AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Against?”
I rolled my eyes. “What foe does the City have, but demons?”
“Ah.” Julian nodded, looking oddly satisfied at my answer. “And yet you left it with me.”
“You seemed to need it more than I did,” I said sharply. I held the ring out to him. When he didn’t take it, I set it back on the table with a clink. I had become accustomed to the Julian I’d met in the graveyard: haunted and desperate, his every action tinted by grief. He seemed a stranger to me now. From where did this sudden assurance come?
“What made you think you no longer needed protection against, as you say, the only foe your City has?” Julian asked, still gazing at me with that strange expression.
“What?”
He shrugged. “It did not seem to take much consideration for you to abandon a holy artifact.”
I flushed. “What are you talking about?”
“Suppose,” Julian said, reaching for one of the carved wooden chickens and toying with it thoughtfully, “that angels and demons weren’t forbidden to be together. Suppose their duality wasn’t destructive.”
I gave a snort of derisive laughter. “Now you’re rewriting divine law?”
“No.” Julian shook his head. “But, as with any law, there are exceptional circumstances.”
“Exceptional—” I stared at him, my heart inexplicably beginning to beat faster. “What do you mean?”
“We need Abigor,” Julian said. “And so does the village.”
“Why?” I exploded. “Please at least make an attempt at clarity. Those villagers will be long dead before I decipher your meaning.”
Instead, Julian turned to the window and gazed out. “Hell,” he said quietly. “Quite the journey, I imagine.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “As I said, it’s forbidden.”
“And you believe he won’t return.”
I saw Abigor in my mind, turning his back and spreading his wings, the look of stricken finality in his red eyes the second before he vanished. I shook my head. “He’s not coming back.”
Julian picked up the ring and looked at me. “Then,” he said, with his jaw set, “we must go to him.”
That startled an incredulous laugh from my throat. “Surely when you say ‘we’ you don’t actually mean…” I gestured between the two of us. “We. You saw the damage that was caused when I was faced with only one demon.”
His dark eyes were serious as he lifted the book of spells, rotating it so the sigil faced me.
“No. I will go alone. But I will need your help.”
