Archon (4 page)

It must have been a fifty-foot drop to the cobblestones beneath. Maybe more.

Angela leaned on the opened pane, forcing the space to widen with her elbows.

The rain was dying off into a drizzle, but the farther parts of Luz remained wrapped beneath a thick blanket of fog and low clouds. Brief flickers of lightning crossed the sky like a strobe light. Angela reached out to test the roofing, finding it even more slippery than it looked. She took a second to kick off her boots before climbing out of the window and onto the shingles. A sharp breeze whipped some of her hair into her mouth, and then plastered it, wet and slick, to the side of her neck. Water soaked into her socks.

The sound of voices filtered up from the street. Angela rose to her feet, steadying herself with one hand on the window frame, half blind until she caught her hair with the other.

Two women stood in front of the dormitory, talking in voices too low to hear their conversation, but animatedly enough that it would be hard not to take any interest. One of the women was definitely a student, though her skirt and blouse lacked the Tree symbol. She was tall, with an elegant way of clasping her hands, her hair a flowing mass of chestnut that had frizzed to a mat in the rain. Her skin had the creamy look of porcelain, and instead of boots she wore pretty slippers that were an expensive-looking silver.

But the other woman, though she had a perfect face and a figure to envy, had an unnerving hardness in her eyes—very large, very dark eyes, now that Angela looked closer—and a nasty twist to her mouth when she talked. She’d protected herself from the rain in a lengthy hooded cloak, but the hood was down right now, exposing her hair.

Long, thin, blond braids, maybe hundreds of them, had been gathered up into a ponytail that must have been heavier than coiled rope. Their color was a surprising contrast against the woman’s copper skin. Maybe she was from overseas somewhere. That would probably explain the strange tattoo curling upward along her neck.

She spat more words at the polite young woman and vanished into the rain.

Angela waited for the other woman to leave before sliding down the roof any farther.

Then she was at the edge, peering down into the street and a great puddle of water. The cobblestones shone back at her beneath the light of a hanging streetlamp—its sconce surprisingly fitted with a bulb instead of a candle. And the stones continued to shine tantalizingly back at her, smooth and beckoning. Offering death, possible oblivion, or most disappointingly, broken bones.

This really would be the last time. If she failed, then it was either murder, or the real reason she’d come to the Academy in the first place—fulfillment.

Angela tensed the muscles in her legs, preparing to jump.

What if you just survive in a bunch of little pieces? You didn’t think about that.

“Are you looking for something?”

The voice of the student with the silver slippers. Apparently, she hadn’t left. Instead she was suddenly standing in the middle of the street, a little to the left, gazing up at the porch roof and Angela, who teetered on its edge.

“You’re not going to jump?” the young woman said, her voice soft, but also carrying itself across the gap between them. “Are you?”

Damn it. Now what do I do?

Yes, Angela could still jump, but it wouldn’t be very nice to splatter herself all over the student’s shoes. Or for her to see it happen. So she backed away, edging for the window again, trying not to twist her ankle or slide off the roof and bang into the gutter. “I—um—I was leaning out the window and I dropped a ring. I think it fell into the gutter.”

The student stared back at her. Her expression was at once sympathetic and too smart for the lie. But she smiled, her tone still gentle. “I’m sorry about that. Perhaps you’ll come across it again. Are you the new student in this dormitory?”

“This dormitory?” Angela pointed back at the building.

The student nodded.

“I thought I
was
the only student in this dormitory.”

The young woman shook her head. “I live in the private apartment below the library. But perhaps I’ll move up a floor or two and give you some company. Would you mind?”

Angela had inspected that apartment when she’d arrived, and it was so bare and drafty, she hadn’t considered anyone might be staying in it. A few blankets and pieces of junk scattered here and there weren’t enough to convince her. It was hard to believe someone would actually even choose it unless they were punishing themselves. “Oh—no. That’s fine.”

“All right then. I’ll start moving my things upstairs tomorrow evening. What’s your name?”

“Angela.”

