Rapture

Luce tried not to imagine what enemies the blond girl envisioned. She lowered herself to the roof again and sheltered herself from the wind behind the warrior statue with the golden spear, more out of habit than need. She adjusted her body so that she could still see the tall brown brick clock tower with the golden face. Five-thirty. She was marking the minutes until Daniel and the other Outcasts came back.

“Do you want to sit down?” she asked Olianna, who lurked directly behind Luce with her arrow at the ready.

“I prefer to stand guard—”

“Yeah, I don’t guess you can really sit guard,” Luce mumbled. “Ha-ha.”

A siren wailed from below, a police car speeding through a roundabout. When it passed and the air grew quiet again, Luce didn’t know how to fill the silence.

She stared at the clock, squinting as if it would help her see through the fog. Had Daniel reached the warehouse by now? What would Arriane, Roland, and Annabelle do when they saw the Outcasts? Luce realized Daniel hadn’t given anyone but Phil a pennon of his wing. How would the angels know to trust the Outcasts?

Her shoulders were hunched up around her ears, and her whole body stiffened with the sense of futile frustration. Why was she sitting here, waiting, cracking stupid jokes? She should have had an active role in this. After all, it wasn’t Luce the Scale wanted. She should be helping rescue her friends or finding the relic instead of sitting here like a distressed damsel, waiting for her knight to return.

“Do you remember me, Lucinda Price?” the Outcast asked so quietly Luce almost didn’t hear.

“Why do the Outcasts call us by our full names all of a sudden?” She turned around to find the girl’s head tilted down at her, her bow and arrow listing against her shoulder.

“It is a sign of respect, Lucinda Price. We are your allies now. You and Daniel Grigori. Do you remember me?”

Luce thought for a second. “Were you one of the Outcasts fighting the angels in my parents’ backyard?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.” Luce shrugged. “I don’t remember everything about my past. Have we already met?” The Outcast lifted her head just a bit. “We knew one another before.”

“When?”

The girl shrugged, her shoulders rising delicately, and Luce suddenly realized she was pretty. “Just before. It is hard to explain.”

“What isn’t?” Luce swiveled back around, not in the mood to decode another cryptic conversation. She stuffed her freezing hands inside the sleeves of her white sweater and watched the traffic moving up and down the slick roads, the tiny cars wedged into slanted spaces on crooked alleys, people in long dark coats marching over illuminated bridges, carrying groceries home to their families.

Luce felt painfully lonely. Was her family thinking of her? Did they picture her in the cramped dorm room she’d slept in at Sword & Cross? Was Callie back at Dover by now? Would she be huddled in the cold window seat of her room, letting her dark red fingernails dry, chatting on the phone about her weird Thanksgiving trip to see some friend who wasn’t Luce?

A dark cloud drifted past the clock, rendering it visible as it struck six. Daniel had been gone an hour that felt like a year. Luce watched the church bells ringing, watched the hands of the great old clock, and she let her memory drift back to her lives spent before the invention of linear time, when time meant seasons, the planting and the harvest.

After the sixth gong of the clock came another—

closer, and Luce spun around just in time to see Olianna slump forward to her knees. She fell and landed heavily in Luce’s arms. Luce turned the ragged angel over and touched the Outcast’s face.

Olianna was unconscious. The sound Luce had heard was the Outcast being hit in the head.

Behind Luce stood an enormous black-cloaked figure. His face was craggy with wrinkles and looked impossibly old, layers of skin drooping under his dull blue eyes and below his protruding chin, beneath a mouthful of crooked black-and-yellow teeth. In his huge right hand was the flagpole he must have used as a weapon.

The Austrian flag hung limply from the end of the pole, fluttered softly against the surface of the roof.

Luce shot to her feet, feeling her fists rise even as she wondered what good they’d be against this enormous fiend.

His wings were a very pale blue, just a shade away from white. Even though his body towered over her, his wings were small and dense, spanning only a little farther than his arms could reach.

Something small and golden was pinned to the front of the man’s cloak: a feather—a marbled gold-black feather. Luce knew whose wings it had come from. But why would Roland have given this creature a pennon from his wings?

He wouldn’t have. This feather was bent and severed and missing some of its matter near the quill. Its point was maroon with blood, and instead of standing upright like the brilliant plume Daniel had given to Phil, this feather seemed to have withered and faded when it was attached to the gruesome angel’s black cloak.

A trick.

“Who are you?” Luce asked, falling to her knees.

“What do you want?”

“Show some respect.” The angel’s throat convulsed as if he meant to bark, but his voice came out warbled and faint and old.

“Earn my respect,” Luce said. “And I’ll give it to you.”

He gave her half an evil smirk and dropped his head low. Then he pulled down the cloak to expose the back of his neck. Luce blinked in the dim light. His neck bore a painted brand, which shimmered gold in the glow of streetlights mingled with the moon. She counted seven points on the star.

He was one of the Scale.

