Rapture

TEN STARSHOT IN THE DUST

“You’re the desideratum?” Luce’s cucumber sandwich fell from her fingers and bounced off her teacup, leaving a glob of mayonnaise on the lace-embroidered table-cloth.

Dee beamed at them. There was an almost impish gleam in her golden eyes that made her look more like a teenager than a woman many hundreds of years old. As she pinned a shiny strand of red hair back into her chignon and poured everyone more tea, it was hard to fathom that this elegant, vibrant creature was also, in fact, an artifact.

“That’s how you got the nickname Dee, isn’t it?” Luce asked.

“Yes.” Dee looked pleased. She winked at Roland.

“Then you know where the site of the Fall is?” The question brought everyone to attention. Annabelle sat straighter, elongating her long neck. Arriane did the opposite, slumping lower in her chair, elbows on the table, chin resting on clasped hands. Roland leaned forward, tucking his dreads behind one shoulder. Daniel clenched Luce’s hand. Was Dee the answer to every question they had?

She shook her head.

“I can help you discover where the Fall took place.” Dee set her teacup down in its saucer. “The answer is within me, but I am unable to express it in any way that I or you can understand. Not until all of the pieces are in place.”

“What do you mean, ‘in place’?” Luce asked. “How will we know when that happens?”

Dee walked over to the fireplace and used a poker to return the fallen log to its place inside. “You will know.

We will all know.”

“But you at least know where the third artifact is?” Roland passed around a plate of sliced lemons after dropping one into his tea.

“Indeed I do.”

“Our friends,” Roland said, “Cam, Gabbe, and Molly have gone to Avalon to search for it. If you could help them locate—”

“You know as well as I that the angels must locate each artifact on their own, Sir Sparks.”

“I thought you’d say that.” He leaned back in his chair, eyeing Dee. “Please, call me Roland.”

“And I thought you’d ask. Roland.” She smiled. “I’m glad you did. It makes me feel as if you trust me to help you defeat Lucifer.” She tilted her head at Luce. “Trust is important, don’t you think, Lucinda?”

Luce looked around the table at the fallen angels she’d first met at Sword & Cross, epochs earlier. “I do.” She had once had a very different kind of conversation with Miss Sophia, who had described trust as a careless pursuit, a good way to get oneself killed. It was eerie how much the two resembled each other in body, while the words produced by their dissimilar souls differed so completely.

Dee reached for the halo in the center of the table.

“May I?”

Daniel handed over the piece, which Luce knew from personal experience was very heavy. In Dee’s hands, it seemed to weigh nothing.

Her slender arms were barely long enough to wrap around its gold circumference, but Dee cradled the halo like a child. Her reflection peered back dimly in the glass.

“Another reunion,” she said softly, to herself. When Dee looked up, Luce couldn’t tell whether she was content or sad. “It will be wonderful when the third artifact is in your possession.”

“From your mouth to God’s ears,” Arriane said, pouring something from a fat silver flask into her tea.

“That’s great-granddaddy’s route!” Dee said with a smile.

Everyone laughed, a little nervously.

“Speaking of the third artifact”—Dee looked down at a thin gold watch buried among her tangle of pearl bracelets—“did someone mention you all were rather in a hurry to move on?”

There was a clamor of teacups jostling back into their saucers, chairs being pushed back, and wings whooshing open around the table. Suddenly, the massive dining hall seemed smaller and brighter and Luce felt the familiar tingle run through her body when she saw Daniel’s broad wings unfurled.

Dee caught her eye. “Lovely, isn’t it?” Instead of blushing at being caught staring at Daniel, Luce just smiled, for Dee was on their side. “Every time.”

“Where to, Cap’n?” Arriane asked Daniel, tucking scones into the pockets of her overalls.

“Back to Mount Sinai, right?” Luce said. “Isn’t that where we agreed Cam and the others are supposed to meet us?”

Daniel glanced toward the door. His forehead wrinkled in agitation. “Actually, I didn’t want to mention this until we’d found the second artifact, but . . .”

“Come on, Grigori,” Roland said. “Let’s have it.”

“Before we left the warehouse,” Daniel said, “Phil told me that he received a message from one of the Outcasts who he’d sent to Avignon. Cam’s group was intercepted—”

“Scale?” Dee asked. “Still harboring fantasies of their importance in the cosmic balance?”