“Angela,” the student repeated. She was gazing upward with the same delicate face, but her eyes widened a little, and her smile appeared more genuine the second time around. “Well, good night, Angela. And if you were in fact planning to jump, I hope you’ll rethink things and stay alive for a while yet. Death, and the mess it makes, tends to inconvenience people.”

She left, her footsteps tapping lightly across the sagging porch. Then the door creaked open, shutting closed again with a
click
.

I don’t know how she did it, but I actually feel stupid.

Angela knelt on the shingles, her knees scraping across tar. Carefully, she stood up again and peered into Luz, picking out a bridge here or a tower there, half wishing that she could just spy an angel soaring through the fog, his great wings whipping away clouds or rolling the air beneath them like the thunder of the sea. The rain was picking up again, slanting sideways so that it needled into her eyes. Angela pulled herself up near the window frame and lifted a foot to slip back inside the den.

Something peppered the porch roof. She spun around, startled.

A few shingles had been scraped off the upper gables, and now they sat in a sad pile, their edges curled with water. Was someone standing on the roof above, looking down at her, like she had been looking down at the street?

She tried to focus on one of the turrets, but the rain made it difficult to see. There was a statue near the highest apartment window, perched mysteriously on the very edge of its lower eaves, right above the dropped shingles. It resembled a gargoyle, or some other kind of stylized devil, its face both pretty and terrible, peering back at her, its wings sickle shaped and arched tightly against a thin back.

The eyes seemed to reflect the poor light of the alley below.

Or maybe they were glowing—a hypnotic phosphorescent yellow.

Angela stared back into them a moment longer than was probably necessary, but finally crawled back inside the den, slammed the window shut, and locked the latch in place. Her hair was dripping onto the musty hardwood floor, and her socks felt like wet rags weighing down her feet. Ironically thirsty, she padded down the rickety stairs into the parlor and swung around a devotional statue, entering the kitchen. The light was still on from when she’d had a snack—

There’s something new you can try. Starving yourself.

No. That was too prolonged. Quick and relatively painless would be much nicer.

Angela got a glass, filling it with water from the sink. Then she pulled out one of the chairs and picked up an Academy newspaper lying on the table. Drops from her hair plopped onto the front page, smearing some of the ink. The paper was from a week ago, its headline printed in a large, attention-grabbing font. There was a picture of a dead body, half covered by a blood-soaked sheet.

MURDERS CONTINUE: VATICAN DENIES OCCULT CONNECTIONS

Eastern District, Luz—After a week of relative silence citywide, the murders continue in Luz, their seemingly occult connections vehemently denied by Vatican officials at the Academy and abroad. Theories abound on both sides, officials suggesting that a human serial killer might be loose in the city, but with a small percentage of others pointing to the animalistic savagery and brazen continuance of the murders as proof of a possible zoological, or even supernatural, origin. Vatican authorities residing in Westwood Academy have another, even more controversial theory, some blaming the high population of blood head students at the school, and their sometimes strictly censured dabbling in the arcane arts . . .

Angela sipped the remaining water in her glass, engrossed and instantly sick. Could Vatican authorities actually be right? Would Stephanie and her friends actually harvest body parts for their midnight rituals?

Nina did call her a witch. But that girl’s definitely got a screw loose herself.

. . . yet the signs of teeth marks, missing organs, and the predatory efficiency of the woman’s torn throat cannot be denied. Residents in the Academy’s Eastern District on the east sea cliff of Luz are being strictly warned to stay indoors in the late hours of the night and during hours of heavy rain and black cloud cover, as these conditions seem most suited to the killer’s habits . . .

Well, that absolutely didn’t sound right. She couldn’t imagine Stephanie deliberately getting her hair wet, even if it was to glean ingredients for a potion that could dry, curl, and shine it in a minute flat. Angela pushed the paper back into the center of the table, her thoughts wandering back to the creepy devil perched on the top of the dormitory.

Maybe if it had been real, she wouldn’t have had to worry about who might kill her or why. She would be the only student in school wandering out in the rain and early hours of the morning, hoping that something sinister would swoop down and cut off her head.

