The Fallen Sequence (142 page)

The blond girl, the one who’d helped nurse Daedalus back to health, grabbed a barely breathing female Scale angel by the hair. The old hag’s moldy blue wings trembled as the blond Outcast battered the Scale’s head against a marble pillar. She shrieked the first four or five times her head struck the stone. Then the shrieks petered out and her bulged eyes rolled back in her head.

Phil struggled with the black straitjacket fastened around Luce. His quick fingers made up for his lack of
sight. An unconscious Scale angel fell from somewhere above her, his battered cheek coming to rest between her neck and shoulder. She felt hot blood trickle onto her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut and shuddered.

Phil kicked the angel off the table, sending him into Luce’s one-eyed captor, who still staggered clumsily around the room, groaning, “Why me? I do everything right.”

“He has the halo—” Luce started.

But Phil’s attention jerked back to the sickly mass of Scale angel wings, where a portly Scale with hair like a Tibetan monk’s had risen and now advanced on Daedalus from behind. A coarse black cloak hung over the Outcast’s head, ready to drop.

“I will be right back, Lucinda Price.” Phil left Luce in her binds on the table and nocked a starshot in his bow. In an instant, he had shoved himself between Daedalus and the Scale angel.

“Drop the cloak, Zaban.” Phil looked as fierce as he had when he’d first appeared in Luce’s parents’ backyard. Luce was surprised to realize they knew each other by name, but of course, they must have once all lived in Heaven together. That was hard to imagine now.

Zaban had watery blue eyes and bluish lips. He looked almost gleeful at finding the starshot pointed at him. He slung the cloak over his shoulder and turned to
face Phil, freeing Daedalus to pick up a spindly Scale angel by the feet. He swung the old angel around in a circle three times, then sent him crashing through the eastern window, out into a tower of scaffolding below.

“Threatening to shoot me, are you, Phillip?” Zaban’s eyes were on the starshot. “You want to tip the balance toward Lucifer? Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

Phil bristled. “You don’t matter enough for your death to tip the balance.”

“At least we count for
something
. All together, our lives make a difference in the balance. Justice always makes a difference. You Outcasts”—he smiled in mock pity—“stand for nothing. That is what makes you worthless.”

That was enough for Phil. There was something about this Scale he couldn’t endure. With a grunt he loosed the arrow toward Zaban’s heart.

“I stand opposed to you,” he muttered, and waited for the blue-winged geezer to vanish.

Luce waited for the vanishing, too. She’d seen it happen before. But the arrow glanced off Zaban’s cloak and clattered to the floor.

“How did you—?” Phil asked.

Zaban laughed and pulled something from a hidden breast pocket in his cloak. Luce leaned forward, eager to see how Zaban had protected himself. But she leaned
too far and slid off the table. She landed on the floor on her face.

No one noticed. They were staring at the small book Zaban had produced from his cloak. Propping herself up slightly, Luce saw it was bound in leather, the same shade of blue as Scale angel wings. It was bound with a knotted golden cord. It looked like a Bible, the kind Civil War soldiers used to stuff in their breast pockets in the hope the books would protect their hearts.

This book had done just that.

Luce squinted to read its title, squirming a few inches closer on the floor. She was still too far away.

In a single movement, Phil retrieved his starshot and swatted the book out of Zaban’s hand. By a stroke of luck, it landed a few feet away from Luce. She wriggled again, knowing she couldn’t pick it up, not the way the cloak was binding her. Still, she had to know what its pages contained. It seemed familiar, as if she’d seen it long, long before. She read the golden letters on its spine.

A Record of the Fallen

Now Zaban ran for it, stopping short of Luce, who lay exposed in the center of the floor. He glared at her and pocketed the book.

“No, no,” he said.
“You
don’t get to look at this. You
don’t get to see all that’s been accomplished by Scale wings. Nor what’s left to do to achieve the ultimate harmonious balance. Not when you’ve spent all this time too busy to take note of us, to take note of justice, selfishly falling in and out of love.”

