I stood in the long grass above the beach on Achill, and watched Egan and Azazel walking along the sand. They had been talking for over an hour now, pacing up and down the shore; I could see several lines of their footprints just above the lip of the water. I’d got too anxious waiting for them and come out to see if there’d been a fight, but it looked reassuringly calm down there. Even the sea was flat, almost glassy, though I suspected that was not natural. Up here among the long grasses it was a bright March day. Someone optimistic had planted clumps of daffodils along the roadside, and their yellow heads were swinging low in the breeze.

I still didn’t feel the chill, but I’d put on a jacket and boots along with my woolen dress, in deference to the season and any of the village neighbors who might spot me.

It was easy to tell the two apart, even at this distance; Egan wore blue jeans and walked with his shoulders squared defensively, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket. Azazel, back in black pants and white shirt and clearly the taller figure, gestured expansively as he strolled.

We’d spent three months freeing the Watchers, one by one. One hundred and ninety-seven prison cells, from Kilauea on Hawaii to Wayland’s Smithy in England, from Timbuktu in Mali to Mount Tsurugi in Japan—and eighty-one had still held living Watchers. Raphael had dealt with the human guardians, employing various degrees of diplomacy; Uriel opened the seals; Egan and I descended to cut the prisoners free; Azazel and Penemuel took them away…well, somewhere else. It had been grim work. Some of the Watchers had been cogent and grateful, but some were raving and many catatonic. The worst, as far as I was concerned, had been those who shrank in terror from the light and tried, weeping, to crawl back into the safe darkness of their tombs.

For those three months, Azazel had seemed preoccupied and somber. He’d made no attempt to get into my pants, which had left me teetering with uncertainty even though I knew it was a condition of the new Covenant that the angelic powers had forged. Instead Egan had taken me to his bed every night and we’d made mundane, wonderful, human love, the type with false starts and ‘Ow!’s and giggling. And some nights we’d just curled up together and he’d held me as I shook, which was the nearest I could get to crying over all we’d seen and done, and I mourned the mother I’d rejected and the fathers—both earthly and Heavenly—that I’d lost.

I’d discovered the ordinary yet world-shaking grace of waking up next to one I loved. Of feeling him next to me; that unconscious, instinctive reach of his hand under the sheet and the caress of his deep, sleeping breaths on my shoulder. Azazel had never slept with me, after all. Thinking about it, I doubted that he could sleep.

Despite all our frenetic activity, it had felt for those three months as if we were waiting; balanced on the cusp between regimes. But it was over now. We’d freed them all, as Azazel had sworn. And the world… Well, it was not back to normal. It couldn’t be, after the international crisis and all those deaths. But it was carrying on. We humans are adaptable.

The official explanation had settled on ‘an unprecedented cosmological phenomenon’.

I pushed the hair back from my face, reaching a decision to go down to the beach and join the guys. I couldn’t remain on tenterhooks any longer.

“You have to say goodbye to the Scapegoat today.”

I turned. Penemuel and Uriel stood behind me on the grass, looking as inhumanly glamorous as ever. Uriel wore a cool half-smile and an embroidered gray silk coat that would not have shamed a French aristocrat at the court of the Sun King. It was Penemuel who had spoken.

“Tell him I will come to him at sunset,” she continued. “We will leave together.”

I didn’t know how I felt about Penemuel. No—scratch that. I felt grateful for all she had done, and grateful that she was going away.

“Okay,” I said, the air emptying out of my lungs. Though of course it was not okay. I didn’t know what would happen when Azazel went into exile—except that I would not see him again. Not in the flesh. Not with these waking eyes. “Have you found somewhere he’ll like?”

“I think he’ll love it,” she said with a wicked smile. “And if he doesn’t, there are always others.”

I looked at Uriel. “What about you?” I wondered.

He shrugged elegantly. “Where she goes, I go.”

Wow. I had to take a moment to clear my throat. “Won’t… I mean, you’re quitting? I thought you were Loyal.”

