The way out of the Netherworld was obviously vastly different from the way in.
It was beautiful. Maybe, besides Israfel, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
But I have seen it before.
Her dream of Sophia. Hadn’t she been standing in front of a stairway of light?
And it looked exactly like this one.
“Go up,” Angela whispered, suddenly overcome by a sense of urgency. The souls seemed to obey instinctively, but not quickly enough. “Higher. Faster.”
Screeches of despair rang out from the valley behind her. Faintly, so very faintly, she could hear someone calling her name as if to curse her. Despite the unspeakable beauty of this Ladder, and how swiftly she’d wrenched it from Azrael’s grasp, her confidence was wavering. She was alone, and behind her were countless enemies. Now the darkness they’d chosen their entire lives was ready to swallow them in nothingness. They had chosen Lucifel. They had chosen a void. And they hated Angela for having to make that choice.
She would have to confront them. It was now both her duty—and her right.
Angela stood up, turning to command them into silence.
Stephanie was there to greet her, her expression shockingly cold. She looked to the Ladder, her face bathed in its light, but only to bring out ghastly shadows across her face. “This must be a miracle, but I’m still not sure I believe in it . . .”
Thick surprise choked off Angela’s voice.
She’s here by herself. But how? Did Naamah help her again?
However Stephanie had managed to enter the Netherworld, or whenever she’d chosen to do it, she must have been hiding all along, waiting for Angela to put Azrael in his place. But what a difference a day could make. She’d dressed herself in a long black coat identical to Kim’s, but with the upper buttons open to reveal her blouse, and the lower opened to give her legs room to move freely. If it was possible, her skin and hair and makeup were even more perfect than before. Only her eyes had changed.
Their irises were blood red. Lucifel’s shade.
Stephanie spotted the Grail and gestured for it, curling a finger. “By the way, I think it’s finally time to share your toys.”
For these Jinn, loyalty rises above all else, and betrayal is punished by the cruelest of deaths. Yes, I’m afraid the consequences of your unfaithfulness will be dire.
—
R
EVEREND
M
ATTHIAS
G
REENE,
Letters of Spiritual Direction
M
aster, the half-breed, he’s—
Fury’s voice cut off sharply, timed to a flicker of crimson light beyond the trees.
Troy skidded to a stop in the leaf litter, her nails ripping through the soil. She’d heard the thunderous beat of Naamah’s wings, yet still hadn’t been quick enough. This was her punishment for leaving Sariel behind, no matter how briefly. Now the demon was going to finish a mission Troy had started centuries ago, leaving her with nothing but a bone or two to placate the Jinn Queen. Her sister wouldn’t humor any kind of excuse. Troy would be the laughingstock of all High Assassins, abysmally stupid for allowing a demon to snatch her prey away.
What a difference minutes could make.
She’d been searching through the shrubs and undergrowth for any sign of Israfel, catching brief traces of him, but losing most of those beneath another overpowering stench. An herb seemed to be growing everywhere, its straight, limp leaves splayed across the ground and giving off a tremendously offensive smell. Troy had torn one of the plants—a heart-shaped white thing no bigger than her eyes—out of the earth, nearly spitting in revulsion from the thick, peppery odor clinging to its bulb. Then she’d scampered back toward Tileaf’s tree, deftly dodging fallen trunks and thick branches.
Fury.
No answer.
Troy paced at the grotto’s threshold, smelling fresh blood.
So much of it ringed her mouth and crusted beneath her fingernails, the old scents nearly blocked out the new. But she could pick two individuals out of the musk: one had been dead for a few hours, faintly stinking of rotting vegetable matter and moss; the other was in the process of dying. A female human, vaguely familiar. Troy crept softly through the leaves and latched onto the tree trunks again, flicking her ears to catch any sound besides her own feet and palms thudding against the bark. She emerged into the grotto as a body crumpled to the mulch.
Thump
.
Sariel turned to regard her, his face paler than she’d ever seen it.
He stood over Nina’s limp body, side by side with the demon beneath a leafless canopy. Tileaf was dead, her white corpse propped elegantly against the oak’s roots, a perplexing mixture of crimson and blue blood staining her limbs and her clothing. Next to a gaping hollow at the left of the trunk, Fury’s wings twitched like a fly’s swatted down in midair. The spirit inside of her had been ejected by Naamah’s attack, and she shivered in the mud, human eyes glazed over by shock.
She always looked much better as a carrion-eating bird than a blond child.
