He just looked at me, his expression saying it couldn’t be soon enough.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave, even if they could give me back some semblance of a normal life with mental acuity intact. Yes, I enjoyed picking on him, and the white had to go. But despite my arguments, I . . . kind of liked it here. Liked the sound of the ocean beyond the open windows, the taste of salt on my lips. I’d always wanted to live by the sea. I was getting my wish a little earlier than expected, and it wasn’t technically living, but it was close enough.

I liked the bed I’d slept in, I liked Sarah, and I most definitely liked to look at Raziel, even if he was frustrating, annoying, and all the other negative adjectives I could think of. And if he could read my mind, tough shit.

In fact, I was living my dream. I’d spent most of my adult life sifting through arcane literature and Bible criticism to come up with my far-fetched mysteries, and I was well acquainted with the totally bizarre fantasies of Enoch, with his tales of the Nephilim and the Fallen.

Except it turned out Enoch wasn’t the acid freak I’d always thought he was. All of this was real.

The kitchen was too small for both of us, but for him to leave he’d have to brush past me, and I knew he really didn’t want to touch me. It was lovely to think that it was unshakable lust keeping him away, but I knew it was more likely annoyance—I’d done my best to make him want to strangle me.

“No,” he said, “I don’t want to strangle you. I just want you to go away.”

Grrrr. “How long are you going to be reading my mind?” I demanded, thoroughly annoyed.

“As long as I need to.”

“Well, that time is now over. Turn off the switch, or whatever it is you do. Stay the fuck out of my brain. Don’t read my mind, don’t cloud my thoughts, don’t wipe out my memory. Keep your distance.” I didn’t bother trying to keep the snarl out of my voice. I’d had enough of this crap.

He was looking dangerously close to be being amused. His gloriously striated eyes glinted for a moment, but I seriously doubted that Raziel possessed even a tiny trace of a sense of humor in his cold, still body. Sure enough, the expression vanished so quickly I was sure I’d imagined it.

“Or what?” he said.

Asshole. He knew I didn’t have much to fight back with. Little did he know that I’d always been wickedly inventive. Maybe that was why I’d been sent to hell.H ands sliding down my body, beautiful hands, his mouth following, on my breast, sucking—

“Stop it!” he said with complete horror, pushing away from me as if burned by the sultry image in my brain.

I smiled sweetly. “I’ve got a hell of an imagination, Raziel,” I said, calling him by name for the first time. “Stay out of my head or prepare to be thoroughly embarrassed.”

Taking the plate of doughnuts, I sauntered back out into the living room.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SHE WAS A WITCH. SHE SHOULD have been humble and weepy and afraid of me. Instead she was the complete opposite, and the quick vision of her sex fantasy was having the expected effect on my body. Azazel was right—I’d been celibate too long.

I stayed in the kitchen, not moving. I’d thought I at least had my body under control. In truth, it was no wonder I was hard, with that brief fantasy she’d indulged in. I had no idea whether she really found it appealing or whether it was just part of the game she was playing.

No, it was real. As I’d seen the thought, I’d felt her own fevered reaction, as intense as mine despite the brevity of the image. If that had simply been an intellectual exercise, it wouldn’t have been so . . . disturbing.

I had to get rid of her, and fast. I needed her out of my rooms, out of my world. There was no way in hell I was going to let them invoke the Grace of forgetting, but apart from that anything would be an improvement. Sarah was always looking for someone to mother—Allie Watson was the very thing. I could pass her over, then go out on my own and not have to think about her anymore. It might take a day or two to get her out of my system, but I could do it. I could turn myself off. As long as she wasn’t living in my apartment and taunting me.

I was getting closer to Lucifer’s burial ground. I could sit and listen and hear him deep in the earth, feel his call vibrate through my body, and I was close, so close. I didn’t need to get distracted by a woman with a mouth that wouldn’t stop moving and erotic images invading my mind.

Why the hell had Sammael brought her up to the cave in the first place? He knew better than anybody that place should be off-limits, particularly to an interloper like Allie Watson. It was the closest we’d come to Lucifer, the Light, and to have her bumbling around with her incessant questions was close to blasphemy.

Not that I believed in blasphemy. That was part of why I was here, wasn’t it? Because I, like the others, refused to follow the rules, to kill without question, to wipe out generations and scourge the land. I had looked on a human woman and fallen in love, and for that I was forever cursed.

Surely there was something wrong with an ethos that equated love with death. It was so long ago I wasn’t sure I could remember what we’d been thinking, could barely remember her. But I couldn’t forget the emotion, the passion that had driven me, the certainty that choosing life, choosing human love, was the right thing to do. It had been worth it, worth everything, and I had never regretted it.

I could regret the vulnerability, the need that had driven me to such a desperate act, but it no longer mattered. I had done what I had done, and I wouldn’t wish it changed. But it would never happen again.

Uriel knew how to use vulnerabilities. He knew how to torture, even with the rules that kept him from wiping us out. I wasn’t going to let him use me again.

So perhaps there were times when I wished I could still feel that innocent, powerful love. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of years, millennia, piling up, and I’d never been able to recapture that pure, essential passion that had made me destroy everything.

But I still would have done it. Chosen to fall. We’d been taught that the humans were like cattle—you trained them, destroyed them if they disobeyed, never answered their questions, and, most of all, never looked upon them with lust.

We’d been sent to earth with our appointed tasks. Azazel had been sent to teach the people metalwork; his job had been to train and to pass on the magic. The first twenty each had jobs, and we’d done well enough at first. But the longer we remained on earth, the more human we became. The hungers started, hunger for food, for life, for sex. And we started thinking that we could make this benighted world a better place. We could bring our wisdom and power, we could experience love and dedication. We would intermarry and our children would grow strong and there would be no more wars and God would smile.