“I’m strongly inclined to obedience, by nature.” He spoke with consummate dignity. “I like a clear set of rules to live by. A chain of command. When such is no longer afforded in Heaven…” His glance flicked to Penemuel. “I must look elsewhere.”

“But The Adversary can’t just disappear, can he? Won’t the Host ask questions?”

“They were not created to ask questions, nor to think for themselves.” A smile lurked around Penemuel’s lovely lips. “That seems to be a tendency we pick up from your species, on the whole.”

I folded my arms across my chest, because I wanted to slap them both. After all the grief Uriel had given me… “I just can’t believe you,” I told him ruefully. “Really? You’re happy with how it’s all worked out?”

He grimaced, somehow managing to make even that look gracious. “I think the Cockroach Option had a lot going for it,” he said, “but I was outvoted.”

The daffodils danced around the hem of his coat. I struggled to keep my face straight.

“I’m going to miss you, Uriel,” I said, and despite my sarcasm it was weirdly, uncomfortably true. “You’re such a ray of sunshine.”

He actually blushed. “I will miss you too, Milja Petak,” he said stiffly. “You were not as pathetically predictable as I first thought.” With a nod, he stepped backward into the spring air and vanished.

I caught myself smiling, but too late to hide it from Penemuel, who smirked and said, “He’s sweet, isn’t he?”

“If you say so.”

“What about your two?” She looked down at the beach. “Did you ever decide?”

“No.” Part of me wanted to curl up somewhere dark.

Her expression turned serious.

“I can’t decide.” I spread my hands. “I don’t have the right to decide anything anymore. It was my decision to free him that led to…all of this.”

She frowned. “Didn’t it work out? You saved him. You saved us.”

“Have you been watching the death-toll on the news?”

“Humans die, Milja. All of them, sooner or later.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Listen.” She cupped her beautiful hands as if shaping chalices from the air. “Do you think I’ve never had to struggle with a hard choice? I decided to Fall, remember. Three things you must weigh every time you choose. You can obey the laws and commandments. You can try to discern the consequences for the future.” She pointed between my breasts. “Or you can follow your inner voice.”

Faith; Hope; Love, I thought.

“Yet all three are so heavy that it takes both hands to hold any one—so no matter how often you weigh them you can never be sure which is greatest. No one can. You listened to your heart, Milja. Maybe you now think it the wrong choice. But it is done, and it is too late to change anything now.”

My stomach clenched. “But you see,” I said hoarsely, “I have thought about it. And if you could somehow take me back now, to the cave where he was imprisoned—if you gave me the choice all over again, knowing what I know now, everything that would happen—”

“I can’t.”

“I would still do it.” My voice was rusty with the words I’d sealed away. “I would. All those people…” I took a deep breath. “Including my own father.”

She bit her lip.

I spread my hands, longing for her to drive nails through them, longing for cleansing heavenly wrath. “I would. You know I can’t tell Egan that. It’s indefensible. There’s no possible moral scale on which that works. I’m not good, Penemuel. I’m not a good person.” I swallowed hard, tasting blood.

The words were out. My confession. I awaited the judgment of the angel.

She looked at me, and looked, and looked. And finally she nodded and said softly, “I am sorry you are hurting.”

I took a couple of deep breaths, but there was no coda. Nothing. No judgment.

“I’m glad you’re free,” I said.

Penemuel smiled. She surprised me then by stepping in, seizing my face between her hands and kissing my forehead. “Make him happy,” she whispered fiercely.

Angels seemed to think that was an order that could be followed. “I can try,” I said sadly. Then, “Wait—which one?”

She stepped back, grinned, and vanished in a shimmer of golden light.

I shook my head.

Then I headed down to the beach. It was eerily calm there, the breeze nothing but a memory. Wavelets stroked the wet and level sand, moving with unhurried grace, and white gulls swooped in lazy arcs across my path. The only marks on the foreshore were the two sets of footprints, side by side; Egan’s rugged boot soles and Azazel’s bare, high-arched feet. The dint of his toes and the curve of his instep struck me as heartbreakingly human.

