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What?!Aria said, echoing my exact sentiment.He doesn’t know who he is yet?!
“Uh… The Resistance Leader. My brother,” I explained as I tried to keep my confusion off my face. Something was definitely weird.
“Oh, the one who wears sunglasses even when there’s no sun? That’s fair. I think he already has tacit permission to ask us for funds, so there’s not a whole lot of point to that.”
The mention of Auren didn’t cause a single ripple in him. Instead, he looked around the room in a way that kind of reminded me of an excited dog. “Any one of these are up for grabs, you said?”
“Yeah… go ahead,” I replied. My weirded-out tone earned me a confused look, but the prospect of owning one of these nightmare pieces seemed to overshadow it; he simply nodded and went to go look through the paintings again.
Do you think Auren made a mistake?Aria suggested.I mean, that first day I saw them, Auren reacted to Ashe, but Ashe didn’t really react to Auren other than making fun of him. And I might have just imagined that, actually.
Auren isn’t the type to hallucinate or lie about an entire bond, though. If he says there’s a bond, then there has to be something there. But if theyarebonded, then the way Ashe is acting is really damn weird.
She went quiet for a second.Is there… such a thing as a one-sided bond, do you think?
I thought that over. Atlan hadn’t mentioned anything about that type specifically, but hehadmentioned that there was more than one type of bond. There were lopsided bonds like the thrall one, so maybe this was just a variation of that?
It seemed cruel to my brother, though. I felt anger and protectiveness boil in my chest—I wasn’t mad at Ashe, exactly, but at whatever deity had screwed over my brother again.
Aria tugged on the bond.Don’t get mad, Sariel,she soothed.We don’t really know what’s going on, but these two are both adults. Let’s let them sort this out.
Sighing, I knew she was right. Although I wasn’t sure what was going on with Ashe, it also seemed kind of pointless to ask him if he was mates with someone whose name he didn’t even know.
“This one looks like Heaven. Did you want to go there someday?”
Ashe’s question snapped me out of my thoughts. I looked over at what he was staring at; it was the painting of the imaginary home I eventually wanted to share with Aria, far, far away from all of this. It was the lightest painting in here and had cloud effects to give it a dream-like feeling, so I could see why he thought it might be of Heaven.
“Couldn’t even if I wanted to,” I replied, looking at Credence’s painted house. “I’m bound for Hell.”
He turned to give me a weird look, arms crossed. “You are? Says who?”
“Says my fallen half.” Some anger crept into my tone.
“Sure, but you’re also half not-fallen, and not-fallen angels always get into Heaven. God’s orders, I’m pretty sure.”
“Lucifer said otherwise.”
Ashe gave me a completely unimpressed look. “Really.Lucifersaid so. Lucifer, who’s a known tempter, manipulator, and liar?ThatLucifer?”
Well, now that he’d said it likethat…
“You’ve probably got human moral rules, if anything. Sin too much, the fallen side wins, be good, and the not-fallen side wins. Maybe he’s trying to manipulate you into thinking your choices don’t matter so that you sin more and end up in Hell. He’sLucifer, angelman, not a reliable source of true facts.”
“I got it,” I grumbled, a little embarrassed and also unsure of the “angelman” nickname. He was right, though; Lucifer was nuts and couldn’t be trusted for anything. Michael was also a douchebag and not much better, but I decided to keep that to myself for now. “For good measure, I’ll just try not to die.”
“That’s the spirit!” He shot me a cheeky wink. “Keep that up until God wakes up, and we’ll all be better off for it.”
I paused at that unfamiliar euphemism. “God wakes up? Is that a figure of speech?”
“Nope.”
At my questioning stare, he grinned conspiratorially at me. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve read several reliable sources that document how divine miracles have basically gone down to nothing these past few centuries, while Lucifer’s actions have been getting bolder and bolder—I haven’t really done my own in-depth research, but from what Ihaveseen, that’s not a lie. Lucifer’s stomping on boundaries he’s never been able to stomp on before.”
A cold feeling went through my gut. Flashes of my time in Hell briefly went past my eyes, making my muscles tense. “What does that mean?”
Ashe’s smile went away, as if he could sense my sudden panic. He watched me carefully. “It means that demons aren’t supposed to be roaming around the Earth unsupervised and that if you aren’t dead, you aren’t supposed to be touched. No matter what.”
But if that was true, then why was Lucifer messing with us?
