Skulduggery nodded slowly. Any sort of official arrest was easily out of the question, then. His reputation would suffer a landslide if Raphael disappeared from his cell overnight, and the other option he dreaded even more. Despite all logic saying the guards wouldn't believe a word Gabe's brother said.
The rest of the conversation seemed to go at a normal pace. The words came physically, and at a regular rate, perhaps even a little slower than the regular rate. And yet, Skulduggery was having a hard time keeping up. The words and their meanings rolled through his mind without traction and refused to connect.
An Archangel, he told himself, and moreover, an Archangel I never met before yesterday, is jealous of me.
Yep. That was the part blocking all the rest. The idea that an Archangel didn't like him, not because of Vile or anything he did during the war, but because they were jealous. So Skulduggery smoothed it over and moved on.
He wanted to point out that it certainly wasn't his idea for Gabe to stay. He'd argued vehemently for the opposite. But for how innocently naive Gabe could occasionally be, the younger Archangel was also quite stubborn. Very stubborn. More stubborn than even Valkyrie was. Far more stubbornly immovable than an angel had any right to be. But even disregarding that, or anything the two brothers were talking about, Skulduggery didn't particularly enjoy getting in the way of family. He enjoyed it even less when said family members he was accidentally crossing had the power to kill him - properly kill him - with the blink of an indifferent eye.
"I'm sure you will," he answered absently. A moment passed, and he shifted his attention properly back to Raphael. "Sounds like you picked up more than just our dimension's location from that contact with Finbar."
He shouldn't have been surprised. And he wasn't. It was just something to remark on, to focus on, to keep from thinking about other, more damaging things.
no subject
The rest of the conversation seemed to go at a normal pace. The words came physically, and at a regular rate, perhaps even a little slower than the regular rate. And yet, Skulduggery was having a hard time keeping up. The words and their meanings rolled through his mind without traction and refused to connect.
An Archangel, he told himself, and moreover, an Archangel I never met before yesterday, is jealous of me.
Yep. That was the part blocking all the rest. The idea that an Archangel didn't like him, not because of Vile or anything he did during the war, but because they were jealous. So Skulduggery smoothed it over and moved on.
He wanted to point out that it certainly wasn't his idea for Gabe to stay. He'd argued vehemently for the opposite. But for how innocently naive Gabe could occasionally be, the younger Archangel was also quite stubborn. Very stubborn. More stubborn than even Valkyrie was. Far more stubbornly immovable than an angel had any right to be. But even disregarding that, or anything the two brothers were talking about, Skulduggery didn't particularly enjoy getting in the way of family. He enjoyed it even less when said family members he was accidentally crossing had the power to kill him - properly kill him - with the blink of an indifferent eye.
"I'm sure you will," he answered absently. A moment passed, and he shifted his attention properly back to Raphael. "Sounds like you picked up more than just our dimension's location from that contact with Finbar."
He shouldn't have been surprised. And he wasn't. It was just something to remark on, to focus on, to keep from thinking about other, more damaging things.