “My instincts say there is.”

  Once more they followed the scene as it played out. Sometimes Ori would pause the “replay” to pose questions she could not answer, to think something through. By the end, he seemed even more puzzled.

  It was during the third time they observed the events that Serrah saw the shadow. She pushed harder at that part of the room, focused intently, then barely swallowed a gasp of surprise at what she’d seen.

  Why were you here? And how could she explain this to the Fallen?

  Fortunately, Ori didn’t notice her reaction, too caught up in his own thoughts. He waved a hand and the past evaporated. Turning on a heel, the Divine was out of the house in a heartbeat, the front door slamming behind him. After a minute or so, she followed him only to find he wasn’t waiting for her outside.

  A shout made Serrah jump as a child on a bicycle zoomed by on the street, hair streaming behind her. Another one followed. Mortals. She never understood them, but then maybe that was the point.

  Closing her eyes, she found the Fallen in the city’s center, on the top of a tall building, staring at nothing. She would not join him, at least not yet. Serrah had her own dilemma—there had been another Divine in that house, someone who should not have been there. Someone shielded from the demons, the exorcist and the Fallen.

  But not from her.

  One of the children zipped by on the street again and that brought a brief smile, along with a bit of envy. Divines never had a chance to play, not even the cherubs. Serrah accepted that her life was an eternity of service. An eternity of following the rules. She’d always been good at that.

  Until now.

  † ~ ‡ ~ †

  Rahmiel sat on a stone bench, feeding a baby squirrel perched on her lap, the delicate creature deftly nibbling on the seeds she presented, one by one. When it spied Serrah, it fled in a scurry of feet.

  “Oh! I am sorry!” she said. “I didn’t mean to frighten it.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll come back. It loves the seeds too much to remain a stranger.” The other Divine waved her over. “Come, sit,” she said, patting the open area next to her. “Did you know that this plot of ground has been sanctified for almost one hundred and seventy mortal years? In our sense of time, a mere moment, but not to them. Because their lives are so short, they understand things in ways we do not.”

  Serrah wasn’t sure why the angel was telling her this, but no doubt Rahmiel had a purpose.

  “Why do you think they were created?” she asked.

  “I am not sure,” Rahmiel admitted. “They are less than us, but more than us in many ways. One mortal suggested that we Divines were our Creator’s prototype, and that the mortals were the improved, second version.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Why not?” the other angel replied, watching her closely. The small squirrel approached slowly, all its attention on Serrah, as if she might snatch it up and devour it if it wasn’t wary. “Neither you or I will ever have a chance to quiz our Creator as to the reason of the mortals’ existence, and if we did, I doubt we’d get an answer we’d understand.”

  This angel was as outrageous as Serrah had heard. “You can’t mean that.”

  A soft smile came her way as the little beast crawled into Rahmiel’s lap. After a few seeds were devoured, it ignored Serrah completely. “Maybe I don’t mean it, still I like to question what I see and that doesn’t always go well with certain of our fellow angels.”

  She meant Michael.

  “You may not realize it, but this city no longer has a Divine guardian. It hasn’t for some time. I do what I can, which isn’t much since I have this holy site to watch over.”

  “You were assigned that task, to watch over the city whenever possible?”

  “No, I took it on by myself.”

  She dared to take on a task without permission?

  “Yes,” Rahmiel replied. She could hear Serrah’s thoughts, though that ability didn’t seem to be reciprocal. “The last guardian had lost interest in the city, and that had consequences. I hear he’s been reassigned to another task much less demanding.”

  “Hmm.” Serrah didn’t understand Divine politics as well as she thought she did. “I have a problem.”

  “I figured, or you wouldn’t have risked visiting an outcast like me again.”

  Serrah’s eyes swept across the garden and gravestones in front of them. “Is it difficult being an outcast here?”

  “It’s absolutely horrible,” the angel replied, followed by a mischievous wink. Even Serrah heard the falsehood. “Long hours of tedious work watching over the mortal remains of all these souls, and counseling those among the living who come my way.”

  “Who would come here?”

  “Riley Anora Blackthorne. Ori the Fallen. Even the exorcist. Well, except for him I issued more of scolding than counseling. Simon Michael David Adler deserved it.” Rahmiel set the squirrel down and dusted off her skirt. Spying a loose paving stone, she marched over and reset it so it rested evenly among its kin.

  “I was here when Michael and Lucifer were so eager to go to war. I watched as Riley Anora Blackthorne argued with them, insisting they step back from the Last Battle. It was an unforgettable moment in my long existence.”

  Serrah couldn’t imagine such a thing. “Simon the Exorcist? Do you know what he is facing?”

  When Rahmiel shook her head, Serrah quickly explained, then added, “When the fiend challenged him to save the three mortals’ lives, there was another Divine there, besides Ori the Fallen. He was hidden from all of them.”

  “One of the Prince’s?”

