Archon (35 page)

“A fine performance, Troy. It deserves a round of applause.”

Troy’s eyes blinked open on the far side of the room. “Oh, but this one’s my parting gift, Sariel. No more sinewy flesh between my teeth.” Her growl was low and thick. “You understand this is your end? I’m finding myself insatiably hungry for the blood of a half-breed. Especially,” she snarled, “one who deserves the same death as his father.”

His voice shook along with his body. “Not yet.”

“I’ve tolerated you long enough. From this point on, I can smell the difference between the Archon and a heap of meat.”

“I know where the Book of Raziel is.”

Troy emerged slightly from the darkness, her ears flicking, catching the noise outside of his door. The cruel perception behind her eyes was like a knife, twisting into him. “You lie. More lies.”

“No,” he said crisply, “I know where she is.”

“She.” Troy’s wings snapped violently. Fury croaked at her shoulder, impatient. “A person? What idiotic nonsense is this?”

“But for me to show you, I’ll have to be alive. Of course.”

“If you’re wasting my time, I’ll make death more slow and painful than you’ve ever thought possible.”

Kim glanced at Lyrica’s body lying on the floor. Troy had left more of her remains intact than his student Telissa’s, yet that only made everything worse.

Troy blinked back at him, her expression suggesting she was supremely disgusted, perhaps nauseated, by his weak stomach. It was one of the reasons that half-breeds were commonly aborted. They were considered weak inside and out. Thanks to his far from blameless mother, Kim was now the only half-Jinn in the world. Like Angela, he belonged neither here nor there. But the more the world had tried to squash him, the sharper his proverbial teeth had become.

Now his bite was as hard as Troy’s, if in other ways.

“If we find Israfel, we find the Book.”

Troy looked at Fury and the bird vanished through the broken window, gliding effortlessly through the too-calm sky. The Vapor disappeared fast, a black speck mixing into a canvas of deeper black and deadly green. Already, she was off searching for another bird, only whiter, smarter, and much more human looking.

Once Fury’s telepathic messages began, Troy would discard Kim fast.

He had to hurry.

The pounding on the door was furious now. Someone worked at the hinges, attempting to screw them apart.

But that was his only escape.

Troy noticed the grim clench of his jaw. She smiled at the door, and her ears folded back with anticipation. “By all means,” she said, painfully delighted, her nails scraping across the hardwood, “be a man and lead the way.”

Thirty-five

Luz’s greatest asset, and its greatest curse, are one and the same. The Fae, dying though she may be, is still strong enough to be of use to us. But this I stress: she must stay alive.

—
A
RCHBISHOP
G
REGORY
T
.
S
OLOMON, PRIVATE LETTER TO THE
V
ATICAN

A
ngela knelt next to Tileaf’s body, sweeping green hair away from blood and dirt and the Fae’s own dead leaves. It had been too easy to kill her, a sign of just how weak the priests had made this former angel, tormenting her with their constant demands. The moment she died, Memorial Park seemed to shiver, the trees dropping leftover leaves to the ground, branches and trunks crashing into the earth in a broken circle around Angela and Nina. For now, though, there had come a pause—a deep and terrible silence. Angela wiped her fingers on Tileaf’s tattered dress, ruining the fabric with inky blue blood.

The mysterious knife had melted out of Angela’s hands into a puddle all over the Fae’s legs and ankles. The wound in her chest looked so small, so insignificant compared to the damage it had done.

Blue blood
.
Not red.

Angela gasped for breath, fighting off a sweeping sickness in the pit of her stomach. Then she stood, her knees wobbling a little, her palm aching where the Grail had nestled into the skin. She opened it, staring back at the stone that was enough of an Eye to contain a startling amount of liquid. And worst of all, perhaps it also contained a soul. A spirit that cursed all who wore it and wielded it, damning them along with the cries of the angels it had murdered.

Lucifel’s Glaive, the weapon she’d used to strike fear into so many hearts, had been made of blood.

But whose?

It doesn’t matter. If this Grail belongs to me now, so do the people who’ve died because of it. Tileaf was just one more.

Her whole body ached inside, like she’d been punched and bruised everywhere. Yet Angela’s soul had never felt stronger. The voice that had echoed inside of her, that had given her the courage and resolve to do what she’d never thought possible, had faded back into her memories. But it had also left behind a passionate sense of certainty, and a strange lack of sorrow. Tileaf had wanted this death, and Angela had given her what she wanted. There was nothing deeper to it than that. Like the voice within had said, Angela had simply taken back what belonged to her in the first place, as if she’d rediscovered some precious object she’d originally lost. The new question was whether that object had been the Grail, Tileaf’s life, or both.

