Angelus Page 16

  Before she could reconsider her foolishness, Angela stepped beyond the statues and onto the long path to nowhere.

  Juno followed behind, slinking with catlike grace among the heavy shadows. More of the bluish spheres flew by them into the blackness, and a few danced around Angela’s head as if trying to warn her away. But she steeled herself and continued, listening to the slow and ominous drip of water from the icicles on the ceiling. Eventually, her ears caught a song floating toward them. There were no words, just a melody that seemed woven from time and starlight. Every note was clean and pure like a crystal dropped in water.

  Angela gasped as she recognized it. This was Sophia’s lullaby. As always, the song took Angela to distant worlds and back into unreachable time, and it plucked at her heart, summoning both pain and bliss. Tears burned the corners of Angela’s eyes.

  She felt so far away from everyone right now. Hearing this song only made the feeling worse.

  If the song affected Juno, she didn’t show it. But she didn’t seem about to turn back either.

  They entered another cavern. Narrow stone bridges stretched and crisscrossed over one another in a thousand different directions. Far, far below the perilously narrow walkways, a pool of water gleamed. Barely a ripple touched its surface, and it was impossible to tell what stream fed it or how.

  The music grew unendurably beautiful by the second.

  Juno stepped out onto the middle of the walkway they’d used to enter, and Angela followed her. Even in Hell, she’d never seen anything quite like this. Angela glanced down at the water, and dizziness swept through her like a tornado. She looked at the walls around them, seeing thousands more skulls.

  “I don’t understand,” Angela whispered through the music. It now seemed to come from every direction at once. “Why would any angel hide in a place like this?”

  Juno stiffened. She crouched down on her hands and feet and her ears pressed against her hair. She bared her teeth, snarling nastily.

  Now the song sounded too enchanting, sweet, and pure. It had lured them deeper inside.

  Angela’s vision spun.

  “Someone’s coming,” Juno growled.

  Angela couldn’t see a thing. Was this angel invisible?

  “They’re here,” Juno said, her large eyes narrowing. She arched her wings defensively.

  Angela and Juno each faced opposite directions instinctively.

  Where was this angel? Where! And what was Angela even looking for?

  The music stopped. Angela held her breath. Then, like he was emerging from a pocket in the air and ether, Kim appeared.

  Seventeen

  FROM BABYLON TO LUZ 12 HOURS EARLIER

  The moment Troy said they were returning to Luz, a sense of dread had suffocated Kim. The idea of returning to that city frosted over his soul and gnawed at his insides. Nothing good could come from some mysterious angel locked up in Luz.

  And Kim thought he’d known all there was to know about the Vatican’s mysterious city.

  Unfortunately, he’d been wrong.

  As he followed Troy on whatever path she felt would return them to Earth, he couldn’t help wondering. Who was this angel, and why did Troy seem so frightened of her? Was this really the right thing to do when he had such little time left to help Angela? Trading his soul to Python had left Kim clinging to every second like it was his last. He forced himself to think of Angela, and her warmth as she nestled in his arms.

  He bit his lip and continued behind Troy in silence. Perhaps the darkness would never end. Perhaps they were trapped in a rat’s maze that would dump them out at the very edge of the universe.

  Thank goodness, he was wrong about that too. At last, they stopped in a circular cavern with pulsing hieroglyphs etched into the stone walls. Before them, a pool of water rested like a silver mirror.

  Troy stepped to the water’s edge and looked back at Kim, gesturing for him to come closer.

  This wasn’t an ordinary pool. A strange whispering filled the air.

  Kim had to push himself to reach Troy’s side.

  Her ears were high and alert, and her breathing sounded ragged. So—she was afraid too. Troy glanced back nervously, as if Python might step out of the darkness any second.

  “This is what Angela used to enter Luz,” Troy said so softly, she could have hissed. “The water called to her, she entered, and then she and the Book and the Kirin disappeared.”

  “You didn’t do anything to keep her out?” Kim snapped.

  “Of course! I tried,” Troy snarled back at him. “But the pull of the water was too strong.”

