I walked the rest of the afternoon away. Out of Vatican City, across the river on the Ponte Regina Margherita, then through the Piazza del Popolo, another discomfortingly vast open space. I ate street food; roasted chestnuts and deep fried artichokes which had just come into season. It was too cold to find the displays of fancy gelatos tempting. I noted hundreds of public statues and stared at many elaborately carved doorways, and let myself be bemused by the SPQR legend stamped on the sewer grates. I was well north of the famous ancient sites of the city here—the Forum and the Colosseum and so forth. This was the Baroque Rome, reinvented yet again by its people on foundations of earlier genius. It was bustling and rather beautiful and full of peculiar detail, as such old places are, and nothing like either the cities I was used to in America, or the little mountain village where I’d grown up. From the piazza, I could see all the way down the Via del Corso to the unreal Olympus of the Victor Emmanuel Monument—a faux-classical white building of unbelievable scale at the heart of the city. But here in the center of the cobbled space, at the foot of a tall Egyptian obelisk, there were four fountains in the shape of lions crouched upon stepped pyramids. They reminded me of my dream so sharply that they made me shiver.

I bought a clear plastic poncho when it started to rain lightly.

I didn’t get my pocket picked. The only time I ran into anything that remotely looked like trouble was while I was taking a turn around the formal gardens of the Villa Borghese, when a man stepped out from under a tree with a focused glint in his eye and a swaggering, “Ciao bella!”

Then he stopped dead, his eyes widened, and he turned away hurriedly and retreated. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t anything about me personally that had scared him off, and then I looked quickly behind me. I anticipated spotting Egan looking bullish, but there was no one in sight. Only, on the path between the lawns, a last swirl of black smoke hovered for a second before it dispersed.

My heart bumped in recognition. I pulled a face at the empty air—half acknowledgment, half wince.

My walking wasn’t entirely aimless. I did have an end-goal in mind: Bernini’s carving of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. After I’d first become involved with Azazel, I’d looked up everything I could online about women having love affairs with angels, and very quickly Teresa’s name had come up. A cloistered nun of the sixteenth century, she’d spent years enjoying spiritual visions in which a beautiful angel appeared to her and inflicted orgasmic ecstasies of pleasure and tears. To me as a reader it was obvious that the sickly nun in the monastery in Avila had been under the influence of a Watcher imprisoned nearby.

As I sat in a café, I pulled up a quote from her autobiography on my phone.

‘I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God.’

I wanted to see the famous sculpture of this incident.

Santa Maria della Vittoria was a small church on the Via XX Settembre, no more remarkable from the outside than any of the historical churches that crowded the streets of Rome. Its pale marble façade fronted a more pragmatic red-rendered structure. I got there a few minutes before six, when according to my online guidebook the church should still have been open, but I could see no light leaking from the few tiny windows onto the darkening winter streets. Rain had set in heavily now. Climbing the steps, I pushed at the door and it opened, directly onto the nave.

For a moment my eyes were confused. A wild jumble of polychrome stone, white marble, fresco and gilding seemed to deliberately refuse any sort of visual sense; the one thing that drew focus was the huge golden cloudburst behind the altar, like a single movie frame of a heavenly explosion. Lighting was minimal and I had to make my preternatural eyes adjust. I tilted back my head and saw half-naked plaster angels clinging like white bats to the arches, and a painted ceiling on which the Virgin Mary presided over what looked like the fall of men and serpents from the celestial realm.

War in Heaven. Does it never stop?

I looked away, dropping my gaze. I didn’t much approve of pews in a church, but at least these ones were plain and did not hurt the eyes. A lone figure sat right at the front, his head resting against his hand in a dejected sideways slump.

I shook off my rain-cape and peered around. It’s like scrambled egg, I thought, curling my lip at all the visual confusion. Or an explosion in a paint factory. How can anyone hear the Still Small Voice in here?

Bernini’s sculpture was supposedly in one of the side chapels so I walked up the center aisle, looking from side to side. It wasn’t a big church at all. My gaze flicked over the seated figure. With his silvery hair and his gray suit he looked naggingly familiar, even though his hand hid his face. He didn’t shift an inch.