“Recognize me now?”

“Is this how the Throne’s enforcers work? Bludgeon-ing innocent angels?”

“No Outcast is innocent. Nor is anyone else, for that matter, until they are proven to be so.”

“You’ve proven yourself innocent of any honor, striking a girl from behind.”

“Insolence.” He wrinkled his nose at her. “Won’t get you far with me.”

“That’s exactly where I want to be.” Luce’s eyes darted to Olianna, to her pale hand and the starshot clenched in its grip.

“But it’s not where you will stay,” the Scale said haltingly, as if having to force himself to commit to their il-logical banter.

Luce snatched at the starshot as the Scale lurched for her. But the angel was much faster and stronger than he looked. He wrested the starshot from her hands, knocked her onto her back against the stone roof with one strong slap across the face. He held the arrow tip of the starshot up close to Luce’s heart.

They can’t kill mortals. They can’t kill mortals, she kept repeating in her head. But Luce remembered Bill’s bargain with her: She had one immortal part of her that could be killed. Her soul. And she would not part with that, not after everything she’d been through, not when the end was so near.

She raised her leg, preparing to kick him like she’d seen in kung fu movies, when suddenly he pitched the arrow and its bow straight over the edge of the roof.

Luce jerked her head to the side, her cheek pressing against the cold stone, and watched the weapon twirl in the air on its way into the twinkling Christmas lights of the Vienna streets.

The Scale angel rubbed his hands on his cloak. “Filthy things.” Then he grabbed Luce roughly by the shoulders and yanked her to her feet.

He kicked the Outcast aside—Olianna moaned but did not stir—and there, under her thin, trench-coated body, was the golden halo.

“Thought I might find this here,” the Scale angel said, snatching it up and thrusting it under the folds of his cloak.

“No!” She plunged her hands into the dark place where she’d seen the halo disappear, but the angel slapped her a second time across the face, sending her backward, her hair swinging over the edge of the roof.

She clutched her face. Her nose was bleeding.

“You are more dangerous than they think,” he croaked. “We were told you were a whiner, not courageous. I’d better bind you up before we fly.” The angel quickly slipped off his cloak and dropped it over her head like a curtain, blinding Luce for a long, horrible moment. Then the Vienna night—and the angel—were visible again. Luce noticed that beneath the cloak he’d been wearing, the Scale wore another, precisely like the one he’d removed and fastened around Luce. He bent down, and with the pull of a string, Luce’s cloak constricted around her like a straitjacket. When she kicked, convulsed, she felt the cloak become tighter.

She let out a scream. “Daniel!”

“He won’t hear you,” the angel chuckled mirthlessly as he stuffed her under one arm and moved toward the edge of the roof. “He wouldn’t hear you if you screamed forever.”

SEVEN

KNOT ANGELS

The cloak was paralyzing.

The more Luce moved, the more it constricted around her. Its rough fabric was secured with a strange rope that pinched her skin and held her body rigidly.

When Luce writhed against it, the rope responded, cinching tighter around her shoulders, squeezing her ribs until she could barely breathe.

The Scale angel held Luce under his bony arm as he scraped through the night sky. With her face buried in the fetid waist of the regenerated cloak the angel wore, she could see nothing, could only feel wind whipping across the surface of her miserable mildewed cocoon. All she could hear was wind-howl, punctuated by the beating of stiff wings.

Where was he taking her? How would she get word to Daniel? They did not have time for this!

After a while the wind stopped, but the Scale angel didn’t land.

He and Luce hovered in the air.

Then the angel let out a roar. “Trespasser!” he bellowed.

Luce felt the two of them dropping, but she could see only the darkness of the folds of her captor’s cloak, which muffled her cries of terror—until the sound of breaking glass halted even those.

Thin, razor-like shards sliced through her constricting cloak, through the fabric of her jeans. Her legs stung like they’d been cut in a thousand places.

When the Scale angel’s feet slammed into a landing, Luce shuddered with the impact. He dropped her roughly, and she landed on her hip bone and shoulder.

She rolled a couple of feet, then stopped. She saw that she was near a long wooden workman’s table piled high with fragments of faded cloth and porcelain.

She squirmed under its temporary shelter, almost suc-cessful at preventing her cloak from constricting more tightly around her. It had begun to close around her trachea.

But at least now she could see.

She was in a cold, cavernous room. The floor beneath her was a lacquered mosaic made of triangular gray and red tiles. The walls were a gleaming mustard-colored marble, as were the thick square pillars in the center of the room. She briefly studied a long row of frosted skylights that spanned the vast ceiling forty feet above. The roof was pocked by open craters of broken glass, revealing dark gray vistas of cloudy night on the other side. That must have been where she and the angel crashed through.

And this must be the museum wing the Scale had overtaken, the one Vincent had told Daniel about on the copper roof. That meant Daniel must be just outside—and Arriane and Annabelle and Roland should be somewhere inside! Her heart soared, then sank.