  “So you’re suggesting that we enter the water and that’s how we’ll return to Luz?” he offered.

  Troy continued examining the pool’s deceptively peaceful surface. “It’s the surest and quickest way. We don’t have the time to climb into Memorial Cemetery through the Netherworld.”

  That was an excuse and they both knew it. It seemed Troy was deliberately ignoring the fact that if either of them were spotted by a rival Jinn Clan—or their own—they would probably be killed. Perhaps her new status as a fugitive like Kim was so odious to her, she couldn’t even bear mentioning it more than necessary.

  “You’re right,” Kim said, agreeing for the sake of avoiding another argument. “No time. So, we just walk into the pool?” he said again.

  “Quiet, I’m trying to think,” Troy growled at him. She closed her glowing eyes. Then she opened them again and slid one toe into the water. Her entire body tensed.

  Nothing happened.

  Troy waded directly into the middle of the pool, cautiously at first, then with a hastiness born from frustration. Her ears flipped back in anger. She flapped her remaining wing, flinging silver droplets into the air. “I don’t understand.”

  “What? What’s wrong?” Kim said. He knelt down and slipped a hand into the water. It was shockingly cold. He held up his hand again, watching the droplets slide down his pale fingers.

  Troy growled under her breath. She examined the demonic hieroglyphs on the cavern walls. She seemed tempted to spit angrily in the water, but checked herself. “I should have known. Angela was summoned. Whoever brought her back to Luz waited until the right moment. Only a witch could know how to do that. They must have used a mirror somehow connected to these pools.”

  “So now what?” Kim said, a little too angrily himself.

  Troy noticed his accusatory tone. She gave him a warning glare. “Patience, cousin. Let me think.”

  “For God’s sake! We don’t have time to climb into the Netherworld and we sure as hell don’t have time to think,” Kim muttered, knowing she could hear him and not caring anymore. “Since when did you become such a detective anyway?”

  “A what?” Troy said, bristling like he’d called her something hideous.

  She clearly didn’t know what that word meant.

  “Never mind. Just hurry, damn it!”

  Troy paced within the water. Then her eyes widened. She reached up to her hair and untied the iron crow’s foot talisman she’d taken from Kim. She held it up to him, nodding. Then she waited a long moment before finally letting go, dropping it into the pool.

  The crow’s foot disappeared with barely a ripple. The whispering in the air grew louder, as if a million voices called to them at once. Troy instinctively backed away from a whirlpool forming in the pool’s center and stood next to Kim again, water dripping from her hair, wing, and face. “I knew it,” she said. “As long as we have a physical connection to the Realm where we wish to travel, the pool acts as a portal.” She quieted again as the pool’s outer edges reflected an odd image of bones and skulls. Troy licked her lips. “So, she’s there. She’s alive!” Troy said with a tenderness in her voice Kim never expected.

  Kim didn’t think she was talking about Angela right now.

  “Who’s alive?” he said, hoping to get some kind of information out of her.

  Troy shook her head, breathing hard.

  “Come on
,” she said, grasping him by the arm so tightly Kim thought his bones might break. “We’re leaving now. Before we miss our chance.”

  She dragged him into the ice-cold water. Kim fought his instinct to splash back to shore, because the more Troy waded toward the pool’s center, the more he felt they were doing something incredibly dangerous. The waves overtook them, and foamy water churned into his mouth. Then Troy lost her grip, and Kim’s feet slipped, and he plunged into a frigid darkness that wrapped around his heart and filled every inch of his lungs.

  No—this was a mistake. He’d done the most stupid thing imaginable and allowed Troy to kill him when Angela needed him most.

  Suddenly a different darkness seeped through Kim’s brain. He felt stretched inside and out and nothingness took over. Was this death?

  If so, it took Kim so stealthily, he might have fallen asleep.

  The darkness didn’t last. Kim’s awareness returned by degrees, and before he knew what was happening, he surfaced for air, gasping and splashing his arms to catch his grip on anything that could save him. Finding nothing, Kim worked against an overwhelming ache in all his muscles and swam as hard as he could. At last, he reached some kind of shore. He collapsed like he was dead, spluttering water from between his lips. Now he realized the water tasted saline, as if it came from the ocean.

