She said there were consequences for using the Grail. Maybe she was talking about my feelings.
“She looks so peaceful,” Nina whispered.
Angela shifted uneasily in front of the oak. The blood was making her sick. Her own thoughts were making her sick. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For not doing it when I first met her. She was suffering so much . . . Those priests were such bastards.” Angela’s fingers curled into fists. The Eye pulsed inside of her palm, throbbing with her heartbeat. “ ‘I make the rules.’ That’s the thought I keep hearing and feeling, over and over in my head. But I wonder—does a thought, no matter how convincing it feels, justify this?”
Nina’s irises brightened to Mikel’s red. Apparently, her agreement with the angel involved them sharing space equally. When one gave way to the other, eventually there would be a reversal. “That depends on who’s thinking it.”
“Right.” Angela sighed, stepping away from Tileaf. “I guess.”
“There’s no time to mourn, Angela. You must enter the Netherworld or Tileaf will have died in vain.”
That’s the problem. I’m not mourning at all.
Angela gestured at the trees. “That would be a lot easier if there was a way in.”
“Underground.” Nina’s voice again. She weaved her away around the roots that separated them so they stood side by side, and then grabbed Angela by the arm, tugging her nearer to a large gap at the oak’s base. It was a huge hole, gaping from beneath a tangle of roots thick as her body, their surfaces gnarled and knobbed with grotesque whorls. “You have to dig. The tunnel should emerge clearly and then—”
“And then?”
“The door.”
“You’re saying I crawl through a tunnel of dirt and push through a door?”
“It’s the only way for a mortal to access the Underworld from Earth without dying. This is why Luz exists. This is the gateway to the other dimensions, whether higher or lower. To Heaven or Hell. But first, you need to get around Azrael.”
Tileaf had mentioned the same name. “Who is that? An angel?”
“You’ll see.”
Angela wasn’t keen on seeing anything at all. This situation was far from what she’d been expecting. A dazzling portal of light, maybe, or a gaping staircase in the earth. Instead she was going to breach the world of the dead through a worm tunnel, and Nina—or more correctly Mikel—acted like they were strolling out to buy bread. Tileaf had said that she needed to die for Angela to enter the Netherworld, but except for the trees’ branches and leaves crashing down, nothing had changed. “She lied to me, didn’t she?” Angela knelt beside Nina, following her lead and scooping dirt out of the hollow. “Tileaf didn’t have to die for us to find this.”
Nina glanced at Angela, her irises back to their dull darkness. “That’s not true. She was blocking the way in.”
Angela sank her fingernails into the dirt, clawing, pulling through fibrous roots and soggy bits of mulch. Worms and wood lice spilled out of the hole, scattering beneath other roots or burrowing down below the leaf litter. Angela slid across a few of the worms, almost certainly squishing them in the grooves of her boots.
“Tileaf herself, not the tree, kept the creatures underneath from emerging above, and vice versa. Now that she’s gone . . .”
“The door’s just sitting there,” Angela finished for her. She wiped some of the mud off her hands and onto her skirt. It was beyond salvation at this point anyway. “So what does that mean? Could creatures from Hell eventually make their way into Luz?”
Nina sighed. “What does it sound like to you? But that’s not the issue right now.”
“What bothers me is”—Angela reached in with both arms, churning through the dirt, spitting out the mud that crept its way into her mouth—“the idea that angels and demons could just come to Earth in droves. They could stamp us flat.”
“But that’s the mistake people make. Earth is an important place for humans, but angels couldn’t care less about it.” Nina rocked back on her heels, letting Angela punch through the last layer of dirt and rocks that had blocked off the tunnel. It was large enough for at least one person to slide inside. The land within dropped at a slow angle into the earth, thousands of roots dangling from its ceiling in webs and tendrils. “To them this planet is only what you’re sifting through. Dirt.”
Ow. What the—
A sharp sting creased through Angela’s palm. She pulled back her hand, examining the Eye. Flesh had closed over it like a lid, protecting it from the humus and the soil. Either it had a mind of its own, or her body was working on some crazy angelic instincts. She sucked back the sour nausea creeping into her head, dizzy. The sky rumbled faintly overhead, but otherwise there was too much quiet. Too much heavy silence.