She was breathtaking, with a horrifying, predatory kind of beauty.
It was hard to look. And it was even harder to look away.
Troy sniffed Maribel’s neck, frightening her into a rigid catatonia.
“What is she?” Angela whispered, already knowing the answer. This was the devil she’d seen on the dormitory roof and hovering above her in the channel below the Bell Tower, and it was real. Of course, it didn’t make her feel any better that Troy was her rescuer. Nina’s real savior.
In her mind, Kim’s book lay wide open again, and she stared at those horrible illustrations of a creature that seemed more nightmare than flesh and blood.
“You know this thing?”
“Troy,” Kim said, whispering back, “is a Jinn. They’re immortal, like angels and demons, but scavengers, cave dwellers that survive in the upper reaches of the Underworld.” He stopped talking as Troy glared at him, suspicious, eventually resuming in an even lower voice. “They claim to be descended from angelic offspring that were rejected and thrown into the lower Realms. The result of eons of interbreeding in the harshest environment that exists . . .”
He made Hell sound like a land as real as Luz, or the Earth, or any other planet in the universe. Not just a place where spirits and untouchable ghosts wandered, punished and burning for all eternity. No, Hell was a place in the most material sense of the word.
And that meant Heaven was too.
“How do you know her?” Angela said, shivering.
There was a pause, and Kim’s tone dipped into tangible anguish. “She’s my cousin.”
His cousin. His father’s or mother’s niece. That means at least one of his parents is a Jinn. A devil. A monster that murders people like a cat hunts mice.
Angela didn’t have to ask. Luz’s infamous serial killer stalked around Maribel, right in front of her, a mere foot from Sophia and the candle cradled in her hand. Suddenly, the dead rat, the dead student near the Theology Center, and the lights Sophia had maintained in their bedroom—suddenly all those instances combined to make this deadly picture. Troy had been spying on Angela all along and eating other people in the meantime.
No wonder Kim had avoided the key chapter of his book.
He’d wanted to forget about his terror of a cousin, even for just one night.
A long screech filled the chapel. The crow that had warned Angela away from the dead student landed on Troy’s shoulder, wings adjusting for balance. Its beak clacked as it cocked an eye at Maribel.
“Fury.” Kim’s whisper was softer than a breath. “That’s the bird’s name. But the crow’s body is merely her shell.”
“A shell for what?”
“A human soul. She’s a Vapor. A familiar bound to Troy. But her human memories are gone by now. Now . . . she’s nothing but an extension of her master.”
Fury chattered her beak and flapped her wings. Anxious about something, it seemed. Troy regarded her with a low growl and leaned down over Maribel, her skinny hands reaching for her like a lover. She and Fury must have silently agreed on a course of action that would satisfy each other, if not everyone else. Maribel had been bleeding so slowly and for so long, her skin had just begun to shade off into gray, and her eyelids were growing heavy. She moved her lips, trying to speak. Angela thought she could make out a strained whisper of thanks, each word painfully drawn.
Then Troy snapped her neck.
That, at least, was mercifully brief.
When they arrived at Angela’s dormitory mansion, Nina was muttering in her sleep, shivering like a leaf and frighteningly feverish. Troy chose to remain at the Bell Tower for the time being, choosing to dispose of, or more likely devour, Maribel’s corpse.
Nina’s prediction of death had been spot-on after all.
Over and over, Angela’s mind replayed the events of the night, and when she, and Sophia, and Kim—who had volunteered to carry Nina the entire way—walked into the mansion, the first thing she did was dash into the kitchen, throw open the refrigerator, and suck down all of the water in a glass pitcher. Afterward, she promptly ran to the bathroom and vomited for at least half an hour, seeing more sticky pentagrams on the walls, and more blood everywhere she looked, even if it was only in her imagination. By the time Kim knocked on the door, she lay next to the toilet, curled up on the cracked tiles so that their chill leeched through her tights and arm gloves.
Her hypothermia, much like her other aches and pains, had disappeared even earlier than usual, and the bathroom smelled strangely comforting and clean. It was too old, though, even for the mansion that surrounded it, and a crack ran through the mirror’s middle. The light was meager, coming more from the space beneath the door than the candle next to the sink.