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“Valdis,” he said immediately.
“Valdis is your sword.” A demon-forged sword with a whole lot of power and a voice and mind of her own, granted, but still a sword. I had a similar one sitting at my back, but Amaya was shadow-wreathed, and no one would ever see her—not until her black blade pierced their flesh, anyway. “Swords don’t count.”
“Then it would be duty,” he said.
I snorted. “It’s a sad statement about the reaper community that duty is considered a far higher priority than love and laughter.”
“It is natural our priorities are different considering our beings are completely different in design.”
I frowned. “Aren’t you even curious as to why we humans consider love, sex, and chocolate so vital to our existence?”
“No.” He paused. “Which does not preclude the possibility that I have experienced at least one of those options.”
“I wasn’t talking about the reaper version of love and sex.”
“Neither was I,” he said, amusement teasing his lips.
I stared at him for several seconds, completely dumbstruck. No, he surely couldn’t mean…
He’d shown no interest in eating in the time I’d known him, so I had to think chocolate was out. And it was hard to imagine him falling in love with a human, given his often harsh opinions of humanity as a whole. But that left only sex and I really couldn’t imagine…
“Why not?” he asked softly. “If I can find death in this form, why would you think me incapable of finding other emotions?”
“Death isn’t an emotion. Neither is sex.” I said this in total disbelief. I was still trying to get my head around the fact that Azriel had had sex. In human form.
“On the contrary, death is a time of great sadness. And does not sex bring joy and completeness?”
“Yeah, for us. You’re not us.”
“Why can you believe it possible for the Aedh to enjoy the benefits of flesh, but not a reaper?”
The Aedh he was referring to was Lucian. Despite all the help Lucian had given to us recently, Azriel both disliked and distrusted him, to the point where he refused to call him by name—even if he was in the same room with him.
“I believe it because I’ve seen the joy Lucian gets out of sex. Besides, reapers are soul guides and it seems to me that you all treat that role with great respect and utmost devotion. I would have thought fraternizing with us would be banned.” Hell, there seemed to be rules forbidding almost everything else in the reaper world.
“Ah, but it is,” he said, and there was an almost bitter twist in his brief smile.
I blinked. “Okay, now you’re just confusing me.”
He studied me for a few moments, his gaze more intense than usual, as if he were judging me. Which was odd, because he was connected to my chi and probably knew me better than I knew myself.
“You remember I mentioned the friend that died?”
“Yes.”
“He was sent to retrieve a soul, but found a trap instead. Ten more reapers found their deaths before I tracked down the person responsible.” Azriel paused, and regret touched the air. But over what it had cost him, I thought, not what he’d done. “I was not a dark angel—not a Mijai—at the time, but I did what I had to do to uncover the killer.”
Which was what he’d advised me to do not so long ago, and the only reason I’d come here to see Jak today. “And doing what you had to do involved sex with a human?”
“Yes. Seducing the killer’s former mistress was the only way I could uncover his location.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Why couldn’t you have simply read her mind, or even waited until he came to see her again?”
“As I said, she was his former mistress. Apparently he’d stopped seeing her just before the killings began. And though it is extremely rare, there are minds reapers cannot read—that is why you sometimes see the classic gray shroud form of reaper.” He shrugged. “Violence was out—I would not desecrate my position as a soul guide that badly—so my only option was seduction. It took two weeks to gain her trust and get the information. That time was… enlightening.”
I bet. “So you became a Mijai because you seduced a woman?”
“And scattered the soul of my friend’s killer to the four winds, never to be reborn.”
