The hotel room doesn't exactly have a bearskin rug, but it does feature a fireplace; wood-burning and crackling merrily away when they come in. Since none of the other rooms feature fireplaces, the concierge was no doubt surprised when Aziraphael thought to ask that an extra bundle of wood be sent up just after they arrived. They hadn't actually ( Read more... )

The gatekeeper's lodge has been there as long as the rest of Southdown Abbey, nestled against the walls in the stretch before, beneath an ivy blanket, they fade into hedges and trees and ditches, the more gently-defined limits of the abbey grounds. It's perfectly easy to wander in and out now; but only Aziraphael knows that the gates have never ( Read more... )

From: Prior Ezra Fell - [encrypted ( Read more... )

It's almost funny. No matter what he does, no matter how often he scrubs and sweeps and runs the old rolling dustcatcher over the carpets, there is always dust in the air of Aziraphael's little bookshop in Soho. On grey, rainy days, he hardly notices at all, but today, with the sun streaming into the back room in great bars of near-solid light, it' ( Read more... )

Crowley,

Don't be irritated with me. But, whatever can it mean?

Yours,
A

*Inside the letter is a pink candy heart emblazoned with the perplexing phrase, Be Nine.*

It isn't quite cold when he arrives in London. Not quite. But compared to the balmy, sticky sort of Mediterranean weather he'd been enduring over the past few months, it seems uncomfortable, despite the wooly sweater he'd given himself once he reached the Alps. By Paris, his wool coat grew a thick, furry lining, and he was quite all right for the ( Read more... )

The curtains in the bedroom are thick enough that he winces when he opens the door into the rest of the suite, slipping out quickly and shutting it silently behind himself. Without the gentle glow of the lamplight, by natural light pouring in through enormous windows, he'd half expected the room to be revealed as something slightly lesser. Expected ( Read more... )

Aziraphael had asked, somewhat plaintively, whether they had anything built to a normal scale in Vienna when he saw the hotel Crowley had booked them into - tall and imposing yet somehow graceful, effortlessly combining function and form in a way that he rather wished modern architects would take note of. The Imperial had originally been a palace ( Read more... )

Crowley ( Read more... )

Aziraphael tries not to get angry. He gets... annoyed. Peeved, perhaps. Certainly he gets miffed with something or other almost every day, but angry? No. Anger leads to - anger leads to bad things; whatever that phrase is from that film Nymphadora enjoys so much. So it's annoyance, obviously, that has him shifting his weight restlessly outside ( Read more... )