“We can’t be sure,” Daniel said, “though it does seem likely. We will set a course for the Pont Saint Bénézet in Avignon.” He glanced at Annabelle, whose face turned a shade of scarlet.

“What?” she cried. “Why there?”

“My marginalia in The Book of the Watchers suggest it is the approximate location of the third artifact.

It should have been Cam, Gabbe, and Molly’s first stop.”

Annabelle looked away and didn’t say anything else.

The mood turned serious as the group filed out of the dining room. Luce felt tense with worry for Cam and Molly, imagining them bound up in black Scale cloaks like Arriane and Annabelle.

Angel wings rustled along the narrow brick walls as they walked back down the endless hallway. When they reached the curved wooden doorway leading back outside, Dee swung open an iron circle covering the peephole and peered out.

“Hmmm.” She let the peephole swing shut.

“What is it?” Luce asked, but by then, Dee had already opened up the door and was gesturing for everyone to leave the peculiar brown house, whose soul was so much richer than its exterior suggested.

Luce went first and stood on the porch—which was really just a heap of frost-kissed straw—to wait for the others. The angels poured out of the doorway one at a time—Daniel arching his white wings back as he exited chest out, Annabelle tucking her thick silver wings fast to her sides, Roland bundling his golden marble wings around the front of his body like an invincible shield, and Arriane plowing through recklessly, cursing an unnoticed candle by the doorway that singed a tip of wing.

Afterward, all the angels stood together on the lawn and flexed their wings, glad to be out in the crisp air again.

Luce noticed the darkness. She was certain that when they’d entered the Foundation, the sun had not been far from rising. The church bells had chimed once more, announcing four o’clock, and the sky had been grasping for the precious gold of dawn.

Had they been inside with Dee for just an hour? Why was the sky now a dark, dead-of-night blue?

Lights were on in the white stone townhouses. People passed behind the windows, frying eggs, pouring cups of coffee. Men with briefcases and women with smart suits walked out their front doors and, without ever once glancing at the congregation of angels in the middle of the street, got into cars and drove away, toward what Luce assumed was work.

She remembered Daniel had explained that Viennese people could not see them when they were inside the Patina. They didn’t see the brown house at all. Luce watched a woman in a black terry cloth bathrobe and a plastic rain bonnet walk groggily toward them with her small furry dog. Her property bordered the overgrown pebble path that led to the front door of the Foundation.

The woman and her dog stepped onto the path.

And disappeared.

Luce gasped, but then Daniel pointed behind her, to the other side of the Foundation’s lawn. She spun around.

Forty feet away, where the pebble path ended, and the modern sidewalk picked up once again, the woman and her dog reappeared. The dog yapped hysterically, but the woman walked on as if nothing had disturbed her morning routine.

It was strange, Luce realized, that the angels’ whole mission was to keep her life that way. So that nothing happened to erase this woman’s world, so that she never even noticed how much danger she’d been in.

But while the people on the street might not have noticed Luce or the angels, they certainly did notice the sky. The woman with the dog kept glancing up at it worriedly, and most of the people leaving their houses wore slickers and carried umbrellas.

“Is it going to rain?” Luce had flown through pockets of rain with Daniel, warm showers that left them refreshed and exhilarated . . . but this sky was ominous, nearly black.

“No,” Dee said. “It isn’t going to rain. That’s the Scale.”

“What?” Luce’s head shot up. She squinted at the sky, horrified when it shifted and pitched. Storm clouds didn’t move like that.

“The sky is dark with their wings.” Arriane shuddered. “And their cloaks.”

No.

Luce stared at the sky until it began to make sense.

With a feeling akin to vertigo, she made out an undulating mass of blue-gray wings. They were smeared across the sky, thick as a coat of paint, blocking out the rising sun. The beats of the short brutish wings buzzed like a swarm of hornets. Her heart clenched as she tried to count them. It was impossible. How many hundreds hovered in the multitude above?

“We’re under siege,” Daniel said.

“They’re so close,” Luce said, flinching as the sky roiled. “Can they see us?”

“Not exactly, but they know we’re here,” Dee said nonchalantly as a small group of Scale swooped lower, low enough for them to see their shriveled, bloodthirsty faces. Cold eyes trolled the space where Luce and the others gathered, but when it came to the Patina, Scale seemed to be about as blind as the Outcasts.