“You’re finally back,” Sariel said to Troy, his voice soft as a breath. His Jinn half enjoyed the smell of blood, but his humanity fought the smile, distinctly unhappy that Troy had arrived. He stared back at her with those dull gold eyes, suddenly so wide, either because of what he’d done, what he was about to do, or what Troy would certainly do to him.
Had he killed Nina?
Most likely it had been the demon. But there was blood on the knife in his hand, and he stood beside Naamah as an obvious ally.
It was easy to see why. Sariel would do anything to stay alive.
No wonder Naamah hadn’t murdered him earlier. They were working toward a common goal after all.
“
What a traitor you are,
” Troy hissed.
Naamah laughed, folding her wings tightly against her back. Metal creaked, and their bare patches dripped oily fluid onto the dirt. “Now, priest,” she whispered, “let’s do this. Before I forget my kindness.”
The storm overhead thundered, ugly and insistent. Its clouds were the same poisonous hue Troy recognized from her own home, their wisps a sickly green shading away into pitch-black. Then the wind picked up. A whirling vortex began to form. Smoky clouds whipped around an eye of pure night, one without stars or light of any kind. A void was forming above Luz, and around it lightning streaked from heaven to earth in crooked spears. One of them struck Memorial Park, and Troy ducked, screeching beneath the light’s brilliance. Thunder cracked powerfully, shivering the ground.
When Troy’s vision cleared, Naamah was closing in on her.
She backed against the trees, snarling. “You would join with the demons, Sariel? Even when your execution will already be so painful? What will Angela think, now that her friend is dead?”
Nina’s body lay sprawled in the dirt, the soil around her turning to mud as blood gushed from her throat. She was finally lifeless, her eyes wide open and unseeing.
There was no sign of the angel.
With her host deceased, Mikel had been forced to return to wherever she’d been imprisoned.
“She’ll cry, and be sad, and then get over it.” Sariel’s voice had that steady crispness to it she despised so much. He straightened the closer Naamah approached, his fingers clenching around his knife as he found his confidence again. “But once I tell her who’s responsible, she’ll also become angry. Troy, we both know that if I told Angela you killed the girl, she’d believe me. Who wouldn’t believe me?” He smiled, obviously enjoying the moment. “You are a devil after all.”
Naamah flexed the blades in her fingers, her eyes dark with revenge.
She couldn’t use any kind of ether or energy on Troy, but all she had to do was slice off her head. The demon wouldn’t take any more chances on poison if she wanted fast results.
“You need the Archon on the Throne of your Prince,” Troy hissed back at Naamah, “but you forget how easy it will be for your Prince to stop you.”
“Words of praise from a Jinn,” Naamah muttered. “But Lucifel won’t fall for flattery.”
“You’re a coward, Sariel,” Troy said, spitting at her cousin. “A spineless shadow who seeks sympathy and pleasure, all so you can drown away your sins. And then you ally yourself with these rotting crows, beg them to do your evil work.”
His golden eyes narrowed spitefully. “
Contra nequitiam—
”
Troy’s breath caught painfully in her throat. Her lungs felt like they were being crushed, and she crouched closer to the ground, the mustiness of the leaves rising to her nose. He was using the same exorcism that had punished Israfel’s Thrones. The very words she’d warned him never to use on her.
“—
et insidias diaboli
. . .”
His words trailed off as Naamah gestured for silence, passing a fingerblade near her throat. Even she wasn’t immune to the Tongue’s crushing effects. Her wings drooped and she panted loudly over the thunder, stalking slowly toward Troy.
More lightning streaked to the earth.
There was an earsplitting crack. Tileaf’s tree exploded.
Troy shrieked and shut her eyes against the blinding whiteness, still seeing half the trunk split to the base, listening to it rock backward and crash into more trees, knocking them to the earth. Heat, which was undoubtedly fire, jumped from its crown to the foliage, burning through the drier wood with incredible speed, racing through the park in a ring of flames. Almost instantly, the wind picked up, fanning it farther. Cinders and ash flaked down from the sky, their pieces blown about by the fire and the storm, stinging Troy’s nose and layering her skin.
She dared to crack open an eyelid, her joints aching horribly. Her insides were almost overturned by the exorcism.
Sariel stood in front of the flames, a black silhouette framed by the most painful orange. She could sense the smile on his face rather than see it.
“
You bastard,
” she said, overcome by rage. “
You traitorous bastard. You’re done . . .”
Troy would kill him. She’d kill him. Oh, yes, their contract was definitely over.
