“I don’t know if you need to. I could just paint her in some Academy tower, locked up in a circle of wet bricks, her hair growing longer but never drying out. In the end, Luz isn’t much different than purgatory, is it?”
Angela walked over to a window and pulled the curtains back, revealing a late-morning vista that could have been mistaken for a late-evening apocalypse. The sun tended to hide itself in Luz. Was it the position of the city relative to the winds and the tides? Was it the latitude? The chimney smoke? The pollution from the iron ships entering through the coastal supports? As the city grew, each building settled on top of the lesser architecture of its ancestors, the light sallowed more and more, its golden slivers less frequent amid the mists and the fog. Finally, the weekly forecast stalemated into storms, rain, or a monotonous sleet in the winter months—a foul time period where no one visited Luz, and nobody left. The city of lights, it was said, might have been cursed by the large number of blood heads living there. But they weren’t leaving any time soon. So, while they entered the school one after the other, the storms became more violent and the lightning developed into a plague, and people used the degrees of darkness to determine the hours of the day and the passing of the seasons.
Right now, it was early fall. Without the trees to say so, most students had only their calendars and the amount of rain in the streets to go by. The Academy Tree was one of the last of its species in Luz. The Vatican needed more space for housing than for giant weeds.
“You’ll get used to it after a while.” Nina took a long drag on her cigarette, tapping the ashes into a cup near Angela’s bed. “I’m surprised you like the sun anyway. Who does? It’s hot, and bright, and yellow, and it makes people shade off into a second-class tan. There’s nothing like that corpse-white hue.”
“Then I guess I am going to be popular for a change. I used to get tans all the time back home, and everyone said I’d end up marrying ‘beneath my family’s expectations.’ The more I liked that, the more they thought I was deranged. So then they sent me to the institution and I forgot what the sun was all about. I didn’t miss it so much until I got back home.”
“Are you?” Nina said. She lay down on the bed, flat on her stomach, a hand still lifting the cigarette to her lips.
Angela swept aside her hair, sitting down on the floor.
Dolls surrounded them from floor to ceiling, crowding the old bookshelves and storage cabinets, their glass eyes cold and scintillating. While most of her paintings remained hidden away in their portfolio cases, two of them hung on the walls, portals to either a dream or a nightmare, whichever happened to suit her fancy at the moment. She felt a kinship to both of them, one day aching for perfect beauty, and the next, for a grayness that wiped away her soul.
“Am I what?” she said, tugging on an arm glove.
“Deranged.”
What did she want to hear, anyway? But Nina was intent on the question, mouth set in a line of excited fear. As if she were watching a horror movie and couldn’t tear her eyes away.
“Well,” Angela said, lifting one of her hands, “Some people think I am.”
She slipped off the glove, allowing her scars and knife slashes to get some air. Nina locked on them without a sound, balancing the cigarette on her fingers, letting its ashes dribble onto the floor. Like she’d forgotten the world. “You sick bitch,” she said, awed.
“You sound like my parents.” Angela ran a finger along a particularly large burn. “My diagnosis was pretty grim from the beginning, you know. My brother was born during a freak storm that nearly swept away the hospital. I was born a few seconds after him, apparently tearing parts of Erianna to shreds on the way out. My mother,” she said, glancing at Nina, seeing there was need for explanation. “She could never have any more children after us. It was a miracle she even survived. And she and Marcus never let me forget it. They didn’t kill me outright. I was part of the Mathers family, and that wasn’t how they did things. Instead, they took a more passive route. Long years of no friends and a lot of harsh homeschooling. Some of the scars are from that.”
Nina opened her mouth, maybe to ask which ones. Then she simply said nothing.
“The paintings are what got me sent to the mental institution. I believed the angels were real—I still do—and I tried to kill myself a few times to get it over with. Because I wanted to be with people or beings that I really understood and cared for. At the institution they taught me how to make human friends and feel okay about the opposite sex, and I had a few brave boyfriends here and there when I got out. But I always wanted to be with him,” she said, pointing at the beautiful angel and his overly large, proud eyes, “and I kept trying. It’s simply my bad luck that I can’t kill myself and wake up in Heaven or Hell somewhere, staring back at him.”
“Why not?” Nina said, whispering.
“Because it doesn’t work.” Angela waved at a drawer in the end table near the bed. “Open that and give me the pocketknife inside, next to the notebook.”
Nina obeyed, tossing the closed knife at Angela.
She caught it with one hand. “Now,” she said, snapping the knife open, “watch carefully.”
“Wait a second,” Nina said, “you’re not going to actually—”
“I mean it. Keep watching.”
Angela pointed the blade’s tip at her heart and pulled her hand back, lifting it higher than she really needed to. Drama would help get the point across.
“Shit—” Nina sat up from the bed, looking like she was either going to scream or lunge for the knife. The cigarette dropped from her fingers to the floor. Her arms shook like twigs in the wind. “What the hell are you going to do—Angela—no—”
Angela brought the knife down against her chest, merciless.
Maybe I’ll get really lucky. Maybe I’ll do it this time.
