Bryony lay and listened to Michael’s deep, rhythmic breathing. Now that he was asleep, she knew he would be almost impossible to wake. She loved that she knew that about him. She opened a curtain and let moonlight touch the ghost of his dimple, his slightly parted lips, his long eyelashes, and his otherwise completely average face. How it came to life when he woke, though. How his smile startled her every time she saw it. She would never tire of seeing him smile. Never. He was so beautiful.
She leaned in to kiss his forehead, and he didn’t even stir. Then she got up and felt her way to her old bunk. Her only practical clothes were still folded in the drawers beneath it. She pulled out a pair of sweatpants and a cardigan, and put them on before going out to get a breath of fresh air.
Sleep would evade Bryony for hours. There was no question of that. She’d intended to find her way to the cargo hold and pick out some books to read, but before she could open the main hatch, she heard a curious sound. It was a periodic shooshing from the forecastle. She made her way up the steps. There, on his hands and knees with a bucket and scrub brush, was Azazel, swabbing the deck.
“What are you doing?” she asked, though the answer was obvious.
He looked up and smiled. “Cleaning my mess. It’s the least I can do for my hosts.”
She felt suddenly guilty for enjoying herself so thoroughly while he worked. “Let me help at least. It’s my mess too.”
He handed her the soft bristle brush. Then he wrung a washcloth and began sopping up the salt he’d already loosened. “Magic circles must always be erased, you know. Especially if they’re on someone else’s floor.” He chuckled. “It keeps the secrets of the trade.”
Salt water soaked into the knees of Bryony’s sweatpants, and she was glad to have chosen a more practical outfit than the one she’d been wearing before. Azza, on the other hand, wore his standard, gorgeous, embroidered clothes. He looked wrong on his hands and knees. “Why don’t you let me finish this?” she said. “You should be long gone by now. Aren’t you anxious to heal your granddaughter?”
“I would never leave without saying goodbye. It’s unforgivably rude.” He smiled up at her. “And etiquette aside, Raphael will have taken ownership of his weapon by now. His sword is no longer free to use. Luckily, before he left, the archangel promised to heal my granddaughter himself. I wouldn’t dare to presume what came over him.” He winked. “But I believe he’s been caught in the web of some sweet, little arachnid.”
The immediate loss of the healing sword was a consequence Bryony hadn’t foreseen when she’d set out to free Raphael, but she was now certain Azazel had. And he’d helped her anyway. Without any guarantee his granddaughter would benefit, without any promise Raphael wouldn’t bind him in darkness again, Azza had helped Bryony. She bowed her head, ashamed of her own cynicism. Ash had been right all along. The watcher wasn’t helping her for their mutual best interest. He was helping her, full stop. She finished scrubbing one section of the circle and moved on to the next. “But you should be with her, shouldn’t you? You should go to her.”
“Alas, I cannot. At least, not right away.” Azza did not look up from his task. “She’ll understand. I fulfilled my promise to heal her, and now I have other obligations.”
“What other obligations?” Bryony laughed, but when the angel looked up, sober as she’d ever seen him, she stopped laughing. “No. You don’t mean me, do you? You can’t mean me.” Azazel did not wink and assure her it wasn’t what she thought, and Bryony began to scrub the deck more aggressively. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“You didn’t have to.” Azza sat back on his heels, and she bowed her head again so she wouldn’t see the affection in his eyes. “A good god never has to ask for devotion.”
Her knuckles whitened over the scrub brush, and she was frankly shocked she wasn’t sanding down the deck as hard as she scrubbed it now. “I don’t want to be a god anymore.”
“But you haven’t a choice, darling. You are what you are, and you need what you need. Why won’t you let me give you what you need?”
She threw the brush down. “Because it’s wrong!”
“Not to me, it isn’t.” His voice was so soft, she couldn’t help softening herself at the sound of it. “To me, worship is life. I’m not human, little orb-weaver. I think sometimes you forget. I need to give worship—you need to receive it. That relationship is already in place. Let’s not waste it.”
“I’m not hungry.” She sounded like a defiant child, even to her own ears.
“Right now you aren’t, but you will be and soon. I hate to tell you this, but you won’t be able to wean off worship. You may as well try to wean off food. You’ll starve, darling, and it’s in my nature to feed a god. Why not let your Michael believe you’ve successfully weaned off his worship? Let him love you as a husband, and I’ll take over as your congregant. It’s safer for him that way—safer for you to have an immortal source of worship.” He tucked one side of his tangerine hair behind an ear. “That way, when he dies and his soul is trapped between worlds, you can conjure and employ him yourself.”
Bryony stared wide-eyed despite her concerted effort to restrain herself. “Why would I want to employ him?”
“Because if you don’t, someone else will. He’ll be called upon by those who are too cowardly to summon the Angel of Death himself. And the work will be ugly, I promise you that. Sorcerers do not summon Samael to heal or to build. Sorcerers summon him to kill and destroy. You’re the only one I’ve ever known to conjure the Angel of Death for the purpose of healing. It must have been quite a shock to him.” He chuckled to himself.
