The Fallen Sequence (147 page)

Luce went first and stood on the porch—which was really just a heap of frost-kissed straw—to wait for the others. The angels poured out of the doorway one at a time—Daniel arching his white wings back as he exited chest out, Annabelle tucking her thick silver wings fast to her sides, Roland bundling his golden marble wings around the front of his body like an invincible shield, and Arriane plowing through recklessly, cursing an unnoticed candle by the doorway that singed a tip of wing.

Afterward, all the angels stood together on the lawn and flexed their wings, glad to be out in the crisp air again.

Luce noticed the darkness. She was certain that when they’d entered the Foundation, the sun had not been far from rising. The church bells had chimed once more, announcing four o’clock, and the sky had been grasping for the precious gold of dawn.

Had they been inside with Dee for just an hour? Why was the sky now a dark, dead-of-night blue?

Lights were on in the white stone town houses. People passed behind the windows, frying eggs, pouring cups of coffee. Men with briefcases and women in smart suits walked out their front doors and, without ever once glancing at the congregation of angels in the middle of the street, got into cars and drove away, toward what Luce assumed was work.

She remembered Daniel had explained that Viennese people could not see them when they were inside the Patina. They didn’t see the brown house at all. Luce watched a woman in a black terry cloth bathrobe and a plastic rain bonnet walk groggily toward them with her small furry dog. Her property bordered the overgrown pebble path that led to the front door of the Foundation. The woman and her dog stepped onto the path.

And disappeared.

Luce gasped, but then Daniel pointed behind her, to the other side of the Foundation’s lawn. She spun around. Forty feet away, where the pebble path ended and the modern sidewalk picked up once again, the woman and her dog reappeared. The dog yapped hysterically, but the woman walked on as if nothing had disturbed her morning routine.

It was strange, Luce realized, that the angels’ whole mission was to keep her life that way. So that nothing
happened to erase this woman’s world, so that she never even noticed how much danger she’d been in.

But while the people on the street might not have noticed Luce or the angels, they certainly did notice the sky. The woman with the dog kept glancing up at it worriedly, and most of the people leaving their houses wore slickers and carried umbrellas.

“Is it going to rain?” Luce had flown through pockets of rain with Daniel, warm showers that left them refreshed and exhilarated … but this sky was ominous, nearly black.

“No,” Dee said. “It isn’t going to rain. That’s the Scale.”

“What?” Luce’s head shot up. She squinted at the sky, horrified when it shifted and pitched. Storm clouds didn’t move like that.

“The sky is dark with their wings.” Arriane shuddered. “And their cloaks.”

No
.

Luce stared at the sky until it began to make sense. With a feeling akin to vertigo, she made out an undulating mass of blue-gray wings. They were smeared across the sky, thick as a coat of paint, blocking out the rising sun. The beats of the short, brutish wings buzzed like a swarm of hornets. Her heart clenched as she tried to count them. It was impossible. How many hundreds hovered in the multitude above?

“We’re under siege,” Daniel said.

“They’re so close,” Luce said, flinching as the sky roiled. “Can they see us?”

“Not exactly, but they know we’re here,” Dee said nonchalantly as a small group of Scale swooped lower, low enough for them to see their shriveled, bloodthirsty faces. Cold eyes trolled the space where Luce and the others were gathered, but when it came to the Patina, Scale seemed to be about as blind as the Outcasts.

“My Patina surrounds us, the way a tea cozy surrounds a pot, forming a protective barrier. The Scale can’t see or travel through it.” Dee managed a smile at Luce. “It only answers to the ringing of a certain kind of soul, one innocent of its own potential.”

Daniel’s wings pulsed beside her. “They’re gathering more brethren all the time. We need some way to get out of here, and we need to hurry.”

“I do not intend to be bound in one of their broke-neck burkas,” Dee said. “No one takes me in my own house!”

“I like the way she talks,” Annabelle said sideways to Luce.

“Follow me!” Dee shouted, breaking into a run along a gated alley. They jogged behind her through an unexpected pumpkin patch, around an ornate and dilapidated gazebo, and into an expansive and lushly green backyard.

Roland’s chin tilted toward the sky. It was darker now, denser with wings.

