He kissed me.

There was no holding back. No hesitation. There was so much hunger instead. And warmth—I felt the warmth flowing through me from my lips, all the way down to the tingling tips of my fingers. The shuddering in my bones stopped, just like that. Like a faucet turned off.

I gasped, and saw a visible shiver run up his frame.

“Milja,” he whispered.

My heart flipped over inside me, and the only answer I had was a breathy grin of wonder. Which he covered in another hungry kiss, and another, eating his way through the cold and the shock into the heat I always bore beneath my skin. His mouth was as sweet as I’d always imagined it. I slid one hand up the back of his neck and jammed the other down behind the belt line of his trousers and into the coarse hair hidden beneath, making him jump.

Oh Egan.

He hadn’t forgotten he was supposed to be getting me dry, but it just somehow got all mixed up with an overwhelming need to get my clothes off. He wrestled my bra-top off over my head, then toweled down my cold breasts, finding nipples stiff and puckered with chill, hard under his warm palms and so sensitive that I cried out when his callused fingertips snagged on them. He stoppered my mouth with his tongue and swallowed my moans, the strong rub of his hands quieting my breasts too, waking yearning aches and sudden warmth instead.

His kisses were so wild that we were both gasping and dizzy with the fire of them.

My goddamn jeans resisted hardest of all, so heavy with water that they were stiff as leather; Egan all but tore them off in the end and my panties went with them.

It was the first time he’d seen me naked outside a dream, I realized, my breath catching. Shyness overwhelmed me and I tried to keep my stupidly gangly legs together. But he leaned into me, one hand on the small of my back, his mouth demanding yet more from my own, his other hand running up the inside of my thigh like a forest fire across a winter hillside—and there was nothing for it, because my body would have it no other way but to twist and open to him and yield the head of that valley to the clasp of his hand.

I wasn’t dry there either. Wet heat blossomed through my flesh at his touch.

“Feck, Milja,” he groaned. For a moment we froze, limbs intertwined, our faces so close that I could see nothing but his flecked blue eyes, all my weight off-balance as I arched over his left arm, his hard thighs grinding against me.

“Please,” I panted, kissing his lips, pushing myself down onto his fingers. I was so afraid that his better judgment would rally and win the fight over base instinct and appetite. I was terrified he’d drag himself away.

He drew back and shook his head, but it was the rueful gesture of someone who has already lost some inner struggle, and knows it. He’d made his choice. Without answering he hefted me up against him, lifting me clear of the table. I wrapped my arms around his neck and my thighs around his hips. Not a word was spoken as he carried me through to the bedroom and laid me on the bed beneath him.

Not a word.

I’d always imagined him deferential; always pictured him cautious, even hesitant, in bed. The reality surprised me. It was like he’d thrown all his words overboard behind him to speed his charge. He swept down to lick and suck at my nipples, making me arch and yelp and bury my fingers in his tufty blond hair. Then his urgent need got the better of him—this was to be no sexual performance, no virtuoso demonstration of foreplay. In fact there was nothing playful in his expression at all; it was as fierce as if he were going into a life-or-death battle. Straddling me on knees and one braced arm, he tugged with flurried impatience at his pants belt.

I got my hand on his fly and inside his combats first though. He was going commando after his shower and I seized his thick hard length, laying claim. He had no recall of the last time I’d held him like that—he’d been too feverish—but I remembered every lovely inch. Oh God; after all this time, I wanted that promise so much that I would have literally got down on my knees and begged for it.

“Ah,” he said, a low heave of breath. Then he broke my grip the only way I could have forgiven him, by pressing down and pushing into me.

Egan. Ohmygodohmygod—yes.

I wrapped my legs around his thighs. He pulled my head back and bit my bottom lip.

Egan in me.

I could feel him inside me. I don’t just mean I could feel that wonderful stretch of his girth or his length or his hardness. I don’t even mean that every slow, full, twisting thrust of his hips sent a building wave of pleasure through me. I suppose I’m easy to please—Azazel had produced an uncanny effect on my body in all sorts of ways and one of them was to make me highly responsive to sexual stimulus. But I felt at that moment something that I’d never felt before, not even with my demon lover. I could feel Egan’s arousal as actual physical sensation, just as I could feel my own; much like my own, in fact, but a different color or taste—or whatever, because there were no words for this, it was not normal, it was not even human. But it was wonderful. I could feel the overwhelming load of his need and the bone-deep ache and the thrill of each thrust into my tight wet grip.

