That said, he didn’t know how she could possibly use anything he told her against him.
“Our mother was a battle angel,” he said finally. “She was pregnant with a potential Radiant, and she was betrayed by an angel to Satan’s forces. Our father was killed in the battle, and she was taken to Sheoul. She gave birth to twins. Heaven worked out a deal to take one of the infants, and Sheoul would take the other.”
“Oh, wow,” she whispered. “So that’s how you’re an angel, not a fallen angel. Heaven took Reaver, didn’t they?”
“Yes. I was left behind, raised in a ten-by-ten cell in a dungeon.” The memories came at him like blows, but he quickly blocked them and got away from that messy part of the story. “Years later, after I learned the truth, I went to Reaver, and it didn’t go well. He’d just discovered that the female he loved had betrayed him and that he had four grown children. He was pissed, I was pissed… let’s just say that between the two of us, we caused a whole lot of destruction.”
“What’s a whole lot?”
“The kind that requires thousands of angels to rewrite history in the minds of humans.”
She swallowed. “They can do that?”
“Apparently they’ve done it several times.”
“Holy shit,” she breathed.
“Yeah.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “So I lost my memory. Satan told me that I was a fallen angel, and that I didn’t remember my time in Heaven because sometimes fallen angels lose their memories when they fall from grace. I bought it. I believed it when he told me that I was kicked out of Heaven for assassinating fellow angels.” He snorted. “I toed the evil line like a champ. Fuck, I need a drink. You?”
She shook her head.
“You sure?” He swung out of bed and strode, naked, to the portable bar in the corner. “Don’t think I’ve ever met a False Angel who wasn’t a lush.”
“I have to work later. For some reason, Eidolon frowns on his staff showing up drunk.”
He poured himself a shot of Sheoul’s finest absinthe, made the old-fashioned way, with wormwood grown in the corpses of imps. “Ah, that’s right. You’re a False Angel with ethics.”
“Yeah. Ethics.” She rubbed her temples as if fending off a headache. “So how long did you go around thinking you were a fallen angel? Also,” she grumbled, “you should put on some clothes. You’re a menace to society when you’re naked.”
Ah, his ego loved the stroking. He definitely wasn’t getting dressed now. “I believed I was fallen for five thousand years, give or take a century or ten.” He knocked back the neon-green liquor, relishing the stinging burn down his throat. “Then, a little over three decades ago, Reaver did something bad again. He broke a huge rule and was punished. Want to guess how?”
“Ah… memory loss?”
“Yep. Well, that and he lost his wings. Went to work at your hospital. And here’s the kicker. The agreement Heaven made with Sheoul when we were born said that whatever was done to one of us had to be done to the other. So my memory was wiped. Again.”
The alcohol sting in his throat turned bitter. Breaking rules resulted in chaos and pain and all kinds of shit, and Reaver’s reckless disregard for the rules had done exactly that.
“Jesus,” she whispered. “So you lost five thousand years of memories in an instant?”
He nodded. “Reaver at least knew that he was being punished. Me? One minute I was… ah… doing fallen angel stuff, and the next I was wondering why the hell I was standing in Sheoul’s Horun region, covered in blood, and standing over the body of some vyrm.”
The color faded from Blaspheme’s cheeks. Her physician self must be appalled by the killing Revenant had done.
He poured another drink. “Like I told you earlier, hunting vyrm and other undesirables was my job. I was Satan’s little assassin helper. I didn’t know that at the time. I only remember now.”
He’d been a straight-up badass hell-bent on destruction, and he’d been proud of it. Now, knowing he had Satan’s blood running through his veins, corroding his body and soul like Drano, the memories left him confused. He was evil – how could he not be? But he was also an angel whose mother had loved him.
His fingers curled around the shot glass so hard his hand shook. Fuck, he was lost.
“I wandered around for a year after the second memory wipe, scrounging out a living in Sheoul, turning myself into a hired hand. And then Satan’s minions came for me. He told me the vyrm must have erased my memory before I killed him, and that I had been a fallen angel for thousands of years, blah fucking yadda.”