Siren—Wednesday, 8 a.m. GMT
We found Michael alone in the throne room. Before his minion Toriel had summoned me, I had been doing what I usually did when I wasn’t listening to inane angel chatter or sitting on top of buildings: training with my katana. If the end of the world was coming, I was going to be prepared, even if sparring with Sybil and Somniel was a waste of my skills.
Michael sat more ramrod straight than usual and glared at me before I even opened my mouth. “I have an assignment for you, and I do not want any argument about it.”
“This ought to be good.” I crossed my arms. “You have me for two days.”
Michael tapped his fingers against the carving of a gold lion under his right hand. “You are the one who keeps saying that we are facing an apocalypse. I would think that would outweigh your petty desire for a holiday.”
Rage began in my stomach and flashed through my body before it erupted out of my mouth. “How about we add up the number of hours you spend in the Haven bar in a year and the number that I do and see who is taking more time off from the cause of righteousness?”
Sybil and Somniel took a step away from me, but Michael only sighed. “I’m not going to prevent you from going off on your little bender. I thought that the concern for the balance of the universe that you were ranting at me about the other day might rank a little higher in your priorities.” As if it were an afterthought, he added, “Oh, and I need you to find Keziel before you go.”
The combination of my wrath and astonishment forced an involuntary “Ha!” out of my mouth. “Are you kidding me? Keziel’s missing after going on an errand that I specifically advised against sending her on, and you want me to go find her? You couldn’t think of a better angel for the job?”
Michael sagged a bit, though I doubted anyone who hadn’t seen him before would have noticed. “I considered all my options, and you still came out top on the list. Which should give you an idea of how dismal my other options were.”
I considered that. Michael could hardly send Jophiel to find out what had happened between his wife and another man. Rachel and Nathaniel were always a bad choice to deal with a failed angelic couple, because they were the only successful one. Raphael was too panicky to be reliable, and I wouldn’t send Uriel after a dog I didn’t like. And far be it from Michael to run his own errands.
But I didn’t want to go either. “Why don’t you send Gabriel?”
Michael shifted in his chair, bumping his elbow against the hilt of his sword. “I am not sending Gabriel back to the diner. He might decide he needs to spend another two thousand years there, and I cannot afford that right now.”
Okay, you lost me. “What are you talking about? What diner?”
“Her diner.” He looked at me as though I was an idiot. “Cama. The Oracle. The one responsible for Gabriel’s continued absence and more than her fair share of evil on earth.”
“Oh.” I had heard of her, of course, but I didn’t know why I would have been expected to know that she had a diner. Unlike some angels, I didn’t spend my whole life tracking the affairs of individual humans. “Fine, don’t send Gabriel. Send”—I flailed my arms, trying to think of a way out of this mission—“Sybil and Somniel! They’re going to be at loose ends in another couple of days, anyway.”
Michael ran his fingers through his hair. “I need someone who is actually going to talk to her.”
“Somniel talks.” I gestured at the red-haired angel behind me and then whipped my head back around to Michael as I realized, “Oh, no. No. You don’t just want me to find Keziel. You want me to go deal with whatever emotional upheaval you’ve caused with all this.” I put my hands up and backed away. “No way. Therapist is not in my job description.”
He smiled, even though schadenfreude should have been beneath the leader of the forces of good and right. “Call it ‘other duties as assigned.’ Or else take it up with the dispenser of angelic free will. Oh, wait. There isn’t one.”
“Ha-ha. You are almost funny.” I didn’t have a choice, and he knew it. “Fine. I’m going.” I turned away, then spun back on my heel. “But you owe me, Michael. Next time I offer a recommendation, you had better either listen or find someone else to clean up your mess.”
Light-cursed Keziel. If she had married the angel she loved, we wouldn’t be in this situation. That was an exaggeration. Keziel wasn’t responsible for everything Bedlam did.
Besides, she wasn’t the only angel to make one bad decision for which she would spend eternity atoning.
After Lucifer entrusted Sarakiel, Mephistopheles, Raziel, and me with the protection of the Earth, we and the plethora of cherubim assigned to assist us became known as the Grigori, the Watchers. For a while, the human population remained small, and we could look over the species without too much difficulty.
But eventually man’s settlements began to spread across wider areas, and one day as we were meeting outside the village granary, Sarakiel suggested that we split up. “It takes too long to travel through all the settlements. It would make more sense if we each managed a region and had a set of cherubim under us.” She leaned over the necklace she was making and added another bone.
