“Mikel,” Kim pressed. “Let Nina go.”
“I told you not to try,” the angel said, petulant but oppressed by the use of its name. “It’s ridiculous to try. You can’t evict me. Nina Willis was willing, and now we share a bond.”
“Then bring her back, so she can tell us that herself.”
“Not yet. Not until you speak to Tileaf.”
Tileaf. The world’s last surviving Fae Queen. Her tree was the symbol and namesake of Westwood Academy, but it was also cut off from students, novices, and citizens of Luz who weren’t in the know and didn’t want the burden of living with the knowledge. Tileaf’s powers had provided prosperity and power to the Vatican officials at the Academy for a century, and lately they’d been tapping her like a maple, draining all the sap of her energy with the most menial requests or demands. Perhaps exulting in humanity’s imminent sufferings, she’d triumphantly revealed to the priests that the Archon would indeed be a woman, and that when the time came, they would be under Her heel like the insects they were.
But to speak with her . . .
It was almost out of the question. Tileaf had no consideration for anything now but death. Actually dying but unable to speed up the process, she hated anything that couldn’t grant her the release her heart desired. That, of course, meant most living things.
“Who is Tileaf?” Angela said, and the name rolled off her tongue with reverence. Wonder.
Kim turned from her, missing their tryst, half wishing for all the world to implode. He hadn’t counted on one of Lucifel’s legendary children to burst out of the past and into his life, and he couldn’t understand why it was happening now and not five years ago, ten years ago. Why had Mikel waited until this moment? “Tileaf is a defector from the angelic realm,” he said to Angela, trying to bite away his fear. “But you would be more familiar with the term faerie. And she doesn’t have any affection for humans. We’ll have to take Troy with us.”
From the look on Angela’s face, that was not what she had in mind.
“I’ll stay here,” Sophia said, folding her hands on her lap, gazing out at the night. “Naamah and Stephanie won’t bother me, but—I’m sure Kim agrees—you and Nina need to leave, Angela.”
“Admirable,” Kim muttered. “The sacrifice in you.”
Sophia sucked in a breath that was more likely her next comment.
Kim walked over and grabbed Angela’s hand, kissing it. He couldn’t help himself. Not with Sophia so infuriated and Angela standing in front of him, accepting his reverence like she was the true Archon and not merely a human who’d be staring Lucifel’s Grail in the literal eye, wobbling on the edge of a terrifying darkness. “Remember,” he said to her softly, “that I can protect you. But not against Troy. If you show any signs of weakness, I can’t promise your safety. To stand with her, you must think like her.”
“And how is that?” Angela said, her face fiercer than she realized. Her hair was like a waterfall of blood, cascading past her shoulders. Long, needle straight, and portentous.
“Hunt hard. Kill swiftly. Waste nothing. And—”
He let her go. It was never good to grow too attached.
“—offer no apologies.”
Nineteen
They had a great city, the terror and beauty of the Underworld before a single War crushed it mercilessly. Its name is a prayer to these beings; the distillation of their hopes for vengeance, given only to the most excellent and skilled of their kind. But human language is a poor filter for their alien speech, and so, we must make do with approximations of dreadful things.
—CARDINAL DEMIAN YATES, A Brief Compendium of Hell and Its Realms
Troy. The High Assassin of the Jinn.
Thanks to Kim’s hasty, half-whispered explanations, Angela had learned before stepping into his cousin’s lair that she was the product of a world where compassion equaled death, and hunger steered the soul. Where any weak links weeded themselves out in a vast and intricate darkness. In essence, she was the personification of survival of the fittest.
Through the prism with which Troy saw the world, Angela would show her true colors— either as a help, or a hindrance destined to bleed beneath her nails.
Unfortunately, it was impossible to say which one the Jinn was deciding on at the moment, and Angela’s breath stopped, and her heart nearly seized up inside of her as they stood perilously near to one another. Kim had taken Angela up into the Bell Attic at the top of the Tower, where Troy had kept her larder since coming to Luz, stashing her half-eaten bones and body pieces in a space that stank of bat dung and rotten flesh. Up close, she was perhaps even more terrifying and beautiful than in the shadows, the blue veins of her skin taking on the appearance of intricate lacework, her large eyes such a brilliant yellow that they bordered on fluorescent. Every other second, her left ear flicked, swinging a chain earring with a metal crow’s foot at its end. Her hair was a short, choppy mess, knotted with tiny bones and teeth, and they rattled softly as she turned her head aside, considering.