“Fine.” Bryony took the bristle brush and began angrily scrubbing at the circle again. “You can . . . be my congregant.” If it was for Michael, she would do it. She would do whatever it took to save him from the kind of afterlife most demons had. “But I won’t lie to him.”
Azazel grinned. “As you wish.”
It was ridiculous, all of it. Bryony still didn’t understand, and she muttered to herself as she worked. “Why anyone would choose to worship me is a mystery I’m sure I’ll never solve. I don’t get it. Especially now. I’m a healing god who can’t even heal anymore. I’m a has-been grifter with a stupid addiction. I’m a liar—”
“Every god is a liar,” Azazel broke in. “None of them can begin to offer what they claim. You do know that, don’t you? What worshipers are drawn to is the power behind the curtain, not the smoke and mirrors. Whether we realize it or not, we all crave after what is truly given, be it community or ritual, inspiration or prayer, absolution or hope.”
Bryony scoffed. “I don’t give anybody any of those things anymore.”
“No,” Azazel agreed. “Your power lies elsewhere.”
“Of course it does.” She rolled her eyes. “Please don’t tell me my superpower is love or empathy or anything useless like that.”
“Useless?” Azazel stood, angry now for some reason. “Useless? Get up. Stand, darling, or I’ll drag you to your feet myself, god or no god.” Bryony stood, and Azza took her by the shoulders and stared down at her with those incomparable, amber eyes. “Listen to me now. I’m going to teach you your worth. I’m frankly disgusted you don’t seem to know it.” Bryony tried to avoid eye contact by staring at the sea, but Azza wasn’t having it. “Look at me, please.”
She did. It wasn’t difficult. If a rose garden said, Look at me, very few would bother to resist.
“Listen,” he said. “You’re worshiped by a godhunter, the deadliest there’s ever been. That alone should be unthinkable.” She began to protest, but the angel pressed three fingers to her lips to silence her. “Don’t speak. Listen. You’ve earned the loyalty of a Jötunn who’s most famous for his disloyalty. I was astonished when I discovered it. And now, you have the devotion of a godless watcher. My own daughters . . .” Azza paused and withdrew his fingers. She could see the pain in his expression, so she did not try to interrupt again. “My daughters want nothing to do with me, and rightly so. They’re monstrous creatures, proud and cruel, and it’s my own fault. They’re bound in the empty place, and I’m the cause of their suffering.”
Bryony wanted to argue, but Azazel preempted her. “I’m the scapegoat for all mankind, but I can’t take on the sins of my own daughters. I’m useless to everyone who matters to me, except you. Why? And, little orb-weaver, most shockingly, today you conjured the Angel of Death and survived.”
This was ridiculous. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
Azza’s eyes widened. “That means everything. There’s a power in you, whether you believe it or not. Your Michael, Loki, Samael, and myself—we were all drawn to it.”
“Please.” She shook her head. “Samael only came because I summoned him.”
“You cannot force Samael to do anything. Surely you know that much about him.”
Bryony glared at the watcher. “No, I don’t know that much about him. I know hardly anything about him in fact. All anyone ever says is, Don’t summon him. Don’t talk to him. Stay away. He’s my future father-in-law, and I’ve already humiliated myself and unforgivably offended him because no one bothered to tell me he was actually blind.” Azza snorted, and the sound was so alien coming from him, it almost threw Bryony completely off her game. “I’m not kidding!” she said. “Did you hear what I said to him about his eyes? He won’t forget that any time soon.”
“He’s used to it, darling.”
“How does that even matter? An insult is an insult. And I probably reminded him of something terrible.” She bit her lip and bowed her head. “Didn’t I? Who . . . Who did that to him?”
“No one did.” Azza blinked down at her, clearly perplexed by her disregard for everything else he’d said. He sighed and gave up trying to steer the conversation. “Samael was . . . How do I translate this exactly?” He knit his brow, and it only made him more lovely. “An angel would say he was ‘born wrong.’ He has the equivalent of several physical deformities or genetic abnormalities, if you will.”
Bryony recalled what Raphael had told her about herself. She had a genetic abnormality. She suddenly felt a kinship with her future father-in-law. “A genetic abnormality doesn’t mean you were born wrong. Plenty of mutations are desirable.” Especially the ones that made it so you could sleep with your own fiancé without triggering his compulsive fear of reproduction.
Azazel smiled. “That’s a very human way of looking at it, but to angels, Samael is an abomination. His blindness, his poison, his wings—”
“What’s wrong with his wings?”
“There are twelve of them,” Azazel said matter-of-factly. “Seraphim have six. Can you imagine a human with eight limbs?”
“Of course I can. We have traveling shows. People pay good money to see that sort of thing.”