Mephistopheles crossed his arms and leaned against the mud-brick wall. “I don’t see why that is necessary. We can travel across great distances in moments, so there’s no reason that we can’t manage everything from right here.”
Sarakiel pinched her lips as if they had already had this conversation several times in private, because they probably had. “We’re not supposed to let the humans know about us or our powers. They’re already questioning how quickly we journey.”
I twisted some reeds I was weaving into a basket. “I think Mephistopheles might be right. If we’re separated, we won’t be able to seek each other’s counsel when problems arise. There’s a reason a group of us was put in charge, and not any one of us.”
Raziel’s gaze clouded. “That’s not what you said last night. You said you didn’t like the idea because—”
I silenced Raziel with a glare. I loved him, but he needed to learn the difference between what I said to him in private and what I wanted the rest of the world to hear.
Sarakiel looked up from her jewelry. “Are you still convinced that humans don’t like you?”
“It’s not that they don’t like me… exactly.” The requirement that I tell the truth necessitated the addition of the last modifier. “It’s that if I spend time around them, they eventually figure out that they can’t lie around me.” Which makes them hate me. “And from there they can figure out that I’m not an ordinary human. They’re not big on sorceresses.”
Sarakiel shook her head. “I can’t believe I have to deal with another ridiculous argument. You don’t see me complaining that everyone thinks I’m some kind of evil spirit because of the yellow hair. I finally convinced him”—she inclined her head toward Mephistopheles—“that we don’t have to be together all the time.”
“You have agreed to that?” Raziel looked up at Mephistopheles. “I thought you said you realized that argument wasn’t working, so you were trying to come up with better ones.”
I picked up a completed basket next to me and thrust it into Raziel’s chest. “Here. Go get some pitch. Then we won’t be able to hear it when you say idiotic things.”
Sarakiel made a shrill sound in the back of her throat. “Why is this still an issue, Mephistopheles? How many times must I say it? We are angels. We are going to be together forever. What does a few centuries apart matter in the long run? You don’t see Siren and Raziel whining because they can’t spend every minute together.”
I returned to twisting reeds. “Please don’t bring us into this,” I said under my breath. Different angel couples required varying degrees of closeness. Michael and Lethe didn’t like to separate for long, but Raziel and I were content to spend some time apart. Look at where obsessive love got Bedlam.
Mephistopheles stepped forward and opened his arms. “What I don’t see is why it’s so incomprehensible to you that we stay together, Sarakiel. I love you, and I want to be with you.”
Sarakiel threw her necklace down, and the little bones clinked against each other. “No! I’m pulling rank on this. We are going to try to do things my way for a hundred years, and then we can reevaluate the situation. I don’t want any arguments. Mephistopheles, it’s only a century—and Siren, no one says that you have to interact with humans yourself. We’re Watchers, so watch.”
Mephistopheles and I argued and pleaded a bit more, but Sarakiel’s mind was made up. We were separating, and nothing any of us could say would stop it.
When Sybil, Somniel, and I arrived at this mysterious diner, I thought for a moment that we had entered the wrong place. The grubby building was as dark as my old houses, before the days of candles, and the only sign of occupancy was Skylar Grey’s rendition of “Love the Way You Lie” blaring from the jukebox.
I heard a faint scuffling coming from the back. I thought it was most likely rats, but I felt obligated to investigate anyway.
I pushed open the door to a room that I decided to be generous and call a kitchen. The music from the other room clashed with the hum of the two giant industrial steel refrigerators to the left that looked as though they hadn’t been replaced since shortly after iceboxes went out of fashion. The air smelled of stale rancid grease, as if no one had bothered to clean up after the last batch of French fries or whatever had been cooked on the fryer/griller to the right.
Keziel sat stark naked in the middle of the floor. She held a large cardboard container in her lap and spooned generous amounts of pink ice cream into her mouth. At least three similarly sized and now empty containers were strewn around her.
I was rarely at a loss for words, but the sight left me silent for at least a full minute. “Keziel, what are you—? Why are you—? What is going on?”
My lack of articulation did not seem to bother the angel sitting on the scratched brown linoleum. “If you want some ice cream, there’s some butter pecan left in the freezer. I ate all the chocolate and vanilla.”
