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“Because we… what if she thinks….”
“She won’t think anything,” he interrupted quickly. “She knows better.”
I knew I shouldn’t be hurt by his words, but they stung. And by his expression, he knew it.
Of course she wouldn’t think anything. He wouldn’t date someone like me.
I frowned. “If I went alone, she wouldn’t help me?”
Sariel’s eyebrows rose. “No, little wolf, she wouldn’t.”
“What if you sent a letter, or a text? Something.”
“Is there a reason you don’t want me there?”
I sighed. “I think I would be safer dealing with this alone. I know you have your own shit to deal with—”
“My father wants to kill me,” he interrupted.
I froze. “What?”
“The only reason I stick around is that he’s an evil bastard, and I don’t put it past him to hurt my brother and Lucy to get to me,” he said offhandedly.
I gaped. “I…”
“Lucy’s not my mother,” he started. “She’s Michaelson and Auren’s mother, but not mine.”
I sat back against the bottom of the couch as he drummed the fingers of his right hand along the chair’s arm.
“I was five when I was left on Azazel Ambrose’s doorstep,” he continued. “I think I’d just started showing signs of what I was, and my mother couldn’t look at me. When she met my father, she was an undercover angel working at the FBI. Or so she told me in her letter. She said they had a wild one-night stand because she didn’t know what he was.”
Sariel’s scoff made me tense; his half-blood nature was beginning to make sense now. He was the offspring of a fallen and Heaven-appointed angel.
“No Heaven-appointed angel was let into the field without knowing who the fallen angels on Earth are,” he said. “They get a whole dossier on each one, with the dos and don’ts of interacting with them. One of which was tonotfuck them.”
He shook his head. “Anyway, daddy dearest was ecstatic, at first. He had a little boy he could mold into his own weapon. Things were great; first, my brothers and I were thick as thieves, Azazel was a doting, attentive father, and Lucy was and still is the best mother any kid could ask for. Then I turned sixteen. That’s the age of maturity for most angel offspring; it’s the age we gain our wings at.”
Dread filled me. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew this was the part of the story where things turned sour.
“Fallen offspring have black wings,” he informed me. “Heaven-appointed offspring have white wings.”
I swallowed.
“But I had both.”
His eyes lost focus as he got lost in the memory.
“Gaining your wings is a painful, bloody experience,” he went on. “Like a wolf’s first change, everything is painful anddisorienting. And, contrary to popular belief, you don’t learn to fly immediately. That takes months to perfect. Learning to keep your balance, adjusting the air in the sky, learning to control your landings… it’s like learning to walk all over again.”
My lips twitched as I imagined a teenage Sariel stumbling around with giant wings trying to learn how to fly.
“When my father saw my wings, he lost it. He hadn’t expected one of them to be white. I would be useless to him now, because with one look at my wings, everyone would know exactly what I was and exactly what I'd done.”
Sariel turned those beautiful hazel eyes on me then, and I knew the worst of the story was yet to come.
“After you’ve lived for as long as he has, you’re bound to go a little crazy…” he trailed off, and I shifted to sit on my trembling hands. “When you’ve seen the birth and death of nations and experienced love, death, and life over so many lifetimes, I think it fucks you up.
“I’m not excusing him, mind,” he clarified. “I’m trying to preface what I’m about to say.”
