Angelus (21 page)

Two Days until the Great Silence

Demons equate love with foolishness, and thus

they are fools themselves.

LUZ
THE ALTAR OF THE BLOODLETTERS

Angela's journey to her execution began with nightmarish cold, escalated with the frenzy of a mob as she was paraded through the streets surrounding Westwood Academy, and ended only when she and Kim arrived at the great iron-clad doors of the institution that Luz's most-feared witch, Stephanie Walsh, had eventually called home.

They were at the edge of the highest sea cliff in Luz, and though the waves had died long ago to an eerie and glassy calm, dampness still seeped into the many-armed tower and oozed from every pore of its mortared stone and bricks. Its windows resembled blank eyes. Angela tried to imagine how many students had already lost their lives behind these unforgiving walls.

She looked up at the stars and noticed the silhouettes of angels perched like birds on the Luz Institution's turrets.

One or two of the angels rustled their wings and shifted position.

She and Kim looked at each other. They were close enough to whisper at least.

“So this is how it ends,” he said bitterly. But Kim gritted his teeth, and a spark of his old mischief brightened his eyes. Maybe he had a plan.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Angela muttered. “We'll find a way out of this.”

Kim sighed and didn't reply this time. His expression dropped its confidence and took on a haunted aspect.

Most of the crowd around them had started to disperse. The bone-chilling cold chased away all but the staunchest individuals after a while. Angela's fingers and toes were already numb, though her captors had made sure she was warm enough to stay alive and for her blood to flow freely. Before she could say another word, rough hands took her by the shoulder and guided her up and into the forbidding building. Kim followed behind her, suddenly wordless and deadly again. Their footsteps met the stone with ominous clicks. Angela sniffed, recoiling at the stench of mildew.

Even if the women imprisoned here managed to survive the bloodletting, the cold and dampness were sure to kill them anyway.

Maybe I can at least get a glance at the other people . . . I want to engrave their faces in my mind. How dare these officials and administrators take their lives so easily . . . These are people, not objects—

“Faster, blood head,” a gruff voice said in Angela's ear.

She turned to regard her newest tormentor, but met with a harsh shove up the next stairwell instead. Their group spilled out into a wet hallway lined with cells crosshatched by barred windows. Unlike Stephanie's portion of the institution, which had boasted some degree of civilization and
whitewashing, this section of the building could have been constructed during the Middle Ages. Black crosses had been tacked above each cell, though very few of the blood heads trapped inside happened to be praying. Some clung to the barred windows available to them, staring at Angela with large forlorn eyes.

A deep shudder of outrage and anguish moved through every inch of her being.

She scanned the row of cells to her left as her captors pushed her toward one of the doors marked by a pitted brass lock.

A woman with thick, deep red hair watched Angela from her position on a worm-eaten wooden bench. A young red-haired girl clung to her voluminous skirt and had hidden her face deep in her mother's colorful shawl. It was Gloriana Cassel and her daughter, Tress.

Angela had almost forgotten about the feather Tress had given her. Thank God, Angela had remembered to hide it in a safe dry spot no matter what clothes she wore. It lay against the skin near her leg right now, safe and sound.

A nasty push sent Angela reeling into the cell. Kim followed shortly behind. He was a man with dark hair, but he was also obviously her accomplice and their murderers seemed to want them together for a reason. Angela couldn't help breathing a sigh of relief that they hadn't been separated, but something within her sounded a sharp warning anyway. She looked at Kim, trying to speak to him with her eyes, but he refused to meet her gaze.

Instead Kim immediately walked to a corner of the cell, where he crouched and sat with his head buried in his knees.

“So we meet again, Archon,” Gloriana whispered the second the cell door slammed shut and the lock turned. “But
our reunion will be brief. They've only put you here while they prepare the altar. This is the cell reserved for their next victims.”

“How long have you been here?” Angela choked out.

Tress shifted in her mother's arms, and she turned slightly, revealing that she was in fact asleep. Dark circles ringed her young eyes.

“Two weeks,” Gloriana said sadly. “I managed to keep myself and my daughter safe by bargaining and making myself useful to these monsters. But servants of the Devil are hard to please. Eventually, we were slated for removal to the towers here. By coincidence—or perhaps fate—we were moved to this cell only yesterday. And now you're here.”

“I won't let them take you,” Angela snapped.

Gloriana sighed and shook her head. “Unless you open the Book of Raziel, our deaths will be soon to come regardless.”

Angela had nothing to say to that.

“But don't blame yourself,” Gloriana added. “I know that if you could open the Book, you would. That much was clear after I spoke to you. And though I'm not sure what obstacles you are encountering—I'm firm in the belief that you will overcome them.”

Angela couldn't say that her roadblock was her love for Sophia. So she lowered her head, and a tight pain tore through her chest and heart.

“The Cherubim below Luz . . .” Angela began hesitantly.

Gloriana straightened, and her face became even more serious. “You found her, then? Kheshmar?”

Angela nodded. She glanced at Kim, who still sat unresponsive. “Yes . . . we both did. We learned that if the Book of Raziel can't be opened, there is still a way to save every
one. I would need to create new stanzas and notes for a song called the Angelus . . .”

Angela trailed off as Gloriana shook her head.

“What?” Angela said. “What's wrong?”

“That's impossible,” Gloriana continued. “The Angelus is the song of creation. Changing the notes would mean a new order to things—a—a revolution of some kind.”

