Azagoth: A Demonica Novella (1001 Dark Nights) Read Free Page B

easy, given the invisible rope tightening inexorably around her neck. “Excuse me?”
    “Did you think we could let your recent transgressions slide?” He waved his hand, and one of the smoky walls became solid ivory.
    Against the white backdrop, in perfect, high-def 3-D, a movie started up. A movie that showed her, three months ago, as she traveled through time to various locations to gather objects.
    An angel named Reaver had asked for some special gifts for his five-thousand-year-old children, items from their childhoods. It was against the rules to bring objects back from the past, but he’d pulled her butt out of trouble once, and she’d owed him.
    But holy crap, had she paid for what she’d done. Fifty years of time travel with supervision only, plus a hundred years of listening in on human prayers, sorting them, and presenting the most urgent ones to the Prayer Fulfillment Department.
    So. Freaking. Boring. Humans could pray for really selfish, stupid stuff.
    The movie jumped ahead, and she watched herself handing the items to Reaver. “I’ve already been punished for that.”
    “And clearly, you didn’t learn your lesson,” he snapped, suddenly and inexplicably irritated. “Because not a month later, you broke one of the most important time travel laws and caused an imbalance in Heaven that we’re still trying to correct.”
    “I had no choice! If you’d just listen—”
    “Silence!” He hadn’t raised his voice, but the echo of his command circled the room a dozen times before fading away. “You say you had no choice, so now I’m giving you one. You can go through the dissection trials to have your ability removed. You will then be assigned to menial labor for the rest of your existence, or you can mate Azagoth and be able to time travel once a day. Which is it?”
    She shook with a combination of rage that the circumstances of her crime were being disregarded, and terror that both punishments were not only horrible, but permanent. Losing her freedom was her greatest nightmare, and now she was facing it in a lose/lose situation.
    “I need time to think about it.” Even her voice trembled.
    “I’m not giving you time,” he said. “But I’m in a generous mood, so I’ll tell you what. Go now to Sheoul-gra, and you’ll have thirty Earth days to change your mind. At the end of the thirty days, the realm’s exit will be sealed to you, and you will never again be allowed to leave except for an hour a day when you use the chronoglass .”
    Her belly twisted, and again, she was glad she’d refused the nectar. “Will I lose my wings?”
    “No. You’ll be like Azagoth...a fallen angel, but...not. He is like his realm; unique.”
    This could not be happening. She searched Raphael’s handsome face for any kind of sign that despite his claim of having no sense of humor this was just a big joke, but the archangel’s expression was all business.
    “What about the Memitim? Will you still be sending angels to him to...breed with?”
    She could hardly get the last part out. Azagoth was the father of all Memitim, and she seriously doubted Heaven would just let him stop producing little baby Reapers. Or maybe he wouldn’t want to stop. Maybe he was like her father, donating baby batter for the greater good and not giving a shit about his offspring.
    “He won’t be creating any more Memitim. We’re reversing their sterility and changing Memitim from a class of angel to an ability any angel can be born with.”
    How easy it all sounded. She wondered how the Memitim felt about the fact that their inability to reproduce was by design and could have been reversed at any time.
    She closed her eyes and considered her options, crappy as they were.
    The removal of an angel’s time travel ability was brutal. Agonizing. And in some instances, fatal. Even if one survived, the process and the loss were traumatic, and the angel was never the same. Lilliana had encountered two angels who had undergone the