Archon (16 page)

Seventeen

We have determined that the Archon will suffer through the greatest personal torments. And I would be lying if I said I felt sorry for what She must endure.

—
S
T.
I
MWALD,
L
ETTERS TO THE
H
OLY
F
ATHER

T
here were no more dreams.

Angela, though, remembered so little of what had happened before that. The last thing she’d seen clearly had been Nina falling over the veranda porch. She’d sprinted after her, hoping to save her, because whenever Angela tried to drown herself, it hadn’t worked and she’d lost every bit of fear that it would. Just as she’d expected, a searing pain had shot through her head, and her clothes flooded with icy water. In a daze, she’d found Nina and wrapped her arms around her, keeping them both afloat. Then, of all possible rescuers for them, she’d hallucinated the devil on her dormitory roof, fluttering overhead.

But after she’d fainted, there had been no dreams. Nothing. No hint of her beautiful angel. Not a wisp of his gray companion. Not even a trace of Sophia and her pretty silver slippers.

From the first day Angela could understand what a dream was, she had one every time she blacked out of reality. That meant at least one dream every night of her life, not even counting the times she fainted.

Now—nothing.

The invocation must have worked.

The hard, astonishing realization pounded through her head as she cracked open her eyelids, amazed to find herself back in the chapel where so much had gone so wrong. Stephanie and the other sorority members had fled, leaving one of their own in a bloody pool close to the balustrade, the student’s breathing painfully intermittent. Kim and Sophia knelt by Angela’s side, Nina’s twisted but twitching arm peeking through a gap between Sophia’s bloody slippers. And the devil who’d saved her . . . must have disappeared like the vision it had been.

There was no sign of an angel with bronze hair and wings—for all she knew, Angela had summoned a monster—but they’d never find out until Nina opened her eyes again, and that didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon.

Angela blinked up at the murky ceiling, so high and cavernous, just taking in air.

A horrid shudder moved up through her chest, and she turned her head, hacking up salt water. It spat out of her throat, burning. She swore out loud.

Kim laughed, sounding relieved. “She’s here with us. Thank God. You shouldn’t be alive, you know.” He leaned over her, his amber eyes gleaming before the meager circle of light. Sophia held a candle in her hand, her other palm cupped around the flame to protect it from the breeze. The worst of the storm was over, its tail edges rumbling out to the west. “Would you like to explain yourself, Miss Mathers?”

Angela took a second to breathe again. Her chest hurt and her ears were ringing a little. “Wouldn’t you . . . have done the same?”

“No,” Kim said, his face reappearing, “because I would have known it meant certain death. So either you don’t have any sense of self-preservation, or you know that killing yourself isn’t a possibility.” His warm mouth tickled the rim of her ear. “You were holding out on me, Angela. There’s more to you than those paintings and dreams.” His finger brushed the tights near her thigh. Ugly purple scars peeked through a hole in the fabric. “Where did these scars come from, by the way? Would it be an insult to call them self-inflicted?”

“The first day we met—” Sophia’s face was still out of sight, but her voice sounded too content. Like a child who’d found her mother at last. “The first day we met, I caught her trying to jump off the roof. She’s reckless. Suicidal.”

Crazy
,
you mean.

Sophia knelt down and brushed the hair from Angela’s cheeks. Her curls had frizzed over in the humidity, but her face remained lovely and chinalike. Perfect, especially with that smile. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

And I do feel crazy. When she says things like that, it makes me wish it had all been for her.

“What happened?” Angela moved to sit up, but her muscles felt like string, the sorority ring around her finger heavy as a gold boulder. “Where did Stephanie and the others go?”

“Back to where it’s safe. Probably to the Pentacle House, where she can plan how to deal with you best.”

“How to deal with me . . .”

“You weren’t supposed to succeed at anything tonight, Angela. Or was my ex-girlfriend’s envy lost on you? She was hoping you’d fail and end up Lyrica’s clone for the next few years of your life.” Kim lifted her gently by the shoulders, his hands as warm as the night they’d kissed. “Although I doubt that kind of mercy will remain in her much longer.”

Ex-girlfriend, he’d said. Angela slumped against his chest, trying to ingest the enormity of what had happened. Kim’s heart beat steadily, all his fear during the invocation replaced by a certainty that calmed her and made her taste his skin, his flesh, all over again.

Sophia’s interruption was more than a coincidence. Her words had a short clip to them, jealous almost. “Maribel is dying. I’m going to at least make her comfortable—”

“
Don’t take another step
. . .”

Angela froze instinctively.

The new voice had a cruel rasp to it, and a soft hiss trailed at the edge of each word, honing their preciseness. She stared into the darkness surrounding the outer edges of the candlelight. Two large, yellow eyes flashed in the shadows, narrowing at Sophia in warning. They held their own light, glowing, phosphorescent, mind-numbing.

“Are you planning to keep her for yourself?” Sophia asked.

There was the slightest hint of a growl. “What do you think?”

It has a female voice.

Kim clasped Angela’s arm, as if he knew she might try to escape. As if he knew what her reaction was going to be when she saw what crouched beside Maribel. “Don’t show your fear,” he murmured softly. “It will work against you. I promise. Troy”—his voice grew louder—“you know this one is going to die.”

“Of course I do.” The eyes flashed open again, their pupils huge. Whatever she was, she began to pace softly beyond the reach of Sophia’s candle. “And she’s mine. I brought her down, and I’ll be the one to finish the job.”

“Then please do,” Sophia said, moving away so that the light barely touched Maribel. “Before it becomes too painful. She was always . . . kind to me.”

