Rebel (4 page)

“In theory. You left before Azazel could banish you. You’ve been gone a long time. Why come back now?”

“Perhaps I am lonely,” he said gently.

“You aren’t capable of such tender feelings, Cain. You’ve come back to cause trouble. That’s all you do.”

“You wound me, Raziel. I came back because I miss my own kind. It’s difficult to live among humans—they fuss about the most ridiculous things. No doubt due to their foreshortened life spans.” He
considered going for a winning smile, but Raziel would never believe it, so he aimed instead for polite sincerity.

Raziel surveyed him stonily, but Cain already knew what he was thinking. There was no way he could deny Cain reentry into the sacred haunts of the Fallen, not unless he had proof that Cain meant them harm. Ezekiel’s death could be considered an accident, though Cain, of course, had been blamed. As for whether or not Cain meant them any harm—they would find out far too late.

“You would have to abide by our rules,” Raziel said finally.

“Of course.”

“You realize that we are in the midst of all-out war with Uriel and the Armies of Heaven? There is no guarantee that we will succeed.”

“There never is. And I am, if you’ll remember, a very good fighter.”

“True enough. You have no bonded mate?”

“No.” Cain hoped his sudden monosyllable would put them off, but he wasn’t counting on it.

“And how long have you been without a mate? How soon do you need to partake of the Source? Because I must warn you, Allie has been called upon to serve far more often than usual, and she needs all her strength. I am not certain another Fallen taking from her might not be too much.”

“And on that off chance, you’d banish me?” he returned lightly. “How cold-blooded of you, Raziel. I’d expect as much from Azazel, but you, I thought, would be more concerned with following the letter of the law.”

“The letter of the law is that I protect Sheol and the Fallen first, and I would not endanger them for the sake of one rogue angel. Besides, the only way you can find another bonded mate is out in the world of the humans.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say I’m a rogue,” Cain shot back. “Maybe a bit of a rebel, but any society needs its rebels. In fact, I am in no immediate need of the services of the Source. My wife just died, and I am . . . unready . . . to embark on another relationship.” He planned that little break purposefully, to express his manful grief at the loss of his mythical wife. In truth, he had had no mate for hundreds of years, but that was one reality he wasn’t ready to share with the rest of the Fallen. Not yet.

Raziel glared at him, and Cain could sense the uneasiness of the gathered Fallen. He glanced over them; for some reason his gaze stopped for a moment on Martha’s troubled expression, and his quick mind leapt ahead.

“Ask your seer,” he suggested. “I imagine she’ll tell you I’m meant to be here, and I’ll bring no harm.” It was a gamble, but he had always been
luckiest when he took extravagant chances. If she had any clear knowledge of the danger he presented, she would already have warned them; therefore he could reasonably assume that she was either a piss-poor seer, as even Raziel had suggested, or that the art of prophecy was as much a fiction as fairness or compassion or the sanctity of the blood-bond.

But he was in no hurry to enlighten them about all the dirty little secrets you could discover when you believed in nothing and questioned everything. That time would come.

All eyes turned to Martha. Calm Martha, with her soft mouth and her big eyes and her determination that would avail her absolutely nothing in the end. If he decided he wanted her, he would take her, body and blood.

She nodded reluctantly, and for some reason he wanted to rumple her soft brown curls as if she were an obedient puppy. “I have seen no danger to the Fallen from his presence,” she said carefully, and he wondered what she was leaving out. He’d known almost instantly that there something she wasn’t telling, and his curiosity, always insatiable, rose up. He filed that thought away, to be explored later, and turned back to Raziel with a limpid smile.

“You see?” he said in a dulcet tone. “Absolutely harmless. The seer verifies it.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said sharply.

“Then what do you see?” he countered.

He wondered if the others would notice the faint wash of color on her cheekbones. So Miss Martha had been having naughty thoughts about him? How very interesting. Still not enough to push him into making a premature decision, but it looked as if Thomas’s quiet widow was a front-runner in his search for the woman to help him bring down the entire organization of the Fallen.