Since I liked neither butter pecan ice cream nor her avoidance of my admittedly roundabout question, my next words were a bit harsher than they needed to be. “You know perfectly well I don’t care about the ice cream. What I do care about is the major upheaval in the balance of the universe—something I think would be bothering you, as well.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Keziel concentrated all her attention on the tub half full of what had to be strawberry. “Especially not with you.”
I motioned to Sybil to grab the coat from the hook on the wall, next to the door. The window air conditioning unit switch was in the off position, so I could see the appeal of nudity in the sweltering August heat. Nonetheless, I could not have this conversation with Keziel while she remained unclothed.
“Well, too bad. I’ve got orders to drag you back to Heaven kicking and screaming if I need to.” I considered what she’d said. “Wait a minute. What do you mean ‘especially not with’ me?”
Tears welled up in Keziel’s already-reddened eyes as Sybil slipped the coat over her shoulders. “You know how you are. You always like to rub it into other angels’ faces when they make mistakes. You walk around with your holier-than-thou attitude. ‘I’m Siren, and I’m so perfect because I don’t lie, and I stayed on the side of Heaven even when all my friends turned traitor.’ Big whoop. We all lost friends in the war, and there are more important things than telling the truth all the time.”
“Like making sure you keep all your promises, no matter what?” The harsh words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. See, this was why Michael should never send me out on tasks that require diplomacy.
Keziel’s glare made me stop longing for the air conditioning for at least a few seconds. I thought she knew that I regretted my words, but she didn’t care. Which was fair. “Go away.”
“Sorry, no can do.” I moved closer, and trying not to look too hard at the dirty floor, I sat down facing her. “Michael sent me to find you, and you know that means if I go back empty-handed, he’ll send somebody worse. Please tell me what happened so I can go off and enjoy my holiday in peace.”
Keziel looked back down at her ice cream, and the tears she had been holding back began to plop into the carton. “He—he rejected me!”
Since I had come seeking information about the Spear of Destiny, I was a bit surprised by the turn in conversation. But I suppose I shouldn’t have been, given her lack of wardrobe and clichéd choice of consumables. “Who? You mean Bedlam?”
An even larger torrent of tears gushed from her eyes. “I was willing to be with him. You know, be with him?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Trust Keziel to need euphemisms to describe sex. “Okay…”
“But he rejected me. He’s been trying to get me to come back to him for years, and I’m the one that says no. But now I’m finally willing to give him what he wants, and he disappears.” She wiped her eye with the back of one hand. “It’s because I’m not pretty, isn’t it?”
Comforting weepy angels facing the poetic justice that should have been dished out to them millennia before not among my fortes, I decided to try to skip ahead to the relevant part. “And what about the spear?”
She glanced back and forth around the room. “What spear?”
“Um. The Spear of Destiny. The object that Bedlam is going after? And you were supposed to find out why? Any bells?”
She scraped her spoon against the side of the ice cream carton. “Oh, right. That. He didn’t say.”
I looked to Sybil and Somniel to see if they were as frustrated by the direction of this conversation as I was, but Somniel had her nose all scrunched up, and Sybil was spinning the order wheel that hung over the pass bar. “And it didn’t occur to you to, I don’t know, ask him about it before jumping him?”
“I did!” She threw her spoon down into the carton, causing a glob of fruity-smelling ice cream to fly up and hit my forehead. “I tried to talk to him first, but he ignored me! Besides, Michael didn’t tell me that I needed to get information or anything like that. He told me to do whatever I could to make Bedlam forget about the spear.”
I wiped the sticky goop off my head and then realized having it on my fingers was worse. “Well, next time, I would suggest persuading Lethe to give you a memory charm. I realize that a torrid affair with your demon lover is more exciting, but if you’re going to consort with the forces of evil, you might as well do it with someone who has the ability to help achieve your goals.”
Keziel tried to glare at me, but given the puffiness of her eyes, the expression was more accurately described as a pout. “Are you quite finished now, Siren? Because if you don’t mind, I would like to finish this ice cream in peace and quiet.”
I glanced at the taciturn angels of peace and patience standing behind me. “And, what a coincidence, peace and the-closest-thing-we-have-to-quiet are here to keep you company. They’ll take you back to Michael when you’re ready to go. Don’t wait too long, as I’m sure he’s going to want to fit in a good scolding before he comes up with a new plan to save the world.”
I stood up with what dignity I could, considering that my hand was covered in melted pink goo. “I… am sorry, Keziel.”
She knew I couldn’t lie, but somehow I doubt she believed me all the same.