I added my own boot prints to the hieroglyphs and wondered if anyone would read them: two men, talking for a long time; one woman follows on.

My two lovers had walked all the way to the end of the bay, to where a few boulders had tumbled to the sand. They stopped talking as I caught up with them and stood watching me approach. Azazel grinned, but Egan’s face was closed and inscrutable. They were so handsome, I couldn’t help thinking—individually and together. My heart felt like it would burst out of my chest and shatter into a thousand pieces. My cheeks flamed under their scrutiny.

“We have reached an agreement!” Azazel cried, raising his hands triumphantly.

“Oh?” My heart thumped.

“We have decided we shall share you. He shall have you by day and I shall have you by night—and then you will have everything you desire!”

Seriously, guys?

Egan cleared his throat pointedly and Azazel’s eyes flicked sideways. “If you are willing, of course,” he amended.

Keep on trying, Azazel. You’ll get there in the end. I couldn’t help smiling.

“Is that a Yes? Do you agree?”

“Are you alright with that?” I asked Egan.

He nodded.

“Uh, right then. Well. Maybe. Oh…” I locked eyes with Egan, longing for him to understand my apology. It must have been so hard for him to reach this place, and now I was about to dash it in his face. “I’m really sorry, Egan. I need to talk to Azazel first. There are…things. You know.”

“That’s grand.” His face didn’t admit any suggestion of hurt or disappointment. “I’ll just go back to the house then, while you talk or…whatever.”

He tried to step past me but I caught his sleeve and pulled myself up to kiss his cheek. “I love you,” I whispered.

He smiled, a little uncertainly, a little dutifully. Could he ever stop being afraid, I wondered? Could he ever stop comparing himself, where there was no comparison to be made?

We both watched him in silence as he walked swiftly away.

“He will make a good husband,” said Azazel, softly. “And a good father. Better than me.”

My heart flipped over but I didn’t answer. What could I say? There was a hint of sadness in Azazel’s eyes as I turned to him that made my heart break a little.

“What do you wish to talk about, Milja?”

I bit my lip. “Penemuel says she is coming at sunset today. So you can both go wherever it is you’re going.”

“I see.” He took a deep breath. “Is that all?”

No. No, it’s not. Oh dear God. “Azazel, do you remember my mother?”

He frowned. “Your mother?”

“In the cave, under the mountain back home.”

“Ah. My memory of my time in prison is…unclear, you understand.”

“Her name was Magdalena.”

He nodded, but looked if anything more perplexed. “Yes then: I remember Magda.”

“Did she ever visit you…on her own?”

“No.” He shook his head. “She was terrified of me.” It was clear that he was clueless as to why I was standing before him gray-faced and sweating. “Why do you ask?”

My courage gave out. I shut my eyes and clenched my fists. “It doesn’t matter. No reason.” And I realized as I spoke that it didn’t matter. I had the information I wanted about my unborn sibling. Anything else—anything he’d tried in the years of captivity—I could guess at all that if I wanted, but there was no point. It wasn’t as if he would feel guilty, or could even understand my fears. He was what he was. If I loved him, then I would have to accept all that he’d done in his past.

The same went for Egan, of course.

And even for myself, perhaps, in time.

I let out a long breath.

“Is that all you wanted to ask?” He was smiling, a little confused but willing to help. He slipped his hands about my waist. “Are we done?”

Too fast. Hold on. I need to think. I took a step backward but he followed up, backing me against a shoulder of rock. I put my hand on his breastbone. “Just…”

“It’s what you want, yes?” From the growing glint in his eye it was only too obvious what he wanted right now. “It will work. Hang wallpaper with him by day. I will have you every night, in your dreams—a hundred thousand ways.”

He swept in for a kiss and I dodged, laughing through my uncertainty. “You think I can keep up with both of you? I’ll die of exhaustion!”

He grinned. “But smiling.”

“Then I guess I won’t have to worry about getting old on you!”

“You will be young, in your dreams, all your life.”

I sobered, my choked laughter fading away, and he stopped chasing my mouth. “Azazel…?”

“What?”

