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I waved away Azrael’s hand. I felt a second hand touch me, pulling me into the air. Lucifer picked me up and stood me on the ground. He was surprisingly gentle about it, although my wings still felt a little out of sorts afterward and I realized I was holding them open. I tried to pull them in and found I couldn’t. Fan-fucking-tabulous, I was going to have to do a mass exorcism with my wings open, that was ridiculous. Two days and I seriously hated these things. I added ‘ask how to deal with my wings’ to the list of questions.
“Soleil, you didn’t have wings the last time I saw you,” Lucifer commented.
“Nope, turns out they were stuck in my body until a few days ago. The wing sacks are still there, I’m supposed to have surgery to remove those, and if I can figure out how to have the wings removed at the same time, that would be a bonus,” I told my uncle.
“You don’t like them?”
“They are cumbersome, and I have no control over them because I wasn’t a kid when they came through,” I replied honestly. “I say cumbersome, but what I mean is they are a giant pain in the ass.” This got me another laugh from the giant angel at my side.
“Okay, niece, time to send us all home,” he told me after he stopped laughing. I blinked at Remiel. We were down one angel, because he wouldn’t be of any assistance with Leviathan in his body. Azrael began his chant and after a few lines, I joined in. The magic wind began to blow. It took us maybe a minute and a half to exorcise the lesser demons. It took a little more effort and time to get rid of Leviathan.
Once Leviathan had been sent back, Remiel blinked at Lucifer several times. Then the two of them had a chat. Eventually, Lucifer and I assured Remiel that his brother would make another visit, because I could do that. Remiel was still reluctant to let me send the giant angelic demon back, though. I couldn’t blame him for that. Azrael had seen their lost brother twice in a year, but Remiel hadn’t been in Chicago with us. He’d only heard about it after the fact. I wondered how I’d feel if Helia had sacrificed herself to create the Stygian and decided I’d miss her, even if we weren’t the best of friends.
Sending Lucifer back was draining. He disappeared with a thunderous boom that rattled windows in houses and set off car alarms. I collapsed again when it was done. Remiel and Azrael both held out their hands to me. I accepted both and used them to pull myself to my feet.
“Do you need a break?” Remiel asked. I shook my head. I needed to see the crime scene.
“I do need to know how to pull my wings in smaller,” I told them after a moment or two, once my knees felt steady.
“Treat them like they are magic, just think about their size and concentrate,” Azrael said. “As you get used to them, it will take less effort.” I did this, my wings tucked in tight around my body, and only the feathers on the very tips dragged along the ground. I concentrated on keeping my wings in as we walked to the house.
There was no trace of the hellfire left inside. It looked like a normal house. A backpack was in the living room on the floor. There was a couch, a coffee table, two end tables, a big area rug, a TV, and a coat rack. The only thing out of place was the blood. There were a few partial shoeprints in blood on the area rug and hardwood floor. The shoeprints were small, only as wide as my own. Meaning they probably belonged to a woman.
“They’re the daughter’s,” Remiel told me, noticing me staring at them. “Martha was stabbed. Harry had his wings cut off and Mitch, the son, had his head cut off. All of it happened in the bedrooms—they are a bloody mess.” I decided then and there that I didn’t need or want to see the bedrooms. When I thought of the job of a private investigator, I thought of missing persons and fraud cases, not murders. Murders and murderers were out of my league.
“Why’d he take the guy’s wings?” the detective asked.
“Because angels can bleed to death from losing their wings, it’s the most surefire way to kill us,” Remiel answered.
“It seems decapitation is as well,” the detective quipped.
“I could survive being decapitated,” Azrael said. “If my head was close by. If my head was cut off and taken away, it’d be iffy.”
“You could survive having your head cut off?” He looked incredulously at Azrael.
“Yes,” Remiel said. “We could stick it back on and the blood vessels would heal first. We might have a touch of brain damage, but if we could put our head back on our neck and stick some duct tape around it, it would be completely healed in a day or less.”
“One more use for duct tape,” I cracked and tried not to giggle. A murder scene was no place for giggling, even if I had the excuse of being bone weary.
“Our wings are much harder to heal, and they need a lot of blood, so cutting them off can lead to our deaths,” Azrael added.
