They were the same words she’d used for her parents.
And they had nearly the same effect.
The sky overhead mirrored the sky over Luz, bubbling and crackling with distant lightning, just like in Tileaf’s mind when Lucifel had turned every soul to ash. Summoned somehow by Angela’s words or feelings, the storm rumbled in on them with horrific speed, its clouds more like living things than air and vapor.
Mikel grabbed Angela’s hand, hissing back pain as she closed it into a fist. “He’s here,” she said, her feathers fluttering in the growing wind. “He’s been waiting.”
The earth below split and heaved.
Souls ran to the right and left, some of them tumbling into deep, seemingly endless chasms, screaming as fleshy roots burst upward from the dry rock.
An octopus with skin the color of human flesh could have been crawling out of the ground, but this octopus had a great mass of branches instead of a bulbous head, and upon those branches, a nearly uncountable number of eyes glistening and gazing out over the plain, like leaves in shades of deep green and muddy violet.
The strange tree was growing at tremendous speed, as if Angela’s words had germinated some seed planted long ago beneath the rock. She’d never seen anything so terrible, so alien and wrong, and could barely look away from its trunk of throbbing flesh and its hundreds of branchlike arms.
Then the branches grew more, twisting toward her.
Before Angela could blink again, she stared back into at least fifty different eyes, all of them coiled in front of her face. She bit her tongue, desperate not to scream.
The eyes faded, replaced by the image of an angel with ebony hair, the strands draping over half of his face. Like the tree, his wings were covered with eyes, irises of green and violet gleaming against their black feathers like living jewels. He was much more strongly built than Israfel, with a sharp and severe face.
And you would dare—his voice pounded through her like a drum—to take what belongs to me. These souls are in my domain.
Angela glanced around wildly.
Mikel was gone. Vanished.
What happened? Why isn’t she here anymore?
The Archon. Azrael smiled arrogantly. Or at least you look like Her. But my loyalty to Raziel ended long ago.
Angela regarded him with an angry face. “And he died,” she said, hardly knowing why she said it or how she knew it, “when you could have helped him. Selfish hedonist. You came here out of greed, to glut yourself.”
Help? Azrael swept his hair aside, revealing the other half of his face. His eyes were as mismatched as those on his wings, his tree. If it were not for me, this remnant of Eden would no longer exist. If it weren’t for my so-called selfish hedonism, these souls would have nowhere to rest, however tormented.
“Either way, they’re no longer yours.”
Eden. This used to be the Garden of Eden. Paradise. The birthplace of humanity.
Now it was simply a pit for the dead.
Azrael’s branches grew more, their fleshy joints bending to snare and choke her. Angela turned and ran back toward the darkness, searching. But Mikel had either abandoned her, or something was happening in Memorial Park. Nina could have been hurt or killed, their connection severed. Now she was alone, and Azrael was gaining on her nightmarishly fast. In seconds the inky black swallowed them, and she was forced to stop, knocked over by a wall of flesh covered in eyes and the shock of him standing in front of her again. The tree must have been his real body, this angelic form a perfect deception.
Now he was going to suffocate her.
Fleshy branches wrapped around her ankles, her legs.
Azrael’s voice seemed to resound throughout the entire Netherworld. To think that Raziel would punish his Throne, ruin my happiness. How I regret the days when I served him, while he served only himself—
He was almost at her waist and began to squeeze. Angela screamed, her bones close to breaking, her hands pushing at his countless arms while they moved higher.
—as hypocritical and insensitive as the rest of Heaven—
Briefly, his image contorted into Israfel’s, bronze winged but horrendously sneering and warped. Was this how he saw his former Archangel?
—unwilling to recognize me for the power, or the person, that I was.
“And out of all the souls you tasted and imprisoned,” Angela gasped through her pain, “how many could stifle your appetite for any of it? You’re completely deluded,” she said, horrendously angry inside, somehow offended by what felt like blasphemy. “And this Realm doesn’t belong to you. And—I NO LONGER SEE A NEED FOR YOU IN IT.”
Azrael recoiled sharply at her words, like she’d injured him with her voice alone. His perfect face hovered above her, wide-eyed and strangely fearful.