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I stared straight ahead, my head—and heart—filling with possibilities.
“Are you mad?” Lucy asked. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I just had no idea how. But I would’ve tried a heck of a lot harder had I known Ambri’s been with you all this time.”
“I’m not mad,” I said with a small laugh. “Just the opposite. But as much as I wish that were true, he’s not reallywithme.”
Lucy studied my face a moment. “You love him.”
“I don’t know,” I said, my throat thick. “I’m trying not to.”
“Because you thought it was hopeless. Does he feel the same about you? Tell me everything.”
I gave her an extremely abridged version of our story, leaving out the actual bridge and that cold, desperate night. Lucy listened, nodding and then smiling.
“You put everything he is in your paintings,” she said. “I can see it. And after all that’s happened with Cas—and now Ambri—I’m beginning to think that any demon who was once human can be saved. We have such capacity for love. It can’t be snuffed out in one dark moment of despair or hopelessness.” She smiled. “I can practically feel my dad telling me I’m right.”
“Jesus, Luce, I hope you are too.”
Her smile faded and her hand on my arm tightened.
“But Cole, you have to be careful. Ambri might want to escape, but he probably answers to a more powerful demon that won’t let him go. The kind of demon that isnotsalvageable. One that might never have been human at all.”
The way she spoke told me there was a hell of a lot more to her and Cas’s story. I wanted to hear all of it, but one thought was clamoring in my head, over and over, louder than Big Ben at noon.
He has a chance.
twenty-one
Casziel, formerly the Nightbringer, erstwhile commander of legions of warmongering servitors, walks in step with me, dragging a suitcase behind him like a common bumpkin. Like any old ordinary human male.
Jealousy chews at my guts.
“Ambri.” His voice is low and full of warning. “What are you playing at with Cole?”
I sniff. “Jealous, are we? Too late. You had more than two hundred years to make a move on me, friend. You blew it. Or didn’t, actually.”
“Be serious. What is your plan? To hurt him? Or—?”
“Destroy him.”
Casziel’s eyes widen in horror.
“Calm yourself. It won’t happen. I can’t do it.”
“But that was the plan?”
I lower my voice. “I was commanded to drive a human to ultimate despair.”
“And you choseCole,” he hisses in disbelief. “Why?”
“I overheard his conversations with Lucy. He sounded halfway there already. I thought it’d be easy.” I pierce him with a dark look. “And I wanted to hurt you.”
“Not me. It would destroy Lucy.”
“And therefore you.”
“True enough,” he says and shoots me a hard glance. “And how did I offend?”
“You left me.”