“My Patina surrounds us, the way a tea cozy surrounds a pot, forming a protective barrier. The Scale can’t see or travel through it.” She managed a smile at Luce. “It only answers to the ringing of a certain kind of soul, one innocent of its own potential.” Daniel’s wings pulsed beside her. “They’re gathering more brethren all the time. We need some way to get out of here, and we need to hurry.”

“I do not intend to be bound in one of their broke-neck burkas,” Dee said. “No one takes me in my own house!”

“I like the way she talks,” Annabelle said sideways to Luce.

“Follow me!” Dee shouted, breaking into a run along a gated alley. They jogged behind her through an unexpected pumpkin patch, around an ornate and dilapi-dated gazebo into an expansive and lushly green backyard.

Roland’s chin tilted toward the sky. It was darker now, denser with wings.

“What’s the plan?”

“Well, for starters”—Dee wandered over to stand under a mottled oak tree in the center of the garden—“the library must be destroyed.”

Luce gasped. “Why?”

“Simple mechanics. This Patina has always encompassed the library, so with the library it must stay. In order to move past the Scale, we’ll have to open the Patina, thereby exposing the Foundation, and I do not intend to leave it for their indiscriminating wings to root through.” Her hand patted Luce’s stricken face. “Don’t worry, dear, I’ve already donated the valuable volumes in the collection—to the Vatican, mostly, though some went to the Huntington, and to a little unsuspecting town in Ar-kansas. No one will miss this place. I’m the last librarian here, and frankly, I don’t plan to return after this mission.”

“I still don’t understand how we get past them.” Daniel’s gaze stayed fixed on the swirling blue-black sky.

“I will have to produce a second Patina, surrounding only our bodies, guaranteeing us safe passage. Then I will open this one and let the Scale flow in.”

“I think I’m smelling what you’re cooking,” Arriane said, climbing up a branch like a monkey to sit nestled in the oak tree.

“The Foundation will be sacrificed”—Dee frowned—

“but at least the Scale will make nice kindling.”

“Hold on, how does the library get sacrificed?” Roland crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at Dee.

“I was hoping you could help with that, Roland,” Dee said, eyes twinkling. “You’re rather good at starting fires, aren’t you?”

Roland raised his eyebrows, but Dee had already turned around. Facing the tree trunk, she reached for a knot in its bark, pulled it like a secret doorknob, and opened the trunk to a hollowed chamber. Inside, the wood was polished, the chamber about the size of a small locker. Dee’s arm dipped in and pulled out a long golden key.

“That’s how you open the Patina?” Luce asked, surprised that it required so physical a key.

“Well, this is how I unlock it so that it can be manipulated for our needs.”

“When you open it, if there’s a fire,” Luce said, remembering the way the woman walking her dog blinked out of existence for a moment while she crossed the Foundation’s front lawn, “what will happen to the houses, to the people on the street?”

“Funny thing about the Patina,” Dee said, kneeling down and rooting around in the garden for something.

“The way it sits on the border between realities past and present, we can be here, and not here, in the present, and also elsewhere. It’s a place where everything we imagine about time and space comes together materially.” She lifted up the fronds of an oversized fern, then dug in the dirt with her hands. “No mortals outside will be affected, but if the Scale are as ravenous as we all know they are, as soon as I open this Patina, they’ll swoop right towards us. For one tense moment, they will join us in the elsewhere reality when the Foundation Library stood on this street.”

“And we’ll fly out, enclosed in the second Patina,” Daniel guessed.

“Precisely,” Dee said. “Then we have only to close this one around them. Just as they can’t get in now, they won’t be able to get out then. And while we soar on safely to lovely, ancient Avignon, the library will go up in smoke, with the Scale trapped inside.”

“It’s brilliant,” Daniel said. “The Scale will still technically be alive, so our action won’t tip the Heavenly balance, but they’ll be—”

“Burn marks of the past, sealed off, out of our way.

Right. Everybody on board?” Dee’s face lit up. “Ah, there it is!”

As Luce and the angels stood over her, Dee brushed the dirt off a collared hole that had been buried in the garden. She closed her eyes, held the key close to her heart, and whispered a blessing:

“Light surround us, love enfold us, shelter us, Patina, from the evil that must come.”

Carefully, she fit the key into the lock. Her wrist shook with the force required to turn the key, but finally, it creaked a quarter turn to the right. Dee exhaled heavily and rose to her feet, wiping her hands on her skirt.