“I’ve done some awful, awful things. I don’t deserve this happiness.”

His expression somehow managed to mix both horny and tender. “Then you are lucky that there is no justice in this world. As Egan has pointed out.”

I think that might have been the first time he’d called Egan by name.

“What about afterward? Egan says that Heaven and Hell were never meant for us. That it was all just a shitty idea thrown onto the table but never put into practice. He says we just die. But I have seen…” Ghosts. “We don’t. Something carries on. I’m scared, Azazel.”

“Hh,” grunted Azazel. He nodded thoughtfully and took a half-step backward, bringing his hands up in a gesture of prayer, or the miming of a closed book. “Do you remember when we ate in Athens?”

The vine on the trellis. The old lady he danced with. His hand up my skirt in public. “Yes.”

“Remember the man blowing soap bubbles into the wire frame?” He hinged his hands open and a cluster of iridescent bubbles bloomed between his palms, some large and some small.

“Yeah?”

“What would happen to the bubbles if you suddenly took the frame away?”

“They’d burst.”

He flung his hands up into the air and the bubbles scattered. Most did burst as we watched; either in mid-air or as they sank to touch the sand. But not all. Some meandered slowly out to sea. A small cluster caught in Azazel’s unkempt hair and clung there, shining. And one rose up high enough to catch a breeze and took off along the beach, in the direction of the cottage. I watched it until it was a speck too small to follow.

“I love you,” said Azazel gently. “I will be there. I can catch bubbles.”

I touched his face, and this time I didn’t resist as he closed in to kiss me, slow and teasing. I never could resist him for long. Besides, this was the last time I’d get to feel his touch in the waking world. We would only meet in dreams from here on, and that just wouldn’t be the same thing, no matter how wonderful it was. Dream sex only feels real while it’s happening. It’s idealized and easy. It doesn’t leave you with heroic bruises and tender aches, like intimate messages from your lover carried on your flesh.

Azazel wasn’t scared of a virtual life because he wasn’t native to the world of flesh. But I was too used to the material to take this bereavement lightly. I was losing something today, and I didn’t know whether it was going to be something I would mourn forever; I just knew that right now I needed the prickle of his stubble and the taste of his lips. I needed the way he pressed me too hard against the lumpy edges of the rocks as he kissed, and the awkward crook of his hand as he slid it up under my short red dress and down inside my opaque fashion-tights. I needed the way I couldn’t find anywhere to put my left foot until I wrapped it around the back of his calf. I needed the way his fingers were momentarily too rough and dry before they found the right spot.

“Ah,” I moaned into his mouth, and his deeper grunt echoed mine.

It was a kiss, that’s all; quite subtle for him. Anyone spotting us would have to peer quite close to be scandalized. A kiss, and fingers pressed close and secretive. Unhurried at first, enjoying its own rhythm, then more urgent as it shed its innocence to reveal our mutual appetite.

“Say yes,” he whispered. He never was one for playing fair. “Say yes to us.”

I swallowed a cry that might have scared the seagulls as his fingers delved inside me and slid out again. My tights and panties unraveled to threads that fell down my bare legs.

“Tell me you want it. I know you do.”

“I want it,” I sobbed, writhing with heat. I did. “But…”

“So say Yes.” Those tiniest of movements were turning me inside out. “Give each of us what we want.”

I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t remember any good reason for refusing. “Yes,” I groaned, just as my orgasm rolled over inside me and stretched out like an animal awakening. “Oh. Oh. Oh. Yes.”

He swallowed my words as if sealing a promise I’d made, and kissed away my whimpers. As my limbs relaxed and I slumped against him, he cupped my molten sex in his hand. “See?” he whispered. “That was easy.”

“For you,” I gasped.

Without a word he took my hand and pressed it to his crotch, demonstrating exactly how hard it had been for him.

“Oh.” I gave him a longing squeeze through the cloth.

“If I had never known any other mortal,” he said softly, “you would have made my Fall worthwhile, all on your own.”

Now that was a compliment, in its twisted way. I kissed his wicked mouth.