Naamah stepped in front of her, blocking her view. The demon gasped for breath, her teeth displayed along with her triumph. “All that fighting for nothing. You would have been better off dying two days ago.”
She lifted her fingerblades, aiming for Troy’s head.
“Time to take that wing bone back.”
The black rain hissed to the earth without warning, big, oily drops plummeting from the center of the vortex in the sky. They smelled hollow and rank—sick with negativity, poison, and the most unwholesome matter—and then they fell in a sheet thick enough to be layers of ink. Naamah glanced back at Sariel, shouting something over the roar of the water. But they were definitively separated, and his answer was lost in the screech of the wind.
Blades whistled over Troy’s head.
She crawled to the left, hardly making a sound. Naamah was searching for her, frantic. Already, the demon had lost all sense of direction.
Master!
Fury’s voice seemed to come out of nowhere.
It had been the demon’s critical error. Fury had the true form of a child, but her avian body hadn’t been destroyed, and she’d joyously crawled back inside of it.
Go ahead,
Troy said to her, curling near a tree. The fire smoldered beneath the rain, but its heat continued to soak into her, making all her inner wounds a thousand times more terrible. Naamah’s blades swept above again, and the demon stumbled to the right, cracking off a tree root. Troy fought the instinctive desire to snap furiously for the demon’s ankles, to break them down to the marrow.
Go ahead. Make her suffer.
The curses were the first sign that Fury had found her mark.
Then there was the incredible light.
Troy caught a brief glimpse of her Vapor’s claws raking Naamah’s eyes, but shut her own just in time to stay alive. The wind was incredible, ripping feathers from her wings, forcing her to dig her nails into the bark of her tree. Naamah howled, sobbing in a nearly pathetic agony while Fury dug into her flesh. Then the crow must have torn away. Her wing beats grew fainter, disappearing to a safer spot deep inside the park. Neither of them had time to bother with Sariel, if he was even alive anymore. Hopefully, if the fire hadn’t finally charred him to death, the black rain would melt the skin from his bones. Troy gritted her teeth, hissing and unable to stop while the water stung at her legs, her hands, her face.
She wrapped her wings around her body, flattening them against the wind—
Everything stopped.
A voice rose cleanly throughout the park, its melody rich and forceful. Notes that reminded Troy of icy waterfalls and cool darkness rang from end to end of the grotto, seeming to freeze out the fire. The heat dissipated, and in its place a deep vacuum spread into the ether. Troy opened her eyes to slits, watching the black rain fall in slow motion. Half the drops had crystallized into something else altogether, fluffing to the ground in chill, ebony layers. Troy focused on one of the black crystals, hissing softly at the glitter of its facets. The thickness of their layers half hid the horrendous light nearby, dulling it enough to keep her brain from searing.
Soft footsteps treaded through the snow, and the song gently died away.
Israfel emerged from the trees, grasping Sophia by the wrist. His Thrones were right behind him, their wingtips scraping through the chill black crystals. Troy wrapped her own wings tightly around her body, peering through a feathered gap, careful to keep her pained breathing to a minimum. If any of them had seen her or sensed her, they weren’t showing signs of it. The Supernal continued to step lightly across the grotto, stopping in front of Tileaf’s tree. The mysterious light gleamed off his hair, forcing Troy to shake away her pain.
“So you do have it,” Sariel said.
He was still alive, then. Troy snarled between her teeth, aching to sprint past Israfel’s Thrones and latch right onto her cousin’s throat. But his execution would have to wait for now.
“But I’d like to know why you’re waiting to open the Book, to take what you want.”
“And what do you think I want?” Israfel’s voice was dangerously gentle. If Sariel was smart, he’d soon realize his life hung by a slender thread. Instead he kept talking.
“Revenge. Against your sister.” An awkward pause. “I can help you with that.”
Where was the demon?
Fury couldn’t have killed her . . .
“Help me?” Israfel laughed, and the atmosphere chilled with more ice and waterfalls. Then he coughed alarmingly, and without any warning, thick waves of scent rolled from his body. Heady perfume and the rancid smell of his blood.
Troy recognized this odor. In the cathedral she had dismissed the memory too quickly, because the match made little sense.
“Revenge? No, priest, you’re mistaken. I’m just waiting for her to see my hour of triumph. My sister will be walking to destruction whether I help her or not. I’d rather cause her pain along the journey than shorten it. You can’t help me, just like you can’t help her.” His wings whipped a swift breeze through the snow. “A half-breed. How interesting. I was under the impression that most of you were killed in the womb.”