“Here we go.”

She raised her arms above her head and then, very slowly, very purposefully, brought them down toward her heart. Luce waited for the earth to shift, for anything to happen, but for a moment, nothing seemed to have changed.

Then, as the space around them grew pin-drop quiet, Luce heard an almost inaudible swishing sound, like bare palms being rubbed together. The air seemed to slightly warp, making everything—the brown house, the row of Viennese townhouses surrounding it, even the blue wings of the Scale above—waver. Colors bent, melted. It was like standing inside the cloudy haze over flowing gaso-line.

As before, Luce could both see and not see the Patina. Its amorphous boundary was visible one moment—

with the iridescent transparency of a soap bubble—then it disappeared. But she could feel it molding around the small space in the garden where she and the others stood, emanating warmth and the feeling of being embraced by something powerfully protective.

No one spoke, silenced by the wonderment of Dee.

Luce studied the old woman, who was humming so intensely she almost seemed to buzz. Luce was surprised when she sensed the inner Patina was complete. Something that hadn’t felt whole a moment before now did.

Dee nodded, her hands at her heart as if in prayer. “We are in the Patina within the Patina. We are in the heart of safety and security. When I open the outer rim to the Scale, trust that security and remain calm. No harm can come to you.”

She whispered the words again— Light surround us, love enfold us, shelter us, Patina, from the evil that must come—and Luce found herself murmuring along. Daniel’s voice chimed in, too.

Then there was a hole, like a gust of cold air entering a warm room. They shuffled closer together, wings pressing up against each other, Luce in the center. They watched the shifting sky.

A savage shriek came from high above, and a thousand others joined in. The Scale could see it now.

They swarmed toward the hole.

The opening was mostly invisible to Luce, but it must have been directly over the chimney of the brown house.

That was where the Scale headed, like winged ants at-tacking a drop of fallen jam. They thudded to the roof, to the grass, to the eaves of the house. Their cloaks rippled with the impact of rough landings. Their eyes trolled the property—both sensing and not sensing Luce, Dee, and the angels.

Luce held her breath, did not make a sound.

The Scale kept coming. Soon the yard bristled with their stiff blue wings. They surrounded Dee’s inner Patina, casting glances hungry as wolves’ directly at the place where the prey they sought were hiding. But the Scale could not see the angels, the girl, and the transeternal safe inside.

“Where are they?” one of them snarled, his cloak tangling in a sea of blue wings as he pushed through the crowd of his brethren. “They’re here somewhere.”

“Prepare to fly fast and hard to Avignon,” Dee whispered, standing stiffly as a Scale angel with a birthmark splashed across his face leaned in near the limits of their Patina and sniffed like a pig seeking slop.

Arriane’s wings were trembling and Luce knew she was thinking of what the Scale had done to her. Luce reached for her friend’s hand.

“Roland, how about that mighty conflagration?” Daniel said through pursed lips.

“You got it.” Roland interlaced his fingers and furrowed his brow, then gave one hard glance at the brown house. There was a great blast, like a detonating bomb, and the Foundation Library exploded. Scale were sent shrieking into the Patina sky, their cloaks engulfed in fin-gerlike flames.

Roland waved his hand, and the hole where the library had stood became a volcano spewing flames and lava rivers through the lawn. The oak tree caught fire.

Flames spread through its branches as if they were matches in a box. Luce was sweating and dizzy from the heat searing through the Patina, but even as the Scale were blown back by repercussive shock waves, the group inside Dee’s small Patina did not burn.

Dee shouted, “Let’s fly!” just as a tornado of hot, flame-laden air swirled through the yard, swallowing a hundred Scale and lifting them into its blazing core, car-ouseling them across the lawn.

“Ready, Luce?” Daniel’s arms wrapped around her just as Roland’s wrapped tight around Dee. Smoke ricocheted off the walls on the outside of the Patina, but Luce was having a hard time breathing through her sore, bruised neck.

Then Daniel had lifted her off the ground. They flew straight up. Out of the corners of her eyes, Luce saw Roland’s marbled wings on the right, Annabelle and Arriane on the left. All the angels’ wings were beating so fast and hard that they wove a pure blinding brightness, straight up out of the fire and into clear blue air.

But the Patina was still open. The Scale who could still fly had some sense that they were being tricked, trapped. They tried to rise out of the blaze, but Roland sent another wave of flame washing down onto them, thrusting them back into the burning earth, singeing off their crinkled skin until they were skeletons with wings.