“You may stay,” Raziel said abruptly. “On a trial basis, at least. As Michael will tell you, we can use all the warriors we can find. Your former rooms have been reassigned, but you have a choice. You can have a small room on the third floor, or a larger room in the annex near the gardens.”

All he needed was Martha’s almost imperceptible jerk to know the answer. “The larger one in the annex. If I remember correctly, that area is relatively private. I find, after so many years of being away from communal living, that I value my solitude.”

“No one’s back there but—”

“We’re done, aren’t we?” Martha interrupted Raziel just as he was about to say something interesting. She didn’t realize Cain had already surmised that she was the sole resident back there. He should be distrustful of things happening too easily, but one look at Martha’s mouth and he was more than happy to take the easy way out this time. He wasn’t normally a being
who believed in signs, but when circumstance aligned with appetite, it was foolish to resist.

Raziel cast the woman an enigmatic look. “We’re done,” he said. “Martha, you may show Cain his rooms, since you’re the only one who sleeps back there, and we’ll expect you both for dinner. We need to celebrate the return of our lost lamb.”

In wolf’s clothing.
It required no magic spells or ESP to know that that was exactly what had entered Martha’s mind while she was trying not to gnash her teeth over Raziel’s lack of discretion. Cain glanced at her, but she was back to refusing to look at him, and he wanted to laugh. Life wasn’t about to get any easier for Thomas’s widow, and if he were a kinder man, he’d regret the necessity of using her.

But he wasn’t a kind man.

Regret was a waste of time. If there was someone so surprisingly tempting to keep him busy, then he was more than happy to take her. She was going to serve him very well indeed.

If only all decisions could be this easy, he thought, smiling at them all agreeably.

F
OR A DAY THAT HADN’T STARTED
out particularly well, things had gone downhill in a truly spectacular fashion, and the very last thing I wanted to do was show how unnerved I was. This was my home, these were my people, and the dark angel who’d arrived in tongues of flame this morning was a threat to everyone and everything I cared about. I wasn’t going to let him hurt them.

Absurd, of course. As if I could protect mighty warriors like Michael and Raziel from one man, one being, when they were far more capable of protecting themselves. I strode down the hallways as quickly as I dared, wanting to dump him in his room and escape.

“Is this a race?” Cain’s liquid voice purred from behind me. “Because my legs are longer, and if things really get bad I can fly, so you’ll never outrun me.”

I slowed down reluctantly and glanced over my shoulder, then jumped. He was much closer than I’d realized, watching me with amusement, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Sorry,” I said briefly. “I have things to do.”

“Of course you do, little one. I’m certain the Alpha’s request ranks far down on your list of priorities.”

I slammed to a stop. I was surrounded by tall, graceful people, and my lack of height had always been a sore point with me. “Do not call me little one,” I said in a dangerous voice.

His long lashes drooped over his intense eyes. “You
are
little,” he pointed out unnecessarily. “Why should the truth distress you?”

I considered all the things I could possibly say and rejected every one of them. “I have things to do,” I said again, turning back. I could get past this. I could get past anything.

The main house was a rabbit warren of rooms and balconies, a strange, cantilevered building that looked oddly like a bureau with its drawers left open. When Thomas had died I’d wanted nothing more than to hide away, and I’d left the rooms I’d shared with him for the annex, a section tucked between the main house and the cliff face behind it, well out of the mainstream of Fallen life. I’d been happily, peacefully alone there, content to grow old and die
in blessed solitude. There were two more apartments back there, but I had foolishly assumed no one would ever want to stay so far away from the open camaraderie of the Fallen.

I was unpleasantly aware that we hadn’t passed anyone at all in the last few minutes. By the time I reached the first of the apartment doors, I was almost running again, and I forced myself to an abrupt stop. “Here you go,” I said hurriedly, turning to leave.

He blocked me. Easy enough to do—the halls were much narrower back here, and he was much bigger than I was. “Why the hurry? Didn’t Raziel tell you to get me settled, make me comfortable? Don’t you think you ought to make sure that I’m pleased with my rooms? I may need something.”

“I don’t think Raziel cares whether you’re pleased with your rooms or not,” I said shortly. “Besides, you’ve lived here before, and you chose.”