Instead she’d have to work to find her angel. Wherever he was.

She glanced out the kitchen window, gazing across an expanse of slate roof tile. Amazingly enough, the same creepy devil statue had been set on the far side, near to the chimney with the kink in its middle. She didn’t remember seeing it there before, but then again, didn’t remember trying to notice either. It had the same, intense expression on its face, all hunger and watchful evil, staring back at her. The ears were long and pointed, pressed back against a head that had been painted with black hair. The skin must have been carved from marble.

But it didn’t move or climb closer to eat her alive. Just like every other statue in Luz.

“You’re pretty disappointing,” Angela said out loud.

She shut the blinds with a
snap
.

Two

What is the essence of life?

Without which substance do we meet death?

For despite the dark future the Ruin brings,

Her crown is made of that precious crimson.

—
C
ARDINAL
D
EMIAN
Y
ATES,
Translations of the Prophecy

T
he cigarette flared in the darkness of Angela’s room, but quickly dulled down to a delicate spot of orange, its tip floating around in the shade as Nina moved from the corner of her bed to the dressers and back again. She seemed fascinated by Angela’s doll collection, which wasn’t the most expensive or even the largest that could be found in the city, but certainly the most diverse. Angela had never quite understood her own obsession with dolls. It was kind of like her obsession with the angels, except instead of being fueled by dreams, it festered in that part of her preferring ceramic people to real ones. Artificial humans could be life-sized or small enough to fit in your pocket. You could dress them in the latest fashions, or force them to wear costumes that would make a showgirl jealous. But best of all, they were friends that would never judge you for things like blood-red hair and the scars on your legs. They didn’t care. They didn’t have hearts.

They sat in their orderly rows, deaf, blind, and beautiful. Forever.

“You have no idea how much this freaked me out when you opened the door.” Nina picked up the doll of a pretty woman jester, her curled hair gathered beneath the traditional three-pronged hat. She examined its feet, the jingling bells, and then set it back next to a shepherdess that was at least fifty years old; a hand-me-down given to Angela by her cousin. “And if you’re smart, you’ll never let anyone else see this fright fest. God, Angie, it’s messed up.”

But she was grinning.

“You should make one of Stephanie and stick pins in its knuckles.”

“Not really my style,” Angela said. “It’d be better to draw her in a gray purgatory somewhere. I don’t think I dislike her enough yet to choose some circle of hell.”

“I could ask if they have room for her there,” Nina said, her eyes sparkling.

Angela sighed. Stephanie had hinted that Nina was ultimately more interested in communicating with spirits than with other human beings.

But she wasn’t a blood head. The odds of her being able to do it at all were slim to none. Wishful thinking, probably.

“I don’t know if you need to. I could just paint her in some Academy tower, locked up in a circle of wet bricks, her hair growing longer but never drying out. In the end, Luz isn’t much different than purgatory, is it?”

Angela walked over to a window and pulled the curtains back, revealing a late-morning vista that could have been mistaken for a late-evening apocalypse. The sun tended to hide itself in Luz. Was it the position of the city relative to the winds and the tides? Was it the latitude? The chimney smoke? The pollution from the iron ships entering through the coastal supports? As the city grew, each building settled on top of the lesser architecture of its ancestors, the light sallowed more and more, its golden slivers less frequent amid the mists and the fog. Finally, the weekly forecast stalemated into storms, rain, or a monotonous sleet in the winter months—a foul time period where no one visited Luz, and nobody left. The city of lights, it was said, might have been cursed by the large number of blood heads living there. But they weren’t leaving any time soon. So, while they entered the school one after the other, the storms became more violent and the lightning developed into a plague, and people used the degrees of darkness to determine the hours of the day and the passing of the seasons.

Right now, it was early fall. Without the trees to say so, most students had only their calendars and the amount of rain in the streets to go by. The Academy Tree was one of the last of its species in Luz. The Vatican needed more space for housing than for giant weeds.