“Just another moment . . .” Dee’s fingertips and steady gaze manipulated the boundaries of the Patina.

Luce studied Dee, then the mess of burning Scale. She imagined the Patina cinching at the top like a cloak around a neck, sealing the Scale inside, choking them out.

“All done,” Dee shouted as Roland took her higher through the air.

Luce looked down, beneath her and Daniel’s feet, as the ground sped away from them. She saw the ugly fire blink, then shiver, and then disappear, swallowed into a smoking hidden elsewhere. The street they left below was white, and modern, and full of people who had never sensed anything at all.

The ground was miles beneath them when Luce stopped envisioning Scale wings cooking in red flames.

There was no use looking back. She could only look ahead toward the next relic, toward Cam, Gabbe, and Molly, toward Avignon.

Through gaps in the thin sheets of clouds, the terrain became rocky, dark gray, and mountainous. The winter air grew colder, sharper, and the ceaseless beat of angel wings shattered the quiet at the edges of the atmosphere.

About an hour into the flight, Roland’s marbled wings came into view a few feet below Luce and Daniel.

He carried Dee the same way Daniel carried Luce: shoulders lined up with hers, one arm wrapped over her chest, the other around her waist. Like Luce, Dee crossed her legs at the ankles, and her stiletto heels dangled precari-ously so high above the ground. Roland’s dark muscles casing Dee’s frail, older frame made the pair look almost comical as they came into and out of focus, rippling through the clouds. But the thrilled sparkle in Dee’s eyes made her seem much younger than she was. Strands of her red hair whipped across her cheek, and her scent—cold cream and roses—perfumed the air through which they flew.

“Well, I think the coast is clear,” Dee said.

Luce felt the air around her warble. Her body tensed in preparation for another timequake. But this time, it wasn’t Lucifer’s encroaching Fall causing the ripple. It was Dee, withdrawing the second Patina. A hazy boundary moved closer to Luce’s skin, then passed through her, making her shiver with an untraceable pleasure.

Then it retracted until it was a tiny orb of light around Dee. She closed her eyes and, a moment later, ab-sorbed the Patina into her skin. It was mostly invisible—

and was one of the most beautiful things Luce had ever seen.

Dee smiled and beckoned Luce nearer with a little wave. The two angels carrying them tilted their wings upward so that the ladies could talk.

Dee cupped a hand over her mouth and called to Luce over the wind. “So tell me, dear, how did you two meet?”

Luce felt Daniel’s shoulder shudder behind her with a chuckle. It was a normal question to ask two people in a happy relationship; why did it make Luce miserable?

Because the answer was needlessly complicated.

Because she didn’t even know the answer.

She pressed a hand to the locket at her neck. It bobbed against her skin as Daniel’s wings beat another strong beat. “Well, we went to the same school, and I . . .”

“Oh, Lucinda!” Dee was laughing. “I was teasing. I merely wondered whether you had uncovered the story behind your original meeting.”

“No, Dee,” Daniel said firmly. “She has not learned that yet—”

“I’ve asked, but he won’t tell me.” Luce eyed the ver-tiginous drop below, feeling as far away from the truth of that first meeting as she was from the towns lining the Adriatic Sea over which they were flying. “It drives me crazy that I don’t know.”

“All in good time, dear,” Dee said calmly, staring straight ahead at the curved horizon. “I take it you have at least tapped into some of your earlier memories?” Luce nodded.

“Brilliant. I’ll settle for the tale of the earliest romance you can recall. Go on, dear. Humor an old lady.

It’ll help us pass the time to Avignon, like Canterbury pilgrims.”

A memory flashed before Luce’s eyes: the cold, damp tomb she’d been locked in with Daniel in Egypt, the way his lips pressed against hers, their bodies against each other, as though they were the last two people in the world . . .

But they hadn’t been alone. Bill had been there, too.

He’d been there waiting, watching, wanting her soul to die inside a dank Egyptian tomb.

Luce snapped her eyes open, returning to the present, where his red eyes could not find her. “I’m tired,” she said.

“Rest,” Daniel said softly.

“No, I’m tired of being punished simply because I love you, Daniel. I don’t want anything to do with Lucifer, with Scale and Outcasts and whatever other sides there are. I’m not a pawn; I’m a person. And I’ve had enough.”

