“I don’t have time for games. Can you do it or not?”

“In theory, it can be done. Assuming all the stars align, of course. And there are a lot of stars that need to align for it to work. But the real question is, why should I?” She throws back the curtains, shocking my eyes again with the panoramic view of the destroyed city. “After all this time, is there any chance you haven’t been lured to the other side? Why should I help the fallen?”

Raffe walks to the counter where his sword lies. He slides the blade out from the scabbard, managing to make the gesture non-threatening, which is quite a feat considering the sharpness of the double edge. He flips it in the air and catches it by the handle. He slaps the blade back into its sheath while watching Laylah expectantly.

Josiah nods. “Okay. His sword hasn’t rejected him.”

“Doesn’t mean she won’t,” says Laylah. “Sometimes they cling to loyalty longer than they should. Doesn’t mean—.”

“It means everything it’s supposed to mean,” says Raffe.

“We’re not made to be alone,” says Laylah. “No more than wolves are made to be solo. No angel can endure such solitude for long, even you.”

“My sword hasn’t rejected me. End of discussion.”

Josiah clears his throat. “About those wings?”

Laylah glares at Raffe. “I don’t have kind memories of you, Raffe, in case you’d forgotten. After all this time, you show up in my life again with no warning. Making demands. Insulting me by flaunting your human toy in my presence. Why should I do this for you instead of sounding the alarm and letting everybody know you had the nerve to come back?”

“Laylah,” says Josiah nervously. “They’d know it was me who helped him.”

“I’d keep you out of it, Josiah,” says Laylah. “Well, Raffe? No arguments? No pleas? No flattery?”

“What do you want?” asks Raffe. “Name your price.”

I’m so used to him taking charge of a situation, so used to his pride and control that it’s hard for me to see him like this. Tense, and under the power of someone who’s behaving like a scorned lover. Who says celestial beings can’t be petty?

Her eyes slide to me as if she wants to say her price is to have me killed. Then she looks back at Raffe, weighing her options.

Someone knocks on the door.

Laylah’s eyes widen in alarm. Josiah looks like he’s just been condemned to hell.

“It’s just my dinner,” says Raffe. He opens the door before anyone can scramble away.

In the doorway stands Dee-Dum, looking professional and detached even though he can’t miss seeing all of us in one glance. He’s still in his butler’s outfit with the coattails and white gloves. Beside him is a cart bearing a silver-domed tray and silverware laid out on a folded napkin. The room fills once more with the scents of warm meat and fresh vegetables.

“Where would you like this, sir?” asks Dee-Dum. He shows no sign of recognition, no judgment about Raffe’s near nakedness.

“I’ll take it.” Raffe takes the tray. He also shows no sign of recognition. Maybe Raffe never noticed the twins at the camp. There’s no doubt that the twins noticed Raffe.

As the door closes, Dee-Dum bows but his eyes never stop tracking the scene in the room. I’m sure he has every detail, every face memorized.

Raffe never turns his back to him to show his scars, so Dee-Dum might still think him human. Although I wonder if he saw Raffe at the club with his wings displayed through his jacket slits. Either way, Obi’s people can’t be happy that two escaped “guests” of their camp ended up in the company of angels at the aerie. I wonder if Raffe were to jerk the door open right now, would we find Dee-Dum with his ear to the door?

Laylah relaxes a little and seats herself on a leather chair, like a queen taking her throne. “You appear uninvited, eat our food, make yourself at home in our place like a rat, and you have the nerve to ask for help?”

I meant to keep quiet. Getting back his wings is as important to Raffe as rescuing Paige is to me. But watching her lounge in front of a panoramic view of the charred city is too much for me.

“It’s not your food, and it’s not your place.” I practically spit out the words.

“Penryn,” says Raffe in a warning voice as he puts the tray down on the bar.

“And don’t insult our rats.” My hands clench tight enough to score nail marks on my palms. “They have a right to be here. Unlike you.”

The tension is so thick I wonder if it’ll smother me. I may have just blown Raffe’s chance to get his wings back. The Aryan looks like she’s ready to break me in half.

“Okay,” says Josiah in a soothing voice. “Let’s just take a time-out here and focus on what’s important.” Of all of them, he looks the most evil with his blood-red eyes and unnaturally white everything else. But looks aren’t everything. “Raffe needs his wings back. Now all we need to do is figure out what Beautiful Laylah can get out of this, and we’ll all be happy. That’s all that matters, right?”

