was quiet. She felt his chest rise against her and then fall. His wings beat a bit more swiftly, but he didn’t answer.
“You know?” Luce pressed on. “The same number of demons on one side and the same number of angels on the other?”
Wind whipped against her.
Finally, Daniel said, “Yes, though it’s not that simple.
It’s not a matter of a thousand here versus a thousand there. Different players matter more than others. The Outcasts carry no weight. You heard Phil lamenting that.
The Scale are almost negligible—though you’d never know that from the way they carry on about their importance.” He paused. “One of the Archangels? They are worth a thousand lesser angels.”
“Is it still true that there’s one important angel who still has to choose a side?”
A pause. “Yes, that is still true.”
She’d already begged him to choose once, on the rooftop at Shoreline. They were in the middle of an argument and the time hadn’t been right. But their bond was stronger now. Surely if he knew how much she supported him, that she’d stand by him and love him no matter what, it would help him finally make up his mind.
“What if you just went ahead and . . . chose?”
“No—”
“But, Daniel, you could stop this! You could tip the scales, and no one else would have to die, and—”
“I mean no, it’s not that easy.” She heard him sigh and knew, even without looking, the precise shade his eyes would be glowing now: a deep, wild lupine violet.
“It’s not that easy anymore,” he repeated.
“Why not?”
“Because this present no longer matters. We’re in a pocket of time that may cease to exist. So choosing now wouldn’t mean a thing, not until this nine-day glitch is fixed. We still have to stop him. Either Lucifer gets his way and erases the past five or six millennia and we all begin again—”
“Or we succeed,” Luce said automatically.
“If that happens,” Daniel said, “we’ll reassess how the ranks are aligned.”
Twenty feet below them, Arriane was flying in slow trancelike loop-the-loops, as if to pass the time. Annabelle flew into one of the rain showers that the angels usually avoided. She came out on the other side with her wings damp and her pink hair plastered to the side of her face without even seeming to notice. Roland was somewhere behind them, probably deep in his own thoughts as he carried Dee in his arms. Everyone seemed weary, distracted.
“But
“Choose Heaven?” Daniel said. “No. I made my choice a very long time ago, almost at the Beginning.”
“But I thought—”
“I chose you, Lucinda.”
Luce swept her hand over Daniel’s as the tar-dark sea beneath them washed up onto a swath of desert.
The landscape was far below, but it reminded her of the terrain around Sinai: rocky cliffs interrupted by the green scrub of an occasional tree. She didn’t understand why Daniel had to choose between Heaven and love.
All she’d ever wanted was his love—but at what price? Was their love worth the erasure of the world and all its stories? Could Daniel have prevented this threat if he’d chosen Heaven long before?
And would he have returned there, where he belonged, had his love for Luce not led him astray?
As if he were reading her mind, Daniel said, “We put our faith in love.”
Roland caught up to them. His wings angled and his body pivoted to face Daniel and Luce. In his arms, Dee’s red hair was flying and her cheeks were aglow. She gestured for the two of them to come close. Daniel’s wings gave one full, graceful beat, and they shot through a cloud to hover at Roland and Dee’s side. Roland whistled and Arriane and Annabelle also doubled back, closing an iridescent circle in the dark sky.
“It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning in Jerusalem,” Dee said. “That means we can expect the majority of mortals to be asleep or otherwise out of the way for perhaps another hour. If Sophia has your friends, she’s probably planning . . . well, we should hurry, dears.”
“You know where they’ll be?” Daniel asked.
Dee thought for a moment. “Before I defected from the Elders, the plan was always to reconvene at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was built on the slope of Golgotha, in the Christian Quarter of the Old City.”
The group glided toward the hallowed ground. They were a column of glowing wings. The clear sky was navy, sprinkled with stars, and the white stones of distant buildings below shone an eerie acid blue.
Though the land seemed naturally dry, dusty, the earth was studded with thick palm trees and groves of olives.
They swooped over the most expansive cemetery Luce had ever seen, built on a gradual slope facing the Old City of Jerusalem.
The city itself was dark and sleepy, tucked in moonlight and surrounded by a tall stone partition. The formidable Dome of the Rock mosque sat high on a hill, its golden dome gleaming even in darkness. It was at a distance from the rest of the crammed city, set off by long flights of stone stairs and tall gates at every entrance.
Beyond the old walls, a few modern high-rise buildings cut out a distant skyline, but within the Old City, the structures were much older, smaller, crafting a maze of narrow cobbled alleys best navigated by foot.
They alighted on the ramparts of a tall gate marking the entrance to the city.
“This is the New Gate,” Dee explained. “It’s the closest entrance to the Christian Quarter, where the church is.”
By the time they filed down the worn stairs from the top of the gate, the angels had retracted their wings into their shoulders. The cobbled street narrowed as Dee brandished a small red plastic flashlight and led them onward toward the church. Most of the stone storefronts had been fitted with metal doors that slid up and down like the door on Luce’s parents’ garage. The doors were all closed now, padlocked to the street through which Luce walked next to Daniel, holding his hand and hoping for the best.
The deeper into the city they went, the more the buildings seemed to press in on either side of them. They passed under the striped tented awnings of empty Arab markets, under long stone arches and dim corridors. The air smelled like roasted lamb, then incense, then laundry soap. Azalea vines climbed the walls, searching for water.
The neighborhood was silent but for the angels’ steps and a coyote yowling in the hills. They passed a shut- tered Laundromat, its sign posted in Arabic, then a flower shop with Hebrew stickers plastered across its windows.
Everywhere Luce looked, narrow walkways forked off from the street: through an open wooden gate here, up a short flight of stairs there. Dee seemed to be counting the doorways they passed, wagging her finger as they walked. At one point she snapped, ducked under a weathered wooden arch, turned a corner, and disappeared. Luce and the angels glanced at each other quickly, then followed her: down several steps, around a damp and darkened corner, up a few more steps, and suddenly, they were on the roof of another building, looking down at another cramped street.
“There it is.” Dee nodded grimly.
The church towered over everything nearby. It was built of pale, smooth stones and stood easily five stories, taller at its pair of slender steeples. At its center, an enormous blue dome looked like a blanket of midnight sky wrapped around a stone. Giant bricks formed large arches along the façade, marking places for massive wooden doors on the first story and arched stained-glass windows higher up. A ladder leaned on a brick ledge outside a third-story window, reaching up for nothing.
Portions of the church’s façade were crumbling and black with age, while others looked recently restored.
On either side, two long stone arms branched forward from the church, forming a border around a flat cobbled plaza. Just behind the church, a tall white minaret stabbed the sky.
“Wow,” Luce heard herself say as she and the angels descended another surprising flight of stairs to enter the plaza.