  He grasped the hourglass pendant at his chest, turning over on his back as he examined it. One-third of the grains were gone.

  A shot of fear scorched through him. How could that have happened so quickly?

  Coughs to his left startled Kim from his horrified trance. He turned and saw Troy collapse on her hands and knees beside him, her wing feathers and hair sodden with water. Amazingly, she uncurled one of her palms and—clink—the crow’s foot talisman dropped to the stone ground.

  She’d somehow recovered it in the whirlpool.

  They looked at each other.

  Troy broke away from Kim’s gaze and stood shakily to her feet. She leaned down, coughing out more water. She wiped her mouth, her face scrunching with surprise. She must have noticed the water’s saltiness too.

  It seemed like they hadn’t made any progress at all, yet they were clearly in another place, and that place was apparently somewhere in Luz. The hieroglyphs were gone, and instead thousands of skulls and bones gleamed at them from long carved rows in the rock. Bluish spheres appeared and disappeared, hiding within the skeletal remains. A lilting melody echoed in the background.

  They were in catacombs, hidden below Luz.

  Kim pushed up on his hands and knees and slowly rose to his feet, staring goggle-eyed at the sheer amount of bones. They seemed innumerable.

  Without warning, Troy tensed and dropped to the ground again, her single wing raised high and stiff. She bared her teeth and her hair stood on end.

  She was so terrifying, Kim could hardly look at her.

  That was when he heard a low rhythmic noise. It echoed from above. He glanced up, searching the cavern’s ceiling. Thin bridges of rock crisscrossed above them, though on the far side, they met at a ledge of black stone jutting from the wall. An immense creature sat upon it, with its four wings folded, and its glassy pure black eyes locked on them.

  Kim couldn’t move. He could barely breathe anymore.

  The creature resembled a Hound, but its mane and body were pure white and its wings held a dazzling shine. Its humanlike hands rested on top of each other as it slouched like a regal lion, examining the mice who’d dared to enter its domain. Was this the angel Troy had been talking about?

  The angel yawned, revealing teeth like daggers.

  Troy didn’t relax, even though the angel was making no move to confront them. Worse, it was large enough not to care. Its hand was the size of Kim’s entire body.

  “You plunged us into a death trap,” Kim whispered to Troy. “What is this thing?”

  “A Cherubim,” Troy said slowly. “She was once one of Raziel’s Thrones. Or so she says.”

  “How would you know? You’ve never been here before!”

  “Some of my ancestors made it here. Only a few returned . . .”

  “What? Why didn’t all of them come back?”

  Troy glanced at the bones surrounding them. “I’d guess the angel was hungry, fool.”

  “Then what’s to say she isn’t hungry now?”

  “So you’ve arrived,” a low female voice said. The angel’s words ricocheted through Kim. He stood absolutely still, his brain screaming to run as the Cherubim dropped from her ledge to the ground directly in front of them. Her feet and hands met the stone with an immense thud, and she loomed over them, her jaws so immense and horrible that Kim’s sanity threatened to melt. “You’ve come about the Archon.”

  The angel knew why they were here?

  Kim glanced at the Mirror Pool, now so glassy and still it was as if they’d never left its waters. This angel must have had the ability to scry the pool. Perhaps she saw them long before they ever arrived.

  Kim stared back into the angel’s onyx-hued eyes. They were somehow both vacant and absolutely penetrating, like staring into two black holes. But it didn’t take much longer for him to realize they were also blind. The Cherubim followed Troy more with her ears than her gaze.

  Troy was still on the defensive. “Yes, that’s indeed why we’ve come,” Troy said cautiously.

  The Cherubim turned and examined her with a strange vacant expression. “A Jinn? I haven’t spoken to one of your race in over two hundred years.”

  “How unlucky of you,” Kim rejoined sarcastically.

  He shot Troy an ironic look she didn’t bother noticing.

  “Now, please explain to me why you’re here. Because if it isn’t for a good purpose, I have no use for you. And besides . . . I am rather hungry. They don’t bring the dead down here anymore.”

