Angel's Blade Read Free

been, Zeke?” Ariel
said, leading him to the table. “We feared you’d gone forever.”
    He didn’t even know where to start.
“After my family faded, I travelled. I never really stopped.”
    “Ten years?” Ariel sounded shocked.
    Zeke shrugged and sat down. “What
else was I supposed to do? Samael was in charge. I had no family.”
    “We were still your family,”
Gabriel said, sitting down near him.
    “You were a boy. I was not.” He
shouldn’t have to explain this to Gabriel.
    “Our parents would have taken you
in,” Ariel said, sliding her hand into her mate’s.
    “I was grown. What would there have
been for me to do here?” Zeke ran a hand along the table’s edge. The wood was
warm. Welcoming. “It was time for me to find my own way, hard as that was.”
    “And did you?” Gabriel asked,
cutting another piece of cake. He handed it to his mate and Raphael set it down
in front of Zeke.
    “I found out that the world is much
larger than I thought,” Zeke said, taking the fork Ariel passed to him. Just
before he slipped a piece of cake into his mouth, he noticed Suriel studying
him. “What are you looking at?”
    Suriel lifted a shoulder. “A very
weary angel.”
    Zeke smiled around the first piece
of cake he’d had in years. “Truth.”
    “Whose sword do you carry?” Suriel
asked, glancing at the pack near the door.
    Zeke swallowed the sugary dessert
and put the fork down. He hadn’t tasted anything so divine in years. “The sword
is mine, but it’s flawed.”
    “How so?”
    “Every blade I create shatters with
use. I can make a human weapon, using human technology, with little difficulty,
but when I use the techniques my father taught me, nothing goes right.” Zeke
hated to say these words. They tasted like ashes in his mouth. He’d wanted to
come here and offer his talents, but he had nothing worth giving to these
angels.
    “You know how to make angelic
weapons?” Raphael asked, surprise in his voice. “I thought we’d lost that art.”
    Zeke shook his head. “It is lost. I know everything my father and grandfather knew, but at the final
moment, the blades shatter.” He sighed and pushed the plate of cake away.
Seemed a shame to waste it, but he couldn’t eat now. Not when he had to admit
his failure to the only family he had left. He looked at Gabriel. His cousin
watched him steadily, face neutral. No hint of what he was thinking showed.
Zeke gathered the last of his courage and said what he’d come all this way,
after all this time, to say. “I come to beg a place as one of your guard,
Alpha.” Instead of waiting to see what Gabriel would say, he bowed his head and
put a fist to his heart.
    Several long heart-stopping moments
later, Gabriel replied. “Of course you may stay. But, Zeke, we live in
dangerous times. Demons walk among us once more.”
    Zeke glanced up. “Demons have
always walked among us.”
    “We fought to close two portals
these past several months. One of them was in the depths of Castle Archangel
itself,” Ariel offered quietly. “Do you really want to stay, knowing that it
isn’t safe here?”
    She didn’t understand. None of them
did. He’d already faced demons inside his own mind and lived to fly out the
other side. “I would rather die here, at your side, protecting you than go into
the wilderness again, alone. I have nothing left.” He sensed them exchange
glances.
    “You can have your grandfather’s
old chamber,” Gabriel finally said.
    A tension Zeke didn’t even know he
carried eased inside him. “Thank you.”
    “Don’t thank me, Zeke.” Gabriel
laughed shortly. “As of now, you’re my guard captain, weapons master, and
weapons maker.”
    Zeke looked up. “Captain?”
    “Do you know how to use the blades
you make?” Gabriel asked.
    “Of course.” Zeke didn’t
understand. Gabriel already knew his father had taught him everything,
including the martial arts of the angels. Why ask him a question to which he
already knew the