Daniel wrapped his hand over Luce’s and squeezed.

Dee and Roland both looked as if they wanted to reach out and do the same.

“You’ve changed, dear,” Dee said.

“Since when?”

“Since before. I’ve never heard you talk like that.

Have you, Daniel?”

Daniel was quiet for a moment. Finally, over the sounds of wind and the flapping of the angels’ wings against thin air, he said, “No. But I’m glad she can now.”

“And why not? It’s a trans-dimensional tragedy what you kids have been through. But this is a girl with tenac-ity, a girl with muscles, a girl who once told me she would never cut her hair, even though she was cursed—your words, dear—by snarls and tangles, a magnet for briars, because that hair was a part of her, indelibly tied to her soul.”

Luce squinted at the old woman. “What are you talking about?”

Dee tilted her head at Luce and pursed her plump lips.

Luce stared at her hard, at her golden eyes and fine red hair, at the delicate way she hummed as they flew.

And it hit her.

“I remember you!”

“Lovely,” Dee said, “I remember you, too!”

“Didn’t I live in a hut on an open plain?” Dee nodded.

“And we did talk about my hair! I’d—I’d run through a patch of nettles diving after something on a hunt . . .

was it a fox?”

“You were quite the tomboy. Braver than some of the men on the prairie, actually.”

“And you,” Luce said, “you spent hours picking them out of my hair.”

“I was your favorite auntie, figuratively speaking.

You used to say the devil cursed you with such thick hair.

A trifle dramatic, but you were only sixteen—and not far off from the truth, as only sixteen-year-olds can be.”

“You said a curse is only a curse if I allowed myself to be cursed by it. You said . . . I had it in my power to free myself of any curse—that curses were preludes to bless-ings. . . .”

Dee winked.

“Then you told me to cut it off. My hair.”

“That’s right. But you wouldn’t.”

“No.” Luce closed her eyes as the cool mist of a cloud washed over her, its condensation tickling her skin. She was suddenly inexplicably sad. “I wouldn’t. I wasn’t ready to.”

“Well,” Dee said. “I certainly like how you’ve styled your hair since you’ve come to your senses!”

“Look.” Daniel pointed to where the cloud floor fell away like a cliff. “We’re here.”

They descended into Avignon. The sky above the town was clear, no clouds to interrupt their view. The sun cast shadows of the angels’ wings onto the small medieval village of stone buildings bordered by verdant pastures of farmland. Cows loafed below them. A tractor threaded through land.

They banked left and flew over a horse stable, breathing in the dank stench of hay and manure. They swooped low over a cathedral made from the same tawny stone as most of the buildings in the town. Tourists sipped coffees in a cheerful café. The town glowed golden in the mid-day sun.

The startled sense of arriving so quickly mingled with the feeling of time slipping through Luce’s fingers. They had been searching for the relics for four and a half days.

Half the time was up before Lucifer’s Fall would be upon them.

“That’s where we’re going.” Daniel pointed to a bridge on the outskirts that did not extend fully across the shimmering river winding through the town. It was as if half the bridge had crumbled into the water. “Pont Saint Bénézet.”

“What happened to it?” Luce asked.

Daniel glanced over his shoulder. “Remember how quiet Annabelle got when I mentioned we were coming here? She inspired the boy who built that bridge in the Middle Ages in the time when the popes lived here and not in Rome. He noticed her flying across the Rhône one day when she didn’t think anyone could see her. He built the bridge to follow her to the other side.”

“When did it collapse?”

“Slowly, over time, one arch would fall into the river.

Then another. Arriane says the boy—his name was Bénézet—had a vision for angels, but not for architecture.

Annabelle loved him. She stayed in Avignon as his muse until he died. He never married, kept apart from the rest of Avignon society. The town thought he was crazy.” Luce tried not to compare her relationship with Daniel to what Annabelle had had with Bénézet, but it was hard not to. What kind of a relationship could an angel and a mortal really have? Once all this was over, if they beat Lucifer . . . then what? Would she and Daniel go back to Georgia and be like any other couple, going out for ice cream on Fridays after a movie? Or would the whole town think she was crazy, like Bénézet?

Was it all just hopeless? What would become of them in the end? Would their love vanish like a medieval bridge’s arches?

The idea of sharing a normal life with an angel was what was crazy. She sensed that every moment Daniel flew her through the sky. And yet she loved him more each day.