She said there were consequences for using the Grail. Maybe she was talking about my feelings.

“She looks so peaceful,” Nina whispered.

Angela shifted uneasily in front of the oak. The blood was making her sick. Her own thoughts were making her sick. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For not doing it when I first met her. She was suffering so much . . . Those priests were such bastards.” Angela’s fingers curled into fists. The Eye pulsed inside of her palm, throbbing with her heartbeat. “ ‘I make the rules.’ That’s the thought I keep hearing and feeling, over and over in my head. But I wonder—does a thought, no matter how convincing it feels, justify this?”

Nina’s irises brightened to Mikel’s red. Apparently, her agreement with the angel involved them sharing space equally. When one gave way to the other, eventually there would be a reversal. “That depends on who’s thinking it.”

“Right.” Angela sighed, stepping away from Tileaf. “I guess.”

“There’s no time to mourn, Angela. You must enter the Netherworld or Tileaf will have died in vain.”

That’s the problem. I’m not mourning at all.

Angela gestured at the trees. “That would be a lot easier if there was a way in.”

“Underground.” Nina’s voice again. She weaved her away around the roots that separated them so they stood side by side, and then grabbed Angela by the arm, tugging her nearer to a large gap at the oak’s base. It was a huge hole, gaping from beneath a tangle of roots thick as her body, their surfaces gnarled and knobbed with grotesque whorls. “You have to dig. The tunnel should emerge clearly and then—”

“And then?”

“The door.”

“You’re saying I crawl through a tunnel of dirt and push through a door?”

“It’s the only way for a mortal to access the Underworld from Earth without dying. This is why Luz exists. This is the gateway to the other dimensions, whether higher or lower. To Heaven or Hell. But first, you need to get around Azrael.”

Tileaf had mentioned the same name. “Who is that? An angel?”

“You’ll see.”

Angela wasn’t keen on seeing anything at all. This situation was far from what she’d been expecting. A dazzling portal of light, maybe, or a gaping staircase in the earth. Instead she was going to breach the world of the dead through a worm tunnel, and Nina—or more correctly Mikel—acted like they were strolling out to buy bread. Tileaf had said that she needed to die for Angela to enter the Netherworld, but except for the trees’ branches and leaves crashing down, nothing had changed. “She lied to me, didn’t she?” Angela knelt beside Nina, following her lead and scooping dirt out of the hollow. “Tileaf didn’t have to die for us to find this.”

Nina glanced at Angela, her irises back to their dull darkness. “That’s not true. She was blocking the way in.”

Angela sank her fingernails into the dirt, clawing, pulling through fibrous roots and soggy bits of mulch. Worms and wood lice spilled out of the hole, scattering beneath other roots or burrowing down below the leaf litter. Angela slid across a few of the worms, almost certainly squishing them in the grooves of her boots.

“Tileaf herself, not the tree, kept the creatures underneath from emerging above, and vice versa. Now that she’s gone . . .”

“The door’s just sitting there,” Angela finished for her. She wiped some of the mud off her hands and onto her skirt. It was beyond salvation at this point anyway. “So what does that mean? Could creatures from Hell eventually make their way into Luz?”

Nina sighed. “What does it sound like to you? But that’s not the issue right now.”

“What bothers me is”—Angela reached in with both arms, churning through the dirt, spitting out the mud that crept its way into her mouth—“the idea that angels and demons could just come to Earth in droves. They could stamp us flat.”

“But that’s the mistake people make. Earth is an important place for humans, but angels couldn’t care less about it.” Nina rocked back on her heels, letting Angela punch through the last layer of dirt and rocks that had blocked off the tunnel. It was large enough for at least one person to slide inside. The land within dropped at a slow angle into the earth, thousands of roots dangling from its ceiling in webs and tendrils. “To them this planet is only what you’re sifting through. Dirt.”

Ow. What the—

A sharp sting creased through Angela’s palm. She pulled back her hand, examining the Eye. Flesh had closed over it like a lid, protecting it from the humus and the soil. Either it had a mind of its own, or her body was working on some crazy angelic instincts. She sucked back the sour nausea creeping into her head, dizzy. The sky rumbled faintly overhead, but otherwise there was too much quiet. Too much heavy silence.

“Remember what I said,” Nina pushed her toward the tunnel. “Be strong about this, Angela.”

“Hold on,” Angela went down on her stomach, peering into the musty gloom, “I don’t see a door.”

