“You coward,” Troy snarled at him, rabid.
Her voice was like the hiss of acid, and she spat at him again, a cobra with wings, teeth, and nails both sharper and stronger than steel.
“You coward. I’ll find you.” Troy’s pitch was as close to a roar as he’d ever heard it. “Sariel. Not even the Archon can save you from this. I’ll put you in your place, demon spawn.”
Israfel’s prophecy, it appeared, might have had another meaning entirely.
Kim’s entire body trembled, but he scratched Mastema’s blood crystal from the center of his cross, aware of Troy’s eyes narrowing even more evilly with recognition. He could only use the Call once, but it would be worth the sacrifice to hide from Troy in the abyssal depths of Hell. There, she could never find him. Never reach him. He stole a final glimpse of Angela, pining inside for her heat on his skin, and her lips touching his chest. The next time he found her, there would be a space just for them, a promise for him, and maybe a throne for her.
Whether she understood his reasons no longer mattered.
He smashed the crystal against an exposed rock, actually baring his teeth back at Troy, hardly ashamed at his slip. She’d understand the gesture better than words, and better than him explaining that the worst part of all this failure was leaving Angela behind.
Troy began to gnaw through the barrier, ripping through it with wet, fleshy noises.
Kim escaped in a dazzling burst of crimson. Mere seconds before she crawled through the hole for his soul.
Omega
And now we are at the End.
Though some would call it a Beginning.
—CARDINAL DEMIAN YATES, Translations of the Prophecy
“There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery.” The novice paused, waiting for the class to ingest the quote and contemplate it. She was slight, and looked too young to be teaching university freshmen. Unlike Kim, her mannerisms were all nerves and a complete lack of charisma that matched her mousy brown hair. “Today we’re going to discuss exactly what Dante was trying to say in that famous quote . . . now if you’d copy the phrase exactly as it appears in the Italian . . .”
Angela shifted in her seat, glancing at Sophia out of the corner of her eye.
She was obeying the student teacher, copying the Italian in her elegant handwriting, her pen swirling deftly across the paper. Sophia had started wearing an overcoat that matched Angela’s—black, brass buttons and an emerald eye stitched on the breast pocket—its sharp lines strangely suiting her neat sense of fashion. With Stephanie permanently absent, and most of the other members gone, Angela had inherited the position of head of the Pentacle Sorority, assuming her role mostly out of spite toward the priests who’d fawned over Stephanie so sickeningly.
Now they would pander to her rules. Ones that would be a lot healthier for all of them.
The novice meandered to the other side of the room, coming to rest under a whitewashed wall, its surface repainted after Stephanie’s insane spree of territorial marking. In the brief span of time Lucifel had possessed her, pentagrams had replaced every sign, religious statue, and crucifix in sight. This room’s crucifix was back in place, gleaming down from its spot above the door frame.
“Miss Mathers.”
Angela lifted her head from its resting place on her hand.
The class quieted, waiting, silently afraid. Most of them remembered Stephanie’s accusations in the cathedral, that Angela had summoned a demon to Luz and murdered Maribel. Ironically, the part about the demon had turned out to be the truth, though almost everyone was disregarding it, nervous yet unable to ignore the fact that Stephanie was now clinically insane.
According to Sophia, Stephanie lived in an institution on the south sea cliff of Luz. Often, she would rave about eyes, darkness, blood, and books.
No one paid attention to a single word she said.
“Yes,” Angela said, standing. Wind whipped through the poorly patched hole in the ceiling, spraying briny rain onto her hair. The sky peered down into the classroom, blacker than ever before. Most of Luz had been so damaged in the worst of the storm, people no longer cared to hide from more of them.
“Miss Mathers, I’d like you to lead the class in discussion of the quote as it pertains to the chapter as a whole.”
Angela tugged at her arm gloves and picked up her book.
She spoke aloud the first question on the discussion page, but her mind was entirely elsewhere. Not that it could be helped.
There was too much to ponder, to fear, to worry over.
It had been three weeks since Nina had died, since Kim had left, and since every angel and demon in her life had disappeared after the short interval she’d known them. In that time, Luz had already changed, its ordinances and Academy life becoming stricter, more secretive, and if possible, even more cut off from the mainland, probably the Vatican’s chosen method to keep the sensational a rumor. But what had taken place was no hallucination or trick of the weather. Angela, too, had almost died, though from the power of the Grail rather than a battle between two angels. Using it to its maximum potential had somehow brought her to the brink of mortality, and when she’d awakened in that new bedroom of the Pentacle House, Sophia’s first comment to her had actually been a soft reprimand.