with a smirk.
“I do so love to see an angel
“Go ahead.” Cam’s voice came for the first time, low and even. Luce nearly cried out when she heard him mutter: “I never asked for a happy ending.” Luce had watched Sophia kill Penn with her bare hands and no remorse. It would not happen again.
Slowly Miss Sophia craned her body around toward Luce and Daniel, clutching her fistful of starshots. Her eyes gleamed silver and her thin lips curled in a ghastly smile as Luce tugged Daniel forward, pulling against his relentless grip.
“We have to stop her, Daniel!”
“No, Luce, it’s too dangerous.”
“Oh, there you are, dear.” Miss Sophia beamed. “And Daniel Grigori! How nice. I’ve been waiting for you.” Then she winked and whipped the starshots over her head in a dense cluster straight at Daniel and Luce.
TWELVE
UNHOLY WATER
It happened in the broken fraction of a second: Roland tackled Miss Sophia, knocking her to the ground. But he was half a heartbeat too late.
Five silver starshots sailed silently across the empty space of the chapel. The cluster of them loosened as they flew, seeming to hang in midair for a moment on their path toward Luce and Daniel.
Luce pressed herself back against Daniel’s chest. He had the opposite instinct: His arms pulled tight against her and dragged her down hard against the floor.
Two great pairs of wings crossed the space in front of Luce, erupting from left and right. One was a radiant coppery gold, the other the purest silvery white. They filled the air before her and Daniel like enormous feathered screens—and then were gone in the blink of an eye.
Something whizzed by her left ear. She turned and saw a single starshot ricochet off the gray stone wall and clatter to the floor. The other starshots were gone.
A fine iridescent grit settled around Luce.
Squinting through the mist of dust, she took in the room: Daniel crouching beside her. A roused Dee struggling atop a writhing Miss Sophia. Annabelle standing above the other Elders, who lay lifeless on the floor. Arriane holding an empty length of rope and her Swiss Army knife in trembling hands. Cam, still bound on the altar, stunned.
Gabbe and Molly, just freed from their altars by Arriane—
Disappeared.
And Luce’s and Daniel’s bodies covered in a film of dust.
“Gabbe . . . Molly—” Luce got to her knees. She held out her hands, examining them as if she’d never seen hands before. Candlelight played off her skin, turning the dust a soft, shimmery gold, then a bright glittering silver as she flipped her hands to gaze at her palms.
“No no no no no no no no.”
She looked back, locking eyes with Daniel. His face was ashen, his eyes burning with such a concentrated violet it was hard to hold their gaze.
That became harder still when her vision blurred with tears.
“Why did they—?”
For a moment, everything was still.
Then an animal’s roar rent the room.
Cam forced his right leg free from the ropes that bound it, ripping his ankle raw in the process. He strained to free his wrists, bellowed as he tore his right hand loose from his bonds, shredding the wing that had been pinned with the iron post and dislocating his shoulder. His arm swung in a gruesomely distended way from his shoulder, as if it had nearly been ripped off.
He leaped from the altar onto Sophia, pushing Dee aside. The force knocked all three of them to the ground.
Cam landed on top of Sophia, pinning her on her side, seeking to crush her with his weight. She let out a tortured howl, pulled her arms weakly before her face as Cam’s hands reached for her neck.
“Strangling is the most intimate way to kill someone,” Cam said, as if teaching Violence 101. “Now let’s see the beauty of your death.”
But Miss Sophia’s struggle was ugly. Gargles and grunts bubbled from her throat. Cam’s fingers tightened, slammed her head with brutal thumps against the floor, again and again and again. Blood began to trickle from the old woman’s mouth, darker than her lipstick.
Daniel’s hand touched Luce’s chin, turned her to face him. He gripped her shoulders. They locked eyes again, searching for a way to tune out Sophia’s wet groans.
“Gabbe and Molly knew what they were doing,” Daniel whispered.
“They knew they were going to be killed?” Luce said.
Behind them, Sophia whimpered, sounding almost like she’d accepted that this was how she’d die.
“They knew that stopping Lucifer is more important than an individual life,” Daniel said. “More than anything else that has happened, let this convince you of how urgent our task is here.”
The silence around them was loud. No more bloody coughs came from Miss Sophia. Luce didn’t have to look to know what it meant.
An arm encircled her waist. A familiar mop of black hair rested on her shoulder. “Come on,” Arriane said,
“let’s get you two cleaned up.”
Daniel handed Luce over to Arriane and Annabelle.
“You girls go ahead.”
Luce followed the angels numbly. They walked Luce to the back of the chapel, opening several closets until they found what they were looking for: a small black lacquered door that opened onto a circular, windowless room.
Annabelle lit a candelabra on a tiled table near the door, then lit another one in a stone alcove. The red-brick room was the size of a large pantry and had no furniture but a raised, eight-sided baptismal bath. Inside, the bath was made with green-and-blue mosaics; outside it was marble carved with a wraparound frieze of angels descending to Earth.
Luce felt miserable and dead inside. Even the baptismal pool seemed to mock her. Here she was—the girl whose cursed soul was somehow important, up for grabs because she’d never been baptized as a child—about to wash away the dust of two dead angels. Was saving Luce and Daniel worth their souls? How could it be? This
“baptism” broke Luce’s already broken heart a little more.
“Don’t worry,” Arriane said, reading her mind. “This won’t count.”
Annabelle found a sink in the corner of the room, behind the baptismal font. She poured bucket after large wooden bucket of steaming hot water into the tub. Arriane stood next to Luce, not looking at her, just holding her hand. When the bath was full and refracting a deep blue-green from the tiles, Annabelle and Arriane hoisted Luce above the surface of the water. She was still wearing her sweater and jeans. They hadn’t thought to un-dress her, but then they noticed her boots.
“Whoops,” Annabelle said softly, unzipping them one at a time and tossing them aside. Arriane lifted the silver locket over Luce’s head and slipped it inside a boot. Their wings fluttered as they lifted off the ground to lower Luce into the warm water.
Luce closed her eyes, slipped her head beneath the water, stayed a while. If she shed a tear, she wouldn’t