I stood and looked around the living room. I had no idea what I was looking for or if I’d know it when I found it. I shrugged, turned on my heels and walked back outside. I took a seat on the front porch steps.
“You look awful,” Janet said, and I remembered the busted lips and black eye.
“I literally walked into a door,” I answered.
“I meant tired,” Janet said, examining my face in the rising sun.
“It is easier to get Lucifer here than to send him back,” I shrugged, this time at Janet.
“Well, no one I know can get Lucifer here, let alone send him back, or Leviathan for that matter.” Janet sat down next to me.
“That wasn’t just me,” I told her.
“I could feel the magic when it was fiddled with, but I couldn’t warn you before Leviathan came through,” she looked at her hands. “If I never become possessed again, it will be too soon.”
“Right?” I said.
“I feel like I need a shower with Comet on the inside of my body,” she was still looking at her hands.
“It takes a day or two, but that feeling goes away on its own, no internal bleaching required.”
“You’ve been possessed?” she asked me, finally turning her attention away from her hands.
“Twice,” I responded. “All exorcists have to be possessed once during training. Then, I got possessed once during a mass exorcism. I had grabbed a demon and pulled it from the host body. But I was alone and didn’t immediately send it across the divide. While I was working to remove a different demon from a different host, the one I’d pulled out entered me. It was then I learned that I can’t perform an exorcism while possessed.”
“Huh, I’d never considered that,” she said.
“Me either. Have you ever been to a murder scene before?” I asked.
“Yes,”
“What do you do?”
“I hunt around for magical traces and signatures,” Janet answered. “I don’t know what you should do at one, because I can’t figure out what powers you have beyond your ability to control and harness the Stygian. I know you have some, but I don’t know what they are.”
“I don’t think I have much power beyond that,” I admitted.
“You’re an archangel, you have lots of power. Whether you know how to use it or not is another story.”
“I’m nephilim,” I corrected.
“Soleil, you’re more powerful than any nephilim I’ve ever met, you and Helia both. I think you are both archangels, even if you are just half angel. I think that’s why you have wings. Winged nephilim are rarer than archangels.”
“There are only ten archangels.” I reminded her.
“Twelve counting you and Helia.” She offered with a smile. “In the history of the world, you’re the only two winged nephilim I’ve ever heard of.”
“One of my nieces has wings too,” I told her.
“Meaning there are 13 archangels and three winged nephilim.”
“There are no nephilim archangels in the history of the world,” I added.
“That could be due to the fact that archangels breed incredibly slowly.”
“My sister and I are only two years apart.”
“Yes, but your parents have been together 500 years and they have two children. Your Uncle Uriel has been with his wife for 3,000 years, and they have three kids. You have ten uncles and ten cousins. Four of your uncles have no children, despite being with their partners for eons. Archangels breed incredibly slowly. You and Helia are flukes being two years apart, and so are her kids.”
“Okay,” I said, not wanting to think about angel breeding habits. Raphael, Uriel, Gabriel, Samael, and Chumael were the only ones with children.
“The point of the conversation is, if you were to access all of your powers, you could do a lot more than you do now.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t really dedicated in school. I don’t even know what powers I might have, I never explored it. I was good with the Stygian and demons. I knew I wanted to be an exorcist, so that was all I focused on. “I’m working with a tutor right now because of Jerome,” I told Janet. “Sometimes, his magic does surprising things. I’m working with a tutor to learn to counter his magic when oopsies happen.”
“When oopsies happen?” Janet giggled.
“The kid has skills, but he’s also still a kid. Sometimes, magic happens, and he just shrugs and says oops, because he doesn’t know what he did.”
“I totally got it,” Janet said. “I just have never heard of a better name for it. When my kids get old enough, I’m going to call it oopsies magic.”
“Janet, it was a witch, but your coven says they can’t get a read on it,” Remiel said.
“Something is cloaking the magic and its caster,” Janet told him. “When I felt him meddle with the magic while you were calling forth demons, I should have been able to see him, but I didn’t.”
“Like a demonic bargain?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she sounded doubtful. “Demons shouldn’t be able to hide witch magic from other witches, it’s a safety measure. If you get a full coven or two in the same place, all of them using and putting off magic, you have to know what kind of magic is being used, because it can make even the simplest spells go horribly wrong. But it isn’t just witch magic, there’s something else to it, another side or edge. I can feel it, but I can’t identify it.”
