“Long ago,” Beezle intoned, and he sounded so stiff that I giggled. He glared at me and I pressed my lips into an appropriate imitation of solemnity.

“Long ago,” Beezle repeated, “before the Fall, a group of angels were sent to Earth to watch over humanity, and they were known as the Grigori.”

“Grigori,” I muttered, trying to remember. I looked at Gabriel. “Didn’t you say something about my father and the Grigori?”

He nodded his head, keeping his eyes on me the whole time. “Lord Azazel is chief of the Grigori, and Lord Lucifer’s right hand.”

“Ahem,” Beezle said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

I mimed zipping my lips together and indicated that he should continue.

“Azazel is a Grigori, and so is Lucifer, and Focalor,” Beezle said. “Soon after they came to Earth, the Grigori became enchanted by the beauty of human women and began to lust after them. They lured the women to them by teaching humans forbidden things, such as the making of weapons of war, and the signs of the sun and the moon, and the resolving of enchantments. The Grigori took these women as their wives, and soon the women bore children, a race of giants called nephilim.

“The nephilim were true monsters. Each one killed its mother as it was born by clawing through her womb. Not one of them had the angels’ beauty. Each grew to more than eight feet tall, with clawed feet and fingers and great razor teeth. Each had some magic passed to it from its father, but the magic was always tainted and twisted inside it.”

“Tainted and twisted, how?” I asked.

“Well,” Beezle said, and he looked at me very steadily now, gauging my reaction. “Lucifer, for example. He was one of the angels of death, who retrieved souls from Earth for entry to Heaven.”

Something was nagging at me, but I was distracted by Beezle’s last statement. I felt a little like a magpie, chasing after the next shiny object. “Hold on a second. Heaven? Like the pearly gates and Saint Peter and all that jazz? Are you telling me there really is a Heaven? It’s not a just a story that we tell the dead to get them to come with us?”

“Well,” Beezle said. “There is something like what you would consider Heaven. There are also other choices. Isn’t that what you do when you retrieve souls? You bring them to the Door so that they can make a choice?”

“Yeah, but I never thought there was an honest-to-goodness biblical-type paradise behind the Door.”

“I don’t think this is the time to debate theology,” Gabriel said. “I believe you were about to tell Madeline of Ramuell?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to know anything of this at all,” I snapped, annoyed at his insistence that Beezle stay on track. “Who died and made you the hall monitor?”

I felt like I was on to something that no other Agent had known before. The moment of blindness when the Door opened was a deep-rooted source of frustration for many Agents, especially at the beginning of their careers. To have so much power over a soul at death and then to be unable to see where they go . . . The thought of solving the mystery was tantalizing.

“The de—Gabriel is right,” Beezle said hastily. “This is not the time for this discussion.”

“And when is the time, Beezle?” I said, angry again. The magic inside me surged up, as if it had only been waiting for my call. “What will it take for you to tell me everything I need to know? Does that monster need to kill me first?”

“The mysteries of the Door are not for humans to know,” Gabriel said, and I could see the stars flaming in the darkness of his eyes.

“Well, I’m not entirely human, am I?” I shot back.

“You are part human, and that is enough,” Gabriel said, with a ringing note of finality in his voice. “This information will not protect you from the creature, nor will it help you defeat him.”

The magic inside me sang out, and I wanted to fight. But I reluctantly conceded that Gabriel was probably right. He and Beezle certainly knew more about the monster than I did, and I would have to settle for getting the information that I needed right now. My magic slunk down again, disappointed.

These surges of power made me nervous. They frightened me, and I wasn’t certain I could control them. Something else to discuss with Gabriel and Beezle—after I had the answers I needed.

Beezle read concession in my face and went on. “Well, anyway, Lucifer. He was one of the angels of death who retrieved souls. But his magic, when rooted in the monstrous form of his nephilim child, was twisted. Lucifer’s son, Ramuell, does not retrieve the soul after death. He sucks it from the living body of a human being, and the soul never moves on, but lives forever, imprisoned in Ramuell’s body.”

As Beezle spoke, the gears in my head turned and everything clicked into place. “Ramuell is the creature that killed my mother and Patrick.”

“Yes,” Beezle said, watching me steadily.

“My mother’s soul is trapped inside that thing for all eternity.”

“Yes.”

“And what if I kill him?” I said through gritted teeth, and the magic zipped through my blood, alight with lust at the thought of death. “Will I free my mother? Will I free Patrick and any other soul trapped inside him?”

“We don’t know,” Gabriel said quietly. “No one has ever killed a nephilim before.”

“Why the hell not?” I shouted. “Obviously they’re monsters, and you and Beezle and probably every angel and demon in the world knows about them. So why hasn’t anyone gone nuclear on them and rid the world of their presence once and for all?”