Uncomfortably familiar.

I stopped a few paces away. Goddamn. “Hello, Uriel.”

Uriel dropped his hand and looked around with an expression of naked dismay. Then he launched himself to his feet and disappeared in crash of silver light.

Well, that wasn’t what I’d expected. The archangel’s sudden departure left me open-mouthed. If he hadn’t been waiting to waylay me, what had he been here for at all? He was strictly Old Testament in allegiance, so far as I knew, and had little but contempt for Pauline Christianity.

I looked around me but the church was silent and nothing had changed. I walked up and looked at the pew where he’d been sitting. From that position, I discovered, he had a pretty good line of sight across the aisle and the apse to the very Bernini sculpture I’d come looking for. Yes, there it was; staged just like a scene from a theatrical production. To either side, sculpted in snowy marble, sat male members of the patron’s family in their boxes, watching with animated fascination. On the central plinth, framed by jewel-colored pillars, the youthful seraph hovered over a collapsed and voluptuously disheveled Teresa, poised to stab her again with his golden dart. His face bore an enigmatic smile that looked positively cruel from this angle; hers was slack with orgasmic transport.

That’s one hell of a spiritual moment she’s having. In front of witnesses, no less.

“What the hell, Uriel?” I said out loud, rankled by my confusion and distracted from my goal. “What’s the point of stalking me if you haven’t got the guts to stick around?”

My voice echoed in the empty church. I squared my shoulders.

“Are you embarrassed your little plot with Roshana fell apart?”

There was a draft against my neck as Uriel reappeared behind me. “Not in here!” he rasped. His blue eyes crackled with electricity and for once he did not look urbane or superior.

“Huh.” I grinned. Of course the thing with churches is that everything said in them can be heard by all the Host of Heaven. “That’s some real dirty linen you’ve got there, Mr. Lightbringer. Don’t want to wash it in public, do you?”

“Are you spoiling for a fight, Milja?”

Yes. Yes I am. I couldn’t fight Father Giuseppe, or Egan, or Azazel. So Uriel would do. And he couldn’t hurt me, not by the divine rules he adhered to so loyally. “Are you going to fess up, or do you just want me to stand here and speculate out loud?”

“Not here,” he snarled.

“Okay. Let’s take it outside.” I remembered the rain. “Tell you what—if you play nice and don’t try any tricks or traps, I’ll let you take me back to my hotel.”

He clenched his fists. Uriel was notably bad at controlling his facial expressions when in human form—unlike us mortals he’d never grown up with a teacher telling him off for rolling his eyes in boredom, and never had to face down a pack of ten-year-old bullies with fake aplomb. He hadn’t even spent time in any sexual relationships with humans like the Fallen had, so he’d never learned to guard his thoughts. Right now he looked nervous and ashamed. It didn’t sit well with his handsome silver fox shtick. “Fine,” he grunted. He reached out one elegant hand and grasped me by the shoulder.

For a moment I was nowhere.

We appeared somewhere I didn’t recognize. If it hadn’t been for my weird eyesight, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all. A single skylight thrummed with rain over a room full of boxes and dust. Lightning stuttered, faintly strobing the corners.

Uriel shifted his hand to cup my cheek. “You should really consider before you provoke me too far,” he said with silky politesse. “You have no protector now.”

“You think?” I answered, remembering the swirl of darkness in the garden.

The archangel laughed, short and sharp, but he let go of me. “That didn’t take long then. Why am I not surprised? The call of the quim, eh?” He stalked off to lean against a beam. Now that he was out of immediate heavenly scrutiny, he relaxed somewhat and straightened his shoulders. The flicker of lightning turned his gray hair to a white halo.

“Where is this?” I demanded.

“The hotel attic.” Uriel gestured at the end of the room and a narrow door flung itself open, admitting the faint illumination of a stairwell bulb. “Don’t worry; you’re not even locked in.”

Okay. He seemed to have kept his promise, and I eyed him with a little less mistrust. “I should have given you more credit,” I said. “You’re way more devious than the Boatman, aren’t you?”