It was also too much—the shock and the pleasure, his and mine. It sent me over. I cried out and slid into spasm, writhing beneath him, making noises that must have sounded like agony because he stopped, holding his breath, holding everything back, staring into my face, his hands cradling me as if they could prevent me from exploding into a million shining stars.

I laughed, because I couldn’t help it, and I stretched up to kiss his parted lips, reminding him to breathe.

“Oh God.” His voice was soft, but I could hear the strain in it. “I love you.”

“No shit,” I whispered.

I was warm now, I realized dimly, from head to toes. Tenderly I touched his lips with my fingers, brushed his eyelashes, tested the tension of his jaw. There was no laughter in his eyes, and none in mine now. The need was back. The lust. His cock impaled me like a red-hot length of steel, and I was melting around him.

“Yes,” I groaned, pulling him deeper. “Egan, please.”

Oh God, his ass, under my hand. The smooth strong dip at the small of his back. His weight, his strength, the sheer masculine beauty of him. And this time as he moved I kept my eyes open and watched everything in delight; the big ridged muscles of his arms; the shake of his hair; the here-but-not-seeing glaze of his eyes as he pushed harder, deeper, faster. I came again, but he did not make the mistake of pausing this time; I urged him on and he kept going, forcing me to catch up. Years of self-control took a long time to batter through, but I felt his momentum build, felt his control crumble. He was nearly there; desire had become an implacable imperative, a merciless spike running through him from his balls upward.

I felt him tense, and start to withdraw.

No!

I dug my nails hard into the dense meat of his ass-cheeks, hard enough to draw blood, denying him any escape. So he thrust like a battering ram into me instead, roaring through the hurt and the explosive release.

And I felt it. I felt his climax, and it took me too. We twisted together, my cries higher and sharper than his guttural gasps, but a perfect harmony. And in those seconds afterwards, in the golden glorious backwash, I felt it pour through me like light, down to my toes and up to my tingling scalp. Like he had filled me to every corner of every cell. Not his actual physical emission—but something.

He rolled off me onto the quilt, gasping. Still wearing his pants, I noted. We hadn’t taken time to get him out of all his clothes. Our eyes met with a strange shyness.

“Milja,” he said hoarsely. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“Shut up,” I told him tenderly, bundling forward to snuggle into his solid chest and kiss his chin. “Shut up and sleep, soldier.”

He slipped his arms around me, holding tight, and passed out within moments.

* * *

I woke after daybreak, feeling parched. We’d managed to move under the covers sometime during the night, and Egan slept on. He was half-curled around me and his fingers tightened as I slid out from under his arm, but I didn’t want to wake him. He needed his sleep.

In the bathroom I drank a glass of water and brushed my teeth. The world outside the window was white and utterly still. I wondered if we’d missed our flight to Europe, and found I didn’t care just at this moment. I wondered how big the pond I’d fallen into would look by daylight, and how deep it was. I shivered.

“Azazel, I love you. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s still true.”

I walked to the back door and opened it onto the white world. Footprints dinted the drifted snow on the porch and steps—mine, Egan’s, and one set of others. They didn’t look human. More like cloven hooves.

Returning to bed, I found that Egan had rolled over onto his back, a forearm draped across his eyes. I could see the blond fluff under his armpit which I found so desperately cute that I wanted to tickle it, but even I wasn’t that cruel. Instead I contented myself by sliding back under the quilt as cautiously as I could. My skin was cold though, after wandering around naked, and he stirred as my knees brushed his thigh. He dropped his arm and turned his blue, blinking eyes upon me. I ran my cool hand down his chest and stomach and into his crotch. To my delight I found that he was already in a state of glory, and at the first exploratory squeeze of my hand that staff of righteousness jumped and swelled even harder.

“Ah…” He sounded ashamed.

That was too much to resist. Throwing back the covers, I pounced up and knelt between his legs, bending to cover him with my mouth. My tongue danced over his helm and Egan arched so hard that he nearly took off vertically from the bed.

“Mary Mother of God!”

