Cadan was right. Will’s mother and Nathaniel had raised him with love, and he was a better fighter than anyone. I wondered what Will would have been like if Bastian had known Will was his son all along.

“I’m so sorry,” I told Cadan.

He shrugged. “I don’t know any different.” He watched me carefully, curiously. “I’d like to, though.”

“What’s your mother’s name?” I asked. “Is she still around?”

“Isolda,” he replied. “I only saw her a few times. She wasn’t interested in caring for me and I knew she’d died. In battle, of course. Bastian never mourned her. I remember she had hair like mine, but more silver. Eyes like chilled amethyst. I think I look a little more like my father, except for my hair. Will looks a bit like Bastian too. It’s the sharpness of his eyes that gives his lineage away. Eyes that see straight to the pit of your soul. I never liked when Bastian looked at me in anger. Both he and Will give that look like they won’t just kill you—they’ll obliterate you.”

I’d seen that look in Will’s eyes infinite times, and every time he gave that look, he destroyed. He wasn’t known for his mercy on those who tried to hurt me. “I wish that Bastian didn’t have to die, but I guess it’s rather naïve of me to hope that we could’ve worked things out. He was still your father. And Will’s. Family is family. They’re a piece of you no matter what.”

“It isn’t naïve to hope one can change,” Cadan continued. “But for Bastian, it was all he ever knew. He knew he had a purpose on Earth, as do the rest of our kind, that we are at war with the angelic, and that we are on the eve of an even greater war, one that could destroy the races of both Earth and Heaven. He grew up learning that the humans, angels, and angelic reapers are his oppressors, and this war proved to him what he’d been taught. My life has taken the same path, but my heart is not as cold as Bastian’s was. He couldn’t see beyond the hate he was conditioned to feel. Perhaps we will never know if the demonic are born evil or the angelic born good. What really determines good and evil, anyway?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that one out for a long time,” I said. “You’re my argument against perfect evil and perfect good.”

“It’s never too late to start over,” he mused. “After eight hundred years, this dog can still learn new tricks.”

That made me smile a little, but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “I wish the same had been true for Bastian. There had to have been something good in him.” I remembered what he had said to Will—that he’d loved Will’s mother, Madeleine. If he could love, could feel true love, then there was hope that he could’ve changed. But now it was too late to save him, and considering what could have been only weighed on my heart even more.

Cadan considered my words thoughtfully. “I don’t know if he was inherently evil. He was a reasonable and logical man, though his reasoning took a darker turn. He lived over a thousand years in the world of demonic reapers. They were his people, his kind—our kind—and he wanted to help us. To him, to many of us, the demonic aren’t ‘evil.’ The Fallen in Hell aren’t monsters. They—we—are just another group with different views from the angels and their angelic reapers. I grew up believing the angelic were our oppressors, that there really was a place for us in a peaceful afterlife. That we could go to Heaven if the humans weren’t standing in our way. Now, though, I realize what is truth. That all reapers are an accident, playthings of the divine that were never meant to be. Reapers are pawns in a proxy war. I’ve always doubted what the others believed, ever since I learned that Antares’s blood runs through my veins. Not a whole lot dilutes her power mixing with my line, and that’s what makes us so much stronger than other reapers. We are so close to the pure source, to pure divine power.”

I became so restless with thought that I got to my feet and paced along the wall. I wondered if the small piece of angelic lineage was what drove Cadan to want to be good, but I realized Bastian had even more angelic blood, and he’d been less inclined to see the light. It didn’t make sense, but it made me realize that I had to be right: that despite a reaper’s heritage and tendencies, he could change, become the kind of person he wanted to be. Bastian had no heart, no goodness in him at all, but his first son, who had even less angelic blood in him, chose to leave the demonic behind.

Cadan stood and eased toward me, moving like a wave. I pressed my back into the wall as he stopped inches from me. “Whatever I am, I’m not evil.”

“I know you aren’t,” I said, and swallowed, fully aware of every part of him and feeling the heat of his closeness. “You have a good heart.”

He rested his head heavily against the wall and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. He raised a hand to touch my arm, but stopped and put it back down. His eyes opened to mine. “I’m trying to change. I know all that I’ve done wrong, the things I’ve let others do because I was too much of a coward to stop them. I want—need—redemption. And I know you can give me that.”

He touched me then, smoothing his hand up my arm, fingers catching on the strap of my tank top before wrapping around the back of my neck. He turned my face to his and his hand molded to the curve of my jaw and lifted my chin.

“I want to help you,” I told him. “You’ve done so much for me.”