Archon(67)

“Then explain how I Bound Troy and stayed sane when she waved this in front of my face.”

Kim unbuttoned his white collar. His sculpted cheekbones seemed to glow, full of moonlight that didn’t exist, a trait he’d probably inherited from his father. It seemed the corpselike pallor of a Jinn’s skin had its own special beauty. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, but as quietly as if he were talking to himself. “The Archon is a reincarnation of Raziel, an angel. And you have his blood-red hair, his blue eyes, his memories, but—”

“You could be wrong.”

He examined her sharply. “What?”

“You could be wrong, just like Troy said. Maybe the Archon has Raziel’s features and memories because he’s possessing her, but she’s actually a reincarnation of someone else. Maybe he gave the Archon his features so that she’d be recognized as someone important—so that everyone would think she’s Raziel—because that was the person they remembered. Because they’d never seen the other one.”

Kim shook his head. He shivered a little. “There is no one else. Mikel said it herself. Israfel is alive and Lucifel is caged. That leaves us with Raziel.”

“Is there someone more powerful than them?”

He laughed. “God.”

He must be right then. There is no one else. But I know I’m not Raziel, even though he must be protecting me from killing myself.

“Kim.”

“What is it?” He continued to pace ahead of her, tall and blurred by the fog. The tone of his voice wasn’t encouraging, but Angela couldn’t stop herself anymore. Some secrets had to come out in the open.

“I never really thought about this. I mean, it happened only once that I can remember—”

He stopped, turning around to face her. Branches framed his strong figure, groping like skeletal arms. He appeared tense again, waiting for anything.

But could he even be surprised at this point?

“When I was eleven years old,” Angela said, “I tried to kill myself with a gun. It didn’t work, like always, but the pistol kicked back, and I knocked myself unconscious. Like I explained to you before, whenever I was unconscious, I would dream. And almost always I dreamed of the angels you saw in my paintings. But that time—was different from all the rest.”

Angela wrapped her arms around her shoulders.

She could still hear the gun firing, the sound of it almost bursting her eardrums.

“Go on,” Kim said gently. The park could have been waiting with him, its silence suggesting that even the trees listened and considered.

“It was only for a minute, but I thought I saw another angel. He said something to me, which was strange, because the others never spoke to me at all. But it’s been so long—and I was so disappointed with surviving . . . I can’t remember what it was, or if he really said anything in the first place. If that makes any sense.”

“So you’ve seen three angels?” The way Kim stared at her, she felt like Troy was crushing her all over again.

“I guess.”

“But you can’t remember a single detail of what he said? Even the feelings he tried to communicate to you?”

“Maybe . . . that I had to stay alive.” Angela examined her hands, and it seemed impossible that she’d ever held a gun at all. “Because people needed me.”

“Then why did you keep trying to kill yourself?”

She turned from him and faced the gate to the park, its iron bars faintly discernible in the mist. Nina approached them slowly, still keeping a safe distance from Kim, her eyes glowing like crimson dots. “If you had been in my position, you’d have known it was a lie.”

So an angel didn’t want her to die. But now Angela knew there was much more behind that than kindness. From what she’d seen of Troy and Naamah, and even Mikel, real angels didn’t care about you. Not as much as they cared about what you could do for them. The situation was searingly ironic. And even more ironic, the closer Angela crept toward being the Archon, the more Kim had started to disbelieve. Either he was afraid the search might be over, perhaps because it meant Troy’s teeth in his neck, or he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her.

His kiss met the top of her hair, followed by the warmth of his arms, embracing her from behind. “Don’t take my actions in the chapel the wrong way. I didn’t want you to die. I just try not to get attached anymore.”

“Then why do you look at me like that?”

But the more he looked, the more it felt right. And the more Angela learned about angels, the more it felt foolish to love an elegant, dazzling creature who would probably never love her in return.