Archon(104)

Israfel half walked, half dragged himself to the velvet loveseat and reclined across from her, his hair spilling against his shoulders. The chick inside him kicked, and his nausea surged up and down, a tide barely mitigated by the Father’s blood.

He gazed at her, smiling. “Oh? And how did she accomplish that?”

Sophia turned away, her hands folding tightly against her lap. The arm he’d mutilated so brutally was almost pristine again. “You treated that half-breed priest like he was dirt. But you are no different than the Jinn that fathered him.”

He touched the fragile wing connected to his ear, still waiting for a real answer. “You know nothing about prisons,” he finally whispered.

Sophia laughed, her eyes cold in the shadows. “What an ignorant thing to say.”

“Did you ever consider,” he continued, “that perhaps I was in a prison? The accepted history is that I entered Ialdaboth . . . of my own free will—and I did.”

He glanced at Angela and held his breath, envisioning a different face, a different person. Certainly half the thrill of controlling her rested in his newfound sense of power.

She looked like Raziel, but she also resembled much more.

“But getting out of there was a . . . different matter.”

“Murder is wrong, Israfel,” she said, still not looking at him. “You can justify it all you want. You can tell yourself that there was a reason. But it won’t change how your actions have put everyone in mortal peril. Humans, angels, demons, Jinn. Everything. Anything.” Her voice took on that whispery gentleness he’d become accustomed to eons ago. “And now the universe will suffer for your lovesickness.”

She never turned until his shadow cast her into blackness. Then she glared up at him, the whites of her eyes somehow blinding.

Israfel slapped her across the mouth, half wishing to tear it off.

What kind of a Book needed to talk, after all?

He breathed hard, the blood rushing to his face, flaring the crimson stripes below his eyes. “Don’t speak about what you don’t know.”

Tears trickled down her cheeks. Like a human, she’d been blessed with the ability to cry, and in the golden half-light, her cheek already swelled, marked with a red welt in the shape of his fingers. She must have been weeping because of the pain. Sophia looked at Angela, hid her face behind her hands, and began to sob. Maybe she did know how despairing he felt inside, because suddenly there wasn’t a more hopeless cry in all of the dimensions.

“And what do you know?” Israfel said, instantly feeling wretched and filthy. “Do you think it was my fault—to fall in love with my own brother? What could you possibly know about pain? You don’t even understand what it is to die.”

She glared at him again, fierce with unspoken denial.

But they both knew the truth, and how much it had to hurt.

“Tell me,” he calmed himself, settling back onto the floor, “who was that other red-haired woman? The one that tasted like—”

He couldn’t say the name. Not now, when he already felt so sick. Israfel put a hand on his stomach and took a deep breath, willing his grace and strength to return.

“—like her.”

“Like who?” Sophia said, her sobs dying to teary whispers.

“Your previous master,” he said, his lips curling distastefully.

Sophia gazed at Angela, either like she was thinking, or yet again, hadn’t quite heard what he’d asked. “I—are you talking about Stephanie?”

“Stephanie . . .”

“Stephanie Walsh.” Sophia’s pretty features creased and her voice lost its sweetness. “She’s a witch.”

“A witch?” The term was reappearing often now.

Sophia sighed. “A female human who summons and makes a contract with a demon, hoping to bring them under her control. The Vatican, the governing body in Luz, believed that she might have been the Archon, and they protected her, allowing her power to grow without realizing the danger, perhaps even benefiting from it. More than anything, she wants to be on the throne of your sister. Though she has more to lose than most.” Sophia shook her head, her curls rustling. “The demon is like an adoptive mother to her. Stephanie knows no other life apart from Naamah, and it makes her dangerous—and unpredictable.”

Ah, he saw it. The fear behind the Book’s eyes.

Both of them, though, had reason for concern. The taste of that girl—it was as if Lucifel had entered her body and festered inside her heart. The shield she’d thrown up merely roused his suspicions more. In a disturbing reversal, Stephanie had abducted the demon back to Hell, not the other way around. “Was she the one who summoned Mikel?”