Angela could barely breathe again, but this had nothing to do with being waterlogged. Her shivers had started, the symptoms of a hypothermia that wouldn’t kill her, but would ruin her night. Nina had a robe wrapped around her legs and waist, and now Kim opened the folds of his own robe, tucking Angela inside where she could lean fast to the warmth of his hard chest. Yet the world continued to fade, everything else lost beyond the spotlight that glimmered faintly on Maribel.

Then, without any more warning,
she
emerged.

An angel? A demon? But in the end, there was nothing to adequately compare her to. Troy—if that was really her name—had a pixie-pretty face, but one holding a mouthful of tiny knives, blood-stained, hiding behind lips the bluish shade of a corpse. Luminous eyes, savage and hungry, scrutinized Sophia with an air of cruelty only a hunter could express, and lengthy, batlike ears swiveled, catching the terrible sound of Maribel’s breathing. Troy’s skin was whiter than Kim’s—whiter than chalk—and yet her hair, her sharply curved wings, and her nails were a black too deep and dark to name.

She was breathtaking, with a horrifying, predatory kind of beauty.

It was hard to look. And it was even harder to look away.

Troy sniffed Maribel’s neck, frightening her into a rigid catatonia.

“What is she?” Angela whispered, already knowing the answer. This was the devil she’d seen on the dormitory roof and hovering above her in the channel below the Bell Tower,
and it was real
. Of course, it didn’t make her feel any better that Troy was her rescuer. Nina’s real savior.

In her mind, Kim’s book lay wide open again, and she stared at those horrible illustrations of a creature that seemed more nightmare than flesh and blood.

“You know this thing?”

“Troy,” Kim said, whispering back, “is a Jinn. They’re immortal, like angels and demons, but scavengers, cave dwellers that survive in the upper reaches of the Underworld.” He stopped talking as Troy glared at him, suspicious, eventually resuming in an even lower voice. “They claim to be descended from angelic offspring that were rejected and thrown into the lower Realms. The result of eons of interbreeding in the harshest environment that exists . . .”

He made Hell sound like a land as real as Luz, or the Earth, or any other planet in the universe. Not just a place where spirits and untouchable ghosts wandered, punished and burning for all eternity. No, Hell was a place in the most material sense of the word.

And that meant Heaven was too.

“How do you know her?” Angela said, shivering.

There was a pause, and Kim’s tone dipped into tangible anguish. “She’s my cousin.”

His cousin. His father’s or mother’s niece. That means at least one of his parents is a Jinn. A devil. A monster that murders people like a cat hunts mice.

Angela didn’t have to ask. Luz’s infamous serial killer stalked around Maribel, right in front of her, a mere foot from Sophia and the candle cradled in her hand. Suddenly, the dead rat, the dead student near the Theology Center, and the lights Sophia had maintained in their bedroom—suddenly all those instances combined to make this deadly picture. Troy had been spying on Angela all along and eating other people in the meantime.

No wonder Kim had avoided the key chapter of his book.

He’d wanted to forget about his terror of a cousin, even for just one night.

A long screech filled the chapel. The crow that had warned Angela away from the dead student landed on Troy’s shoulder, wings adjusting for balance. Its beak clacked as it cocked an eye at Maribel.

“Fury.” Kim’s whisper was softer than a breath. “That’s the bird’s name. But the crow’s body is merely her shell.”

“A shell for what?”

“A human soul. She’s a Vapor. A familiar bound to Troy. But her human memories are gone by now. Now . . . she’s nothing but an extension of her master.”

Fury chattered her beak and flapped her wings. Anxious about something, it seemed. Troy regarded her with a low growl and leaned down over Maribel, her skinny hands reaching for her like a lover. She and Fury must have silently agreed on a course of action that would satisfy each other, if not everyone else. Maribel had been bleeding so slowly and for so long, her skin had just begun to shade off into gray, and her eyelids were growing heavy. She moved her lips, trying to speak. Angela thought she could make out a strained whisper of thanks, each word painfully drawn.

Then Troy snapped her neck.

That, at least, was mercifully brief.

W
hen they arrived at Angela’s dormitory mansion, Nina was muttering in her sleep, shivering like a leaf and frighteningly feverish. Troy chose to remain at the Bell Tower for the time being, choosing to dispose of, or more likely devour, Maribel’s corpse.

Nina’s prediction of death had been spot-on after all.

Over and over, Angela’s mind replayed the events of the night, and when she, and Sophia, and Kim—who had volunteered to carry Nina the entire way—walked into the mansion, the first thing she did was dash into the kitchen, throw open the refrigerator, and suck down all of the water in a glass pitcher. Afterward, she promptly ran to the bathroom and vomited for at least half an hour, seeing more sticky pentagrams on the walls, and more blood everywhere she looked, even if it was only in her imagination. By the time Kim knocked on the door, she lay next to the toilet, curled up on the cracked tiles so that their chill leeched through her tights and arm gloves.

Her hypothermia, much like her other aches and pains, had disappeared even earlier than usual, and the bathroom smelled strangely comforting and clean. It was too old, though, even for the mansion that surrounded it, and a crack ran through the mirror’s middle. The light was meager, coming more from the space beneath the door than the candle next to the sink.

“Can I come in?” Kim said. His voice sounded sultry as always.

Angela rolled onto her side, fighting off dry heaves. “Ye—yeah.”

This isn’t me. Running like that.

But it also wasn’t her to suck a lightning bolt down from the sky.

Everything was changing. Everything. She stared at the coiled radiator next to the toilet, hardly knowing what to ask first or how to ask it. She was just lucky that Kim must have sensed her distress and decided to take the initiative for a change. “Are you ever going to leave this room?” His fingers found her hair and lifted some strands, rubbing them. He sat on the toilet, bent over her, his black coat sweeping the tile. “Or should I carry you to bed like I did your friend?”