Archon(48)

“This won’t be like last year. I’ll allow Nina Willis to be present—for Angela’s sake—but she won’t perform the actual summoning.”

“You’re going to use her as the Sacrament?” He shook his head, chuckling softly. “No matter what you do, this time there’s going to be a real challenge. The demon is using you, Stephanie.”

She glared directly at him, calm and dangerous. They both knew his words were also a challenge. “And I’m using you. But I don’t see you complaining.”

Touché. But that warning would be his last kindness. She was repeating his mother’s mistakes all over again, and though it would be fascinating to watch her go down the same path, his lingering feelings justified a red flag of some kind. Even if Stephanie, like all ambitious witches, was too power hungry to notice it.

“You know, I never asked you,” she said, her eye shadow running with the rain. “Why did you get involved with me to begin with? Was there any reason beyond the obvious benefits?”

She was mistaken if she thought his loyalties went deeper than her usefulness.

But with Stephanie, there was also that hidden question, and this time it centered around her desire to be the Ruin—a perverse desire that had attracted him along with her attributes in the very beginning, but had died considerably even before his night with Angela Mathers. Now, Angela’s paintings haunted him most of all, perhaps more than his latest glimpse of Troy’s blood-encrusted mouth. The gray angel especially clung to his nightmares, screaming the obvious. Somehow, in some way, Angela had seen Lucifel. The Black Prince herself.

And if Stephanie was asking whether that really mattered, then, yes.

Yes. It did.

“There was no other reason,” Kim whispered. “Besides the thrill of putting you in your place, tell me, Stephanie, how does it feel to be on the other side of a lie?”

Stephanie stared at him. She lifted her hand as if to smack him violently across the face.

Then she lowered it, trembling with the effort. “Whatever you say, the truth remains. I own this school. I own you.” She spoke in the same monotone she often used after visiting her demon. Like all the brightness in her life had been stamped flat. “And I allow you to sleep with other women and smirk about it because it’s fun—knowing that I could crush you, and them, like flies at any second.”

“Flies. How ironic. They are her symbol, you know.”

“Whose?”

He smiled. “Lucifel’s.”

Stephanie’s courage evaporated, but for a mere second. “She has no power anymore. She’s caged, and when I prove myself to be the Archon, I’m going to go to Hell, slaughter her, and take her goddamned place.”

An insane idea. Maybe Stephanie had already tried to open the Book after all. It wouldn’t surprise him if the demon had brainwashed her into such foolishness, half hoping the wish would come true. Kim understood better than anyone else what it meant to be schooled in shadows.

“And if she escapes that cage? How will you deal with her then?”

Silence.

“Because she will find you.” Kim ran fingers through the wet mess of his hair. “And then she will extract the information she needs out of you, and suck your life away without a touch. By all accounts, it will be a painful way to go.”

“Why do you care?” Such a soft whisper. For the second instance since Kim had met her, Stephanie sounded truly anguished. The first was when she’d slept with him and then sat up all night crying, like a little girl who’d had her candy taken away. As if he’d forced her into bed at gunpoint. But whatever had taken place with the demon this Halloween night, something had changed. She was blatantly hurt and failing miserably at hiding the scars. “You never tried before. Why start now?”

Kim grabbed her hand before she could leave the balustrade. “What will you do if Angela is the Archon?”

Stephanie ripped her arm away. Her lips quivered. And then her jealousy finally won out over her pain. “I’ll kill her. But it doesn’t even matter. She’s not the One. And we’ll prove it tonight. And then she’ll have no choice but to serve me for four long, miserable years. Now make sure everything is ready, priest,” she said, her tone so soft, but so fatal. “It’s time to teach your newest girlfriend a lesson.”

Westwood’s leading blood head marched back inside of the chapel, dignified.

Yet, despite her confidence, the night could turn out to be a disaster in many ways.

If Stephanie misplaced even one of her carefully planned steps . . .

Kim lifted his hood again, its edges flapping in front of his face. Above him, Fury screeched into the incoming storm, lifting into the air and spiraling up, up, up into the black and gray clouds.