He looks at each of us. I want to say I won’t be happy, but I’ve said enough.

“Great, so Laylah,” says Josiah. “What can we do to make you happy?”

Laylah’s lashes sweep down coyly over her eyes. “I’ll think of something.” I have no doubt that she already knows her price. Why be coy about it? “Come to my lab in an hour. It’ll take me that long to prepare. I’ll need the wings now.”

Raffe hesitates like a man about to sign a deal with the devil. Then he walks back into the bedroom, leaving me to be stared at by Laylah and Josiah.

The hell with it. I follow after Raffe. I find him in the bathroom, wrapping his wings in towels.

“I don’t trust her,” I say.

“They can hear you.”

“I don’t care.” I lean against the doorjamb.

“Got a better idea?”

“What if she just takes your wings?”

“Then I’ll worry about it then.” He puts one wing aside and begins wrapping the other in a matching towel that’s practically the size of a sheet.

“You’ll have no leverage then.”

“I have no leverage now.”

“You have your wings.”

“What should I do with them, Penryn? Mount them up on the wall? They’re useless to me unless I can get them sewn back on.” Raffe rubs his hand over the two folds of wings. He closes his eyes.

I feel like a jerk. No doubt this is difficult enough without me reinforcing his doubts.

He glides around me through the doorway. I stay in the bathroom until I hear the front door close behind the pair of angels.

CHAPTER 33

I stare at the dark windows overlooking the charred city. “Tell me about the Messenger.” This is the first chance I get to try to make sense of the earlier conversation with Josiah.

“God commands Gabriel. He’s the Messenger. Then Gabriel tells the rest of us what God wants.” Raffe takes in a heaping spoonful of his reheated mashed potatoes. “That’s the theory, anyway.”

“And God doesn’t talk to any of the other angels?”

“Certainly not to me.” Raffe slices into his rare steak. “But then again, I haven’t been real popular lately.”

“Has He ever talked to you?”

“No. And I doubt he ever will.”

“But from what Josiah said, it sounded like you could be the next Messenger.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t that be the biggest joke? Not impossible, though. I am technically in the succession pool.”

“Why would that be such a joke?”

“Because, Miss Nosy, I am agnostic.”

I’ve had a lot of surprises in the past couple of months. But this one nearly floors me.

“You’re…agnostic?” I look at him for signs of humor. “As in you’re not sure of the existence of God?” He’s dead serious. “How can that be? You’re an angel, for chrissake.”

“So?”

“So, you’re God’s creature. He created you.”

“He supposedly created you too. Aren’t some of you unsure of God’s existence?”

“Well, yeah, but he doesn’t talk to us. I mean, he doesn’t talk to me.” My mother comes to mind. “Okay, I admit there are people who claim that they talk to God or the other way around. But how am I supposed to know if that’s true?”

My mom doesn’t even talk to God in English. It’s some made-up language that only she understands. Her religious belief is fanatic. More accurately, her belief in the devil is fanatic.

Me? Even now, with angels and all, I still can’t believe in her God. Although I admit that late at night, I sort of fear her Devil. Overall, I guess that still makes me agnostic. For all anyone knows, these angels could just be an alien species from another world trying to trick us into giving up without much of a fight. I don’t know, and I expect I’ll never know about God, angels, or most of life’s questions. And I’ve accepted that.

But now, I’ve found an agnostic angel.

“You’re making my head hurt.” I sit down at the table.

“The Messenger’s word is accepted as the word of God. We act on it. Always have. Whether each of us believes it or not—whether even the Messenger believes it or not—is another story.”

“So if the next Messenger says to kill off all the remaining humans just because he feels like it, then the angels would do it?”

“Without question.” He bites into the last slice of rare steak.

I let that sink in while Raffe gets up to prepare to leave for his surgery.

He puts on his pack. It is wrapped with white towels to give the impression that wings are folded beneath the jacket.

I get up to help him adjust his jacket. “Won’t this look suspicious?”

“There won’t be many eyes where I’m going.”

He walks to the front door and pauses. “If I’m not back by dawn, find Josiah. He’ll help you get out of the aerie.”

Something tight and hard clenches inside my chest.

I don’t even know where he’s going. Probably to some back alley butcher working with filthy surgical tools under dim lights.

“Wait.” I point to the sword lying on the counter. “What about your sword?”

“She won’t like all those scalpels and needles near me. She can’t help me on the operating table.”