“What’s the plan?”

“Well, for starters”—Dee wandered over to stand under a mottled oak tree in the center of the garden—“the library must be destroyed.”

Luce gasped. “Why?”

“Simple mechanics. This Patina has always encompassed the library, so with the library it must stay. In order to move past the Scale, we’ll have to open the Patina, thereby exposing the Foundation, and I do not intend to leave it for their indiscriminating wings to root through.” Her hand patted Luce’s stricken face. “Don’t worry, dear, I’ve already donated the valuable volumes in the collection—to the Vatican, mostly, though some went to the Huntington, and to an unsuspecting little town in Arkansas. No one will miss this place. I’m the last librarian here, and frankly, I don’t plan to return after this mission.”

“I still don’t understand how we get past them.” Daniel’s gaze stayed fixed on the swirling blue-black sky.

“I will have to produce a second Patina, surrounding only our bodies, guaranteeing us safe passage. Then I will open this one and let the Scale flow in.”

“I think I’m smelling what you’re cooking,” Arriane said, climbing up a branch like a monkey to sit nestled in the oak tree.

“The Foundation will be sacrificed”—Dee frowned—“but at least the Scale will make nice kindling.”

“Hold on, how does the library get sacrificed?” Roland crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at Dee.

“I was hoping you could help with that, Roland,” Dee said, eyes twinkling. “You’re rather good at starting fires, aren’t you?”

Roland raised his eyebrows, but Dee had already turned around. Facing the tree trunk, she reached for a knot in its bark, pulled it like a secret doorknob, and opened the trunk to a hollowed chamber. Inside, the wood was polished, the chamber about the size of a small locker. Dee’s arm dipped in and pulled out a long golden key.

“That’s how you open the Patina?” Luce asked, surprised that it required so physical a key.

“Well, this is how I unlock it so that it can be manipulated for our needs.”

“When you open it, if there’s a fire,” Luce said, remembering the way the woman walking her dog had blinked out of existence for a moment while she crossed the Foundation’s front lawn, “what will happen to the houses, to the people on the street?”

“Funny thing about the Patina,” Dee said, kneeling down and rooting around in the garden for something. “The way it sits on the border between realities past and
present, we can be here, and not here, in the present, and also elsewhere. It’s a place where everything we imagine about time and space comes together materially.” She lifted up the fronds of an oversized fern, then dug in the dirt with her hands. “No mortals outside will be affected, but if the Scale are as ravenous as we all know they are, as soon as I open this Patina, they’ll swoop right toward us. For one tense moment, they will join us in the elsewhere reality when the Foundation Library stood on this street.”

“And we’ll fly out, enclosed in the second Patina,” Daniel guessed.

“Precisely,” Dee said. “Then we have only to close this one around them. Just as they can’t get in now, they won’t be able to get out then. And while we soar on safely to lovely, ancient Avignon, the library will go up in smoke, with the Scale trapped inside.”

“It’s brilliant,” Daniel said. “The Scale will still technically be alive, so our action won’t tip the Heavenly balance, but they’ll be—”

“Burn marks of the past, sealed off, out of our way. Right. Everybody on board?” Dee’s face lit up. “Ah,
there
it is!”

As Luce and the angels stood over her, Dee brushed the dirt off a collared hole that had been buried in the garden. She closed her eyes, held the key close to her heart, and whispered a blessing:

“Light surround us, love enfold us, shelter us, Patina, from the evil that must come.”

Carefully, she fit the key into the lock. Her wrist shook with the force required to turn the key, but finally, it creaked a quarter turn to the right. Dee exhaled heavily and rose to her feet, wiping her hands on her skirt.

“Here we go.”

She raised her arms above her head and then, very slowly, very purposefully, brought them down toward her heart. Luce waited for the earth to shift, for anything to happen, but for a moment, nothing seemed to have changed.

Then, as the space around them grew pin-drop quiet, Luce heard an almost inaudible swishing sound, like bare palms being rubbed together. The air seemed to slightly warp, making everything—the brown house, the row of Viennese town houses surrounding it, even the blue wings of the Scale above—waver. Colors bent, melted. It was like standing inside the cloudy haze that rises from flowing gasoline.

