“You shouldn’t be afraid,” Israfel said with a measured gentleness. “Of course, I can always bring you back in a new body, whenever I feel like it. And then another. And another.” His pink lips mouthed the words too softly. “So why fear death? You’re going to be happy now, Brendan. An eternity of slavery to me, just as you wished. And you’ll have a million bodies with which to enjoy it.”
Sophia shuddered next to Angela, like her own execution had been pronounced.
Brendan will be just like her. Dying over and over, only to wake up in a new body—all to wait for a different kind of death.
Somehow, Brendan had pissed Israfel off. Now he was going to pay for it dearly. For eternity. “Why?” her brother gasped, almost lunging out of Naamah’s lethal grip.
Israfel looked to Angela.
Brendan followed his gaze, horrified.
“No need for two in my confidence,” the angel whispered. “It simply wouldn’t be fair.”
Angela’s brother was suddenly a mess, his hair tangled in front of his eyes, his face contorted with anger. “You,” he said to Angela. “You!” He pointed at her, shrieking at the top of his lungs. “It wasn’t enough to ruin the family? To ruin my life? And here I scraped and slaved my way into this seminary, and yet you enter Luz simply because you’re a blood head—”
He was raving. Israfel had pushed him completely over the edge.
Angela lunged to grab him, to rescue him from the danger that loomed more menacingly every second. But Sophia yanked her back just as swiftly, her fingers like an unbreakable vise.
“—but you can’t have HIM, Angela. He’s MINE. MINE—”
“Brendan,” she said, trying to say more with her expression than her words—
Shut up. Shut up before it’s too late.
“You sound like a crazy person. You sound like—”
Sophia held on tighter. Painfully, impossibly tight.
“You’re crazy! You’re going to be the ruin of us all! Why didn’t they just kill you that night—when we were born—LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO ME—”
Sophia turned away, her eyes squeezed shut.
As if this was her cue, Naamah gave a slight flick of her wrist.
Brendan’s throat slit open like a ripe fruit. He gurgled, slipping in the mess of his own blood, flailing out of her reach and onto the floor, clutching at his wound. Angela didn’t even realize she was screaming until Sophia twisted her arm, shocking her back into a dreamlike, semiaware state. But no one could save her brother. And Stephanie, his former lover, simply watched, her mouth set in a line and her expression stony. Brendan crawled for the angel, spitting more blood as he tried to talk.
Israfel stood over Brendan, judging him like a god but not saying a word. Her brother grasped the angel’s foot, his skin paling to chalky white, his eyes round with shock. An exchange of thoughts seemed to pass between him and Israfel, ones that brought shivers to Brendan’s body.
He collapsed a second later. Dead.
Naamah breathed heavily, wiping her dirtied blades in a fold of coat fabric. “He was uncommonly loud for a priest,” she said, muttering. Then she laughed at Israfel, certainly overjoyed to see him distressed by her violence. “I wouldn’t be too upset. He also wasn’t a fitting toy, am I right?”
“Angela,” Sophia was saying, as if from very far away. “Angela . . .”
But she was becoming one with the audience trapped inside the church, dazed and overwhelmed. That raving mockery of humanity hadn’t been her brother. Yes, he and Angela might have been estranged for years, but even so, the thought was the only support that was keeping her from losing her last precious thread of self-control and collapsing inside for good.
Her reaction, though, was a universal one.
Everyone else who’d been left alive to watch her brother die stood in the same dull kind of silence, as if the bloodshed no longer meant anything. Some of the novices had huddled in the darkest corners they could find, and out past the dim light of the candles there were the reflections of hundreds of eyes, the ragged breaths from hundreds of mouths, the prayers whispered half in fear and half in the hope of escape.
I can’t just curl up and cry. It won’t change anything.
Despite her resolve, the tears trickled down her face.
No. Angela knew she had to help. She was one of the only people who could.
But how? And without killing herself?
You should have never Bound her to you . . .
Troy. Angela could actually use that terrifying creature and she was nowhere to be found.
But if you are nearby, she said to herself, you’d better come.
Members of the Pentacle Sorority had sat still in their pews, protected from the mayhem until Israfel’s arrival. Now they rested on the tiles, their knees tucked up within the circle of their arms, watching Stephanie and Angela like they were two gods on the verge of battle.