“You’ll get used to it after a while.” Nina took a long drag on her cigarette, tapping the ashes into a cup near Angela’s bed. “I’m surprised you like the sun anyway. Who does? It’s hot, and bright, and yellow, and it makes people shade off into a second-class tan. There’s nothing like that corpse-white hue.”

“Then I guess I am going to be popular for a change. I used to get tans all the time back home, and everyone said I’d end up marrying ‘beneath my family’s expectations.’ The more I liked that, the more they thought I was deranged. So then they sent me to the institution and I forgot what the sun was all about. I didn’t miss it so much until I got back home.”

“Are you?” Nina said. She lay down on the bed, flat on her stomach, a hand still lifting the cigarette to her lips.

Angela swept aside her hair, sitting down on the floor.

Dolls surrounded them from floor to ceiling, crowding the old bookshelves and storage cabinets, their glass eyes cold and scintillating. While most of her paintings remained hidden away in their portfolio cases, two of them hung on the walls, portals to either a dream or a nightmare, whichever happened to suit her fancy at the moment. She felt a kinship to both of them, one day aching for perfect beauty, and the next, for a grayness that wiped away her soul.

“Am I what?” she said, tugging on an arm glove.

“Deranged.”

What did she want to hear, anyway? But Nina was intent on the question, mouth set in a line of excited fear. As if she were watching a horror movie and couldn’t tear her eyes away.

“Well,” Angela said, lifting one of her hands, “Some people think I am.”

She slipped off the glove, allowing her scars and knife slashes to get some air. Nina locked on them without a sound, balancing the cigarette on her fingers, letting its ashes dribble onto the floor. Like she’d forgotten the world. “You sick bitch,” she said, awed.

“You sound like my parents.” Angela ran a finger along a particularly large burn. “My diagnosis was pretty grim from the beginning, you know. My brother was born during a freak storm that nearly swept away the hospital. I was born a few seconds after him, apparently tearing parts of Erianna to shreds on the way out. My mother,” she said, glancing at Nina, seeing there was need for explanation. “She could never have any more children after us. It was a miracle she even survived. And she and Marcus never let me forget it. They didn’t kill me outright. I was part of the Mathers family, and that wasn’t how they did things. Instead, they took a more passive route. Long years of no friends and a lot of harsh homeschooling. Some of the scars are from that.”

Nina opened her mouth, maybe to ask which ones. Then she simply said nothing.

“The paintings are what got me sent to the mental institution. I believed the angels were real—I still do—and I tried to kill myself a few times to get it over with. Because I wanted to be with people or beings that I really understood and cared for. At the institution they taught me how to make human friends and feel okay about the opposite sex, and I had a few brave boyfriends here and there when I got out. But I always wanted to be with him,” she said, pointing at the beautiful angel and his overly large, proud eyes, “and I kept trying. It’s simply my bad luck that I can’t kill myself and wake up in Heaven or Hell somewhere, staring back at him.”

“Why not?” Nina said, whispering.

“Because it doesn’t work.” Angela waved at a drawer in the end table near the bed. “Open that and give me the pocketknife inside, next to the notebook.”

Nina obeyed, tossing the closed knife at Angela.

She caught it with one hand. “Now,” she said, snapping the knife open, “watch carefully.”

“Wait a second,” Nina said, “you’re not going to actually—”

“I mean it. Keep watching.”

Angela pointed the blade’s tip at her heart and pulled her hand back, lifting it higher than she really needed to. Drama would help get the point across.

“Shit—” Nina sat up from the bed, looking like she was either going to scream or lunge for the knife. The cigarette dropped from her fingers to the floor. Her arms shook like twigs in the wind. “What the hell are you going to do—Angela—
no
—”

Angela brought the knife down against her chest, merciless.

Maybe I’ll get really lucky. Maybe I’ll do it this time.

The blade sank into her skin a half inch deep. A second later it broke with a loud
twang,
the handle flying onto the bed next to Nina, the rest of the blade dropping out of Angela’s skin and clattering to the hardwood floor, its once sleek metal now jagged at the edges. Warm blood pooled from the cut, soaking into her shirt. Nina stared at the knife on the bed like it was a demon crawling for her own throat. When she decided to look at Angela again, her face was even whiter than a cadaver’s.

