Keeper of Crows (Keeper of Crows #1)(35)

“What did you see?” I asked, brows knitted together.

Michael shook his head, a crystalline tear falling from one of his eyes. “You have so many things working against you, Carmen. That is one burden I will bear for you.” He was crying. For me. The archangel wept with a silent strength I didn’t understand.

Gabriel eased Dimitri from the floor and carried him outside, but I couldn’t look away from the clear, wet streaks running down Michael’s cheek.

Did angels often cry?

“Sometimes,” he answered, a matching tear falling on the other side.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, stepping to him and wiping his face.

“You have no reason to be,” he whispered back. And then I did something monumentally stupid. I stepped up on my tippy toes and placed a soft kiss on his lips.

His eyes darkened to a rich toffee and then he smashed his lips onto mine, claiming them with the same intensity that he radiated from morning to night. Nipping and tugging, licking and breathing into me an intoxicating flavor I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to stop tasting. My fingers pulled him closer and closer until there was too much space between us and my lips were left aching and swollen from the sweet assault.

With a shove, he pushed me away from him and began pacing.

He pointed his finger at me. “You’re not supposed to kiss me,” his voice broke as he pinched his bottom lip.

“But—”

His face turned to stone. So did his voice. “Never again, Carmen.”

Gabriel stood at the back door, watching with his mouth agape as Michael stomped around him and disappeared outside.

“Did I hurt him?” I asked Gabriel when I was sure Michael was out of earshot.

“Not physically, no, but you can’t treat him like a human man. He isn’t one. And if he and you were to... Well, he would no longer be an archangel.”

I let out a frustrated noise and threw my hands in the air. “Why is everything so either or, black and white, with no shades of gray in this fucking gray world?” I said, swiping tears of frustration from my eyes.

Gabriel sighed. “I’m not sure.”





14





I didn’t tell Michael about my new nightmare, but since he could read my thoughts, he probably knew about it anyway. Dimitri was in my father’s pocket on Earth. Father paid him to nearly kill me, he’d said. But now that he was a Lesson, Dimitri could be controlled and manipulated by my father here in Purgatory. He was a triple, and that made him a triple threat.

Gabriel stared out the back door, as if waiting for someone or something. It was morning and the manna would fall anytime now. Michael had come back at some point, because I heard him speaking with Gabriel in the language of the angels. Their discussion got heated, and then he left again.

“Why are we here?” I asked him.

Gabriel turned, leaned back against the wall beside the door, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Philosophically?”

I laughed slightly. “I should rephrase. Why are we hiding out in this house? You’re an archangel. Michael is an archangel who controls an entire legion of crows. Why aren’t we storming the city, righting wrongs, and kicking my father’s ass?”

“It isn’t that simple, Carmen.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t it that simple? Why make it any more complicated than it has to be?”

He sighed. “We are given orders, and we don’t resort to vigilantism—unless we’re told to.”

Oh, really? I thought. Perhaps he didn’t understand the concept of vigilantism. Vigilantes don’t take orders; they act. Like Michael did when he punished Dimitri.

“What do you call making Dimitri a triple, then?”

Gabriel’s lips thinned into tight lines of flesh.

I had him, and he knew it.

“Are you always this bold in your thoughts? What happened to women being meek?”

“A thousand or so years,” I answered.

“We’ve been told to keep you in the outskirts, but maybe a new safe house is in order.” It might have been the shattered front and balcony doors, or maybe Dimitri’s blood staining the floor beside the tar of the Lessons, but this house certainly didn’t look safe anymore. “You shouldn’t have contact of any kind with Malchazze.”

“I don’t want to have contact with him.”

Gabriel pushed off the wall, dropping his fists to his side. “We will deal with your father when we’re given instructions, or if he attacks first. Believe me, nothing would bring me greater pleasure than to end him slowly and send him to the demons he uses to do his dirty work. They would enjoy his torment, as well.”

“How is he so powerful?”

Gabriel closed his eyes. “Crossers were never supposed to exist. The threshold wasn’t meant to be breached by a soul. When the veil tore and the barrier was compromised, we worked feverishly to mend it and round up those who had escaped into the earthen realm. But there was a problem we never anticipated. Those who breached were endowed with the power to create fissures and cross back and forth along the divide as they pleased. Your father took it one step further. He began to build a following here. His powers to control the Lessons are recently acquired ones, but he is more dangerous now than he ever has been.”