Angela felt her eyes widen. Sophia had mentioned a revolution once before, shortly before Lucifel nearly beat Angela to death while they were trapped in Hell. She'd mentioned it in connection to the dire prophecy that Angela's choices were long supposed by so many to be the ruin of humanity and of all living things. But—Sophia had added—perhaps it would not be so much a matter of ruin, as it would be a revolution of the established order to the universe.

“It doesn't matter,” Angela said softly, though her mind had started to race. “I wouldn't even know how to go about doing such a thing.”

“It wouldn't be possible here, certainly,” Gloriana said. “To do that, you would have to approach the foot of God's throne, just like Raziel did.”

That meant going to Heaven, the home of the angels. Angela didn't see how that was even remotely possible at this point.

“Kim,” she ventured, looking right at him.

He and Gloriana were now in the same room, and Angela still didn't have it in herself to tell him the truth: that he wasn't the only half-Jinn in existence.

If only he would look at her, and somehow see everything for himself.

Kim still didn't answer her. His face remained on his knees and half hidden by his arms. Angela tiptoed closer to
him and he didn't stir. She reached out and brushed the long bangs from his eyes. He was asleep, just like Tress.

“Who is he?” Gloriana said, studying Kim keenly. If she noticed anything unusual about him, she didn't seem about to mention it.

“He's . . . a friend,” Angela said.

She turned to the barred window and its view of the dark and mirrorlike ocean. An eerie glow danced across the water as the angelic city shone down like a gigantic moon on Luz. Angela stared and stared at the placid expanse before her. She thought of the Mirror Pools and their salty taste. The ocean was said to taste salty, though she'd never actually swallowed a mouthful, even accidentally. Angela had never been allowed to play on the shore or mingle with other children when her parents were alive.

“Do you know what some religions have said about the ocean?” Gloriana said. She stood by Angela's side, sighing and gazing with her out over the star-speckled scene. “They say,” Gloriana continued, “that water is the blood of the gods. Sometimes, they took it one step further and mentioned the earth as the corpse of a god.”

Blood is salty too,
Angela thought in spite of herself.

But Angela looked at her and said, “That sounds ridiculous.”

“Does it?” Gloriana said. “Yet the ocean is the source of all life on Earth, and who knows where else water might be found throughout the universe, waiting to give life to creatures? Not too long ago, people stopped believing in angels and demons too. They called such notions superstitious nonsense. Now they know better. In the end, there is so little we know about why we exist and where we are going after death. I once asked an angel what happens to their kind at
death. He told me that an angel's spirit returns to its original home. He had no answers for me beyond that. Honestly, I don't think he knew the truth either.”

Angela pondered Gloriana's words. The more she stared into the stars, the more she seemed to see. Her left eye burned, and suddenly she felt like she had crossed space again to stand before the Father's bleeding corpse.

They looked so much alike. It could have been her, winged and dead, streaming endless rivers of blue blood.

“Do you ever get the feeling,” Angela said, “that you've experienced something before? That perhaps you've made certain choices in—well, let's say in a past life, for instance—and now you've been given one more chance to set everything right?”

Gloriana's gaze burned into her. “No,” she said after a while. “But if I did, the first thing I would ask myself is ‘what went wrong?'”

Gloriana returned to her daughter and unfolded her shawl, laying it over Tress's sleeping form. Angela continued to stare out at the sea and the stars, entranced by their peacefulness until her eyes began to feel heavy. Then, with a final glance at Kim resting serenely in his corner, she allowed herself a moment to relax.

And that was when she fell asleep.

Morning soon arrived, and though Angela had awakened, she wondered if this was all just one long and endless nightmare. But the scene before her never changed.

For a second, she wished for the relative comfort of their jail cell all over again.

The altar to Lucifel used by the bloodletters had been hastily constructed from any available materials, but Angela
shivered at the eerie likeness of the Supernal in the statue erected above the long stone table that might be Angela's deathbed. The proud angel's arms outstretched in an almost merciful gesture, yet her marble-smooth face and apathetic expression emphasized her otherworldly loveliness to devastating effect. Her great wings had been reconstructed with black crow feathers. Some kind of red stone had been used for her crimson irises.

The bloodletters had chosen the pinnacle of the Luz Institution's highest tower to commit their murders, and besides the cold altar, there was nothing but mortared stone composing the walls and ceiling, flickering candles set high in the eaves to stay out of the reach of any possible wind, and large windows without bars or glass of any kind.

This must have been a bell tower for the Institution at one time. That alone explained the openness of this room to the elements.

The two priests who'd dragged Angela and Kim from their cell now forced them to kneel on the unforgiving stone. Angela struggled, but the combined strength of two pairs of hands was enough to make her collapse. She skinned her left knee, wincing with the pain.

Footsteps approached them from across the room.

Father Schrader emerged from the shadows, dressed in a long woolen black coat. His eyes shone a terrifying shade of red.

Kim's face twisted with shock. His tone became furious. “It's
you
?” he spat indignantly.

“Unless you want things to move faster, you'll stay silent from this point on,” Father Schrader said with dangerous softness. Yet his speech was uncharacteristically lilting. Angela recognized it: this was the angel Mikel's sweet musi
cal voice. She'd possessed Father Schrader, as if confirming the worst of Nina's fears about him.

Visions of pain and sorrow raced through Angela's mind.

She'd suspected Mikel had betrayed them all, and she'd been correct. Yet the reality of it was infinitely more horrible with the angel here in front of them.

“Mikel,” Angela whispered back. “Why?”

Mikel knelt in front of them. “You ask me ‘why,' yet your eyes are judging me,” she said with a hint of real pain in her voice.