“Stygian?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” she turned her attention to me, looking me full in the face. “I have felt Stygian magic through you before. You may not summon a lot of demons, but you always carry Stygian magic with you, and I’ve seen you use it on demons. This doesn’t feel like that. It feels like, well, like ...” she paused. “It feels happy. I noticed it at the scene in Alton and at Bill and Camilla’s. There is residual magic left in the house and it feels like happy magic. But that’s insane because magic doesn’t have emotions.”
“Does it feel like angel magic?” Remiel asked.
“No,” Janet answered firmly. “Angel magic might make me feel happy, but the magic definitely isn’t happy magic. It is really like nothing I have ever felt before.”
“Okay,” Remiel said. He and Azrael walked me down the street. The sun was now up. “You won’t have the energy to fly back to the hotel and we aren’t going to let you go via cab. So, you have two options, you can ride with me back to the hotel or I can call and have someone pick you up.”
“My car is still at my parents’ house,” I told him.
“You need a new car,” he told me.
“I need a lot of things. And I have a ton of questions.”
“Fine, we’ll take you to breakfast and you can question us. I have some questions for you, too.” Which sounded totally ominous and made me not want to go. I texted Duke and let him know who had died and that whoever was doing it was using witch magic. I left out the summoning of Leviathan and Lucifer, because well, he’s mortal and my bringing Lucifer into the graveyard in Chicago had scared the shit out of him. I didn’t think he’d handle a repeat performance all that great.
The three of us were loaded into an SUV driven by a chauffeur. He’d been waiting for us at the end of the street. I looked at him and recognized him as one of the guys in Remiel’s office. I wondered if my uncle kept a chauffeur on staff all the time and decided he probably did. Six of my uncles and my father were considered the richest men in the world. It was easy to do when you lived for eons and hoarded shiny things and kept jobs because it got you out of the house. There were only seven archangels on the list, because Lucifer and Zadkiel were deceased and Michael had renounced all his worldly possessions to live in a cave a few hundred years ago, which isn’t a figure of speech. Michael had built a house in a cave, it was a nice house, if you didn’t mind living in the dark. It prevented people from coming to look for him and asking to be healed.
We arrived at the hotel and Remiel told the guy at the desk to set up one of the conference rooms for breakfast and keep everyone out of the room except us. I gave him a look.
“Jerome will know you’re here.” Since that was impossible unless I called him, I continued to give him a look, but didn’t argue.
“Either you don’t know about soul tying or you’re playing stupid,” Azrael said after a moment.
“That’s one of my questions,” I told him. “What is soul tying?”
“Oh,” Remiel said and it was his turn to give me a look.
“I thought you graduated from angel school?” Azrael asked.
“I did.”
“Really? Like on your own merits?” Remiel asked.
“Yes, really,” I snipped.
“Huh, they must not be teaching important stuff in angel school anymore.” Remiel let out a low whistle.
“We’re a dying species,” Azrael said.
“I don’t know why everyone is looking at me all shocked.”
“Because soul tying should have been taught in angel school,” Remiel said.
“I feel like that is something I would remember if it was,” I told him.
“Oh boy,” Remiel said. “Okay, come on.”
“So, what is soul tying?” I asked as we entered the conference room.
“It’s why your mom has been alive for 500-plus years.” Azrael said.
“Okay,” I answered.
“Some angels can bind their souls to that of a mortal’s. Normally, it’s reserved for husbands and wives, but not apparently in your case,” Remiel said, shutting the door behind us.
“It is specifically a trait of archangels,” Azrael added. “The lesser choirs aren’t strong enough to do it. Your father decided he really did want to spend eternity with your mom, so he bound their souls together. As long as your father lives, your mother can’t die. Now, if Raphael were to die, your mom would die at the same time. But it uses a magic spell and ritual.”
“If you don’t know anything about it, how did you bind Jerome to you?” Azrael asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered, blinking at him. “Jerome’s really powerful, maybe he accidentally did it.”
“Jerome couldn’t use angel magic like that,” Azrael said. “We know he does use your magic from time to time, but he couldn’t use that. You would have had to do it, not Jerome using your magic. Witches can’t do it.”
“It beats the fuck out of me then,” I said.