Azza’s mouth twitched, and he nodded, stifling a laugh. “Curiosity is one of the things I love most about humans, despite the tendency of some to exploit it. Most angels are not curious. They don’t explore and question. They only serve or dominate. Without a hierarchy, they don’t even know when to breathe. Samael exists outside the norm, which means he exists outside the hierarchy. He’s the essence of change and impermanence, so to angels, Samael is hideous.”
“That’s absurd.” Bryony pulled away from Azza, rejecting the ideas he communicated as though they were his own. “I mean, he’s an angel, so I wasn’t particularly happy to see him. But I’m not going to pretend he wasn’t impressive and . . . well, honestly, kind of pretty for a seraph. Anyway, how are more wings a bad thing? They’re wings. They’re beautiful by default.”
As she spoke, Azza brought a hand to his mouth in a vain attempt to contain his laughter. Before she was quite finished, he was doubled over. He shook his head and clutched at his stomach. “Stop,” he gasped. “It’s too much.”
“What’s so funny?” She glared at him.
He slapped her on the shoulder. “You, darling! How can you say such things to me and never once think to say them to him? You really are the worst flatterer I’ve ever known. Ah, you could have confounded him so easily. Imagine his reaction!” He cackled again.
“It’s not flattery.” She was not enjoying this conversation at all. “It’s the truth.”
Azza stopped laughing instantly. Somehow his expression went from hysterics to sobriety without a moment of transition. It was always unnerving when he did that. “Then tell him next time you meet him, and promise you’ll let me watch. I’ve never seen him flabbergasted, and I won’t miss my one and only chance.”
Bryony promised nothing. “And another thing. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ about being born blind. It happens to humans all the time. If I’d known that was why his eyes looked the way they did, I wouldn’t have minded them. I just thought he’d manifested that way to intimidate me.”
“No.” Azza shook his head. “He’s always had trouble manifesting eyes, which reminds me. Do ask to see Ash’s feet next time you see him. I want your reaction to them as well—and his reaction, come to think of it.”
“This is so stupid.” Bryony sat as angrily as she could manage. “I don’t make a point of knowing exactly how each type of angel is supposed to look, so none of you are wrong to me. You’re all just angels.”
“Good. Tell him.”
“That’s not a compliment.” She knelt and went back to scrubbing. “I mean you’re all terrifying as far as I’m concerned—or you were, I guess, before I got to know you personally. To me, the Angel of Death doesn’t look any more monstrous than the rest of you. I doubt he even means to paralyze everyone who looks at him. He probably hates it.”
“Tell him.”
“Tell him what exactly!” she snapped.
Azazel crouched down and tilted his head until he could look beneath her curtain of hair. “The next time you see Samael, tell him you think his wings are beautiful. Start with that.”
“He’ll just think I’m making fun of him.”
“He won’t.” Azza sat on his heels and took the brush from her. “He’ll believe you. Trust me. Your sincerity is deafening. Even when you’re lying, you’re somehow sincere about it. So, little orb-weaver, tell the Venom of God you think he’s beautiful. Catch him in your honeyed web. I swear to you, he won’t know what to do with himself—not if it’s you—because you’re . . .” He knit his brow. “I can’t translate this. Forgive me. I have to show you.”
Before Bryony quite understood what was happening, Azza had placed a hand on either side of her head and brought his mouth to hers. He breathed ice into her, and she heard him loud and clear.
It was a feeling she knew well. One winter, when she was a child, she’d taken a shortcut through the woods on her way home and quickly lost track of her surroundings. The day was overcast and getting darker, and her little heart beat faster and faster as the realization that she was truly lost finally settled in. She feared she wouldn’t find her way back before night. She wondered if she would ever see her family again—or would they find her lifeless body in the woods? But against all odds and just before nightfall, young Bryony had spotted a glowing, yellow orb through the trees. She knew it at once as the cobwebbed porchlight of home, but that night, it meant so much more. It was better than hope. She’d cried at the sight of it. She’d run to it, eager for the familiar voices of people who loved her, eager for hot chocolate and a warm hearth, and so very eager to snuggle down in her own bed and rest at last.
Azazel pulled away, and Bryony reached up to her cheeks to feel the tears the angel had somehow drawn from her eyes. What he’d communicated to her was home, but not just home—it was home after it has been lost. “What was that?” she asked, though deep down, she already knew.
“Your name.” He pressed a palm to her cheek and smiled a warm, beautiful smile. “In our world, you’re called after what you most resemble. You’re called after the feeling you evoke. I named you for your power, little orb-weaver, and it is a million miles from useless.”
Her name. But it wasn’t just a name, she knew. It was a big idea, a big truth she was only beginning to understand. Home after it has been lost did not teach her something about herself as much as it taught her something about the creatures she feared. “Oh my god.” She brought a hand to her mouth and stared up at Azazel. “You’re all just lost, aren’t you?”
The watcher closed his eyes and touched his forehead to hers. “Yes, yes, yes, darling. Lost and terrified. Now you understand. We need to be found, merciful god. Find us, if you can. Draw us out, and show us home.”