“You sick bitch,” she said again, her lips almost slack. She began laughing. “I thought you were going to dye me red. You sick, lucky, lucky . . .”

She slid off the bed, stamping out the light of the fallen cigarette.

“Don’t even bother,” Angela said. She dabbed at the cut with the arm glove. “It’s not as deep as it looks. It never is.”

“How the heck—”

“Maybe there is a real angel, protecting me. That’s the only reason I can figure.” Angela leaned back, resting her elbows on the floor. More blood blossomed on her breast like a flower. “That’s why I have the burns. I got frustrated and tried fire, but I must have just fallen unconscious, and the blaze killed my family instead of me. All I got out of it was some freaky scar tissue.”

She lifted another arm, a leg.

“You didn’t go to jail? Even if it was an accident—”

“My family had good connections, good lawyers.” Angela shook her head. “And a reputation to uphold. My relatives just wanted me out of the picture, maybe so that Brendan could continue with his education, or maybe because they were afraid of me. But no matter what, it was an ironic way to get my freedom back.”

Nina played with her skirt, looking unsure of herself.

“Are you sad?” she eventually whispered. “I mean—that your parents died because of . . .”

Angela hushed along with her. “Because of me?”

Sad.

No. She’d murdered her guilt the second it became clear that nothing about her past could ever be changed. For better or for worse, her failure to die had erased the other lives that had made hers a nightmare. But even though that chapter of her life had ended as painfully as it began, it was finally over. The morning Angela awoke in the emergency ward, she almost felt resurrected. The possibilities for her future, limited as they might have been, somehow seemed endless.

“They were the ones who beat me when I cried. By the time they were gone—I promised myself whatever tears I had left wouldn’t go to waste.”

Nina nodded, suddenly more confident in the face of Angela’s confession. She rubbed a few tendrils of frizzy hair from her forehead. “I can’t say I don’t admire you for that. Most people would do what you said: wall themselves up and cry.” She sighed heavily. “Luz is a hell of a place to start over, though. You could have gone anywhere—”

“I came here to apologize to my brother. But also to see if there was a way I could find
him
.” Angela stood, walking over to the dazzling portrait next to her dressing mirror, brushing the curl of her angel’s bronze wings with a finger. “If that’s even possible. I’m a blood head, but besides dreams and lacking the ability to kill myself, I don’t have any other powers that I’m aware of. I was hoping that maybe the priests could help me. It’s a long shot, but the Vatican is the worldwide authority on angels, aren’t they? I’ve been thinking that somebody could recognize these two. Tell me who they are and why I dream about them. Or even help me see them somehow. Which reminds me—”

Angela stooped down and picked up the broken knife blade, handing it to Nina.

“I’ve been going over this in my head since last night—and if you came to visit, I thought I’d ask—could you do it? Could you . . . kill me?”

Nina focused on her feet, half biting her lip. “God. What makes you think I’d say yes?”

“I don’t know.”

A lie. Kind of.

“And what makes you think I won’t go to the school counselors and tell them about this? That I won’t get you kicked out of the Academy? Or”—Nina’s face darkened, a wicked light brightening her eyes—“sent back to that institution?”

Angela shrugged. Good questions, but she had an answer for most of them. “Because I know you’re a lot like me. Because I could tell them that you’re a nut who believes she’s talking to spirits, and then suggest that we both end up in an institution together. Though I’d probably be the only one to survive it. And not even by my own choice.”

Nina examined her, cautious. More respectful. “What makes you think that I’d even be successful?”

“Other people can hurt me. Pretty badly if they want to. My parents have, my tutor did. But they never went far enough, like they knew that keeping me alive was more of a punishment.” She fiddled with the knife blade for a second longer, handing it to Nina again. “I want someone to do me a favor, and I don’t want it to be someone who gets off on violence and guts. That’s like prostituting myself. And just so you know, I won’t hold it against you. You can have all of my belongings. Everything. I want to get the hell out of here.”