“I have a theory,” Remiel offered, sitting down finally. “Jerome will die of old age—he’s a wizard, not an immortal—if he isn’t killed before then. Never has an angel had a mortal child; it just doesn’t happen. But we all know mother’s magic can be kind of unpredictable. I think it’s possible that Soleil’s motherly love for Jerome bound him to her. Now, she won’t outlive her son; even if they aren’t biologically mother and child, emotionally they are to her.”
“So, if I die, Jerome dies?” I asked, a horrible thought coming into my head.
“Not today or tomorrow or even three weeks from now, only if he lives past the time he should have died of old age—so in 1,000 years or 2,000, depending on his wizard’s life span.” Azrael patted my hand.
“However, being tied to someone means they can always feel you, even if they can’t see you,” Remiel told me. “When we walked into the hotel, Jerome knew. It explains why Jerome can use so much of your magic. Beyond what is normal. After all, magic is just energy and anyone can use energy, but Jerome uses a lot of your energy and he does it unconsciously. Hence, your Stygian dog.”
“Angel isn’t really a hellhound, she just looks scary, because Jerome’s a 14-year-old boy.”
“Angel has some Stygian magic in her,” Remiel said. “He accessed some of the same magic to make Angel that Leviathan uses to make his monsters. But he’s a wizard and he shouldn’t have had access to the Stygian. Hell, most angels don’t have access to Stygian magic. You and Lucifer are the only two I’ve ever met that do.”
“Why did Leviathan call me an archangel? Janet did too.”
“Because you are,” Azrael told me. “We’ve been dropping hints for more than 20 years about it, you just never would get a clue. You are really stubborn sometimes. But we knew if someone flat out told you that you were as powerful as an archangel, you’d argue about it until the world ended.”
“Helia accepted the information quite easily, but not you.” Remiel smiled at me. “You have always been so incredibly stubborn and determined.”
“That’s why Uriel resents you,” Azrael said. “His three full angel children don’t have near enough power to be archangels, but you do. Even Valerie, who was human, knew it. We believe you didn’t know due to willful ignorance. You wanted to be just a nephilim, so that’s what you were. But now you have Jerome and you’ve had to start accessing some of those powers, and even you can no longer ignore that you can do more than you realized.”
“Jerome’s been good for you,” Remiel said. “You’ve grown up emotionally, mentally, and magically.”
“That being said, you do have a strong connection to the Stygian and what resides there,” Azrael said. “You’ve told me before that all angels can perform exorcisms, but that isn’t true. Most angels can’t. Most beings can’t. Summoning demons is easier than sending them back, but you have exorcised some demons that I don’t think I could. Your ability to bring Lucifer here is mind blowing. None of us could do it. I give you that you have to have other angels around to do it, but even with other angels around, we couldn’t bring Lucifer across the divide.”
“We’ve tried,” Remiel added. “We’ve tried everything, and it’s never worked. Also, you stood against Beelzebub. He’s the oldest and worst of the demons; he’s the reason the Stygian was created. Only Gabriel has done that without needing Michael to recover.”
“Next question.” Remiel said. And suddenly, I couldn’t think of anything.
“How do I manage my wings?” I asked lamely.
“Practice,” Azrael shrugged. “Most angels start practicing with them within a week or two of being born. You didn’t get that time, although now that I think about it, we should have had you checked for wings when you were a child, you and Helia both.”
“You knew I was an archangel back then?” I asked him.
“We knew the moment you were born.” Gabriel said, pushing past someone to enter the room. “Thank God we are finally having this talk! I wanted to sit her down in Chicago and beat it into her, but I didn’t think you all would take that very well.”
“What are you doing here?” Remiel asked.
“Jerome called me, said Soleil was scared and in the hotel, but hadn’t come up to the room. He also told me there was another murder this morning. I tried to call Soleil, but she didn’t answer, so I flew over to check on things and the front desk guy said you were all in here and didn’t want to be disturbed, which I knew could only mean one thing. You were finally having the archangel talk.”
“Oh,” I answered, unsure why I needed to answer anything at the moment. I was still confused. “Why didn’t you tell me as a kid?”
“We tried,” Gabriel said. “We tried when you burned the yard and did it with Stygian magic, but you just kept yelling at us that you couldn’t be an archangel, because you didn’t have wings and your mom was a mortal.”
Oh,” I said. That sounded like me.