“What happened?” I asked him. He was tall enough to see over the crowds of people clustered around the front of the bus. “Did someone get hurt?”

“Yes,” he said in that rich, luscious voice. “Someone was killed.”

I started toward the crowd, curious, but he caught my arm. “You don’t want to go there,” he said. “There’s no need to go through that.”

Go through what? I thought, annoyed, staring at the crowd. I glanced back up at the stranger, and I had the odd feeling that he’d gotten taller. I suddenly realized my feet didn’t hurt anymore, and I looked down. It was an odd, disorienting sensation. I was barefoot, and if I didn’t know it was impossible, I would have said there was thick green grass beneath my feet.

I glanced back up at the rain-drenched accident scene in front of me, and time seemed to have moved in an odd, erratic shift. The ambulance had arrived, as well as the police, and people were being herded out of the way. I thought I caught a glimpse of the victim—just the brief sight of my leg, wearing my shoe, the heel broken off.

“No,” said the man beside me, and he put a hand on my arm before I could move away.

The bright light was blinding, dazzling, and I was in a tunnel, light whizzing past me, the only sound the whoosh of space moving at a dizzying speed.

Space Mountain, I thought, but this was no Disney ride.

It stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and I felt sick. I was disoriented and out of breath; I looked around me, trying to get my bearings.

The man still held my arm loosely, and I yanked it free, stumbling away from him. We were in the woods, in some sort of clearing at the base of a cliff, and it was already growing dark. The sick feeling in my stomach began to spread to the rest of my body.

I took a deep breath. Everything felt odd, as if this were a movie set. Things looked right, but everything seemed artificial, no smells, no sensation of touch. It was all illusion. It was wrong.

I wiggled my feet, then realized I was still barefoot. My hair hung down past my shoulders, which made no sense since I had short hair. I tugged at a strand, and saw that instead of its carefully streaked and striated color, it was brown again, the plain, ordinary brown I’d spent a fortune trying to disguise, the same plain, ordinary brown as my eyes. My clothes were different as well, and the change wasn’t for the better. Baggy, shapeless, colorless, they were as unprepossessing as a shroud.

I fought my way through the mists of confusion—my mind felt as if it were filled with cotton candy. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

“Don’t struggle,” the man beside me said in a remote voice. “It only makes it worse. If you’ve lived a good life, you have nothing to be afraid of.”

I looked at him in horror. Lightning split open the sky, followed by thunder that shook the earth. The solid rock face in front of us began to groan, a deep, rending sound that echoed to the heavens. It started to crack apart, and I remembered something from Christian theology about stones moving and Christ rising from the dead. The only problem was that I was Jewish, as my fundamentalist Christian mother had been for most of her life, and I was nonobservant at that. I didn’t think rising from the dead was what was going on here.

“The bus,” I said flatly. “I got hit by the bus. I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

I controlled my instinctive flinch. Clearly he didn’t believe in cushioning blows. “And who does that make you? Mr. Jordan?”

He looked blank, and I stared at him. “You’re an angel,” I clarified. “One who’s made a mistake. You know, like in the movie? I shouldn’t be dead.”

“There is no mistake,” he said, and took my arm again.

I sure as hell wasn’t going quietly. “Are you an angel?” I demanded. He didn’t feel like one. He felt like a man, a distinctly real man, and why the hell was I suddenly feeling alert, alive, aroused, when according to him I was dead?

His eyes were oblique, half-closed. “Among other things.”

Kicking him in the shin and running like hell seemed an excellent plan, but I was barefoot and my body wasn’t feeling cooperative. As angry and desperate as I was, I still seemed to want him to touch me, even when I knew he had nothing good in mind. Angels didn’t have sex, did they? They didn’t even have sexual organs, according to the movie Dogma. I found myself glancing at his crotch, then quickly pulled my gaze away. What the hell was I doing checking out an angel’s package when I was about to die?

Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten—I was already dead. And all my will seemed to have vanished. He drew me toward the crack in the wall, and I knew with sudden clarity it would close behind me like something out of a cheesy movie, leaving no trace that I’d ever lived. Once I went through, it would all be over.

“This is as far as I go,” he said, his rich, warm voice like music. And with a gentle tug on my arm, he propelled me forward, pushing me into the chasm.

CHAPTER TWO

THE WOMAN WAS FIGHTING ME. I could feel resistance in her arm, something I couldn’t remember feeling before in any of the countless people I’d brought on this journey. She was strong, this one. But Uriel, the ruler of all the heavens, was infallible, or so he had managed to convince just about everyone, so this couldn’t be a mistake, no matter what it felt like.

She was just like so many others I had brought here. People stripped of their artifice, shocked and needy, while I herded them on to their next life like a shepherd of old, not wasting much thought on the entire process. These humans were simply moving through the stages of existence, and it was in their nature to fight it. Just as it was my job to ease their passage and see them on their way.

But this woman was different. I knew it, whether I wanted to admit it or not. She should have been anonymous, like all the others. Instead I stared down at her, trying to see what eluded me. She was nothing special. With her face stripped free of makeup and her hair down around her shoulders, she looked like a thousand others. The baggy clothes she now wore hid her body, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t care about women, in particular human women. I’d sworn off them for eternity, or for as long as Uriel kept me alive. This one should have been as interesting to me as a goldfish.

Instead I reacted to her as if she somehow mattered. Perhaps Azazel was right, and swearing off women and sex had been a bad idea. Celibacy was an unhealthy state for all creatures great and small, he’d argued. It was even worse for the Fallen. Our kind need sex as much as we need blood, and I was intent on keeping away from both. And instead of things getting easier, this woman was resisting.

I paid no attention to my hunger—it had nothing to do with her, and I could ignore it as I’d been ignoring it for so long. But she was somehow able to fight back when no one else could, and that was something I couldn’t ignore.