His voice shook along with his body. “Not yet.”
“I’ve tolerated you long enough. From this point on, I can smell the difference between the Archon and a heap of meat.”
“I know where the Book of Raziel is.”
Troy emerged slightly from the darkness, her ears flicking, catching the noise outside of his door. The cruel perception behind her eyes was like a knife, twisting into him. “You lie. More lies.”
“No,” he said crisply, “I know where she is.”
“She.” Troy’s wings snapped violently. Fury croaked at her shoulder, impatient. “A person? What idiotic nonsense is this?”
“But for me to show you, I’ll have to be alive. Of course.”
“If you’re wasting my time, I’ll make death more slow and painful than you’ve ever thought possible.”
Kim glanced at Lyrica’s body lying on the floor. Troy had left more of her remains intact than his student Telissa’s, yet that only made everything worse.
Troy blinked back at him, her expression suggesting she was supremely disgusted, perhaps nauseated, by his weak stomach. It was one of the reasons that half-breeds were commonly aborted. They were considered weak inside and out. Thanks to his far from blameless mother, Kim was now the only half-Jinn in the world. Like Angela, he belonged neither here nor there. But the more the world had tried to squash him, the sharper his proverbial teeth had become.
Now his bite was as hard as Troy’s, if in other ways.
“If we find Israfel, we find the Book.”
Troy looked at Fury and the bird vanished through the broken window, gliding effortlessly through the too-calm sky. The Vapor disappeared fast, a black speck mixing into a canvas of deeper black and deadly green. Already, she was off searching for another bird, only whiter, smarter, and much more human looking.
Once Fury’s telepathic messages began, Troy would discard Kim fast.
He had to hurry.
The pounding on the door was furious now. Someone worked at the hinges, attempting to screw them apart.
But that was his only escape.
Troy noticed the grim clench of his jaw. She smiled at the door, and her ears folded back with anticipation. “By all means,” she said, painfully delighted, her nails scraping across the hardwood, “be a man and lead the way.”
Thirty-five
Luz’s greatest asset, and its greatest curse, are one and the same. The Fae, dying though she may be, is still strong enough to be of use to us. But this I stress: she must stay alive.
—ARCHBISHOP GREGORY T. SOLOMON, PRIVATE LETTER TO THE VATICAN
Angela knelt next to Tileaf’s body, sweeping green hair away from blood and dirt and the Fae’s own dead leaves. It had been too easy to kill her, a sign of just how weak the priests had made this former angel, tormenting her with their constant demands. The moment she died, Memorial Park seemed to shiver, the trees dropping leftover leaves to the ground, branches and trunks crashing into the earth in a broken circle around Angela and Nina. For now, though, there had come a pause—a deep and terrible silence. Angela wiped her fingers on Tileaf’s tattered dress, ruining the fabric with inky blue blood.
The mysterious knife had melted out of Angela’s hands into a puddle all over the Fae’s legs and ankles. The wound in her chest looked so small, so insignificant compared to the damage it had done.
Blue blood. Not red.
Angela gasped for breath, fighting off a sweeping sickness in the pit of her stomach. Then she stood, her knees wobbling a little, her palm aching where the Grail had nestled into the skin. She opened it, staring back at the stone that was enough of an Eye to contain a startling amount of liquid. And worst of all, perhaps it also contained a soul. A spirit that cursed all who wore it and wielded it, damning them along with the cries of the angels it had murdered.
Lucifel’s Glaive, the weapon she’d used to strike fear into so many hearts, had been made of blood.
But whose?
It doesn’t matter. If this Grail belongs to me now, so do the people who’ve died because of it. Tileaf was just one more.
Her whole body ached inside, like she’d been punched and bruised everywhere. Yet Angela’s soul had never felt stronger. The voice that had echoed inside of her, that had given her the courage and resolve to do what she’d never thought possible, had faded back into her memories. But it had also left behind a passionate sense of certainty, and a strange lack of sorrow. Tileaf had wanted this death, and Angela had given her what she wanted. There was nothing deeper to it than that. Like the voice within had said, Angela had simply taken back what belonged to her in the first place, as if she’d rediscovered some precious object she’d originally lost. The new question was whether that object had been the Grail, Tileaf’s life, or both.