I had no idea why his response was so strong—he must have had someone suck him off before now, surely? Whatever, he seemed absolutely pinned by my hand and my mouth, his own hands clenching the sheets frantically and his shaft red-hot in my fingers.

Which made me happy. Very happy, in a dark and squirmy way. My view up his supine body was unparalleled, from the dark gold thatch of his groin, over the hard ridges of his belly and the broader upland of his chest. Oh God, how he excited me. Paler than Azazel, yes; more robust, less body-hair, and—it turned out—much more of a challenge to bring to climax, since I was used to a fallen angel who came quickly, but as often as he cared to try.

Egan resisted. But I didn’t resent that, because there was no question that he was hard for what I was doing to him. It just gave me time to play, to explore, to sheathe him all the way down my throat and feel myself choked, then to tease him with the tip of my tongue until he groaned and heaved. And I used my hand as well as my mouth, hard, because he was big enough and stubborn enough to warrant it.

I flashed on poor Uriel, complaining that he’d never had a blowjob and didn’t understand the fuss, and I laughed darkly inside. Azazel knew. Egan knew.

He was mine, totally under my control. That turned me on so much. What I gave, he had to take. What I gave, he craved. His pleasure, his release—all was at my mercy and under my direction. I could stop any moment I chose, I thought, and he’d beg me bring him to orgasm. Except that I didn’t want to stop, of course. I wanted to give him bliss like he’d never known before in his life. I wanted to give him so much pleasure that he’d be my slave forever.

I wanted to break him.

And I did. He came, sweating and shuddering; came like I’d cut his throat and it was his life he was pouring out. Came with taut, despairing groans that I had already learned to recognize and relish.

I sat back as he caught his gasping breath, chasing some spill from the corner of my mouth and then licking it off my finger. I smiled at him. Egan’s eyes were wide, almost shocked.

And not bloodshot anymore, I thought. A clear, wintery blue. He looked so much better now that he’d surrendered to his desires. Not happy of course—the day I saw him unreservedly, thoughtlessly happy would be the day Hell froze over—but whole, which was what mattered, and gratifyingly awestruck.

He opened his mouth as if to say something.

I jumped out of bed and threw the cover over his still-tumescent embarrassment. “Go back to sleep if you like,” I told him; “I’m taking a shower.”

Then I skipped out of the room before he could clear his throat and speak.

* * *

I was washing up the pots from our meal the night before when I heard him come into the kitchen. I didn’t look around, but I jammed my hands into the hot water so that he couldn’t see them tremble.

Egan came up behind me without a word and slipped his arms around my waist, kissing the top of my head, breathing the scent of my hair.

Goddamn it; to cut him some slack, I’m fairly sure he didn’t know the effect that had on me; my insides doing that flip-flop thing that hurt so good. His own pent-up morning tension had been released already, after all.

“We need to talk,” he murmured.

Bastard. I knew it. Here it comes! “How did you sleep?” I said desperately, unable to stop myself leaning back into his embrace, molding to the big sheltering wall of his body.

“I slept like a baby. Didn’t wake. Didn’t even dream.” His voice was soft, and just the murmur of it in my ear made shivers run all the way down to my sex. “I want to apologize for last night. I was more selfish than I should have been. It’s been, well, a few years, you see… But for what it’s worth, I meant what I said.”

Selfish? “You need to be selfish way more often,” I told him.

He sighed, and pressed his lips to my hair. “Oh, Milja,” he said, his voice breaking. “If we’d met in different circumstances, if I was a different man…”

“Then you wouldn’t be the one I loved.”

He was silent a moment. Then; “We have a choice.”

Here it comes. Mr. Rationality. Mr. Consequences. My stomach tightened up like a knotted fist. They were so different, my two loves. Azazel was a creature of appetite and the moment, living for his desires—but Egan lived in the battlemented ivory tower of overthinking, fending off the armies of his libido. Only when he was undermined by illness or exhaustion or drink did he ever fall into recklessness.

And me? I was much more like Azazel. I went with my gut instinct. None of this would have happened if that hadn’t been the case.

“Go on.”