As before, Luce could both see and not see the Patina. Its amorphous boundary was visible one moment—with the iridescent transparency of a soap bubble—then it disappeared. But she could
feel
it molding around the small space in the garden where she and the others stood, emanating warmth and the feeling of being embraced by something powerfully protective.

No one spoke, silenced by the wonder of Dee.

Luce studied the old woman, who was humming so intensely she almost seemed to buzz. Luce was surprised when she sensed the inner Patina was complete. Something that hadn’t felt whole a moment before now did. Dee nodded, her hands at her heart as if in prayer. “We are in the Patina within the Patina. We are in the heart of safety and security. When I open the outer rim to the Scale, trust that security and remain calm. No harm can come to you.”

She whispered the words again—
Light surround us, love enfold us, shelter us, Patina, from the evil that must come
—and Luce found herself murmuring along. Daniel’s voice chimed in, too.

Then there was a hole, like a gust of cold air entering a warm room. They shuffled closer together, wings pressing up against each other, Luce in the center. They watched the shifting sky.

A savage shriek came from high above, and a thousand others joined in. The Scale could see it now.

They swarmed toward the hole.

The opening was mostly invisible to Luce, but it must have been directly over the chimney of the brown house. That was where the Scale headed, like winged ants attacking a drop of fallen jam. They thudded to the roof, to the grass, to the eaves of the house. Their cloaks rippled with the impact of rough landings. Their eyes trolled
the property—both sensing and not sensing Luce, Dee, and the angels.

Luce held her breath, did not make a sound.

The Scale kept coming. Soon the yard bristled with their stiff blue wings. They surrounded Dee’s inner Patina, casting glances hungry as wolves’ directly at the place where the prey they sought were hiding. But the Scale could not see the angels, the girl, and the transeternal safe inside.

“Where are they?” one of them snarled, his cloak tangling in a sea of blue wings as he pushed through the crowd of his brethren. “They’re here somewhere.”

“Prepare to fly fast and hard to Avignon,” Dee whispered, standing stiffly as a Scale angel with a birthmark splashed across his face leaned in near the limits of their Patina and sniffed like a pig seeking slop.

Arriane’s wings were trembling and Luce knew she was thinking of what the Scale had done to her. Luce reached for her friend’s hand.

“Roland, how about that mighty conflagration?” Daniel said through pursed lips.

“You got it.” Roland interlaced his fingers and furrowed his brow, then gave one hard glance at the brown house. There was a great blast, like a detonating bomb, and the Foundation Library exploded. Scale were sent shrieking into the Patina sky, their cloaks engulfed in fingerlike flames.

Roland waved his hand, and the hole where the library had stood became a volcano spewing flames and lava rivers through the lawn. The oak tree caught fire. Flames spread through its branches as if they were matches in a box. Luce was sweating and dizzy from the heat searing through the Patina, but even as the Scale were blown back by repercussive shock waves, the group inside Dee’s small Patina did not burn.

Dee shouted, “Let’s fly!” just as a tornado of hot, flame-laden air swirled through the yard, swallowing a hundred Scale and lifting them into its blazing core, carouseling them across the lawn.

“Ready, Luce?” Daniel’s arms wrapped around her just as Roland’s wrapped tight around Dee. Smoke ricocheted off the walls on the outside of the Patina, but Luce was having a hard time breathing through her sore, bruised neck.

Then Daniel lifted her off the ground. They flew straight up. Out of the corners of her eyes, Luce saw Roland’s marbled wings on the right, Annabelle and Arriane on the left. All the angels’ wings were beating so fast and hard that they wove a pure blinding brightness, straight up out of the fire and into clear blue air.

But the Patina was still open. The Scale who could still fly had some sense that they were being tricked, trapped. They tried to rise out of the blaze, but Roland sent another wave of flame washing down onto them,
thrusting them back into the burning earth, singeing off their crinkled skin until they were skeletons with wings.

“Just another moment …” Dee’s fingertips and steady gaze manipulated the boundaries of the Patina. Luce studied Dee, then the mess of burning Scale. She imagined the Patina cinching at the top like a cloak around a neck, sealing the Scale inside, choking them out.

“All done,” Dee shouted as Roland took her higher through the air.