Page 61 of To Crave Deeply
Shit. That was old.“How long have you been… um… body hopping?”
I felt her eyebrow raise and a small smile play about her mouth.Body hopping?
“Well, what would you call it?”I asked defensively.
She chuckled.That seems a fair assessment of what it is. I’ve been body hopping since I died the first time. I think I had been on the earth for fifty-six years until Lucifer destroyed me.
My foot stumbled beneath me, and I lost my footing on the narrow path. Torsten turned round instantly and grabbed me to stop me from falling on my ass.
“Are you alright?” he asked softly, those mismatched eyes staring at me with concern.
“Yes,” I replied sheepishly. “Just not watching where I was going.”
“Well, be careful. It looks like the path is getting steeper.”
I thanked him and he turned back around before resuming our descent on the path deeper into the Pit, but I could tell he was keeping an eye on me, even when he wasn’t looking at me.
“Why did Lucifer destroy you?”I asked, anxious for the answer. I loved Lucifer, but hearing that he destroyed Iveri bothered me. I knew he had a past, I knew he punished souls and that he was a little bit on the darker side, but Iveri had been with me now for a while. In some sense she’d become part of me, and it troubled me that Lucifer had done something like that.
He had his reasons, Iveri replied, and I could tell that was all she was going to say about it.
I’d learnt more about her in these last five minutes than I had in all the months of knowing her. I detected a note of regret in her voice, and I wanted to ask more but we were doing so well with this truce that I didn’t want to risk it by asking a question she didn’t want to answer.
So, what are you going to do about Camael and the whole stealing your soul thing?she asked, and I knew she was deflecting. Well, if she wanted to talk about me for a while, then so be it.
I sighed. I had no idea what I was going to do about Camael and the angels or the missing witches. I hadn’t really given them much thought with the whole dying and coming back from the dead saga.“No idea. I don’t even know why Camael stole witches and mages.”
I imagine you’ll get summoned to the great upstairs. Not everyone comes back from divine retribution and lives to tell the tale.
My shoulders slumped and I felt defeat settled in my bones.“Yeah, I have a feeling we haven’t heard the last from Camael. I bet he’s going to be pissed when he realises my soul is back where it belongs.”
Yup. I almost feel sorry for you.
“Gee, thanks. How sweet of you,”I drawled sarcastically.“Why do you think the angels took mages and witches?”
Isn’t it obvious?she asked derisively.
“Not to me,”I replied a little sharply. I’d only been part of this supernatural world for a couple of months, not six hundred years like some people.
The angels can’t destroy anything unless ordered too. If Camael was ordered to destroy you, he would only be able to destroy you and no one else. From what I understand, the Witch Queen sacrificed some of her witches to the angels so that they could have a force to attack the people at the Gathering. Murder is a sin, and an angel wouldn’t be able to commit that atrocity. Divine retribution, on the other hand, is a glorious honour to perform.
“But he killed Cassian.”My heart clenched with agony and the image of Cassian as he breathed his last flashed before my eyes. Maybe I needed to have some sort of memorial for him to put him to rest. It had helped when I lost my foster mum, Martha. She’d raised me when no one else wanted me. I was a troubled child, but Martha had stuck by me and showered me with love when I’d needed it the most. When she’d died in a freak car accident, my world had fallen apart. And while her loss felt different to Cassian’s, I still felt his death with just as much sorrow.
Maybe the divine retribution extends to your team? Perhaps it’s a death by association thing.
She could be right. Kind of like when you’re charged as an accomplice. You didn’t actually do the crime, but you knew about it or helped plan it.
“But why would the witches control the mages? That’s what I don’t get. Why use two types of magic users?”
Because witches cannot destroy Lucifer,she said quickly, and I didn’t fail to miss the angry note in her voice.They are one of his creations and therefore cannot do him any harm.
Iveri’s face twisted into something ferocious deep in my mind. There was a history here between the two of them, and I was curious to know what had happened. But judging from the way she was pretty much spitting sparks of anger, right now probably wasn’t the best time to ask for a history lesson.
“Huh, I didn’t know that. But isn’t mind control a dark kind of magic?”I’d studied some forms of magic while trying to understand what my magic was before Elissa and I figured out I was a shadow mage. There were some types of magic that you just didn’t do, like mind control, necromancy, and blood magic. They were massively frowned upon in the world of the witches.
I believe so. Imperium magic, or control magic, of any kind is usually forbidden. I wonder what the Witch Queen got from the angels for sacrificing her witches.
I’d been wondering that, too. It must have been something impressive to allow her to give up her people, to sacrifice them into what appeared to be a war the Divine had unleashed on the mortal plane all because of a Sin Reaper and some prophecy.