“The Boatman?”

“Denim shirt. Stomps dragons. Commands the Host.” I couldn’t use Michael’s name in case he overheard.

“Ah. The Pillar of the West,” he corrected me, with heavy disdain. “Well, we all have our talents. His is hitting things, mostly.”

“I’ve had a few weeks to think about it. Haven’t really been able to think about anything else, to be honest. Ethiopia was no coincidence, was it?”

“Hh.” He brushed cobwebs off his cuffs.

“I mean, it makes sense that Roshana used that art exhibition and that particular copy of The Book of Enoch as bait for…my boyfriend. It’s sort of obvious now I look back on it. She practically pointed me at the clue we needed.” I’d been kicking myself for so long now that the bruises were numb. “And he couldn’t resist finding out more, could he? Not if it offered the way to free his old, old friend. So poor li’l orphan Roshana got to meet her daddy at last, as an ally. And she used me to make the introductions; she was quite open about that. Which also makes sense, because it’s not as if she knew how he’d react to her, was it? If she’d just popped up out of nowhere, he could have… Well, he could have chosen to eliminate the risk she represented.”

Uriel bit his upper lip, eyes narrowed.

“But the thing is… How did she know where the Bookworm was? And how did she know who I was? I guess she could have had an enormous network of international informants. She was old and pretty rich. But she wasn’t Vidimus. How did she even know that her father was free, unless someone told her?”

I could see his unblinking eyes in the shadows, glowing blue.

“I think you told her.”

Uriel cleared his throat, and smiled. “My, you have been exercising the old gray matter.”

“Am I right?”

He only smiled. But he looked uncomfortable.

I’d spent so long wanting to shriek accusations, but it just came out flat and hard. “I think you set the whole thing up. The attack on Lalibela. The fight with Saint George. Roshana imprisoning her father. Was that her ambition from the beginning?”

He shrugged one Armani-clad shoulder. “Who knows the mysteries of the human heart? I might have pointed out certain options to her. She didn’t confide in me much.”

“And you—You were prepared to risk freeing the Bookworm, just to get him?”

He hesitated. “She’s no warrior.”

“What makes it super-creepy is that you were in conspiracy with one of the Nephilim, and could have ended up making her immortal. Yet your job is supposed to be to eliminate them.”

“She died, didn’t she? Well done, by the way.”

“That doesn’t let you off the hook. No wonder you don’t want me mouthing off in church—that’d look really bad in front of the others. You disobeyed orders. Divine orders.”

Uriel held up a warning finger and almost tripped over his words; “That’s not true. She was a tool used to a greater end. The Scapegoat needed to be imprisoned, and she was the means.”

“Oh fine. What do they call that—Situation Ethics, isn’t it?”

His face twisted. “I have dispensation. My role as Adversary… It may seem that I am working for the Darkness, but that is only so the Light may shine through in Truth.”

I folded my arms. “I bet that makes you way popular.”

His mouth tightened and he looked down.

“What happened, Satan?” I asked. There was no need to raise my voice in that quiet place. “When did you become the Enemy of God?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t,” he whispered. “It’s all lies.”

“Forty days and forty nights in the wilderness?” I asked, skeptically. “‘Bow down and worship me,’ you said, ‘and I will lay all the kingdoms of the world at your feet’?”

His reply was so soft I barely caught it. “I was doing my job.”

“Right. It’s a bit unfair how everyone else seems to have gotten completely the wrong idea, then. The Host. The Church.”

“Funny how you comprehend that, and my brothers do not.” He pushed himself away from the beam. “Is that all, Milja?” he said bitterly, stalking toward me. “Can I go now?”

I’d almost forgotten how physically dominating he could be when he took the initiative. It took all I had in me not to take a step back as I looked up into his face.

“You screwed up,” I reminded him, pushing back at my own weakness as much as I was pushing back at him. “Your gamble failed. There are two Watchers free now.”

It worked. He blinked—angels hardly ever blink—and turned away from me. Hiding his face. “Are you done?”

“You were the one who followed me into the church.”

“No I didn’t.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Not everything’s about you, Milja.”

