Archon(68)
Angela had given up suicide, dreams, and family. Now she was even giving up on her angels despite being closer to them than ever.
She barely knew herself anymore.
Kim sighed in her hair. “I thought I had everything figured out, and you’re changing that for me yet again.” His thin lips touched her cheek. “Don’t mistake me—I want you to be the Archon, Angela. You and I work well together. In fact, we’re a lot alike.”
“How?” she said, truly desperate to know.
“Well—” Kim tugged her by the hand, urging her to keep walking. “Both of us have suffered from prejudice and abuse because of how different we look. My mother and I”—his tone became grim—“we were cast out of village after village because of me. They said I was a child of the Devil—which wasn’t so far off. But my mother deserved a little better than that.”
Village after village. A child of the Devil.
Kim was conjuring a world of superstition and witchcraft that had only recently returned. How old was he? Hundreds of years . . . and yet he hadn’t grown tired of living yet. That fact was almost as incomprehensible as his paternity.
“—and then there is the matter of your parents. You were so appalled that I killed my father, yet you’ve done exactly the same—”
“It wasn’t the same.” Angela let go of his hand. Tileaf’s oak loomed ahead, its massive trunk seeming to grow the closer they came until it was thicker than seven people could hug with their arms touching finger to finger. Branches grew from it in a gnarled mess that spread almost as far as the roots, their thick bark coiling and curling through the strong-smelling earth like sea serpents. The tree was dying, but sparse tufts of brown and green leaves still clung to it, rustling in the slightest breeze. There was a silence here that hinted of death and sickness. Every spoken word felt like a sin. “It wasn’t the same at all.”
“You mean they didn’t deserve to die for how they treated you? I know they abused you.”
His cool face questioned her, wondering.
Angela stopped to let Mikel walk ahead of them, the angel’s red eyes gathering in the tree with awe. “But that’s where you and I differ, Kim. They didn’t deserve to die.” Angela slipped the Eye beneath her blouse, letting its chill touch her heart. For once, her bitterness felt like it belonged. “They deserved worse.”
Her lips said it like a prayer.
“They deserved to suffer.”
Twenty
From the highest of heights they fell;
Stars longing to clothe themselves in Nature’s garb.
Fairest of creatures who dance on mortal Earth,
Are those Untamable Ones who sing of the trees.
—VARIOUS AUTHORS, Songs of the Fair Folk
“When Tileaf appears don’t act frightened . . . or show that you’re upset . . .”
“. . . is she in pain, dying like this . . .”
“Torture . . . would be the better word . . .”
Troy etched the Blood Circle into the dirt, directly in front of the Fae Queen’s tree, trying her damnedest not to run over and rip Sariel’s mouth out of his head. His every word annoyed her, her palm twitched from the cut Angela had dared to inflict on her, and her pride wasn’t doing so well either. She traced lines through the soil, finger shaking, drawing the sigils that would protect the bitch from the harm she deserved.
Angela might have been possessed by an angel. But she wasn’t an angel herself.
Sariel didn’t understand, partly because he didn’t have the nose of a full-blooded Jinn. Angela was all wrong, twisted and warped, and her soul’s scent resembled both the freshness of a spring-fed pool and the most oppressive darkness Troy could remember. Worst of all, she’d known how to consummate a Binding, which wouldn’t have been such a miracle if it were on any other Jinn. But Troy, as the Underworld’s most skilled hunter, its High Assassin, had more than enough power to ward off such a trick. Angela might as well have clipped her ears and caged her—which was absolutely unthinkable. Yet she’d been forced into a bond she’d never wanted, leaving her in a numb state that would turn into a rage hell-bent on killing for killing’s sake.
If she couldn’t snap Angela’s neck, someone else would have to die. That was for damned sure.
Troy tucked away her next angry hiss, feigning indifference.
Angela sat next to Kim on top of one of Tileaf’s roots, her possessed friend resting behind them in the leaf litter. Often, she would stare at Troy, intensely interested in what she was writing, and then Troy would merely spread her wings, turning them into a mantle that blocked her view.