Archon(134)

She was the one who had possessed Stephanie all along.

Angela had called her spirit along with Mikel’s on the night of the summoning, not even knowing it, hardly registering what those bloody pentagrams had meant. God. It was Angela’s fault, exactly as Stephanie had said. Unwillingly, unknowingly, she’d released a part of the Devil from her cage, practically begging her to kill her when she had the chance.

And she’d been talking with her the entire time.

Lucifel glanced up at Sophia, her jaw set with disappointment.

Apparently, her experiment had proven Raziel correct.

Before Angela could say a word, the wind picked up. Wings beat powerfully above her, thundering away the snow.

She fell beneath the shadows, squeezing her eyes shut.

Two angels descended on Lucifel, one on either side. Israfel’s two guardians. Angela had thought they’d been an illusion, or a product of her imagination, but they were real, and they struck their own kind of terror into the heart, their faces blazing with anger.

The angels streaked like dive-bombing eagles.

Lucifel waved her hand.

Electricity snapped around her in a sphere of crimson, and they plummeted. Both angels screamed savagely, rolling in the snow like its touch was poison. But before Lucifel could silence them permanently, Israfel appeared.

Now the contrast was even more striking.

“Angry?” he whispered to her, somehow audible over Stephanie’s screeching. She continued to rock on the ground, hair disheveled around her face. “That makes two of us.”

Crimson stripes flared to life below his eyes, and his pink lips pursed together.

His wings quivered, spasming away the flakes as they touched his feathers.

Lucifel smiled. Then she zeroed in on the Ladder, its brilliance half veiled by the snow. She didn’t run, she didn’t fly, but her figure erupted into a buzzing mass again and zoomed with lethal determination toward the golden light.

Israfel followed immediately, graceful despite his anger, his six wings shining through the blackness.

Angela scrabbled up from the ground, racing behind him.

They’re fast. I don’t stand a chance.

Would Lucifel kill him? She was frightening enough, and this was only her shadow.

The flakes melted where they met Angela’s skin, staining it with an oily residue. She was completely soaked when she burst through a burned stand of bracken, skidding to a halt at the base of the impossibly large stairway. Each one of its steps seemed overly enormous up close, and they shimmered with an unearthly pearlescence that had dazzled from a distance but somehow become more tolerable. as if everything Angela understood about light had suddenly changed.

Overhead, the sky rippled, its maw deep and fathomless where the last of the souls were vanishing into another dimension. The spiraling bridge seemed to extend up into nothingness itself, its height impossible and staggering; a testament to how any human perception of distance meant nothing to angels.

That explained it.

The stairway was operating on an entirely different kind of physics—and it had allowed Israfel and his sister to already reach the halfway point.

Lightning arced down from the clouds, hissing where it touched parts of Luz or the ocean.

Angela glanced back down at her feet again. The stairway’s steps seemed made of a dazzling gold that had all the clarity of crystal. Carefully, Angela tapped one of them gently with her boot and finding it solid, braved another. Then another.

Good enough.

She dashed after the two Supernals, her heart pounding along with her footsteps.

Shots of electricity seared the air higher on the stairway.

Thunder boomed around them, the air contracting and expanding beneath the onslaught.

Lucifel had taken shape again, and both she and Israfel were two streaks of gray and white, half running and half flying, higher and higher, water from the sea spiraling up around them in a vortex of diamonds. But though Lucifel often turned to answer Israfel’s blasts of electricity, she was still ahead, aiming for the hole in the sky. Angela pushed herself harder, biting back the pain in her joints, only mildly shocked by how the earth below was suddenly so small, so inconsequential. She couldn’t afford anything more than a glance—both for her sanity and for the sake of time.

Luz sat below her like a plate of buildings, nearly sliding into the sea. Waves churned against its lower levels, some of them seeping deeply into alleyways, streets, homes, and dormitories.

More lightning surrounded the stairway in silver forks.

Lucifel wants to go through that hole.

She was going to escape into the higher dimensions, to wreak whatever havoc suited her hunger for silence. That simply couldn’t happen.

Angela wouldn’t let it happen.

She clenched her teeth, stabbing her fingernails into the Eye.