Archon(34)
Demons. Angela had forgotten all about them. She’d never even stopped to consider what the real differences between angels and demons were, whether she was infatuated with someone who wasn’t exactly good for her, or whether a truly evil angel could even exist. The gray angel was frightening, but Angela felt too familiar with her to call her evil. “So why does Stephanie suspect that I’m this Archon?” Angela said. “Because I paint pictures of angels and dream about them?”
“Of course. You’re a threat. Until now, she’s been grooming herself for the position.”
Stephanie was a real fool then. Just like Angela and Nina, she could just be suffering from the birth pangs of the true Archon making herself known in the world.
“But why? Why would anyone want to be such a horrible person? Doesn’t she realize the Vatican will exterminate her the second they determine she’s the one they’re looking for?”
Kim smiled at her, amused at her cleverness. “The answer is power. Don’t make the mistake of so many others and let her soft appearance fool you. Stephanie is ambitious, relentless, unsympathetic, and power hungry. What I’m telling you is arcane knowledge, but—the angel left behind an artifact when he died, one that—once opened—has the power to fulfill the prophecy of Ruin. But only the Archon can actually open it without suffering terribly.” Kim’s grimmer expression returned. “Stephanie’s playing a dangerous game. Actually, more than one. If she’s wrong, and she tries to open this artifact without truly being the Archon, she’ll go absolutely insane.”
The roof creaked again, and footsteps pattered across the shingles.
Angela glanced at the chandelier, quaking a little. There was still some light. Enough to last them another hour or so. The previous evening with Sophia and Nina was coming back to her in all its disturbing detail. “This artifact is—”
“No one knows its true form—they say that those who’ve seen it by accident have gone mad. But it does have a name.” Kim spoke the words half under his breath. “The Book of Raziel.”
The first angel name that could hold any meaning for her.
But not for the reasons she’d been hoping.
Kim registered the blank look on her face and grasped her by the hand, pulling her to her feet.
“What is it?” she said.
He opened the door to the hallway. “Come with me.”
Angela had been in the library once since moving into the dormitory mansion.
She hadn’t found a reason to return yet.
Every other room in the building had a distinct sense of old elegance to it. Lamps were tarnished, wood needed polishing, and upholstered furniture sat overloaded with dust, but otherwise her new living quarters had retained at least a speck of understated dignity. The library, though, was almost as dreary as that private apartment Sophia had been calling home, only much more forbidding. The ceiling, high as it was, escaped into the darkness like there was no ceiling to be found. Paintings of landscapes from the days when the Academy was in its planning stages graced the walls, though years of dirt had grimed their sunny imagery into shadows. But besides a heavy table with six even heavier chairs surrounding it, the room was wall-to-wall books. Angela had stopped at one shelf, rifled through volumes of theological discourse texts, and finally left when it became clear she wouldn’t find anything of interest.
She let out a sigh of relief when Kim walked by that particular shelf and stopped at the next, his candelabra raised high.
Gold-embossed text glimmered on the spine of a particularly giant book. The Lies of Babylon.
He heaved it off the shelf and dropped it onto the table, gesturing for her to take a seat.
“I told you I’m not that interested in books,” she said, sliding out a chair. “How often do you come here, by the way?”
“What do you mean?” Kim set the candelabra on the table and swiftly opened to a set of pages heavily illustrated in deep shades of red and gray. The first symbol Angela noticed was the pentagram, its design almost identical to the Pentacle Sorority’s.
“You seemed to know exactly where to find this book. That implies some kind of familiarity, right?”
“There’s a copy in every mansion belonging to the Vatican.”
Angela stared at him, watching the candlelight play off the strange hue of his eyes. “Why? It doesn’t look very holy.”
Kim didn’t answer, but he let her flip through the pages as he observed, and the more she flipped, the more uneasy she felt. Whatever chapter she was in, there were no angels to be found, just a lot of strange quotations, formulas that resembled spells, and most disturbingly of all, prayers written in red ink that could just as easily have been blood. When his hand touched hers, suggesting that she stop, the heat from it seemed to jolt her back into reality. “Do you understand anything that you see?” he said, hardly bothering to hide the interest on his face anymore.