“Azazel… Will I become more human again once we stop, you know, meeting up in the flesh? Will I be able to cry again?”

He shook his head, and put his hand between my breasts, fingertips pressing the bone. “A witch must carry her sorrows here, inside her, always. But you will be able to weep with joy; I promise that.”

I folded my fingers over his, pressing him to my heart.

“And now you should go back to him,” he added, the wolf-growl audible in his throat, “before I break this new Covenant at the first test.”

I didn’t obey. Instead I wrapped my arms around him in an embrace. Not a sexy fuck-me-hug, arms up around his neck, but down around his chest so I could squeeze tight and feel his ribs and his breath and his strength. To commit all those things to memory.

Azazel held me for a long moment, his hand tracing the line of my neck, his breath in my hair. “You are mine, Milja, always,” he said. “Do not be afraid.” With one last dark, sweet kiss, he pushed me to arms’ length. “I will see you tonight,” he threatened, “when you sleep. Now go. I mean it.”

I bit my lip and moved away. The cool air tickled my damp thighs. “What about my clothes?” I asked nervously.

“What about them?”

I tugged at the hem of my very brief dress. It barely covered the necessities. “This is, uh, sort of obscene.”

“I know.” He grinned. “I’ll be watching you.”

I swear I blushed.

As I walked away from him back along the beach I imagined that I could feel his gaze upon me. In fact the stray breeze that blew up out of nowhere and persisted in tossing up the back of my skirt to bare my ass-cheeks made me sure of it. But I didn’t look back. I didn’t want him to see my face all wobbly and twisted.

My heart thumped so loud it felt like the whole of Ireland could hear it.

By the time I’d climbed up among the marram grasses and reached the little coastal road, I’d grown calmer, clutching my loss to me like a stone. I even managed to keep my cool when I saw a beat-up Land Rover approaching; I just stopped by the side of the road and held my skirt-front down demurely, assuming an expression of serene indifference. Mini-dress, knee-boots, bare legs between—what was there to notice?

The Land Rover passed, and I scurried across the road behind it. From the corner of my eye I saw the vehicle weave suddenly and almost collide with the verge, but by that point I was already through Egan’s gate.

He was going to have some explaining to do to his village neighbors, I thought, if we decided to stay on.

I found Egan sitting in the kitchen, his elbows on his knees. One heel drummed anxiously on the floor. His face was unreadable.

“Alright?” he asked.

I nodded, and he watched as I stooped to unzip my damp-soled boots.

“Did you decide?”

“Yes.” I straightened up. “I said Yes.”

He jumped to his feet and came in to catch me against him, hard, for a kiss. Oh, I could read that. He all but took my breath away with his fervor. As his hands descended to my ass he discovered my distinct lack of panties and grunted in not-really-surprise, hefting the curves of my bum-cheeks. “Mmm.”

I looked at him apologetically from beneath my lashes and he laughed. I ruffled the short blond hair at the back of his neck, so different from Azazel’s wild locks. “Are you really sure about this?”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering,” I said shyly, “whether that meant you wanted to join in, in the dreams?”

“Ah no, I don’t think so. Probably not a good idea. Maybe sometime. We’ll talk about it.”

I brushed my lips softly across his, and laughed. Without warning he grabbed my ass hard and lifted me up. I wrapped my thighs around his hips as he carried me over to sit on the kitchen table.

“So you didn’t just talk,” he said, his mouth twisted. “There was some Whatever too?”

The question was clearly rhetorical, but I nodded.

He slid his hand up the inside of my bare thigh and found me shamefully wet. “Did he make you come?” he asked hoarsely.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Is it bad that that’s making me hard, right now?”

“Very, very bad,” I told him as his other hand fought with his belt and zipper. And I kissed him.

“Very, very hard,” he growled, pushing me flat on the table top, pulling up my thighs and giving me a demonstration in full.

“Ah!” I gasped. “Oh—Egan…”

He stopped mid-thrust. “Is something wrong?”

“No! Why?”

Wonderingly, he touched my cheek. “You’re crying.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”