Page 86 of Grave Revelations (Prophecies of Angels and Demons #3)

Chapter 85

Azazel

Azazel blinked open new eyes and wished for nothing more than to have his head torn from his body once more so he could return to the nothingness where pain and her absence didn’t exist. Lifeless orbs stared back at him in the dirt, twins to the ones he’d just regrown.

He pressed an arm into the floor, pushing himself into a sitting position. His gaze darted from the head Samael had ripped from his neck to the dais at the center of the room, still bathed in her blood.

His shoulders screamed in agony where the poison had not yet faded; his face ached in all the places it had regenerated. Bone lengthened along his back, stretching into new wings. Soon, dark feathers would sprout, each one a tiny pinprick.

None of it mattered.

He stumbled on unsteady legs to the dais and threw himself across the table. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. She didn’t exist.

He laid his head against the damp wood, slick with her life force. It was cold. Devoid of her essence. As if a mere human’s blood had been sacrificed on this altar. She had not been sacrificed, though. She gave herself willingly.

For him .

But he was unworthy of her, of her sacrifice. He had failed her. Again. And now she was gone, and he was forced to exist for eternity with only her memory and the aching chasm in his chest where half his soul had lived.

A chill crept over him as the room grew colder. Somewhere, the Fallen was completing the mortal plane’s transformation. He no longer needed the witches. With the rift open and the demon populous swarming Earth, their dark deeds would soon ravage the land.

His light wouldn’t have wanted him to stand by and let it happen, but she was gone, and thinking of her was a dagger through his tattered soul.

The first prickles of sensation started at his shoulder blades as feathers grew in. He inhaled sharply, desperate for a last whiff of her essence, her being, but the room smelled only of copper and death.