“So you just have a thing for Saint Teresa?” I snapped.

“There,” he said with hauteur, “was a woman who knew the true consolations of spiritual obedience.”

And he vanished.

Oh Uriel. I shook my head, slightly stunned. You just can’t see what’s in right front of you, can you? Yet it sticks out like, well…

I clomped down two floors from the attic to my own room, seething. And not just with irritation at his disdain, or anger that he’d played me for a fool. There was a problem with angels, I’d found; they’re just too good-looking. Even the creepy ones. Even the ones that are trying to get you trapped or killed. They exhale charisma like carbon dioxide, and I’ll shamefully admit that it leads, inevitably, to some serious global warming. I locked my door and kicked off my wet shoes and that stupid long skirt that had been supposed to make me acceptable to the clergy. I stared at myself in the gilt-framed mirror over the bed; my eyes shiny and wild, my mouth hard and full and downturned. My pale legs stuck out from beneath the baggy sweater I’d chosen so unwillingly. I felt wildly off-kilter. Things were churning inside my soul, clawing for release, desperate for attention I would not give them. And my body—Oh my body; how it ached. My belly felt ravenously empty, but it wasn’t food I wanted.

I wondered if Egan was back in his own room yet, a floor below mine and a corridor along. I pictured kicking his door open and marching in, dressed just like this. I imagined straddling his lap and pulling his head back by his hair so that I could bite his lips—and that thought made my insides spasm with delicious pain. I pictured Egan, provoked beyond human endurance, kissing my breasts and grabbing my ass and sliding his fingers beneath my damp panties and touching me there. And I groaned out loud.

Saint Teresa knew what it was all about, I told myself; ‘Lord, either let me suffer or let me die.’ That pain better than any calm. That emptiness inside that needed to be filled. That grinding ache for a revelation that would overwhelm the senses and obliterate the self.

I dragged my sweater over my head and threw it across the room. Come upstairs, Egan. Can you hear me? Come upstairs and throw me down on the bed like you did in Minot and give me what I need. Fill me. Take any hole you want. Make me scream. Make me beg. Make me forget the fear and the rage and the loss.

Make me forget Azazel.

Make me stop thinking about what he did, and to whom. Make me stop wanting what I can’t have. Make my pussy stop seeping heat and my mouth stop burning for his kisses and my heart stop hurting.

I pulled off my panties. In secret rebellion, I’d worn beneath my dowdy skirt the brightest, most lacy pair I owned: a cerise froth. I’d titillated myself with imagining how Egan would have reacted, if only he’d known. I’d pictured his arousal and his frustration and his shamefaced torment. If ever there was a priest with no natural calling to celibacy, it was Egan. His body was painfully, dangerously sexual in instinct and appetite.

What a waste. Panties and man, both.

I cannot bear this.

I walked barefoot to the window and flung open the glass doors. The winter rain was pounding vertically down, flooding the little balcony and bouncing up in splashes as high as my thighs. Lightning stutters outlined the dome of St. Peter’s. I stepped out onto the ledge, defying the rain, ignoring the traffic queued in the streetlights below me, not caring if anyone looked up and saw my bare muff, my inadequate camisole top, my hard and tingling nipples poking through the wet cotton. I lifted my face to the ferocious deluge.

“Azazel!” I called, my voice guttural.

He heard me, and he came; a cloud of darkness boiling across the rooftops, across the river and the road. I staggered back into my chamber as it flooded over the balcony’s iron railing. He coalesced into human form as he touched the marble floor, a demon-god of shadows and smoke and burning intent. He swept me backward, right off my feet, and knocked the breath from my lungs against the wall. The loud tick of the clock suddenly fell quiet.

He pulled my thighs apart.

“Azazel,” I gasped in relief and joy and terror.

He put his hand over my mouth, smothering my words. His eyes were black and fathomless pits and his erection was rock-hard. As I struggled under his palm, the thrash of my open legs only made it easier for his cock to find and breech its hot, wet target.

OH—!

