“No.”
“Yes. For the Father’s sake, let’s get this over with.”
He lifted Sophia’s left arm and stripped away her skin in one smooth movement.
Sophia never cried out. She barely shed a tear. But her face twisted with a terrible anger, and her gray eyes regressed to those vacant holes Angela feared so much. Israfel let her go, and Sophia stumbled away, clutching her arm while black blood trickled down to her wrist. Israfel dropped the part of Sophia’s arm that seemed more glove than skin—and Angela stared at the white muscle, the black veins that had been hiding beneath it—understanding that she was seeing something alien and inhuman, and maybe worse than both.
“Do you know what she is?” Israfel said gently.
In the background, Naamah screamed and Troy hissed like some gigantic snake as they fought. Candlesticks, altar cloths, tapestries, and glass fell, smashed, crashed. But that chaos was nothing compared to the blow Angela was feeling. Her stomach felt like someone had pulled it out with a hook.
Why? First Brendan, now this.
“She said she’d died—”
“A lie.” Israfel forced Sophia to turn back to them both, pinching her chin between his fingers. She was frightening to look at, her porcelain complexion contorted by the rage that was showing in her unwholesome eyes and quivering mouth. “Or maybe a half-truth: one can never know when it comes to her. In actuality, she is a golem—an artificial creation.”
“Whose creation?” Angela’s mouth went dry. She was torn between screaming herself and wrenching Sophia out of Israfel’s grasp and shaking her like a rag doll. “Whose?”
Israfel leaned down, repeating the question like she was a child. “Whose creation, Sophia?”
Now the tears began. Sophia glanced at Angela, her face streaked by water and misery, half sobbing. “Raziel’s.”
Raziel’s . . .
“You lied to me.” For the first time since they’d entered the church, Angela took the chance to yell like everyone else. No one was who she’d thought. Everyone seemed to hide behind masks, secrets, half-truths, and martyrdoms. “You lied . . . you said that you died in childbirth, that you had been brought back to life as a punishment—”
“It’s true!” Sophia struggled and squirmed from Israfel’s touch. She held Angela fast, forgetting the horror of her skinless arm. “I did, and I am. Kim was not wrong. I am a REVENANT—”
“Then explain this!” Angela thrust her away, indicating her inhuman body.
“You weren’t supposed to know,” Sophia mumbled between her tears. “What I really am. But everything I told you before was the truth.”
“Were you ever truly human?”
A wretched sob. “No.”
“Oh God.” Angela clutched her head. “Then what?”
Sophia fell to her knees, pounding the tiles with her fists and screaming. “The Book! I’m the Book of Raziel! And I’ve been in Hell for eons, watching, and waiting for Her to open me—”
The darkness behind her eyes was terrifying. Angela stepped backward, seeing nothing but the Book from Tileaf’s memories and its great Eye, gazing through her. The Fae had said that few creatures, if any, knew what the Book truly looked like. Kim had said that if it was opened by the wrong person, they would go insane from what was hidden in its pages. But there lay the horrendous mystery. How did you open a Book that was a living, walking, talking, intelligent creation, and not a tome or collection of scriptures? Where were the pages, and how could they be read? And if you did manage to pry into Sophia’s depths, what terrors would lie in wait for you, sucking away your soul if they couldn’t be withstood?
Sophia stood with incredible speed, turning on Israfel, and she was a frightful vision of grace and unearthly anger. Even worse, her arm was already healing, new skin solidifying and hazing over the white muscle beneath. “Child,” she hissed at him, “and murderer! But I will let all of Heaven and Hell know what you have done, Israfel. It will be through my mercy alone that you find any redemption.”
“My sister’s words?” he glared at her coolly. “You speak of Hell, but it was your own fault to follow her there . . .”
“Lucifel was not my master. Neither were you.”
“Why not say,” he smiled delicately, “that your punishment is self-inflicted?”
Sophia’s mouth kept moving, but no sound came out. She paused, her cheeks flaming red, her fingers trembling like she would walk up to him and take him by the neck. No one would have ever guessed, but Raziel’s portentous Book was a golem in the shape of a human young woman, her features and actions doll-like, aching for protection. No wonder Angela had been tempted to dress her, hold her, simply be with her. That must have been the effect she had on people, and once you made the mistake of trying to open her—free her—it was too late.