Well, that absolutely didn’t sound right. She couldn’t imagine Stephanie deliberately getting her hair wet, even if it was to glean ingredients for a potion that could dry, curl, and shine it in a minute flat. Angela pushed the paper back into the center of the table, her thoughts wandering back to the creepy devil perched on the top of the dormitory.
Maybe if it had been real, she wouldn’t have had to worry about who might kill her or why. She would be the only student in school wandering out in the rain and early hours of the morning, hoping that something sinister would swoop down and cut off her head.
Instead she’d have to work to find her angel. Wherever he was.
She glanced out the kitchen window, gazing across an expanse of slate roof tile. Amazingly enough, the same creepy devil statue had been set on the far side, near to the chimney with the kink in its middle. She didn’t remember seeing it there before, but then again, didn’t remember trying to notice either. It had the same, intense expression on its face, all hunger and watchful evil, staring back at her. The ears were long and pointed, pressed back against a head that had been painted with black hair. The skin must have been carved from marble.
But it didn’t move or climb closer to eat her alive. Just like every other statue in Luz.
“You’re pretty disappointing,” Angela said out loud.
She shut the blinds with a snap.
Two
What is the essence of life?
Without which substance do we meet death?
For despite the dark future the Ruin brings,
Her crown is made of that precious crimson.
—CARDINAL DEMIAN YATES, Translations of the Prophecy
The cigarette flared in the darkness of Angela’s room, but quickly dulled down to a delicate spot of orange, its tip floating around in the shade as Nina moved from the corner of her bed to the dressers and back again. She seemed fascinated by Angela’s doll collection, which wasn’t the most expensive or even the largest that could be found in the city, but certainly the most diverse. Angela had never quite understood her own obsession with dolls. It was kind of like her obsession with the angels, except instead of being fueled by dreams, it festered in that part of her preferring ceramic people to real ones. Artificial humans could be life-sized or small enough to fit in your pocket. You could dress them in the latest fashions, or force them to wear costumes that would make a showgirl jealous. But best of all, they were friends that would never judge you for things like blood-red hair and the scars on your legs. They didn’t care. They didn’t have hearts.
They sat in their orderly rows, deaf, blind, and beautiful. Forever.
“You have no idea how much this freaked me out when you opened the door.” Nina picked up the doll of a pretty woman jester, her curled hair gathered beneath the traditional three-pronged hat. She examined its feet, the jingling bells, and then set it back next to a shepherdess that was at least fifty years old; a hand-me-down given to Angela by her cousin. “And if you’re smart, you’ll never let anyone else see this fright fest. God, Angie, it’s messed up.”
But she was grinning.
“You should make one of Stephanie and stick pins in its knuckles.”
“Not really my style,” Angela said. “It’d be better to draw her in a gray purgatory somewhere. I don’t think I dislike her enough yet to choose some circle of hell.”
“I could ask if they have room for her there,” Nina said, her eyes sparkling.
Angela sighed. Stephanie had hinted that Nina was ultimately more interested in communicating with spirits than with other human beings.
But she wasn’t a blood head. The odds of her being able to do it at all were slim to none. Wishful thinking, probably.
“I don’t know if you need to. I could just paint her in some Academy tower, locked up in a circle of wet bricks, her hair growing longer but never drying out. In the end, Luz isn’t much different than purgatory, is it?”
Angela walked over to a window and pulled the curtains back, revealing a late-morning vista that could have been mistaken for a late-evening apocalypse. The sun tended to hide itself in Luz. Was it the position of the city relative to the winds and the tides? Was it the latitude? The chimney smoke? The pollution from the iron ships entering through the coastal supports? As the city grew, each building settled on top of the lesser architecture of its ancestors, the light sallowed more and more, its golden slivers less frequent amid the mists and the fog. Finally, the weekly forecast stalemated into storms, rain, or a monotonous sleet in the winter months—a foul time period where no one visited Luz, and nobody left. The city of lights, it was said, might have been cursed by the large number of blood heads living there. But they weren’t leaving any time soon. So, while they entered the school one after the other, the storms became more violent and the lightning developed into a plague, and people used the degrees of darkness to determine the hours of the day and the passing of the seasons.