Angel Of Solace (11 page)

And then he felt nothing.

Chapter Eight

Damien took off his coat as he and Sariel walked into the run-down apartment building, one of many such places, he was told, that the Asurans used as safe-houses. It wasn’t glamorous—the room was little more than a foyer with a small, one-person kitchen, a washroom on the left, and then a bedroom around the corner to the right. Even his own quarters at the Agency had been more impressive, but the more time he spent here, the less surprising he found that to be.

“Nice and cozy,” he commented. Sariel, he noted, quickly set off to inspecting the room to make sure no one had been here and planted any listening devices. 

At least, that was part of what she was doing. The other part was summoning enough courage to tell him whatever else he needed to know. Even without physical contact and the sharing of emotions that followed it, her body language told him plenty. The tension had only grown as they had gotten closer, and he started to wonder how bad this could possibly be. The fact she was slowly being taken over by an intangible spirit seemed about as horrible as things could get…

She finally sighed and sat down at the edge of the bed. “Before we do anything else I just want to apologize,” she told him softly. “You’re only involved in this mess because of me.”

Damien leaned against the wall. “I’m here because I wanted to leave Louvette. Whether or not I got support, I was probably going to try. You just made sure I survived.”

She smiled tiredly and seemed to relax a bit. “So you understood what Kronn was talking about?”

“I think so, more or less. Everyone learns about the Angels growing up, and we don’t really pry for details. We go to temples and see these beings with unfathomable power and grace work miracles, and that’s all that matters.” He nodded at her. “Did you know more when they chose you?”

“No,” she said mechanically, her eyes fluttering closed. “I was eighteen when they told me I was being considered. It was the happiest day of my life, and I didn’t even know what was going to happen. It was only two weeks before the Bonding when they finally explained what was involved, and they still didn’t get into specifics. They said I would have to open myself to the Lord, and a fraction of his spirit would step inside of me. They said it would change my life, and that I would have a power and clarity few beings could ever experience. I would be closer to God than anyone else…and I would be an integral part in spreading His word across the Argoa.”

Damien grabbed a nearby chair and pulled it over. He made a compromise between personal space and a comforting presence and sat down only a meter away. “Did you know why they chose you?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “I was the right age, of course—new Angels are always bonded young, typically before twenty. I had spent my entire life in the temple, and I knew I was well-liked, but I was still just a junior priestess…”

There was more to that sentiment, but Damien didn’t press. He stayed close and quiet, letting her work through it on her own. His Incubus training covered far more than sex and fantasies; it taught him how to measure a person very quickly. Angels might have been a bit more complicated than his usual client, but by now he was confident he had a good feel for her. She wasn’t someone that needed coddling to deal with her inner turmoil, nor was she someone who just resisted help out of principle. She was somewhere in between, and so that’s where he positioned himself.

“I suspected I…knew the reason, but it was terrifying,” Sariel continued eventually. “It still is.”

He frowned, wondering what she meant, but something in her face…

No, it couldn’t be. How could she have survived so long in a temple? How could the others have not known? It seemed impossible, but he knew it was true.

 “You’re a Demon, aren’t you?” he whispered. “Before you even bonded?”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Yes. The first flashes came when I was eight, but I don’t think I realized what it meant until long afterwards. No one else knew—they couldn’t. Even as a young girl, the other acolytes used to whisper about what happened to the “tainted” children the priests brought in from the streets. People’s parents sometimes just dropped them off, abandoned them on the steps…” Her voice failed and her eyes closed again. He noticed her knuckles had gone white, and he resisted the temptation to reach out to her. “I’m sure you understand that well enough.”

Damien wondered dimly if she knew that about his past, and if she did, how. But he quickly brushed it aside as irrelevant for the time being. “My parents were going to do the same with me,” he told her. “Or at least, that’s what the Agency told me. They purchased me instead.”

“Slavery or…” her jaw tensed and she seemed to steel herself. “Or I don’t know. They never told me what happened to the Demons they brought in, even after the Bonding.”

“So how did you hide it? Especially from the Angels?”

She reached out her hand to touch his. Their skin brushed together…and he felt nothing. No spark at all—just normal skin.

“I learned to control it,” she said. “I realized it was how they identified Demons, so I had to figure out a way to hide it. I can’t really explain it, but I just
knew
I could keep it bottled up inside me. And it worked.”

He traced his fingers along her arm, marveling at the accomplishment. He had grown up with dozens of other Demons, and none of them had this type of control. He hadn’t even known it was possible. If others learned how to do it, it would make it even harder for the Covenant to track them down…

He shook away the thought. She had revealed her heritage for another reason.

“You think the fact you are a Demon is affecting your bond somehow?”

“I don’t know, but it’s the only thing different about me,” she said. “And if it is…I’m not sure it really changes anything. Either way I still feel myself slipping. I had another episode at the stadium earlier. I lost myself in the power, and for a while I wasn’t sure I was going to snap out of it. It seems to get worse every time.”

He stopped his fingers when he reached her shoulder. “That was one thing you wanted to tell me. What’s the other?”

She pressed her lips into a thin line. “The other is that I have no idea if this might harm you. Neither does Kronn, for that matter. Reaching into the mind of a normal person or another Demon is one thing, but an Angel might be something else entirely. They liked to say the will of an angelic spirit is indomitable. I’m not sure if that’s true, but...”