“Choice one. We quit. We take the car and drive somewhere else, and I break my vows and we forget any of this ever happened, for a while. We forget the Fallen. And we live together happily ever after until the day we die, and I love you, and you do your best to love me, though feck knows that’s not always going to be easy. But one day soon there will be a war, an all-out fight between the powers of Heaven and Hell, and I think the Fallen will lose because that is what every single prophecy claims. And your man there will be chained up again for eternity. But in that war the world will be torn apart and thousands, maybe millions, will die. Including us, perhaps. It could literally be the end of the world. So we’ll go down with that ship, on Judgment Day. That’s choice one.”

“What’s choice two, then?”

“We go to the Vatican. We go and we try to broker a deal between the Host of Heaven and the Fallen, to put off Armageddon. I can talk to…to the Book Lady, I guess, but a negotiation needs both sides at the table. And for that, I need Vidimus to persuade the archangels.”

“But you are Vidimus.”

“Huh. I’m just a field operative, Milja. I’m a trained mutt. Now there are some higher up who might listen to me. But they have to be persuaded that I have not been corrupted, after what I’ve done helping free those two, after…being healed by her, you understand. They have to believe that I haven’t fallen to the Enemy.”

“I can vouch for you.”

“Oh, that’s not going to cut it. Standards in the priesthood might be slack here and there, but believe me, in Vidimus they are exacting, because of who we have to deal with. Our order is dedicated to Saint Michael; he’s our patron and he’s going to be our first point of contact. I can’t be a priest with a mistress, Milja. I will have to make a full confession of everything I’ve done, and I’ll have to repent all my sins and be shriven.”

“You can repent this?” My voice shook. “What we just did?”

“I’ll have to reject all my sins, and all temptation. That means us.”

I wanted to cry with pain. “How is this a sin?” I asked, covering his hand with my own, feeling his body and mine fitting together like they were made for one another. “How can you say that?”

“Oh, Milja.” The weight of two thousand years of dogma and revelation were in those two miserable words. “You are going by feelings, and they’re no guide. Divine Law is given to us so we don’t have to rely on feelings.”

“If love doesn’t matter, then nothing does.”

He wrapped his arms around me and kissed my temple. “I am just telling you how it has to be, if we make that choice.”

“You’d choose the Church over me.” I pushed his arms away and turned to look him in the face.

“No.” He put his hands on my shoulders and took a deep breath. “I’m not making that choice. I’m asking you if you are prepared to give me up, to save Azazel.”

His words, his terrible words, blew all mine away. We stood for a long moment, locked in stillness, locked in silence. “You can’t say that,” I managed at last. “You can’t say that to me. That is too cruel.”

“It’s the reality we have to deal with. You need to see it.”

I tore myself out of his grasp and marched around the room, my hand over my mouth, until I had the table between me and him. He didn’t follow; he didn’t even turn and look at me. He stayed exactly where he was, facing the sink and looking out of the window, his arms loose at his sides. Part of my brain wondered at how calm he looked, and how understatedly handsome in his loose shirt and his jeans, like someone’s husband just watching his kids play outside in the snow. Like someone I didn’t know at all.

“There has to be some sort of alternative!”

“Feel free to suggest anything that comes to mind.”

“You said that you love me.” I was trying to sort all the pieces, but they were flying around inside my head, refusing to be captured.

“I do.” His face, in profile and lit by the winter light, was expressionless. “I love you far more than I have any right to.”

“Is this some sort of messed-up way of punishing me?”

“For what?”

“For loving Azazel too, like a slut? For screwing up your life? For leading you into sin?”

Egan blinked. “No. Just… No.”

“Then why are you trying to split us up, Egan?”

“I’m not. I’m giving you the full picture. The choice.”

You’re not; that is a lie. Do you even know that? You said Azazel’s name, which you never do sober, and that means he heard. Is the moral blackmail not enough? This is not a choice between two boyfriends, this is between you and the whole world. And you are forcing my hand. But you are forcing me to choose him.

How can I do anything but to try and save Azazel? I love him. I will not let him go back into the darkness, not if I have any alternative.

“I can’t abandon him,” I groaned. “I can’t! Please Egan, you’ve got to understand!”

He looked over at me, and I saw the hurt in his eyes. But not raw hurt, the natural emotion of a man rejected by the woman he loves. An old, accepting hurt instead, like something familiar carried for years. One that bordered on grateful. “That’s the right choice,” he said. “In my opinion.”

