Archon (40 page)

Nina appeared out of the void, grabbing Angela by the arm.

A deep gash cut her throat from chin to collarbone. Someone had killed her while she’d been standing guard by Tileaf’s tree, and Mikel very well might have used Nina’s own hand to accomplish the murder. “Angela, I’m going to take your place.”

“Take my place?” Angela screamed over more screams. “No! You have to go up the stairway—with the rest of them—”

The tears rolled down her face, surprising and pathetic.

I might as well have killed her myself.

“I can’t!” Nina shouted at her. “You have to go back to Luz! This is the only way—you can’t leave the Netherworld like the others!”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not dead!”

“But where are you going?”

Nina’s eyes widened, their whites no longer bloodshot now that she was deceased. In that instant, she looked calmer and more sane than at any time before, all her fear of Stephanie, and Lucifel, and of the absurd importance of Academy life lost in the definition of her fate. Then, the ground opened up. A sky thick with gray clouds appeared below them, a horrendous stench of sulfur and smoke steaming up through the gap.

Nina fell down into the hole, her hand ripping sharply from Angela’s arm.

In the same instant, Angela went up, breaking through the whorl of darkness above them and into a brilliant light.

She was crying when she landed in the grotto, its trees smothered in their heaps of ash, Tileaf’s oak split viciously down the middle. Black snow drifted to the ground, illuminated by lightning that cracked through the sky in javelins of white and green, and by the great Ladder that suddenly was so much closer and so much brighter. The ashy crystals fell in such thickness it was difficult to see, but Angela didn’t need to search for long.

Stephanie strode toward her, her figure emerging through the drifts. Her eyes were back to their normal green shade, overflowing with all the tears Mikel had stifled. Abruptly, she paused, swaying like she’d pitch into the ground. “It’s all your fault,” she said, her whisper cracked with grief.

Her mind must have returned again.

But Angela was just as ready for it to leave. She wiped away her tears, stumbling from a burned patch of earth. “Don’t try it,” she said. “I’ll fight you this time. Even if it kills me.”

“That’s fine,” Stephanie said, the tears rolling down her face. “It’s too late for me anyway.”

Angela paused, wary.

“I have to admit it. I’m jealous, Angela. Because it’s just not fair. You thought your life was so bad, but look at you. You’re the Archon. You have everything now. And I”—her voice trembled—“I have
nothing
. No father, no mother.” She choked back more tears. “Naamah won’t want me now. Not anymore.”

What was going on here? Stephanie’s expression was saturated with despair.

There was a gentle, crunching noise from behind.

Angela turned around, peering through the snow.

Sophia padded gently through the blackness, her beautiful face more frozen than the rain. Something was wrong. She’d been with Israfel—and now she’d walked out of nowhere just in time for Stephanie’s arrival?

“I am the Ruin,” Stephanie was saying, “just not in the way I’d hoped. Now, it’s time to prove it to you once and for all. I command you to show me the Book.”

Forty

Ruin is an essential element of the universe.

But in the very end, this balance shall tip precariously.

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

S
ophia looked past Angela, deep into an unfathomable nothingness that hovered far beyond Earth. Her eyes were more vacant than the sky, and the light from the stairway cast her features into fierce, powerful angles. Her hair whipped in a breeze that didn’t even exist. Never had she seemed so frightening, so bottled up—like an explosion waited to burst out of her, hungry to burn everything that existed to death. “This is your last chance at redemption, Stephanie,” she said softly. Too softly. “Turn aside and leave me alone. Even if it means killing yourself. We both know there are worse fates.”

Stephanie’s face blanched. “You know I can’t do that.”

“The weakness of your soul,” Sophia said, “is no one’s fault but yours. But I warned you once before—and I suppose that was enough.”

Sophia’s polite smile was chilling.

Stephanie blinked back at her, at Angela, at the mysterious snow and the utter stillness of the park, and for a second it looked like she would actually change her mind. But the moment streaked past like a dream, and then she was walking toward Sophia, her eyes watering with pain. Every step seemed forced on her, and she struggled helplessly against it.

Angela shifted away, unnerved and admittedly terrified. “Sophia—”

“No,” Sophia said with a mother’s crispness, “let her go.”

“But she’s not—”

“
Let her go
.”

Sophia held out her hands, materializing a familiar Book held safely by her delicate fingers. It was a large tome with a sapphire cover and a gray eye—exactly like her own eyes—staring intently at Stephanie. Stephanie grabbed it with violently shivering hands, her eyes wide and wild. Desperate with fear.

