“Once, I think. Isn’t that just God or something?’

He rolled his eyes. “No. It’s one of the others,” he said waving his hand absentmindedly toward the sky. “Angra is his twin brother. He is his opposite. Angra is the Destructive Spirit.”

“How does some spirit I’ve never heard of have a child with an archangel? Aren’t they on two different sides of things?”

Diabolus pointed at me as if I had said something brilliant. “Exactly. That was what got his mother tossed. She’s still a do-gooder though,” he added the last bit as if that was ridiculous.

I needed to be alone or to wake up and this to have all been a terrible nightmare.

“I have to go. But I’m never far,” he said with a tip of his head in my direction. Then he was gone.

I was alone.

I wasn’t waking up.

The world was still here as it had been yesterday.

The new company car was parked beside me.

And everything I thought I knew had just been snatched away and handed back as one horror after another. Things I hadn’t been sure were real existed. I squeezed my eyes closed and wished more than anything for this to have been a nightmare. I wanted to wake up with Rathe there in bed beside me. Normal Rathe. Human Rathe. Not immortal Rathe.

The fact that my father was the Devil should have been the worst of it. But it wasn’t.

TWENTY-THREE: THE CLOSURE

Twenty-Three

Lala Longstreet was crazy and a distraction I was thankful to have. After two weeks of working with her, I had started to understand her thought process some and calls to Barney for translation were getting fewer and fewer. I was moving out of Duely’s tomorrow and although he didn’t want me to go, I needed to be alone.

No one, not even Duely, knew who I was. I couldn’t tell anyone. Ever.

Diabolus hadn’t been around again but Rathe was also gone. He’d vanished. Taken all his things when no one was at home and left a note that they could keep the rent. He had decided Delvaux wasn’t for him. He was going abroad. Heath had been happy about Rathe’s departure and he hadn’t tried to hide it. He had been trying to get me to move in with them free of rent, but I couldn’t take Rathe’s room.

His memory was too fresh. My emotions too raw. As much as I wanted to hate him, I couldn’t. He had lied to me. What I thought we had was never real. But he hadn’t been the only liar. I had lied to him too.