Oh Egan. Egan. It’s not me that you’re trying to punish, is it?

It’s you.

“I’ll go see to arrangements,” he said, walking away. Then in the doorway he paused. “Just a question, Milja.”

“What?” I felt numb with shock.

“How did you kick the door open last night, when you couldn’t even climb the steps? How did you get out of the lake?”

I shivered, as if I felt the ice all over again. Details in my memory were vague, however. “I don’t know,” I whispered.

“Hm.” He grimaced. “I think I do.” He left the room without another word.

* * *

I am in a place of dust.

It lies all around, heaped into dunes taller than I am. When I move it scuffs up in clouds from my feet. If I had to breathe it I would choke, but I tell myself not to breathe. This is a dream, after all.

The vault overhead is exactly the same dust-color as the dirt beneath my feet. In fact, I cannot tell if that dome is an ill-defined sky, or something more solid. There’s no sun.

I’m naked.

What is this place?

I wonder if it is Sheol. Long before Christianity, the ancients believed in a waterless abode of the dead, neither Heaven nor Hell, where all went, good and evil alike. My own faith teaches that after death we go to Hades temporarily to await final judgment—but that is a place of comfort or terror, depending on how you stand with God. This desert seems to be neither.

“Milja?” A voice behind me.

I turn and there is a woman standing there. She has long dark hair, and looking into her pale face is like looking into a mirror.

“Milja, do not trust him.” Her hand presses the curve of her belly. “See what he did to me.”

“Go away!” I shout. “I don’t want to hear you!” And she dissolves into dust, blowing away.

I plunge into the dunes, my feet sliding beneath me as I mount the heaps and then slither down the far side. Strange objects poke out of the dirt; the marble bust of a man with a rooster’s head; the head of a snake wearing a long wig, all carved out of wood; a bronze disk of many cogs.

One of the long mounds is far bigger than the others, and I head toward that because there is no other landmark in this place. Then I realize it is not just another ridge of dust and I pause uneasily, discerning the crook of a vast leg, the curve of a shoulder. Slowly I work my way along, skirting its vast bulk, until the haze thins and I can look at it end-on.

It is a sphinx, like the Great Sphinx of Giza. A couchant lion with the face of a bearded man, and a regal head-dress. But unlike that guardian of the pyramids with its wind-whittled, noseless visage, this face is whole still, and handsome, and distinctly sub-Saharan in cast. I stand between the huge paws and stare up at it towering over me.

Grit falls in a hissing shower from the broad brow. Slowly the monster shakes its vast head, scattering the accumulated dust of centuries, revealing dark skin and slotted amber eyes. The dunes at its flanks pour away, and a broken wing that might easily blanket a football pitch shifts weakly.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Daughter of Earth, tell them to set me free!” he says, his voice so deep that I feel it as a seismic rumble through my bones. “Tell them!—Tell them that I will keep their secret!”

I fall to my knees, my joints loosened by that thunderous roar.

And I wake…

* * *

…To the sound of bells.

My room in the old ex-convent was more shabby than chic, the drab frescos at the angles of the doors and window peeling, and the high ceiling filled with shadows even though slats of light were creeping through the shutters. I woke to the sound of bells welcoming the dawn.

At least that drowned out the loud tick of the old clock that had kept me awake for hours.

Throwing off my thin blanket, I rose and padded across the marble floor to the window. The shutter latch was peculiarly complex, shifting rods in all sorts of unexpected directions, but it opened at last and I stepped out onto my balcony.

The Tiber gleamed below me, sepia in the strange light. Though it wasn’t yet fully day, traffic purred and honked in the distance. Across the river a shadowy landscape of roofs and satellite dishes marched away to the great dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. Beyond that, heavy cumulonimbus clouds massed, their tops picked out by the first rays of the rising sun.

As my eyes focused on the distance, something dark swirled and vanished from the shadows of a balustrade. A wisp of smoke, perhaps.

“Azazel, I love you,” I whispered. I clenched my hands on the metal railing, feeling the air cool the sweat on my breastbone through my cotton tank top. My bare legs prickled, but this chill held none of the killing cold of North Dakota. The sun would be up very soon, and all of Rome would rejoice in its light.

And I’d go face Vidimus.