Angela could sense the bated breaths inside the Park. They weren’t alone.

“I can’t—” Stephanie slid a finger beneath the cover, ready to flip it open.

There should have been explosions. More lightning. A shudder through the universe.

Something.

Instead, Stephanie opened the Book like a normal manual from a library shelf, scattering pages with her fingers. But the more she perused, the more perplexed her expression became, and finally she dashed it into the snow, shrieking. “I can’t—it’s not there. The Key isn’t there,” she moaned, explaining herself to someone else. “I can’t. There’s nothing in there.
Nothing
.”

Sophia folded her hands calmly. “That’s because you didn’t open the Book.”

Stephanie stared at her, as if she sensed what was coming next and why.

“That was simply the illusion of trying. And you knew that from the very start. Before you used this girl to experiment—and to set your spirit free.”

There was a silence deeper than the blackness in the Netherworld.

At first, just as when Stephanie had tried to open the Book, nothing out of the ordinary seemed to happen. She and Sophia had locked gazes, and that was all. But gradually, as seconds turned into minutes, her face began to change. She was seeing something—maybe in Sophia’s eyes, maybe somewhere else—and her own eyes became even wider, and her mouth moved in soundless whispers. Then she began to shake. All over. Stephanie clutched her head, screaming at the top of her lungs, the noise reaching up into the sky and then back to stab through the heart. She was going insane, babbling almost incoherently.

Because she’s not Israfel, or Lucifel—or me.

“The eyes—so many eyes. What are—what is—
GOD, NO. NO.
”

And the denials continued, screeching and horrible.

Then, the world did seem to explode.

Stephanie collapsed into the black snow, a buzzing mass of flies erupting from her body as if they’d escaped through her pores. They gathered into a silhouette, a figure.

Angela thought she might die on the spot.

The Black Prince.
The Destroyer Supernal.

The titles cycled inside of her head, screaming themselves into existence.

The Ruin.

Though . . . there can be two
 
. . .

Lucifel—or more like her shadowy semblance—stood in front of Sophia, aloof and satisfied, her crimson eyes piercing. It was impossible to look at her as she truly was, and also even more impossible to look away. This was her mere shadow, but the shape, the color of her eyes, and the severe, beautiful contours of her face struck Angela dumb. She was Israfel’s antithesis in every way, sharp where he was curved, hard where he was sensual, her presence seducing you by force rather than choice. How tall she was. Slim like a man, and with a man’s casual stance. Faintly, Angela could distinguish her clothing, a tight black fabric stitched, and stitched again. With her pale skin and that sickly gleam to her eyes, she resembled a body sewn together and brought back to life.

She was the one who had possessed Stephanie all along.

Angela had called her spirit along with Mikel’s on the night of the summoning, not even knowing it, hardly registering what those bloody pentagrams had meant.
God
. It was Angela’s fault, exactly as Stephanie had said. Unwillingly, unknowingly, she’d released a part of the Devil from her cage, practically begging her to kill her when she had the chance.

And she’d been talking with her the entire time.

Lucifel glanced up at Sophia, her jaw set with disappointment.

Apparently, her experiment had proven Raziel correct.

Before Angela could say a word, the wind picked up. Wings beat powerfully above her, thundering away the snow.

She fell beneath the shadows, squeezing her eyes shut.

Two angels descended on Lucifel, one on either side. Israfel’s two guardians. Angela had thought they’d been an illusion, or a product of her imagination, but they were real, and they struck their own kind of terror into the heart, their faces blazing with anger.

The angels streaked like dive-bombing eagles.

Lucifel waved her hand.

Electricity snapped around her in a sphere of crimson, and they plummeted. Both angels screamed savagely, rolling in the snow like its touch was poison. But before Lucifel could silence them permanently, Israfel appeared.

Now the contrast was even more striking.

“Angry?” he whispered to her, somehow audible over Stephanie’s screeching. She continued to rock on the ground, hair disheveled around her face. “That makes two of us.”

Crimson stripes flared to life below his eyes, and his pink lips pursed together.

His wings quivered, spasming away the flakes as they touched his feathers.

Lucifel smiled. Then she zeroed in on the Ladder, its brilliance half veiled by the snow. She didn’t run, she didn’t fly, but her figure erupted into a buzzing mass again and zoomed with lethal determination toward the golden light.

Israfel followed immediately, graceful despite his anger, his six wings shining through the blackness.

Angela scrabbled up from the ground, racing behind him.

They’re fast. I don’t stand a chance.