“You have to crawl.”

“How far?”

Nina shrugged, ruffling a hand through her frizzy hair. “God. I don’t know.”

“Does Mikel?” Angela snapped at her.

“She said she’ll meet you inside. Once you pass through the door.” Nina’s irises began to redden at the corners. She crossed her arms, suddenly glancing at the sky like it was a predator out for the hunt. When she turned back, her smile was more one of farewell than encouragement. “Because from what I’ve learned, you’ll need all the help you can get.”

A
ngela scooted through the tunnel, her fingers curling into mud and mounds of decay. Insects dropped on her back from overhead, and the gloomy light of Memorial Park disappeared fast. This felt too much like being locked in a closet or spending a day in the crawlspace of her parents’ basement, both of which she’d experienced as punishment.

But that was the one good thing she’d inherited from her time at the institution—a way to make her brain melt away her most traumatic memories in favor of others.

And when she couldn’t do that, Angela simply accepted them and choked down the pain, quarantining it inside the part of her soul that grew angrier by the day. The part of her that found freedom in the arms of Kim—or Israfel, even if she had to imagine the angel’s embrace, even if half of his feelings had been a dream.

But he was real. And the time for dreams was officially over.

Angela took ragged breaths, inching on her elbows through the darkness, determined to focus on anything other than the wall of earth surrounding her.

Israfel . . . He has Sophia now. What if he finds out how to open her?

Tileaf had mentioned a Key and a Lock, both missing. Yet that strange detail didn’t make Angela feel any better. Israfel was Raziel’s brother, a Supernal, and one of the only creatures in the universe who could open the Book without going mad. If Israfel knew where to look and how to use what he found, there was a chance, however slim, that he would act in the best interests of himself and not so much everyone else. Otherwise, why would Raziel go through the trouble of reincarnation to open the Book himself? There must have been a reason—a very good reason—why Sophia couldn’t simply blab every little secret inside of her. And also why Raziel wanted as few people as possible to hear those secrets.

That’s why the demons want the Archon on Hell’s Throne. It has to be.

To manipulate Her. Use Her as a puppet to open Raziel’s Book, and then—

Then they’ll murder Her. Whoever is in charge under Lucifel will kill the Archon, take the power inside of the Book—inside Sophia—and rule in Her place.

My
place.

But they couldn’t do that if
Lucifel
murdered the Archon first. Or opened the Book first. Because it was rather obvious that if Angela was the Archon—and with every passing second, she felt more strongly that this was the case—then Lucifel would torture her until she found the Key, the Lock, and everything that went with it. When it came down to it, Angela now had two very powerful and very real enemies. The gray angel she’d grown so reluctantly fond of after years of memories and dreams, and the demons who either wanted Lucifel gone or wanted a figurehead they could murder with much greater expediency whenever the time arrived.

Too bad they didn’t know who they were dealing with.

Angela hadn’t forgotten about punishing Stephanie for Brendan’s death. Instead, she now felt vengeance was her absolute right.

Her breath huffed out of her, stifled. The tunnel could have been losing all its air, and now the earth would swallow her like a gigantic snake, its roots and sticky strands of what could have been spiderwebs or moss sliding across her cheeks, hair, and shoulders. Angela fought with the panic scorching her nerves, the heaviness tugging on her brain, the sweat trickling down her neck. There was no turning back. And this could go on for a long time. Hours, days, a week. And she hadn’t brought any food, or water, or even better clothing so that the centipedes didn’t crawl across her skin. Why couldn’t she have been Troy, just for one brief second? If what Kim had said was true, the spaces Troy scampered through were even narrower.

It was so ironic. For years, Angela had wanted nothing more than to kill herself.

Now, death actually frightened her. Because now, she wasn’t trying anymore.

And if it’s not deliberate
 
. . .

Then it could very well happen.

She reached out to pull herself forward—and stubbed her fingernails against metal. Angela hissed back the pain, taking a moment for her digits to stop throbbing. Then she searched in the darkness again, soon scraping her fingertips across a cool metal hatch. It had a ring for a handle, and on its surface someone had embossed what felt like a Tree surrounded by flames or clouds. She pulled, hard, groaning with the effort. Eventually realizing her error, she pushed in the opposite direction.

The hatch opened, smoothly and silently.

Angela paused for a moment, letting the sweat dribble into her mouth. Gathering her courage, she bit her lip and stuck her arm through the opening.

Air. Empty space. And a dismal, vacuous smell that came from everywhere at once.

“Nina!” she shouted. “Nina! What do I do now? Just go through this thing?”