“That is true,” I said. “I am Ellie, but I am also Gabriel. I’m not human. Not anymore.”

He reached for me and I began to pull away, but I stopped and allowed him to touch my cheek. “Have I lost you?”

His fingers against my skin were warm and not unpleasant. As much as I wanted to push him away, I didn’t. “I’m right here.”

“You don’t understand, do you?” he asked, his tone heavy with sorrow. “You can’t feel anything. You don’t even know me.”

Something instinctive and uncontrollable stirred in my chest, a flutter of heat and longing. “I can feel. I can feel your touch.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. He drew in a short breath and bit his upper lip, a gesture that gave me more unwanted feelings. “It’s more than that. Don’t you remember me? Don’t you know me?”

“I remember you,” I said in a small voice. “Will.”

He backed off and clenched his fists, his lips trembling. “You say my name like you don’t know me.”

It was then that I pulled away and the coldness returned. “I know you. You are my Guardian.”

He stared at me, slack-jawed and pathetic. “That’s it?”

I spread my wings and started to turn away from him. “I am sorry.”

He shook his head. “You don’t even know what sorry means. You’ve let yourself become just another heartless angel.”

Over my shoulder, I narrowed my gaze at him. “And you are just a reaper.”

He said nothing for several long moments, and just as I was about to leave, he drew a deep breath and spoke. “This…this is far more cruel than anything anyone has ever done to me. This is worse for me than if you had died. This is torture.”

I studied, perplexed, as the agony on his face deepened. I knew the extent of his emotions for me and I knew how I had felt about him, but now I felt…nothing. I remembered, but the feelings were only memories, distant, fading things far out of my reach. Perhaps there was nothing after all. When I looked at my Guardian’s face, at the sorrow and pain in his eyes, I felt regret for what I had said to him. That was nothing I had ever felt before in Heaven. Angels had been created to be perfect soldiers. We felt no regret, no mercy, and certainly no compassion. I was an archangel once again, but I had changed.

Something in my pocket vibrated. I slipped out a device, something my human memories recalled was a cell phone. I stared at it and Will took it from my hand. He took an instant to identify the caller on the screen and then pressed the phone to his ear.

“Hello?” he answered. “It’s Will. Yeah. Sort of. Just meet us at the hotel.” He recited the address and hung up. “That was Cadan.”

“Ah,” I said. “The demonic reaper.”

“My brother,” Will growled. “And your friend. You’d better not treat him the way you treat me.”

I did not reply to that.

“I’m calling Ethan and telling him to clean up the evidence left behind in the church,” he continued. “He can meet us at our hotel room where we’ll regroup with Cadan. Do you remember where—?”

The rest of his question was lost to my ears. I’d already taken flight and left him.

I had to tuck away my wings when I returned to our hotel. The mortals of today weren’t as welcoming of my presence as they were the last time I visited as an archangel. The times had changed. I’d lived all of them, and I was grateful for maintaining my human memories. I would have had a much harder time navigating this new world without them.

But the memories also made things more complicated. My Guardian…How I had allowed myself to have feelings for him—to love him—was beyond me, but I’d been human for so long. I was built to be a soldier, the perfect machine created to seek and destroy. I commanded my own legions of angels that devastated and banished the armies of Lucifer eons ago. When I was first told I would be sent to Earth to destroy the demonic reaper spawn of Lucifer’s Fallen abominations, Sammael and Lilith, I had felt the first flicker of emotion since my creation. I was…uncertain. I’d seen the humans, watched them grow from languageless creatures into a species with ideas and ambitions, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to walk among them. To feel as they do. To smile the way I’d seen them smile. I carried a dark secret in my heart: I wanted these things. When I become mortal, God gave me a human soul. He told me that His angels weren’t as perfect as He had hoped we would be, that there was something missing in us, something that kept us from reaching our full potential as His creation. He told me that my human soul was a gift, that it would save me—save us all. And then I had felt the second emotion since my creation: doubt.

My time in Heaven was always so brief in between my mortal deaths and I remembered nothing the instant I returned to my human vessel. That had been frustrating. No matter how much I trained with my brothers and sisters in Heaven, or how much strength I gathered in my archangel power, it all went to waste the moment I returned to Earth.

When Michael had discovered Bastian’s plans to release Sammael and Lilith, my orders were to remain in Heaven. on my next reincarnation, I had to be stronger, faster, and more certain to defeat the Fallen. We’d hoped that the longer I delayed my return to Earth, the likelier chance I’d retain my memories as my true self. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect and I’d had an even more difficult time regaining even my human memories. I’d set myself even farther back and only made myself more human, a mewling little thing—a human teenage girl.