Though Luce hated the Scale, if there was a record of the fallen, she burned to know whose names were on those pages, to see where Daniel’s name was tallied now. This was what the fallen kept talking about. A single angel who would tip the scale.

But before Zaban could hurtle any more criticism at Luce, a pair of brilliant white wings filled her vision—an angel descending through the largest hole in the skylights.

Daniel touched down in front of her and eyed the cloak imprisoning her. He studied her constricted neck. His muscles strained through his T-shirt as he tried to tear the cloak away.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Phil lift a small pickax from a nearby table and slice it across Zaban’s chest. The Scale angel swerved, trying to spin out of range. The blade connected with his arm. The blow was so powerful it severed Zaban’s hand at the wrist. Sickened, Luce watched the pale, slack fist thump to the floor. Aside from the blue blood streaming from it, it could have belonged to one of the ravaged statues.

“Tie that on with one of your knots,” Phil taunted as
Zaban fumbled after his missing appendage among the battered, unconscious bodies of his sect.

“Is it hurting you?” Daniel tore at the knots binding Luce.

“No.” She willed it to be true. It almost was.

When brute force didn’t work, Daniel tried approaching the cloak more strategically. “I had the loose end just a moment ago,” he muttered. “Now it’s riddled up inside the cloak.” His fingers inched across her body, feeling close and far away.

Luce wished that her hands, over any other part of her body, were free so she could touch Daniel right now, soothe his anxiety. She trusted him to free her. She trusted him to do anything.

What could she do to help him? She closed her eyes and drifted back to the lifetime in Tahiti. Daniel had been a sailor. He had taught her dozens of knots in their quiet afternoons on the beach. She remembered now: the alpine butterfly, which made a long loop in the middle of a rope with two lobed wings on either side, good for carrying extra weight on a line. Or the lover’s knot, which looked simple, heart-shaped, but could only be untied using four hands at once; each one had to loop a strand through a different portion of the heart’s core.

The cloak was so tight Luce could not move a muscle. His fingers trolled the collar, tightening it further. Daniel cursed at how it pinched her neck.

“I can’t,” he finally cried out. “The Scale straitjacket is composed of infinite knots. Only one of them can unbind it. Who did this to you?”

Luce jerked her head toward the blue-winged angel howling to himself, staggering in a corner by a marble faun. The starshot fletching still protruded from his eye. She wanted to tell Daniel how her captor had taken out Olianna with a flagpole, then bound her up and brought her here.

But she could not even speak. The cloak was too tight.

By then, Phil had the whining angel in his grasp, gripped by the collar of his blood-wet cloak. He slapped the Scale three times before the Scale ceased his self-pitying moans and pulled back his blue wings in alarm. Luce saw that a thick ring of dried blue blood had formed around the place where the starshot fletching protruded from his socket.

“Unbind her, Barach,” Daniel ordered, recognizing Luce’s captor immediately, making Luce wonder how well they knew each other.

“Not likely.” Barach leaned away and spat a stream of blue blood and a couple of sharp and tiny teeth out onto the floor.

In a flash, Phil had a starshot trained between the angel’s eyes. “Daniel Grigori instructed you to unbind her. You will oblige.”

Barach flinched, eyeing the starshot with disdain. “Vile. Vile!”

A dark shadow fell over Phil’s body.

Hazily, Luce processed the sight of another Scale angel, the craggy old hag with moldy blue wings. She must have roused herself after she’d been knocked out. Now she came at Phil with the same pickax he’d used on Zaban—

But then the Scale angel vanished into dust.

Ten feet behind her, Vincent stood with an empty bow in hand. He nodded at Phil, then turned back to scour the carpet of blue wings for movement.

Daniel turned to Phil and muttered, “We need to be careful about how many we take out. The Scale do matter in the balance. A little.”

