She could hear the screams.
Naamah was gaining on them fast. She wouldn’t let Angela’s friend survive if she could help it.
But she couldn’t.
Troy caught an updraft and ascended, enough to let her take aim.
Then she smacked into Naamah, flipping them both into an opposing tower.
Metal screeched across brick. Stone cracked, ripping from the building in chunks. Blades whistled past her ears. Naamah’s shriek was as desperate as the human’s Troy had cut down. “Having fun, rat?”
She thrust out her hand, probably to knock Troy down with an ether current.
“Forgetting again.” Troy shook her head, rattling the bones tied to her hair. “You’re a part of me now, bitch.”
She bit into Naamah’s flesh, and they fell again.
The wind screamed around them, the world passing by in a blur of fog and weak light. A set of windows seemed to shoot upward as they plummeted, lost to the sky. Another. Another. Below, the turbid sea took shape, half of its waves bleached by lightning. Troy’s eyes smarted from the glare, and she closed them momentarily, using her nose and ears to assess the danger. The demon was anything but quiet.
Naamah screamed out curses, and water cascaded down the curves of Troy’s wings, soaking into their feathers and slicking them to an oily sheen. The air buffeted them violently.
Finally, Troy shoved Naamah away.
In moments, the rain fell too thick to see.
Angela’s scent reemerged, emanating from a flooded channel near the base of the Bell Tower. The demon would never catch it in time.
Troy arched her wings into sharp crescents and dived, eventually hovering above a choppy mess of icy black water, peering through the night. Angela was treading the channel, somehow still alive with her arms wrapped around the human she’d nearly killed herself to save. Her friend looked like she had a broken leg, maybe an arm, but she smelled like her brain was reasonably intact. Not that it would matter otherwise, but even Troy couldn’t let a human who might be the Archon perish. She flapped above Angela, snatching for her, and Angela glanced up at her through the rain, sputtering seawater and hair from her mouth.
Her face whitened to Sariel’s shade, and her eyes rolled back in her head.
Luckily, the water was too shallow for her to sink like a rock.
Seventeen
We have determined that the Archon will suffer through the greatest personal torments. And I would be lying if I said I felt sorry for what She must endure.
—ST. IMWALD, LETTERS TO THE HOLY FATHER
There were no more dreams.
Angela, though, remembered so little of what had happened before that. The last thing she’d seen clearly had been Nina falling over the veranda porch. She’d sprinted after her, hoping to save her, because whenever Angela tried to drown herself, it hadn’t worked and she’d lost every bit of fear that it would. Just as she’d expected, a searing pain had shot through her head, and her clothes flooded with icy water. In a daze, she’d found Nina and wrapped her arms around her, keeping them both afloat. Then, of all possible rescuers for them, she’d hallucinated the devil on her dormitory roof, fluttering overhead.
But after she’d fainted, there had been no dreams. Nothing. No hint of her beautiful angel. Not a wisp of his gray companion. Not even a trace of Sophia and her pretty silver slippers.
From the first day Angela could understand what a dream was, she had one every time she blacked out of reality. That meant at least one dream every night of her life, not even counting the times she fainted.
Now—nothing.
The invocation must have worked.
The hard, astonishing realization pounded through her head as she cracked open her eyelids, amazed to find herself back in the chapel where so much had gone so wrong. Stephanie and the other sorority members had fled, leaving one of their own in a bloody pool close to the balustrade, the student’s breathing painfully intermittent. Kim and Sophia knelt by Angela’s side, Nina’s twisted but twitching arm peeking through a gap between Sophia’s bloody slippers. And the devil who’d saved her . . . must have disappeared like the vision it had been.
There was no sign of an angel with bronze hair and wings—for all she knew, Angela had summoned a monster—but they’d never find out until Nina opened her eyes again, and that didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon.
Angela blinked up at the murky ceiling, so high and cavernous, just taking in air.
A horrid shudder moved up through her chest, and she turned her head, hacking up salt water. It spat out of her throat, burning. She swore out loud.
Kim laughed, sounding relieved. “She’s here with us. Thank God. You shouldn’t be alive, you know.” He leaned over her, his amber eyes gleaming before the meager circle of light. Sophia held a candle in her hand, her other palm cupped around the flame to protect it from the breeze. The worst of the storm was over, its tail edges rumbling out to the west. “Would you like to explain yourself, Miss Mathers?”