  Kim shuddered. He wanted to ask exactly why there was a Cherubim beneath Luz and why it fed off the dead. But he doubted his questions would be answered satisfactorily. It was bad enough to know that a monster like this lived and breathed beneath the city. It was a certainty she couldn’t leave at will. How many of the priests knew about her? How many had died trying to reach her? That might forever be a mystery.

  “I thought you knew why we’ve come,” Troy answered the Cherubim testily.

  “I do indeed,” the Cherubim said. “Yet—only to a certain degree. I cannot always rely on the visions I see in the pool. Sometimes they lie.” The Cherubim sighed. She gazed now at Kim, piercing through to his soul as she spoke. “One tiny change—a bird’s wing testing the air, for instance—can set off a chain reaction that turns the present and the future in another direction. Between the time I gazed and saw you, and the moment you arrived, much could have changed concerning our destinies.”

  “When did you last look?” Kim said breathlessly. He stared at the water to his left. It was definitely a Mirror Pool like the one in Hell. But how could one have existed beneath Luz, untouched by the ocean? The ocean came first, and Sophia had hinted that the Mirror Pools were incredibly ancient.

  Kim remembered how the water tasted salty. He couldn’t understand. A crucial detail was eluding him.

  “When did I last look?” the angel repeated solemnly. “Oh, a long time ago. And only a minute ago. Time is a concept, of course. Humans, and half-humans, aren’t usually intelligent enough to understand. I won’t even bother trying. This is the outer darkness beneath Luz. That is all you need to know.”

  “What is she talking about?” Kim leaned over and whispered hurriedly in Troy’s ear.

  Troy bristled at his closeness. “She means that this portion of the earthly Realm is somehow outside of time. It follows the river of time but is not bound by it. She can not only see the present, but the future.”

  “How can that be? Even the Supernals don’t have that ability.”

  Troy ignored him for a moment. “There is a rumor that this angel foresaw Raziel’s death, left him as his Throne, and chose to dwell here. T
his place existed before Luz.”

  Kim felt the shock like a thunderbolt.

  “The Thrones are actually Cherubim, but their bodies were tampered with to be more pleasing to the eyes, more typically angelic.” Troy’s tone became nasty. “Those arrogant crows should have left well enough alone. Changing a creature’s appearance can’t change its soul. And so most Thrones kept their instincts. The deformities marked them from the start. But this one chose not to undergo the transformation.”

  “Why is she down here? As a punishment?”

  Troy shook her head grimly. “I doubt it.”

  “It is because I know the very hour, minute, and moment of my impending death,” the Cherubim said. She had been listening the entire time. “A death it is impossible to avoid. But, more important, it is so I can be here to help you.”

  What twisted logic was that? It was almost maddening. “Why not run away if you know you will die?” Kim shouted up at her.

  “You’ve just answered the question, half-Jinn,” the angel said. “Because it is both my choice and my fate to stay.”

  “Satisfied?” Troy said, smiling at him with evil sweetness.

  “If I don’t help you, you are lost,” the Cherubim said. “How could I not stay here, then? Especially when you might arrive at any time?”

  Kim’s head began to spin with the reasoning of that, but he chose not to say anything about it anymore. He’d only become more confused. He took a deep breath and held up his hourglass pendant. “So you know why we’re here. Fine. Can you speak to your late master Raziel for us? This pendant links me to the Archon’s soul. She knows how to open the Book of Raziel, but we need to find another way. We already know that the Angelus is the real power within the Book. Is there any way to obtain the song in its entirety without harming the Book itself?”

  “Yes,” the Cherubim said. “And no.”

  “That’s not any kind of answer,” Kim snapped, struggling to keep his cool. He looked again at the Cherubim’s ferocious teeth to remind himself not to be too brave.

  “It is the truth, half-Jinn, and that is answer enough. But first, ask yourself: are you aware of who and what the Book of Raziel truly is? As you can see, she appears human. But I can tell you that her age surpasses my own and that of all Cherubim. She existed even before the Supernals, though in a slightly different form. What you see of her now is merely what remains.”