The Fallen Sequence (141 page)

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? Bludgeoning 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 illogical 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 through 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

T
he 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 in 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 succeeding 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.

Their wings were bound, the Outcasts had said. Were they in the same shape she was in? She hated that she had made it here and couldn’t even help them, hated that she had to move to save them but that moving put her life in peril. There was perhaps nothing worse than not being able to
move
.

The Scale angel’s muddy black boots appeared before her. Luce peered up at his towering figure. He bent down, smelling like rotting mothballs, his dull eyes leering. His black-gloved hand reached for her—

Then the Scale angel’s hand fell limply—as if he had been knocked out. He lunged forward, crashing heavily into the workman’s table, pushing it back, exposing Luce. The severed sculpture head that had apparently struck the Scale rolled eerily to rest on the floor near Luce’s face, seeming to stare into Luce’s eyes.

As Luce rolled back under the table, more blue wings blurred in her peripheral vision. More Scale. Four of them flew in loose formation toward a recessed alcove about halfway up the wall … where Luce now saw Emmet standing, brandishing a long silver saw.

Emmet must have thrown the head that had saved her from the Scale! He was the trespasser whose entrance through the ceiling had enraged her kidnapper. Luce had never thought she’d be so happy to see an Outcast.

Emmet was surrounded by sculptures on platforms and pedestals, some shrouded, some scaffolded, one newly beheaded—and by four impossibly old Scale angels, hovering closer to him in the air, cloaks extended, like shabby vampires. These stiff black cloaks seemed to be their only weapon, their only tool, and Luce knew well it was a brutal one. Her pained breathing was evidence of that.

She suppressed a gasp as Emmet pulled a starshot from a quiver beneath his trench coat and held it out in front of him. Daniel had made the Outcasts promise not to kill the Scale!

The Scale in the air backed slowly away from Emmet,
hissing, “Vile! Vile!” so loudly that it caused Luce’s captor to stir on the table above her. Then the Outcast did something that amazed everybody in the room. He aimed the starshot at himself. Luce had seen Daniel suicidal in Tibet, so she knew something about that emotion’s desperate atmosphere, the defeated body language that accompanied a gesture so extreme. But Emmet seemed as confident and defiant as ever as he looked from one leathery Scale face to another.

The Scale became emboldened by Emmet’s strange behavior. They hovered ever closer, blocking the thin Outcast from Luce’s view with the slow intensity of vultures approaching a carcass on a desert highway. Where were the other Outcasts? Where was Phil? Had the Scale already done away with them?

What sounded like thick and heavy fabric being torn echoed loudly through the room. The Scale hovered motionlessly, their broad, overlapping cloaks like the gaping mouth of an Announcer that led somewhere terrible and sad. Then a slicing sound cut through the air, followed by another tearing sound—and then the four Scale angels spun like rag dolls toward Luce, their jaws slack, their eyes open, their cloaks mutilated and ripped open to expose black hearts and black lungs twitching spastically, streaming pale blue blood.

Daniel had told the Outcasts they could not use their starshots to
kill
the Scale, but he had not said the Outcasts could not hurt them.

The four Scale angels fell to the floor in a clump like puppets whose strings had been snipped. Luce looked up from where they lay, struggling to breathe, to the alcove, where Emmet was wiping black Scale blood from the fletchings of his starshot. Luce had never heard of anyone using the butt end of a starshot as a weapon—and apparently neither had the Scale.

“Is Lucinda here?” Luce heard Phil call out. She looked up to see his face glowing through a crater in the roof.

“Here!” Luce shouted up to him, unable to keep herself from lunging as she did so, causing her cloak to cinch even more tightly around her throat. When she grimaced sharply, the cloak tightened a little more.

A huge leg drooped over the edge of the table, its black boot swinging into Luce’s face, striking her flush on the nose, bringing tears of pain to her eyes. Her captor was awake! This realization, coupled with the sudden pain that half blinded her, caused Luce to push back more deeply under the table’s shelter. When she did so, her cloak closed all the way around her neck, pinching her trachea completely shut. She panicked, gasped uselessly for air, writhing now that it didn’t matter if the cloak constricted any more—

Then she remembered how she’d discovered in Venice that she could hold her breath for longer than she’d thought possible. And Daniel had just told her she could will herself to overcome mortal limitations anytime she
wanted. So she did it; she just did it; she willed herself to stay alive.

But that didn’t stop her captor from knocking the sheltering workman’s table aside, sending pottery and the severed limbs of ancient sculptures flying.

“You look … uncomfortable.” He grinned, revealing blood-slick teeth, and extended a black-gloved hand toward the hem of Luce’s cloak.

But the Scale angel froze when a starshot fletching burst through the place where, only a moment before, his right eye had been. Blue blood jetted from the emptied socket, down onto Luce’s cloak. He cried out, staggered wildly around the room, arms flailing, the backward starshot protruding from his wizened face.

Pale hands appeared before her, then the sleeves of a ratty tan trench coat, followed by a shaven blond head. Phil’s face betrayed no feeling as he dropped to his knees to face her.

“There you are, Lucinda Price.” He gripped the collar of the binding black cloak and lifted Luce up. “I had returned to the palace to check on you.”

He set her atop a nearby table. She immediately fell over, not able to hold herself upright. Emmet righted her with as little emotion as his colleague had.

At last she could afford to take a longer view. In front of her, three shallow stairs led down to an expansive main chamber. In its center, a red velvet rope sectioned
off a towering statue of a lion. It was reared up on two feet, teeth bared toward the sky mid-roar. Its mane was chipped and yellowed.

Blue-gray wings coated the floor of the restoration wing, reminding Luce of a locust-covered parking lot she’d seen one summer after a Georgia rainstorm. The Scale weren’t dead—they had not vanished into starshot dust—but so many of them were unconscious the Outcasts could barely tread without crunching their wings. Phil and Emmet had been busy, incapacitating at least fifty of the Scale. Their short blue wings twitched occasionally, but their bodies did not move.

All six Outcasts—Phil, Vincent, Emmet, Sanders, the other Outcast girl, whose name Luce did not know, even Daedalus with his bandaged face—were still on their feet, brushing pieces of tissue and bone from their blue-splattered trench coats.