Damien nodded idly. It wasn’t all that surprising. All bonds had risks, even the ones he used to make on a daily basis. There was always the chance of slipping up and pushing too hard, wiping out a memory or two that he had no business touching. In six years of whoring, it had happened to him a few times. Nothing serious had ever come of it, though. In this case…well, he had no idea how bad it could be.

So when it all came down to it, he just had to make a choice. He could either try to help the woman who saved his life—a woman who was suffering—or he could walk away. 

There weren’t many good reasons not to do the latter. He sympathized with the Asurans, certainly. He was the prototypical person they worked to help, a Demon abandoned by society and threatened by legions of hate-filled cults and bloodthirsty criminals. Like many of the other Incubi, he had gone through periods of fancy where he imagined striking back against his owners, of organizing some huge and soaring rebellion that would free himself and all of his people.

But this was not fantasy. The Asurans lost people on a weekly basis, and despite their efforts, very few tainted children ever escaped a life of slavery or disappearance into the arms of the Covenant. He had been fortunate enough to escape his own slavers, and now he had a chance to start again. It would be a hard life, certainly, and he would always have to be wary of exposing himself to others, but he was resourceful. It would take time, but he would find a way to survive. Maybe he would even have the chance at a real life someday.

Damien stood and walked to the apartment’s only window. The sun had set, and Solace was bathed in the glow of a million street lights. For more than a decade he had looked out longingly at those distant flickers of light, praying that one day he would have the chance to stand among them, to be in the only place in the world where someone like him could be free…

No, this wasn’t a fantasy. A fantasy would be him walking away from this once-in-a-lifetime chance, in believing that he could live with himself if he didn’t help her—if he didn’t at least try. All things considered, she was asking very little, and her expectations were low.

He had to try. That was reality.

“I understand the risks,” he said, turning around to face her. “I can’t make any promises, but I think it’s worth the attempt.”

“You’re certain?”

“No,” he said, smiling faintly, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

***

A part of her—a very large part of her—wanted to refuse Damien’s help. There were too many risks for such a marginal hope, and if the pain of slowly losing one’s mind wasn’t bad enough, the thought of slowly losing it and damning another innocent man in the process probably should have been enough for her to just push him away.

But another part of her—the selfish part—had no intention of doing that. Pangs of guilt gnawed at her stomach, but she realized that perhaps it wasn’t all so terrible. It may have been selfish, but humans often were. Maybe that meant there was still something of her left. And if not, the fact she had to rationalize this to herself probably meant the same thing.

“All right,” she said. “I suppose we might as well get started.” She glanced back to the bed and then to him. “Thought I admit I’m not sure how to do that.”

He smiled tightly and moved over to sit on the edge of the bed with her. Even without stretching out her senses she could feel his apprehension, but he was hiding it well. His body moved with fluid grace, and he raised his hand and held it near her head.

“So you’ve never done anything like this?”

“I’ve touched minds, of course, but only just the surface,” she told him. He slowly pressed his hand against her head, and she gasped as the empathic spark washed over them. His apprehension and caution were suddenly quite tangible, but trumping both was his resolve. He
wanted
to help her, and it helped her relax. “Like this, but little else. We were always warned anything beyond surface contact was…well, dangerous.”

“I’ll go slowly, so just try and relax. Try and concentrate on something.”

“Like what?”

She felt a brush of air on her neck. “Well, normally it’s about sex, but in this case…I don’t know. Try thinking of a particular place, or a memory you find interesting. It’s easier for me to look around when you’re distracted.”

“Okay,” she murmured, closing her eyes. Given how tumultuous things had been over the past several months, it wasn’t easy to find a soothing memory or even a place to lose herself in. The most impressive thing she had seen recently was Damien himself, and his image flashed into her mind—not as he was now, but when he was just waking up, touching his skin and feeling his warmth…

She bit her lip and quickly buried that thought. No, that was
definitely
not something she was going to focus on. Not now, not with everything else going on. Not with him in her mind. She needed something soothing, something serene….

Her thoughts turned to the temple in Louvette where she had grown up. In particular, to the room she had been given when she turned twelve and officially became an acolyte. It was small, no more than a few meters on either side, but it was the first place she could remember really being hers. Over the next several months, she had decorated it with all manner of silly things, from mostly spent candles to half-finished or awkward tapestries artists had donated to the temple. Even now the picture in her head was a mess, but it was a place where she felt safe. A place where she felt at home.

Despite the generosity of Kronn and the Asurans, this was not her home. They never stayed in any once place very long, but it wasn’t just that. While she liked the people, she still felt distant from them—a distance she had carefully maintained. As much as she wanted to help them all, she couldn’t afford to get too close. Not with the power she carried and the potential for disaster it brought with it.

It was the same reason, she realized belatedly, that she didn’t want to get close to Damien. There was nothing else stopping her now, no temple duties or chastity vows. She could do whatever she wanted, have whomever she wanted…

But no. Now was not the time, and most likely it never would be. She had to keep him away just like all the rest of them. If and when the Angel finally took control, she couldn’t place them at risk, not anymore than she already had—