  “No, one of Michael’s.”

  Rahmiel stopped fussing with a shrub and straightened up, her attention caught. “Which one?”

  “Zareth.”

  “Ah yes, Zareth,” she said, nodding as if that made sense. “He’s the one who reported my supposedly ‘blasphemous’ comments to Michael.” Rahmiel thought for a moment, then added, “I might owe that fool a debt of gratitude for my exile, which is a depressing thought.”

  “But why would Zareth be there? Why did he not assist the exorcist and free those young mortals?”

  “Perhaps he was told not to interfere,” Rahmiel suggested.

  Would the Archangel have done that? Serrah shook her head. “No, I think he was there to watch the Fallen even though Ori didn’t sense his presence. That meant Michael was shielding him.”

  “Or Zareth may have hidden himself. He has enough power to do so. Which means you have a dilemma, don’t you?”

  Serrah rose and walked to a nearby gravestone, one dedicated to a mortal named Georgia Harris. It proclaimed her ‘once a slave, and now free’.

  It took some time before she could find the words. “I have a choice—I can keep Zareth’s presence a secret, or I can reveal it to the Fallen. Zareth being present at that moment may mean nothing, or it may be the key to saving those mortals’ lives.”

  Rahmiel nodded in agreement. “That is how I see it.”

  “What do I do?” she pleaded.

  “You must make the decision, for no matter what happens, you will be judged for that, not I.”

  “But I have no idea which is right!”

  “Then ask yourself what is more important—perhaps doing something opposite of what the Archangel wants, and paying penance for that insubordination, or saving three innocent mortal souls?”

  That was the dilemma. “You had to make that decision, didn’t you?”

  “Something similar, yes.”

  “But mortals are not as important—”

  “Are they not?” Rahmiel challenged, her hands on her hips now. “Or are they as integral to the Divine Plan as we are?”

  Serrah sighed. “I do not know.”

  “Neither do I. I based my decision not on what I felt Michael might want, but what I felt our Creator would desire. As you can see,” she said, gesturing around her, “this is my penance for that decision.”

  “I won’t end up anywhere as nice as this.”

  “Always a possibility. The former guardian of Atlanta is currently on a tiny uninhabited island in charge of watching over the tortoises, the birds and the crabs. From what I hear, he actually likes it there because there are no mortals to annoy him.”

  Her fellow Divine took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. “Riley Anora Blackthorne often speaks of tests, the kind we face each day. Small ones and big ones, all designed to judge our minds and our hearts, to teach us lessons along the way. Perhaps this isn’t about the Archangel, or Zareth, or even about the Fallen. Perhaps this particular test is for you alone.”

  That was what Serrah feared most. She slumped down on the bench, then felt Rahmiel’s hand touch her arm.

  “Trust your heart. It’ll rarely lead you wrong.” After a last reassuring squeeze, she announced, “Now I must find out why one particularly persistent mole insists on uprooting an iris bed despite my repeated warnings.”

  Serrah could not hold back the smile. “Thank you, Rahmiel.”

  “You’re welcome. And if I were you, I’d trust the Fallen more than you’d think wise. He is honorable, and has paid for his ill-fated decision in ways even we cannot imagine.”

  With one last nod the angel of the cemetery vanished, off to scold a particularly pesky mammal. Serrah sat on that bench for some time, then rose to join the Fallen. Perhaps together they would find the answers they sought.

  TWELVE

  Ori came often to this high place to gaze down on the city, to observe the mortals in their daily pursuits. From here it was easier to spot the truly dangerous fiends, then to hunt and kill them.

  When the other angel appeared, he did not look her way. Instead, he felt a wave of anxiety pouring off Serrah that even she couldn’t hide.

  “What is troubling you?” he asked, still not moving his focus from the city laid out in front of him like it was his kingdom. Perhaps, in some ways, it was.

  “We need to speak . . . privately.”

  “About?”

  She looked around, uneasy. “Not here.”

  He gestured. “Then lead us to where we can speak our minds.”

  In a blink of an eye, he stood along a shoreline with pale white sand, rolling foam-capped waves, and a golden-amber sun just above the horizon. It was a highly detailed and private illusion, one of Serrah’s own making. He’d done the same with Paul Blackthorne’s daughter, taking her on a picnic when he was trying to seduce her so he could claim her soul. The troubled expression on Serrah’s face told him nothing like that was on her mind.

  She didn’t speak, but turned away and stared at the waves for some time. In so doing, she had exposed her back to him, a weakness he could exploit with one slash of his sword. Did she realize she had done that?

  A movement along the shore caught his attention and he walked a short distance across the sand to a piece of driftwood. A yellow crab had gotten one of its claws stuck in a notch of the wood, and it struggled to free itself. Kneeling, he gently released it, then set it on the sand. It clacked its white claws at him in warning, because even the smallest creatures were not often that grateful, then headed toward the water.