I turned my head away, embarrassed by my longing for him, by the way I had thrown myself at him.

“Don’t,” he said, putting his finger under my chin and turning my face back. “Do not turn from me in shame. The fault is not with you, but with me. I allowed myself to be overcome by my own jealousy.”

“Jealousy? Of what?” I asked.

“Of that puling human Bennett,” he said, and his vehemence startled me.

“Bennett? J.B.?” I asked incredulously.

“You do not see the way that he looks at you,” Gabriel said. “And you think he is attractive.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Because I’m not blind.”

The pouty expression on his face made me laugh. “Gabriel, there are many, many attractive men in the world, but not one of them holds a candle to you. You’re an angel, for Pete’s sake.”

“Half angel,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you seem to have gotten your looks from your mom. Ramuell got beat hard with the ugly stick. And besides, J.B. is a pain in my ass at the best of times and a total flaming jerk otherwise. It doesn’t matter how cute he is. I don’t think too much of his personality.”

“You did not think too much of my personality recently, either,” he said. “You were quite furious with me for entering your mind.”

I colored in embarrassment. “Well, yes. And I’m still annoyed about that, to tell you the truth. It was wrong of you.”

He nodded.

“But you saved my life a few times, so I’ve decided to forgive you. Besides, I’m sure that you were acting on my father’s orders.”

“Yes.”

“So he’s the one I need to yell at.” I sobered, remembering why we were having this conversation. “But I still don’t understand why you’re breaking up with me before we’ve even gone on a date.”

Gabriel exhaled heavily and pushed off the sofa, pacing the room like a restless lion. “The nephilim’s lives were preserved because the Grigori did not want to murder their own children, however monstrous. But neither did the Grigori want further generations of nephilim. So the nephilim were forbidden to reproduce, and since I am half nephilim, this edict also falls on me.”

I stared at him. “So, you can’t have babies. Does that mean that we can’t be together? Hello, birth control?”

Gabriel’s mouth twisted. “Human methods of preventing conception would be unable to stop you from getting pregnant. We are supernatural beings. There has never been a case where an angelic being has not impregnated his human partner. I have every reason to believe that if I made love to you, you would conceive my child. And for that sin, we would both be brought before Lucifer and punished.”

“By ‘punished,’ you mean killed?”

Gabriel nodded.

I stared at him. “So, you’re saying you’ve basically been condemned to a loveless existence because you can’t reproduce, and if you do, you and your lover and your child will be slaughtered?”

He nodded again.

I pushed myself up to my elbows and felt another wave of dizziness. I was furious, but I felt too tired and sick to move any farther. “You’re being punished for all eternity because your mother was raped by a nephilim? That’s ridiculous. That’s cruel.”

“That is Lord Lucifer,” Gabriel said. “His word is law, and his law is binding. These are the terms of my existence. Should I attempt to appeal them, I am certain he would remind me that I could have been struck down while still an infant.”

I wanted to go on, to argue some more, to find a way for us to make it work. It was beyond unfair that I had finally found someone to be with and he had a sword of Damocles hanging over him that would come down the second we knocked boots.

But there were, as always, more important things to worry about. I decided to revert to professional mode and worry about my tangled feelings later.

“Gabriel, I had wanted to go to the Hall of Records today. And now that J.B. has seen Antares, he’s more likely to cooperate.”

Gabriel looked a little surprised at my sudden shift in topic but seemed to realize it was best not to spend any more time talking about the whole forbidden-lust thing.

I continued. “I was planning on going there so that I could look for other people like my mother and Patrick—people whose records don’t show their choice after death. I thought it could help me find Ramuell.”

“And it still may,” Gabriel said thoughtfully. “Ramuell’s victims may help us define his purpose here if there is a pattern to his choices. It also may help us identify his puppeteer. Whoever loosed this creature did so for their own foul purpose.”

There was something not quite right here. I frowned. “One thing I don’t get about this puppet master theory, though—if my father sent you here to protect me because only you can contain Ramuell long enough for him to be re-bound, then how could a puppet master control the nephilim? I mean, you said it took all the magic of the fallen to bind the nephilim before, right?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said, and a crease appeared between his brows.

“So who, besides you, could possibly have the power to contain it in between rampages?” I asked.

“There could be more than one master,” Gabriel said. “It would make sense. Only the combined magic of many powerful creatures could contain even one nephilim.”