Demon Angel

madness taking hold of him—this couldn't be Lilith. However, despite his painfully vivid memory of her death and his certainty that she'd never deigned to say "please" before, his instincts said she was who she appeared to be.
    Her laughter, the wicked tilt to her eyebrows as she perused his body, the fluidity of her movements, and her habit of positioning herself so that she was ready for combat in an instant— they told him the truth, impossible as it seemed. This was Lilith. A subdued version, perhaps, of the demon he'd killed sixteen years before, but another demon couldn't have imitated her so well. Their egos prevented them from completely disappearing into another personality.
    And those Below might have known Lilith and he had shared a singular rivalry and planned to use their history against him, but they couldn't have known to choose the form she currently wore, nor realized its significance. Only Michael had been present the night she'd called for the Guardian to save him. Only Michael had known that Hugh had thought her an angel when she'd bent over him.
    Her skin paled and the horns slid back into her skull; he regarded her steadily, conscious of the odor of death in the air and the ache of sudden inactivity settling into his leg muscles. She'd pulled her midnight hair into a high, tight queue, and the severe hairstyle emphasized the arch of her eyebrows, her Mediterranean-olive skin, and angular cheekbones.
    He resisted the urge to reach out, to trace the beautiful line of her features with his fingertips and ascertain they were real.
    Hugh had only seen that face once again, in Seattle. He didn't know why she'd chosen a human form to die in instead of her demonic one. Perhaps she'd hoped to inspire pity and mercy in those last moments? Or, considering her acute sense of fatalism and her flair for drama, maybe she'd simply thought it appropriate, bringing them full circle from that first night.
    He rested his elbows on his knees and laced his fingers together instead. "Two minutes," he said.
    Expecting her to triumph over his capitulation, he was surprised when she said without humor, "You need to walk away, and pretend you never saw me, or this." She gestured toward the massacred body with her head, but her gaze never left his face. Her irises were dark brown, almost indistinguishable from her pupils, and her expression grave.
    He sighed. "You know I can't."
    She sucked in a breath between clenched teeth and continued as if he hadn't spoken. "I will erase any evidence that you've been here." She glanced down; the ground was soft from the weeks of rain, and his shoes left clear impressions in the soil. "You'll remain outside the investigation, and anything that follows. Just walk away. Now."
    He shifted to ease the stiffness developing in his legs, and her face brightened. She thought he was going to go, he realized. Shaking his head, he said, "I won't leave him here; nosferatu and demon influence over him ends now."
    "He's dead." Her voice shook with frustration, and he wondered at her vehemence. "It's a corpse, not a human."
    "If it weren't for the nosferatu, he still would be human," he said quietly. "Why does it matter if I'm the one who finds him?"
    His question seemed to puncture the intensity he had sensed building within her; she exhaled deeply, closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, as if warding off a headache.
    Momentarily taken aback by the gesture, Hugh stared at her. She'd never seemed so human as in that second; demons couldn't develop headaches, and yet she'd performed the movement as if it was familiar, natural.
    Guardians kept their habitual gestures long after they'd been transformed. He tried to remember if she'd done it before, and couldn't; but there had been thousands of other actions, small and large, that had seemed as human. He'd always attributed them to her acting skill, and the length of time she'd been living with mankind—nothing about it felt artificial now.
    He pushed his uneasy thoughts aside when she lowered her hand and glanced up at him with a wry smile. "You've always been a stubborn ass, Hugh. I hate free will."
    Meaning that if she could, she would force him to leave—by carrying him away, most likely. When he'd been a Guardian, she might have tried; now, she was hampered by rules against interfering with a human's will.
    She stood before he could respond. "My two minutes have passed," she said.
    Surprised that she'd adhered to his time limit, he