Would Lucifel kill him? She was frightening enough, and this was only her shadow.

The flakes melted where they met Angela’s skin, staining it with an oily residue. She was completely soaked when she burst through a burned stand of bracken, skidding to a halt at the base of the impossibly large stairway. Each one of its steps seemed overly enormous up close, and they shimmered with an unearthly pearlescence that had dazzled from a distance but somehow become more tolerable. as if everything Angela understood about light had suddenly changed.

Overhead, the sky rippled, its maw deep and fathomless where the last of the souls were vanishing into another dimension. The spiraling bridge seemed to extend up into nothingness itself, its height impossible and staggering; a testament to how any human perception of distance meant nothing to angels.

That explained it.

The stairway was operating on an entirely different kind of physics—and it had allowed Israfel and his sister to already reach the halfway point.

Lightning arced down from the clouds, hissing where it touched parts of Luz or the ocean.

Angela glanced back down at her feet again. The stairway’s steps seemed made of a dazzling gold that had all the clarity of crystal. Carefully, Angela tapped one of them gently with her boot and finding it solid, braved another. Then another.

Good enough.

She dashed after the two Supernals, her heart pounding along with her footsteps.

Shots of electricity seared the air higher on the stairway.

Thunder boomed around them, the air contracting and expanding beneath the onslaught.

Lucifel had taken shape again, and both she and Israfel were two streaks of gray and white, half running and half flying, higher and higher, water from the sea spiraling up around them in a vortex of diamonds. But though Lucifel often turned to answer Israfel’s blasts of electricity, she was still ahead, aiming for the hole in the sky. Angela pushed herself harder, biting back the pain in her joints, only mildly shocked by how the earth below was suddenly so small, so inconsequential. She couldn’t afford anything more than a glance—both for her sanity and for the sake of time.

Luz sat below her like a plate of buildings, nearly sliding into the sea. Waves churned against its lower levels, some of them seeping deeply into alleyways, streets, homes, and dormitories.

More lightning surrounded the stairway in silver forks.

Lucifel wants to go through that hole.

She was going to escape into the higher dimensions, to wreak whatever havoc suited her hunger for silence. That simply couldn’t happen.

Angela wouldn’t let it happen.

She clenched her teeth, stabbing her fingernails into the Eye.

It began to bleed, blue liquid warming her hands. Almost—she was almost there.

“Does this part of me hurt you that much, Israfel?” The Devil’s voice was as soft as before, yet unbelievably loud, her words echoing throughout the warped space around the stairs. Each word seemed to ricochet like a bullet. “But if you stood still, it would all be over soon. You know you can’t defeat me like this.”

The light somehow leeched away at Israfel’s loveliness, turning the kohl darkening the circles of his eyes into blotches of pain. He wobbled on his feet for a second, clutching at his stomach with a hiss of agony, his wings flapping. Then he flew for Lucifel, meeting with her so that they crashed and tumbled dangerously down the stairs. Her shadow was still solid enough for a physical battle—until it dispersed again, regathering to swarm around Israfel in a buzzing mass.

He used an etheric blast to break up the cloud, but it swirled back, suffocating.

“
I’m eager to learn how you survived all this time
.” Her voice was now disembodied, echoing. “
You and that infant hope of yours.
”

He was on the defensive, using his wings to fend off her attacks, his gorgeous eyes tainted by the vicious pride behind them.

“
But if you’d allow it, I’ll forget the past and finish what I started.
”

She
was
going to kill him.

Angela had finally gained on them, only twenty feet away, if that. Her mind was almost numb with rage, and the blood in her hands solidified to match the ice in her heart, lengthening, stretching, until she held a long shaft capped by a scimitar of crystalline blue.

The Glaive.

She’d at last conjured the same weapon that had killed countless angels, the same weapon rumored to have the power to cut through anything, that could terrorize the entire universe, as if she were a newborn god of death, introducing herself to the masses. But this was the Archon’s symbol now, not Lucifel’s. And Angela wasn’t about to use it for the same thing twice.

Israfel spotted her, his eyes hard with a new fear.

He was gasping for breath, too weak to move, maybe to speak.

Lucifel’s cloud sucked in on itself, re-forming into her tall body and imposing stance. She turned her head sharply and glared at Angela, eyes narrow with recognition.

According to her expression, Angela shouldn’t have been able to climb the stairway.

Lucifel gestured with a finger, and an etheric blast struck Angela hard in the chest. It flung her backward, stunning her in a tremendous burst of pain.