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now we hope you’ll want to help us.”
    “You mean help the Asurans?”
    Sariel leaned back a bit in her chair and crossed her legs. “Yes. We’re in the middle of a war for our survival, and we need all the assistance we can get.”
    “Like an Angel who left the Covenant and risked her life to help a whore she’s never met.”
    She turned back towards him. His eyes weren’t accusatory, just curious. She had gotten him to trust her that much, at least. “There’s a great deal to it, as you can imagine. As far as I’m aware, I’m the only one who has ever gotten off the mainland before, and certainly the only one who has gotten to Solace.”
    “But it has happened before?”
    She nodded faintly. “Others have tried to leave shortly after the Bonding. It is said that something went wrong with the ritual. I’m…not sure if that is true or not.”
    “The Bonding…you mean when they stick a holy spirit inside you? I thought you became the spirit.”
    “Not precisely. You’re a Demon—you know what the Covenant says about you. They claim you can possess people, take over their bodies and minds…but you can’t. We’re not really that different.”
    “But it is inside you?”
    “Yes,” she said softly, carefully planning out her words. He would need to know all of it eventually, but for now he would have to be content with the basics. “I was Bonded when I turned eighteen, and for two years everything was going well. It’s impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t undergone it. After the ritual, you have this other consciousness inside of you. You can’t exactly feel it, but you know it’s there, and every once in a while you will get…flashes from it.”
    “Like thoughts or memories?”
    “Nothing that concrete. You just know things you didn’t before. I went into the ritual as a temple priestess, and the next day I could heal a man with a touch. I can’t explain how it works, but I just know how to do it.”
    Damien turned from the window and took a seat next to her. “So then why did you leave?”
    “I began to notice certain…problems that I hadn’t before.”
    He raised his eyebrow inquisitively but said nothing. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to read his emotions, but of course that would work both ways, and she still needed to remain a bit aloof.
    “Normally the Bonding strengthens a priest’s resolve, as you can imagine. With the spirit inside of us, we become far more loyal and determined. Many priests change so much their friends don’t recognize them anymore.” She paused and took a deep breath. “That didn’t happen to me. I started to notice all the little things I used to ignore. The priests seemed to violate the Sacra’thar on a daily basis, and the other Angels were…well, cruel at times. They were more obsessed with tracking down Demons than with the continued restoration of Argoa.”
    “And you started wondering why?”
    “I still wonder why,” she admitted. “When I suggested we should learn more about the Demons, it was taken as the highest form of blasphemy from an Angel. They were going to…remove it from me.”
    Damien’s cheek twitched. “I’m guessing that wasn’t going to be pleasant.”
    “I would have died,” she told him. “Once a priest is Bonded, there is no way to remove the spirit without an exorcism—and those are always fatal.”
    “So you ran,” he reasoned.
    “Yes. I fell in with the Asurans mostly by chance, and their leader eventually convinced me we shared the same goals.”
    He seemed to mull over it for a few minutes. He undoubtedly had a million other questions to ask her, but she hoped he would be patient. All this had to be overwhelming enough for him as it was…
    “So what about me?” Damien asked finally. “How do I fit in?”
    “You initiated contact,” she reminded him. “We try to help any Demon we can, but of course we don’t have the resources to do it all the time. In your case, I did some checking