“So I did.” In any other man I would have thought his voice even and pleasant. Not this one. There was just the faintest undertone beneath it, one I couldn’t identify. “Nevertheless, I think you need to show me my new quarters, don’t you?”

Before I realized what he was doing, he’d reached past me to push the door open, and a moment later he’d crowded my body into the apartment simply by using his size, closing the door behind us, shutting us in.

I skittered away from him with what I hoped was composure, looking around me. This apartment was more than three times the size of my own small room, with a bedroom off to one side and French doors leading out to our shared courtyard. The plain furniture was white, overstuffed, and comfortable-looking, and I could see past the open door to the huge bed.

“I see the Fallen still think they live in the clouds,” he drawled, moving past me to survey his surroundings. I wondered if I’d be able to slip away before he could stop me.

“Did they ever?” I was surprised at myself for asking. The origins of the Fallen were as shrouded as Sheol within its mists. To be sure, we all knew the stories: how the original, Lucifer, had been driven out of paradise by the archangel Michael himself, how the next had fallen because of their love for human women. Still later Michael himself had come, and others as well, exiled by the archangel Uriel, who now ruled in the place of the Supreme Being, who had simply granted humankind free will and then disappeared, leaving a sadist in charge. I’d heard stories of strange, unhappy places like the Dark City where souls lived in torment, but never had I heard of what humans thought of as heaven, a place of angels and harps and fluffy clouds.

Thomas had never wanted to answer my questions, and eventually I’d stopped asking. He’d been
one of the first to fall, and he’d told me that world was long gone. Only the world of Sheol remained, and we should live in the present, not the past.

We’d done so, until Thomas had been eviscerated and murdered in front of my eyes, and I had gone down in a welter of blood, barely managing to survive. Even now my loose white clothes hid scars that I showed no one.

Cain didn’t answer my question either—not that I’d expected him to. He seemed to have forgotten about me, looking around him with an odd expression on his face, and I began to edge toward the door. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you were here,” I continued briskly, “but things run relatively smoothly. If you’re hungry you need only think about food, and it will be provided. The Source . . . well, you know what the Source provides.”

“Blood,” he said absently. And then his gaze focused on me, and his easy smile was back. “I have no need of blood at the moment. On the other hand, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten laid.”

The word startled me, as it was doubtless meant to. “I’m afraid everyone here is already bonded. Most widows choose to return to their homes with no memory of their years with the Fallen. Raziel says it’s easier that way.”

“But not you, sweet Mary,” he murmured. “Why didn’t you go back home?”

Because I had no home to go to,
I thought mutinously, but I wasn’t about to admit that to
him
. “I never liked the idea of having my memory wiped clean.” I wasn’t going to bother correcting him about my name. I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that this was just part of some complicated game he was playing, and that the only way to win was to refuse to play in the first place.

“So clearly you’re the only game in town. And how long has it been since you were widowed?”

I froze. “Why do you ask?”

Out in the ordinary world, people talked about angelic smiles. Cain’s was the very opposite—charming and devilish. “I simply wondered how long it’s been since you’ve enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh. I’d be more than happy to oblige.”

I knew he was trying to shock me. “I don’t think so.” I sounded calmer than I felt, turning away from him.

I should have been able to reach the door before he did—I was much closer. But he was there ahead of me, smiling down at me, genuinely amused. “Don’t look so shocked, sweet Mary. I was only asking. I’m certain I’ll find someone else who’s interested if you’re not.”

“Martha!” I snapped, giving in to his goading. “And you’re not going to find anyone in Sheol. I told you, everyone here is bonded.”

“And you think that would stop me?” His voice was very gentle.

I didn’t move. I understood instinctively that he would let me pass if I simply asked him. I looked up at him, into his wicked, beautiful face, and wondered if this was what sin truly was. Seductive, almost irresistible, calling an otherwise sane woman to do things she’d never, ever consider doing, simply by smiling at her. I had no doubt at all that he could manage to seduce whomever he wanted if he set his mind to it. Who could say no to such a soft, sensual lure?