They landed on the bank of the river under the shade of a weeping willow tree, sending a flock of agitated ducks flapping into the water. In broad daylight, the angels folded in their wings. Luce stood behind Daniel to watch the intricate process as his retracted into his skin.

They drew in from the center first, making a series of soft snaps as layers of muscle folded on empyreal feathers. Last came Daniel’s thin, nearly translucent wing tips, which glowed as they disappeared inside his body, leaving no trace on his specially tailored T-shirt.

They walked to the bridge, like any other tourists interested in architecture. Annabelle walked much more stiffly than normal, and Luce saw Arriane reach out and touch her hand. The sun was bright and the air smelled like lavender and river water. The bridge was made of big white stones, held up by long arches underneath.

There was a small stone chapel with a single tower attached to one side near the entrance of the bridge. It held a sign that read CHAPEL DE SAINT NICOLAS. Luce wondered where the real tourists were.

The chapel was coated with a fine, silvery dust.

They walked the bridge silently, but Luce noticed that Annabelle wasn’t the only one upset. Daniel and Roland were trembling, keeping well clear of the entrance to the chapel, and Luce remembered they were forbid-den to enter a sanctuary of God.

Dee ran her fingers over the narrow brass railing with a heavy sigh. “We are too late.”

“This isn’t—” Luce touched the dust. It was insubstantial and light, with a hint of silver shimmer, like the dust that had covered her parents’ backyard. “You mean—”

“Angels have died here.” Roland’s voice was monotone as he stared into the river.

“B-but,” Luce stammered, “we don’t know whether Gabbe and Cam and Molly even made it here.”

“This used to be a beautiful place,” Annabelle said.

“Now they’ve marred it forever. Je m’excuse, Bénézet. ”

That was when Arriane held up a quivering silver feather. “Gabbe’s pennon. Intact, so it must have been taken by her own hand. Perhaps to give to an Outcast who didn’t get it before . . .” She looked away, holding the feather to her chest.

“But I thought the Scale didn’t kill angels,” Luce said.

“They don’t.” Daniel bent down and wiped away some of the dust that was mounded like snow at his feet.

Something was buried underneath it.

His fingers found a dusty silver starshot. He wiped it on his shirt and Luce shivered each time his fingers drew near the deadly dull tip. At last, he held it out for the others to examine. It was branded with an ornate letter Z.

“The Elders,” Arriane whispered.

“They are happy to kill angels,” Daniel said softly.

“In fact, there’s nothing they’d rather do.” There was a sharp crack.

Luce whipped around, expecting . . . she didn’t know what. Scale? Elders?

Dee shook out her fist, rubbing red knuckles with her other hand. Then Luce saw: The wooden door to the chapel was smashed in the center. Dee must have punched it. No one else thought it was remarkable that such a tiny woman could cause so much damage.

“You all right there, Dee?” Arriane called out.

“Sophia has no business here.” Her voice quaked with rage. “What Lucifer is doing is beyond the compass of the Elders’ concern. And yet she could ruin everything for you angels. I could kill her.”

“Promise?” Roland asked.

Daniel slipped the starshot into the satchel and clasped it shut. “However this battle ended, it must have begun over the third relic. Someone found it.”

“A war of resources,” Dee said.

Luce flinched. “And someone died for it.”

“We don’t know what happened, Luce,” Daniel said.

“And we won’t know until we stand before the Elders.

We need to track them down.”

“How?” Roland asked.

“Maybe they went to Sinai to stake us out,” Annabelle suggested.

Daniel shook his head and paced. “They don’t know to go to Sinai—unless they tortured the location out of one of our angels.” He stopped and looked away.

“No,” Dee said, looking around their circle on the bridge. “The Elders have their own agenda. They’re greedy. They want a larger stake in all of this. They want to be remembered, like their forefathers. If they die, they want to go as martyrs.” She paused. “And what is the most self-indulgent location to stage your own martyr-dom?”

The angels shifted their weight. Daniel’s wings bristled as he scanned the pale pink eastern sky. Annabelle ran her long nails through her hair. Arriane hugged her arms around her chest and stared hard at the ground, at a loss for sarcastic words. Luce seemed to be the only one who didn’t know what Dee was talking about. Finally, Roland’s voice echoed ominously across the crumbling bridge:

“Golgotha. Place of skulls.”