“But when we succeed, couldn’t you . . .”
“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.
The angels approached the heavy double doors that towered over them, forty feet high at least. They were painted green and flanked by three plain stone pillars on either side. Luce’s eye was drawn to the ornate frieze between the doors and the arches above them—and above that, the gleaming golden cross puncturing the sky. The building was quiet, somber, alive with spiritual electricity.
“In we go, then,” Dee said.
“We can’t go in there,” Roland said, moving away from the church.
“Oh, yes,” Dee said, “the incendiary business. You think you can’t go in because it’s a sanctuary of God—”
“It’s the sanctuary of God,” Roland said. “I don’t want to be the guy who takes this place down.”
“Only it isn’t a sanctuary of God,” Dee said simply.
“Quite the opposite. This is the place where Jesus suffered and died. Therefore it has never been a sanctuary as far as the Throne is concerned, and that’s the only opinion that really matters. A sanctuary is a safe haven, a refuge from harm. Mortals step within these walls to pray, in their infinitely morbid way, but as far as your curse is concerned, you will not be affected.” Dee paused.
“Which is good, because Sophia and your friends are inside.”
“How do you know?” Luce asked.
She heard footsteps on stone on the east side of the courtyard. Dee squinted down the narrow street.
Daniel grabbed Luce’s waist so swiftly she fell into him. Turning a corner beneath a street sign that read VIA DOLOROSA, two elderly nuns strained under the weight of a large wooden cross. They wore simple navy habits, thick sensible sandals, and beaded rosaries around their necks.
Luce relaxed at the sight of the old believers, whose average age seemed to be eighty-five. She started to move toward the women, obeying an instinct to assist the elderly with a heavy load, but Daniel’s grasp on Luce’s waist did not loosen as the nuns approached the great doors of the church with excruciating slow-ness. It seemed impossible that the nuns would not have seen the group of angels twenty feet away—they were the only other souls in the plaza—but the struggling sisters never so much as glanced in the angels’ direction.
“A little early for the Sisters of the Stations of the Cross to be out, isn’t it?” Roland whispered to Daniel.
Dee straightened her skirt and pinned a rebellious strand of hair behind her ear. “I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but we’ll simply have to kill them.”
“What?” Luce glanced at one of the feeble, sun-weathered women. Her gray eyes sat like pebbles in the deep folds of her face. “You want to kill those nuns?” Dee frowned. “Those aren’t nuns, dear. They are Elders and they must be disposed of, or they will dispose of us.”
“I’m disposed to say they already look disposed of.” Arriane shifted her weight from side to side. “Apparently Jerusalem recycles.”
Maybe Arriane’s voice found the nuns and startled them, or maybe they were waiting to arrive at precisely the right location, but at that moment, as they reached the church doors, they stopped and turned so that the long beam of their cross pointed across the plaza, toward the angels, like a cannon.
“Time she is a-wasting, angels,” Dee said through tight lips.
The pebble-eyed nun bared veiny gums at the angels and fumbled with something on the base of the beam.
Daniel shoved the satchel into Luce’s hands, then positioned her behind Dee. The older woman didn’t cover Luce exactly—the top of her head came only as high as Luce’s chin—but Luce got the idea and ducked. The angels unleashed their wings with brutish speed as they fanned out on both sides—Arriane and Annabelle veer-ing left, Roland and Daniel diving right.
The giant cross was not a pilgrim’s penitential bur-den. It was an enormous crossbow, filled with starshots meant to kill everybody there.
There was no time for this to register with Luce. One of the nuns released the first shot; it sizzled through the air, heading for Luce’s face. The silver arrow grew larger in Luce’s vision as it swirled closer in the air.
Then Dee jumped.
The tiny woman spread her arms open wide. The starshot’s dull tip collided with the center of her chest.
Dee grunted as the arrow—harmless to mortals, Luce knew—glanced off her tiny body and clattered to the ground, leaving the transeternal sore but unharmed.
“Presidia, you fool,” Dee shouted at the nun, dragging the arrow backward with her high heel. Luce leaned down to pick it up and slipped it inside the satchel. “You know that won’t hurt me! Now you’ve annoyed my friends.” She gestured broadly at the angels darting forward to disarm the costumed Elders.
“Stand down, defector!” Presidia replied. “We require the girl! Surrender her and we will—” But Presidia never finished. Arriane was at the Elder’s back in a flash, brushing the habit from her head, taking her white hair in each of the angel’s fists.
“Because I respect my Elders,” Arriane hissed through her clenched jaw, “I feel I must prevent them from embarrassing themselves.” Then she lifted off the ground, still holding Presidia by the hair. The Elder kicked the air as if pedaling an invisible bicycle. Arriane pivoted and slammed the old woman’s body into the cornice of the church’s façade with such force it left an indention when she collapsed in a twisted heap, hands and legs sticking out at grisly angles.
The other incognito Elder had dropped the cannon-cross and was trying to escape, running hard for an alley in the opposite corner of the plaza. Annabelle took up the cross and became a javelin thrower, rearing back like a tightening coil, springing to release the heavy wooden T.