“It’s important to me,” I said, cutting him off. “I’ve had enough of that self-deprecating crap from you. You’re important to me. I’m terrified of losing what I feel inside once I become Gabriel.”

“We have to be willing to give up things to do what’s right, sometimes,” he said, eerily mirroring to me what Nathaniel had said about war. About sacrifice. In order to win this war, I had to be willing to sacrifice who I was. If it came down to becoming someone else and protecting the people I loved and the rest of the world, then I had to do it. I had to be brave, even though I couldn’t be fearless.

“If I do this,” I said, “if I become Gabriel, I refuse to forget you. I may become an archangel, but I’ll still have my human soul.”

He let his head drop and ran his hands through his hair. Something more was troubling him so much that for a second I thought I saw him shaking. He chewed on his upper lip and exhaled heavily.

“What Bastian said about you isn’t true,” I said, touching his cheek. I turned his face to mine as I brushed the backs of my fingers along the line of his jaw. He closed his eyes so tightly that his brow furled and darkened with pain. I heard his teeth grind together.

“Yes, it is.”

“No, Will,” I pleaded. “How could you even think that?”

“Because I am full of hate and rage.” He pulled away from my hand and looked out at the gray lake. “I want you to promise me one thing, for when this all goes down.”

I swallowed hard. “What is it?”

“Save Merodach for me,” he said, his voice cold and deadly as thin ice. “He’s mine.”

I shivered at a chill slicing through my veins. “Okay.”

“Si vis pacem, para bellum,” he said very quietly. His hands balled into fists and he drew a long, shaky breath.

If you want peace, prepare for war. If we wanted to win and to be safe, we had to be strong and fight this evil that threatened to tear us apart and steal everything we loved.

We sat in silence until he stood up. “I have work to do on the house.”

I nodded, pushing back the wildfire of tears building in my eyes. Within minutes, the pounding of nails and ripping up of shattered floorboards filled my head and numbed my thoughts. But I had work to do as well. I had to call Lauren.

I sat on the floor in the kitchen with my cell phone in my hands. I leaned against the cabinet doors, the metal handles digging into my back. I’d dialed and redialed her number a hundred times and still hadn’t found the courage to call her. I squeezed my eyes shut and called at last. On the first ring, she answered.

“Ellie.” Her voice was broken, hoarse, as if she’d been crying or screaming, or both.

“Lauren,” I said, forcing the word from my lips. “I … I don’t know how to …”

“I know.”

She hung up, and I let the phone slip from my fingers onto the tile and just sat there with my back against the wall. Sometime later, I heard a car drive up and its door open and shut. I stumbled to my feet and headed toward the front of the house. As soon as I saw Lauren’s quietly smiling face and red, puffy eyes, I let out a choking sob and collapsed at her feet as our arms wound around each other.

We sat in the living room with cups of coffee in our hands, both of us cried out for the moment. The last time she was in this house, she was in Nathaniel’s arms and he was telling her he loved her. Minutes later, he was dead.

“I never thought I’d outlive him,” Lauren said weakly. “That wasn’t the way we were supposed to end. I knew the things he and Will did were dangerous and would kill him eventually, but …”

She leaned over the end table beside her, resting on her elbow, and buried her face in her hands, her fingers threading through her dark hair, and she started crying again.

My lips trembled as I fought my own tears. “I’m so sorry, Lauren.”

She wiped at her face with the sleeves of her sweater and forced a small laugh. “It’s okay. I’m really going to miss him and his stupid jokes.”

I laughed with her, letting out an ugly, half-sobbing noise. “Yeah. His jokes were so bad.”

We laughed and cried for a little while, recalling many of Nathaniel’s silly habits and sayings, but also reminiscing about how wise he was. How good he was. How much he took care of us all. How much he’d made this house a home. The lights were on in here, but outside the skies were dark with rain clouds, and it felt like we were in a cave. Rain beat the windows, and Will clunked something heavy around somewhere in the house and then hammered it.

When it came time for Lauren to go home, she wandered through the house, surveying the damage, running her fingers down the shredded walls, pausing to touch things that had belonged to Nathaniel.

“Anything you want should be yours,” I said, following her through the wreckage. Will had cleaned up so much of it already that the floors were mostly cleared.

Lauren nodded absently. “It’d be strange to take any of it, since it was his. Maybe one day I’ll be able to. It still doesn’t feel like he’s gone—it’s like he’ll come back any day because he’d miss all this old junk of his.”

I looked around the house, purposely avoiding her gaze. “And once Will puts the house back together, it’ll look like nothing even happened here.”

“He’s certainly on a roll, isn’t he?” She gave a small laugh that faded away sadly. “I should get going.”