Page 17 of Seraph's Tears
“I am willing to try it. I did purchase the food,” he rumbled, not quite meeting my eye.
“Perfect.” I bit my tongue, trying to think of something a seraph would be interested in eating. Like I’d mentioned, cooking was not a great skill of mine.
“And you may stay during the meal,” he offered magnanimously. “As you did just now.”
I blinked at him. Surely this was against protocol. But I had broken the rules first. And perhaps things were different with seraphim? I nodded. “Thank you, sir.” The skin between my shoulder blades itched until the door closed behind me and I was in the hall once more, as if he stared at my back until I’d disappeared from his view.
Gabriel
The rest of the day I had the oddest compulsion to go practice tight flight maneuvers in the Great Hall. I resisted, because I knew Eve was downstairs cleaning the oriel windows in between her other tasks. I had peered over the minstrel gallery and caught sight of her, hair wrapped up and stretching on her tiptoes on a stepladder to wipe thick dust and cobwebs as high as she could reach. The curves of her body lengthened, and I imagined flying up behind her and wrapping my hands around her waist.
She hummed and whistled as she worked. A key, dull from age and use, hung around her neck. Her breasts shifted under her dress, and I imagined pressing my mouth right between them, soaking up her scent.
Charmed, I let my wings relax. It wasn’t dusty anymore, thanks to my lovely housekeeper—and the release of tension ached through my body. I’d never been so content to watch someone clean.
She was fascinating and odd and so human. I didn’t dislike humans. I just didn’t understand them. We were so different, and they lived such a short time.
Perhaps if I studied her longer, the fascination would end. I didn’t need to twist my feathers trying to understand her. We had secrets that kept us safe from a human mob, and I couldn’t risk sharing them, not even with Eve.
My mind drifted. If we were on Rundis and I was on military leave, if we had met…she could be my mistress. She’d come from one of the lower echelons, several orders below me. But in the military, people often looked the other way. I’d even seen a marriage between a civilian and a warrior, though one echelon kept them apart. Once the warrior left the military, though, she would drop down to his order.
But this was the human world, and she was my housekeeper, and I wasn’t interested in her like that. I shouldn’t be. My body didn’t care about that, though.
The next day I somehow gravitated back to my spot in the gallery when she showed up at the oriel. She’d cleaned as high as she could reach—roughly a third of the way—on three panels of the five. The dirt and grime on the outside still kept light from spilling through the stained glass, but red and green and blue squares dotted the design.
The curve of her face was perfect for my hand. A tiny mole dotted her neck below her ear. I had dreamed of it last night, and woke to spilled seed cooling against my thighs. I hadn’t done that since I was seventy years old.
Instead of whistling, Eve glanced up at me. “If you’re not busy, you can help,” she said with a smile.
My heart lurched, causing my chest to pang. Ruffled from a poor night’s sleep, I frowned down at her. “Help clean?”
Eve nodded. “You have wings. I can’t reach the top.” She wore a mulberry dress today that better fit her form. It made my hands clench at my sides and the ayim pump faster through my veins.
I scoffed. “You expect me to use my wings to help you with manual labor? That I already pay you for?” At home my family owned two estates and a city townhouse. My parents employed dozens of servants. I had led a much sparser lifestyle as an active military officer, but I still had some privileges.
Eve shrugged, undaunted by my attitude.
“If I ever use my wings for you,” I told her, “It won’t be to clean windows.” I’d rather take you night flying, with your hair flowing in the wind and the world lost in the velvety blackness surrounding us, until it feels like we’re the only people that exist in the universe. I turned away from her before she could see those thoughts cross my face. I rubbed my chest again as I went to my open balcony door and launched myself into the fresh, clear sky. Away from troublesome housekeepers with big brown eyes and mousy hair.
Over the next two weeks somehow she burrowed her way into my rooms, cleaning them during the day when I was busy out of doors and sitting with me during supper.
I tossed and turned in my sleep, waking to wet trousers and ruffled feathers—preferable to nightmares, but embarrassing. I would catch her scent in the hall and my cock would turn rigid as steel. It was growing untenable, and I could only take so many midnight flights before I went mad.
One night, after bringing me cabbage and leek soup—which was as disgusting as it sounded and I thanked the stars no such vegetables existed in my world—she stayed and picked at her own bowl.
“Do you really not need much food?” she asked bluntly after a pause. “Or do you hate human food that much?” Eve eyed me. “Your muscles certainly don’t look like they’re withering.”
I preened. I’d quickly learned humans almost never went around without some sort of shirt. Their women, absolutely never. I hadn’t realized how intimate the lack of clothing was for humans, though. She never requested I put on one of my vests, but I caught her eyeing my chest frequently. Once I nearly called her on it, but her blush when she realized she’d been seen was so adorable I couldn’t bear to make her embarrassment worse.
“We have a fluid in our body,” I admitted, “called ayim.” Was this a good idea, sharing secrets of the seraphim with a human? I didn’t know. It wasn’t like telling her about the space my parents inhabited at the royal court, nor how I survived barracks as a young seraph ages ago. This felt more personal, potentially even dangerous. My sedge had avoided intimate or vulnerable situations with humans so they would never learn our weaknesses, never have anything to use against us.
“Ayim?” Her brow furrowed, and my finger itched to smooth out the spot between her eyebrows. “What’s that?”
“Like blood,” I told her. It’s Eve. I can trust Eve. “We have a heart that pumps blood throughout our body, like humans.”
She nodded.
“But our heart has two extra chambers, and that’s where the ayim resides. Those arteries mix further away from our center with the arteries for our blood, so it eventually blends together. And then separates again when pumped back into the heart.”