I bit him, and he gave me air at last, but by then I had no words. He’d driven them all out of me with that first ruthless thrust. For a moment we both went still. I was pinned to the wall by the press of his hard, hard body and the heft of his hands, stretching me open. His fingers bit into my ass cheeks and I sank my nails into his back in retaliation.

Please, I thought, but when he moved inside me I only cried out wordlessly.

Please, yes, yes.

It was a good thing I was so wet, so aroused, because he wasn’t giving any thought to foreplay. The sheer strength and girth of him hurt me, but in all honesty I wanted to be hurt. There was not enough hurt to make up for my guilt and my emptiness, and now, the more he thrust the less it hurt; not his length or his thickness, not even the bite of his hands in my heavy flesh. Need gobbled up pain. Wet gobbled up hard. In Me gobbled up In You.

The only thing that still hurt was the emptiness of his eyes, staring into mine. His face was set in grim lines. No joy there, and none of the wicked playfulness I knew so well. Just inexorable need. Like I was a black hole and he was being pulled into a gravity well he could not escape. Like I was crushing him even as he crushed me against that wall, harder and faster and deeper. My breasts shuddered wildly beneath my wet clothes as his rhythm built to a pounding beyond endurance.

Please, Azazel, please keep—

Oh God. Oh God. I’m going to—

He shut his eyes.

I came, and as I came he filled me. Wordlessly and absolutely silent, for the first time ever. The only sound was my own high cries, and the thump of my head against the plaster. He let his own head fall into the crook of my shoulder, and held me there. I could feel the hot wet gusts of his breath on my neck. I could feel the race of his heart, banging against his ribs and mine.

He lifted his face and I looked into his eyes, and in that moment, before he could make any decision, I reached out and kissed him softly on the lips. Pleading.

Oh, Azazel, please just talk to me please just kiss me—

I think I nearly killed him with that kiss.

He turned his face away and let go of me. I slithered down the wall, my legs folding, trapped between the whitewash and his hard torso. His erection was a thick strong curve, just nodding in submission; I caught it in my mouth, tasting myself and him, and laved him with my tongue.

Azazel groaned out loud—the first sound he’d made since entering the room.

I drew him deep into my throat.

He clenched his fist and slammed it against the wall, the groan turning into a roar—and as he roared he started to come again, filling my throat, pulse after pulse. He didn’t stop. He kept punching the wall, and kept ejaculating, and kept on howling like I was sucking his soul out. Chunks of plaster were raining on my head, and I couldn’t breathe, and I was choking, but his other hand was knotted in my hair now, forcing me close, and that was all that mattered to me.

Only when the room started fading into blackness did he let me go, and even when he pulled free he still slopped over my lips and chin and down the curves of my heaving cleavage. He staggered back a few paces.

His eyes weren’t empty now. He looked confused, and in pain. But that was something. Something.

“Please don’t go,” I gasped, falling forward on hands and knees.

He rolled his head, a half-gesture of denial. And he kept backing off toward the window.

He was starting to turn away now.

I played the only card I had left to keep him from going. “I’ve found Samyaza.”

He stopped, and looked back at me. It seemed to take a long time for him to stop simply feeling, and start thinking. “So? We’ve already found him,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Penemuel has worked out the location of every one of our brothers. She’s smart like that.”

“I can help you free him! He’s right here in Rome!”

He tilted his head, eyes narrowing. “No, he’s not. We know precisely which mountain in Jotunheim.”

Mountain? Jotunheim? Rome was supposedly built on seven hills, but I didn’t understand what he was talking about. “I’ve seen him!” I said, still panting.

Azazel sifted his hand through his thick black hair, which made my heart thump painfully. Oh, at least he was still here, still talking. “What did he look like?”

“Um.” I sat back on my heels, fingering angelic semen from my bruised and swollen lips. “A big, big lion thing. With a human head. Wings.”

He smiled. It was a puzzled smile, but it was devastating as far as I was concerned. “That isn’t Samyaza,” he said. “That’s Gabriel.” He turned back toward the window, and darkness swirled around him as he stepped up into the night. “I’d wondered what happened to him.”

Then he was gone.

The clock resumed its heavy tick, and another lump of plaster fell from the ruined wall.