Passion

see a small, pale angel sharing his Announcer. Daniel did not know him. The angel’s features were soft and innocent-looking, like a baby’s. In the cramped tunnel, his fine blond hair blew across his silver eyes in the wind that Daniel’s wings sent back each time they pulsed. He looked so young, but of course, he was just as old as any of them.

“Who are you?” Daniel asked again. “How did you get in here? Are you Scale?”

“Yes.” Despite his innocent, infantile appearance, the angel’s voice was gravel-deep. He reached behind his back for a moment, and Daniel thought perhaps he was hiding something there—perhaps one of his kind’s trapping devices—but the angel simply turned around to reveal the scar on the back of his neck. The seven-pointed gold insignia of the Scale. “I’m Scale.” His deep voice was rough and clotted. “I’d like to speak with you.”

Daniel gnashed his teeth. The Scale must have known he had no respect for them or their meddlesome duties. But it didn’t matter how much he loathed their high-flown manners, always seeking to nudge the fallen to one side: He still had to honor their requests. Something seemed odd about this one, but who other than a member of the Scale could have found a way into his Announcer?

“I’m in a hurry.”

The angel nodded, as if he already knew this. “You search for Lucinda?”

“Yes,” Daniel blurted out. “I—I don’t need help.”

“You do.” The angel nodded. “You missed your exit”—he pointed down, toward the place in the vertical tunnel where Daniel had just come from. “Right back there.”

“No—”

“Yes.” The angel smiled, showing a row of tiny, jagged teeth. “We wait and watch. We see who travels by Announcer and where they go.”

“I didn’t know that policing the Announcers fell under the Scale’s jurisdiction.”

“There is much you don’t know. Our monitor caught a trace of her passing through. She’ll be well on her way by now. You must go after her.”

Daniel stiffened. The Scale were the only angels granted vision between Announcers. It was possible a Scale member would have seen Luce’s travels.

“Why would you want to help me find her?”

“Oh, Daniel.” The angel frowned. “Lucinda is a part of your destiny. We want you to find her. We want you to be true to your nature—”

“And then to side with Heaven,” Daniel snarled.

“One step at a time.” The angel tucked his wings to his sides and plummeted through the tunnel. “If you want to catch her,” his deep voice rumbled, “I’m here to show you the way. I know where the connection points are. I can open up a portal between the tissue of past times.” Then, faintly: “No strings attached.”

Daniel was lost. The Scale had been a nuisance to him ever since the War in Heaven, but at least their motives were transparent. They wanted him to side with Heaven. That was it. He guessed it would behoove them to lead him to Luce if they could.

Maybe the angel was right. One step at a time. All he cared about was Luce.

He tucked his wings in at his sides as the angel had done and felt his body moving through the darkness. When he caught up to the angel, he stopped.

The angel pointed. “Lucinda stepped through there.”

The shadow-way was narrow and perpendicular to the path Daniel had been on. It didn’t look any more right or wrong than where Daniel had been headed before.

“If this works,” he said, “I’ll owe you. If not, I’ll hunt you down.”

The angel said nothing.

So Daniel leaped before he looked, feeling a wind lick wetly at his wings, a current picking up again and speeding him along, and hearing—somewhere far behind him—the faintest peal of laughter.

NINETEEN THE MORTAL COIL

MEMPHIS, EGYPT • PERET—“THE SEASON OF SOWING” (AUTUMN, APPROXIMATELY 3100 BCE)

“You there,” a voice bellowed as Luce crossed the threshold of the Announcer. “I should like my wine. On a platter. And bring in my dogs. No—my lions. No—both.”

She’d stepped through into a vast white room with alabaster walls and thick columns holding up a lofty ceiling. A faint scent of roasting meat was in the air.

The room was empty except for a tall platform at the far end, which had been dressed with antelope hide. Atop it sat a colossal throne, carved from marble, padded with plush emerald-green pillows, and adorned along the back with a decorative crest of interlocking ivory tusks.

The man on the throne—with his kohl-rimmed eyes, bare muscular chest, gold-capped teeth, bejeweled fingers, and tower of ebony hair—was talking to her. He had turned away from a thin-lipped, blue-robed scribe holding a papyrus-reed script, and now both men stared at Luce.

She cleared her throat.

“Yes, Pharaoh,” Bill hissed into her ear. “Just say Yes, Pharaoh.”

“Yes, Pharaoh!” Luce shouted across the endless chamber.

“Good,” Bill said. “Now scram!”

Ducking backward through a shadowed doorway, Luce found herself in an interior courtyard surrounding a still pond. The air was cool, but the sun was fierce, scorching the rows of potted lotus flowers that lined the walkway. The courtyard was huge, but, eerily, Luce and Bill had the whole thing to themselves.

“There’s something strange about this place, isn’t there?” Luce stayed close to the walls. “The pharaoh didn’t even seem alarmed by seeing me step out of nowhere.”

“He’s too important to be bothered with actually noticing people. He saw movement in his peripheral vision and deduced that someone was there for him to boss around. That’s all. It explains why he also didn’t seem fazed by the fact that you’re wearing Chinese battle garb from two thousand years in the future,” Bill said, snapping his stone fingers. He pointed to a shadowed niche in the corner of the courtyard. “Hang tight right there and I’ll be back with something a little more à la mode for you to wear.”

Before Luce could strip off the Shang king’s cumbersome armor, Bill was back with a simple white Egyptian shift dress. He helped tug off her leather gear and slipped the dress over her head. It draped over one shoulder, tied around the waist, and tapered into a narrow skirt ending a few inches above her ankles.

“Forgetting anything?” Bill said with a strange intensity.

“Oh.” Luce reached back into the Shang armor for the dull-tipped starshot tucked inside. When she pulled it out, it felt so much heavier than she knew it really was.

“Don’t touch the point!” Bill said quickly, wrapping the tip in fabric and tying it off. “Not yet.”

“I thought it could only harm angels.” She tilted her head, remembering the battle against the Outcasts, remembering the arrow glancing off Callie’s arm without a scratch, remembering Daniel telling her to stay far out of the arrow’s range.

“Whoever told you that didn’t tell you the whole truth,” Bill said. “It only affects immortals. You have a part of you that is immortal—the cursed part, your soul. That’s the part you’re going to kill here, remember? So that your mortal self, Lucinda Price, can go on and live a normal life.”

“If I kill my soul,” Luce said, securing the starshot under her new dress. Even through the coarse cloth, it was warm to the touch. “I still haven’t decided—”

“I thought we were agreed.” Bill swallowed. “Starshots are very valuable. I would not have given it to you unless—”

“Let’s just find Layla.”