“Unfortunate,” Phil said, strange envy in his voice. “We will keep the killing to a minimum, Daniel Grigori. But we would prefer to kill all of them.” He raised his voice for Barach’s ears. “Welcome to the realm of sightlessness. The Outcasts are more powerful than you think. I would kill you without a second thought, without a first one, even. However, I will ask again: Unbind her.”

Barach stood for a long moment, as if weighing his options, blinking his one remaining wrinkled old eyelid.

“Unbind her! She cannot breathe!” Daniel roared.

Barach growled and approached Luce. His age-spotted
hands worked out a series of knots that neither Phil nor Daniel had been able to find. Luce felt no relief in her neck, though. Not until he began to whisper something, very low, under his rancid breath.

Lack of oxygen had made her feel faint, but the words tunneled into her foggy mind. They were an ancient form of Hebrew. Luce didn’t know how she knew the language, but she did.

“And Heaven wept to see the sins of her children.”

The words were almost unintelligible. Daniel and Phil had not even heard them. Luce couldn’t be sure she’d heard them right—but then, they were familiar. Where had she heard them before?

The memory came to her faster than she would have liked: a different member of the Scale, sweeping Luce in a different body into an older cloak than this one. It had happened a very long time ago. She’d been through all this before, bound up and then released.

In that lifetime, Luce had gotten her hands on something she wasn’t supposed to see. A book, tied up with a complicated knot.

A Record of the Fallen
.

What was she doing with it? What did she want to see?

The same thing she wanted to see now. The names of
the angels who had yet to choose. But she hadn’t been permitted to read the book then, either.

Long before, Luce had held the book in her hands, and without knowing how, she had nearly untied its knot. Then came the moment when the Scale caught her and bound her in the cloak. She had watched his blue wings shudder with intensity as the angel tied and retied the book. Making sure her impure fingers hadn’t damaged it, he had said. She heard him whisper those words—the same strange words—just before he shed a tear over the book.

The gold thread had unraveled like magic.

She looked up at the craggy old angel now and watched a silvery tear slide from his eye down the maze of his cheek. He looked truly moved, but in a patronizing sort of way, like he pitied the fate of her soul. The tear landed on the cloak, and the knots mysteriously unknotted.

She gasped for air. Daniel yanked the cloak the rest of the way off her. She swung her arms around him. Freedom.

She was still embracing Daniel when Barach leaned in close to her ear. “You’ll never succeed.”

“Silence, fiend,” Daniel commanded.

But Luce wanted to know what Barach meant. “Why not?”

“You are not the one!” Barach said.

“Silence!” Daniel shouted.

“Never, never, never. Not in a million years,” the angel chanted, rubbing his sandpaper cheek against Luce’s—right before Phil loosed the arrow into his heart.

EIGHT

HOW HEAVEN WEPT

S
omething thudded at their feet.

“The halo!” Luce gasped.

Daniel swooped down and snatched the golden relic from the ground. He marveled at it, shaking his head. Somehow it had remained when the Scale angel and his strange, regenerating clothes had disappeared.

“I am sorry for taking his life, Daniel Grigori,” Phil said. “But I could not tolerate Barach’s lies any longer.”

“It was beginning to grate on me, too,” Daniel said. “Just be careful with the others.”

“Take this,” Phil said, sliding the black satchel off his shoulder and handing it to Daniel. “Conceal it from the Scale. They are hungry for it.” When Daniel opened the satchel, Luce saw his book,
The Book of the Watchers
, tucked inside.

Phil zipped it up and left the bag with Daniel. “I will now return to stand guard. The wounded Scale could rouse at any moment.”

“You’ve done well against the Scale,” Daniel said, sounding impressed. “But—”

“We know,” Phil said. “There will be more. Did you encounter many outside the museum?”

“Their numbers are legion,” Daniel said.

“If you would let us use the starshots freely, we could secure your escape—”