I took a deep breath. “Who are you?”
The words hung in the air between us like wisps of smoke. I could feel tension radiating from his body.
“You promised me that you would tell me,” I reminded him.
“I did.”
“Are you a fallen angel, like Azazel?”
He looked wary. “Why is it relevant?”
“Because I want to know,” I said. “Because you’ve saved my life.”
“I am . . . not exactly like your father,” Gabriel said.
“Are you half-and-half, like me?” I pressed. “You’ve got starshine in your eyes, like I had when you showed me in the mirror.”
“Madeline, you must understand. I want to tell you. But I fear what you will do when you have the information. You need to trust me. I cannot fulfill the charge that Lord Azazel has placed on me if you do not trust me.”
“And I do.” I didn’t think that there was anything Gabriel could say that would make me trust him less.
“Before I tell you this, you must understand that Lord Azazel, your father, trusts me absolutely. He would not have put you in my care if he did not. There is nothing in all eternity that is more precious to him than you, his daughter.”
I nodded slowly, and I was ashamed to feel tears prick at the backs of my eyes. I had never known my father. If I was so precious to him, why had he left me here all alone? Why had he chosen to leave rather than stay with my mother? If he had been with her, would she have been protected from Ramuell?
“I understand,” I said.
“My mother,” Gabriel said, “was an angel. Not fallen. She was still a child of paradise when she came to Earth to deliver a visitation upon a human. While she was here, a nephilim found her.”
I could read between the lines without any further coaching. “She was raped.”
“Yes,” he said without inflection. “Violently. Even as a divine being with divine powers, she barely survived. When it was discovered that she had gotten a child from the nephilim, she was cast out of Heaven. By this time the Grigori had also fallen, for the sin of coupling with human women. My lord Azazel sheltered my mother until I was born.”
Why? I wondered. From everything I had heard about fallen angels so far, they weren’t exactly models of altruism. Azazel must have had some ulterior motive for sheltering Gabriel’s mother.
“After my birth, my mother left. She wanted no truck with a thing born of such a monster. The Grigori would have had me destroyed—it is forbidden for the nephilim to reproduce—but Lord Azazel argued on my behalf. He swore that if I ever became a danger, he would destroy me himself. So Lucifer consented, and I was allowed to live as Lord Azazel’s thrall.”
“My father kept you as a servant?” I said, a little offended. Why hadn’t he raised this lost half angel as his own?
“Of course,” Gabriel said, surprised. “What else would I be? And I am grateful to him. He taught me to understand my powers. And now he has sent me to you, so that I could use those powers to protect you from Ramuell.”
His face was braced, expectant. He thought that I was going to explode now that I knew he was part nephilim. But instead of being angry that he’d deceived me and hidden his identity from me, I could feel only pity. Pity for his mother, who lost Heaven through no fault of her own. Pity for this lost child, who was abandoned to death by his mother and lived as an outcast because his father’s magic was inside him.
“So Ramuell is . . . what? Your cousin?” I asked.
Gabriel’s face was very white in the darkness, and he seemed almost unable to speak. “He is my father.”
The ground beneath me shifted a little. “Ah,” I said, feeling lame. “Your father.”
I wasn’t really sure what else to say to that. This beautiful half angel sitting before me, this man who had already tangled up my feelings every which way from lust to fury since the moment I’d met him, was the son of the creature that had murdered my mother. But it did explain why Beezle insisted on calling him “the devil.” He was the grand-son of the one and only Morningstar himself.
“My lord Azazel sent me to you because my father’s magic lives inside me, and only I have hope of containing him alone. When the Grigori first bound the nephilim to the Valley of Sorrows, it took the combined might of all of their magic to contain them. But now that I have reached maturity, my magic is enough to disable Ramuell until he can be bound again.”
I remembered something then, something that I’d nearly forgotten in the revelations of the last day. “That first night, when I faced Ramuell at the overpass . . . I remember that I was half-conscious after I bolted him with nightfire. Somebody chased Ramuell from me, and then picked me up and carried me home.”
Gabriel nodded his head in acknowledgment.
“You also bathed me, and dressed me, and braided my hair, just like tonight,” I said thoughtfully. “That’s the part that I think I’m annoyed about.”
He looked stunned for a moment, then let out a sharp bark of laughter. He seemed surprised that the noise had come out of his mouth. “I tell you that I am a monster, that I am kith and kin to the creature that wants to destroy you, and you are worried that I kept you from sleeping in the stench and filth of that overpass?”
“See, when you put it that way, it sounds unreasonable. I’m just not sure how I feel about the fact that you performed such an intimate service when I don’t know you that well,” I said, and the air suddenly seemed charged with another kind of tension.