The blade sank into her skin a half inch deep. A second later it broke with a loud twang, the handle flying onto the bed next to Nina, the rest of the blade dropping out of Angela’s skin and clattering to the hardwood floor, its once sleek metal now jagged at the edges. Warm blood pooled from the cut, soaking into her shirt. Nina stared at the knife on the bed like it was a demon crawling for her own throat. When she decided to look at Angela again, her face was even whiter than a cadaver’s.
“You sick bitch,” she said again, her lips almost slack. She began laughing. “I thought you were going to dye me red. You sick, lucky, lucky . . .”
She slid off the bed, stamping out the light of the fallen cigarette.
“Don’t even bother,” Angela said. She dabbed at the cut with the arm glove. “It’s not as deep as it looks. It never is.”
“How the heck—”
“Maybe there is a real angel, protecting me. That’s the only reason I can figure.” Angela leaned back, resting her elbows on the floor. More blood blossomed on her breast like a flower. “That’s why I have the burns. I got frustrated and tried fire, but I must have just fallen unconscious, and the blaze killed my family instead of me. All I got out of it was some freaky scar tissue.”
She lifted another arm, a leg.
“You didn’t go to jail? Even if it was an accident—”
“My family had good connections, good lawyers.” Angela shook her head. “And a reputation to uphold. My relatives just wanted me out of the picture, maybe so that Brendan could continue with his education, or maybe because they were afraid of me. But no matter what, it was an ironic way to get my freedom back.”
Nina played with her skirt, looking unsure of herself.
“Are you sad?” she eventually whispered. “I mean—that your parents died because of . . .”
Angela hushed along with her. “Because of me?”
Sad.
No. She’d murdered her guilt the second it became clear that nothing about her past could ever be changed. For better or for worse, her failure to die had erased the other lives that had made hers a nightmare. But even though that chapter of her life had ended as pa
infully as it began, it was finally over. The morning Angela awoke in the emergency ward, she almost felt resurrected. The possibilities for her future, limited as they might have been, somehow seemed endless.
“They were the ones who beat me when I cried. By the time they were gone—I promised myself whatever tears I had left wouldn’t go to waste.”
Nina nodded, suddenly more confident in the face of Angela’s confession. She rubbed a few tendrils of frizzy hair from her forehead. “I can’t say I don’t admire you for that. Most people would do what you said: wall themselves up and cry.” She sighed heavily. “Luz is a hell of a place to start over, though. You could have gone anywhere—”
“I came here to apologize to my brother. But also to see if there was a way I could find him.” Angela stood, walking over to the dazzling portrait next to her dressing mirror, brushing the curl of her angel’s bronze wings with a finger. “If that’s even possible. I’m a blood head, but besides dreams and lacking the ability to kill myself, I don’t have any other powers that I’m aware of. I was hoping that maybe the priests could help me. It’s a long shot, but the Vatican is the worldwide authority on angels, aren’t they? I’ve been thinking that somebody could recognize these two. Tell me who they are and why I dream about them. Or even help me see them somehow. Which reminds me—”
Angela stooped down and picked up the broken knife blade, handing it to Nina.
“I’ve been going over this in my head since last night—and if you came to visit, I thought I’d ask—could you do it? Could you . . . kill me?”
Nina focused on her feet, half biting her lip. “God. What makes you think I’d say yes?”
“I don’t know.”
A lie. Kind of.
“And what makes you think I won’t go to the school counselors and tell them about this? That I won’t get you kicked out of the Academy? Or”—Nina’s face darkened, a wicked light brightening her eyes—“sent back to that institution?”
Angela shrugged. Good questions, but she had an answer for most of them. “Because I know you’re a lot like me. Because I could tell them that you’re a nut who believes she’s talking to spirits, and then suggest that we both end up in an institution together. Though I’d probably be the only one to survive it. And not even by my own choice.”
Nina examined her, cautious. More respectful. “What makes you think that I’d even be successful?”
“Other people can hurt me. Pretty badly if they want to. My parents have, my tutor did. But they never went far enough, like they knew that keeping me alive was more of a punishment.” She fiddled with the knife blade for a second longer, handing it to Nina again. “I want someone to do me a favor, and I don’t want it to be someone who gets off on violence and guts. That’s like prostituting myself. And just so you know, I won’t hold it against you. You can have all of my belongings. Everything. I want to get the hell out of here.”
“Come on, Angela. What’s in it for me? For anyone who’s actually sane? Really?”
“Money. That’s all I’ve got.”
Nina traced a line of thread on the bedspread, as if pondering all the possibilities that could be had in murdering a blood head. Then she sighed, her shoulders rising and falling. “This is messed up. As much as the thought of being rich might tempt me, it’s not enough to murder someone. Anyone. Not even you—no offense.” She took the broken knife blade and tossed it into the trash bin next to Angela’s desk. Between the blood and the humidity, it wouldn’t take long to rust. “Looks like you’re going to have to stick it out for a while longer. I’m not too keen on my conscience torturing me, or the police locking me up for sixty years. Though it is brave of you,” she said, sliding to the edge of the bed, “to ask me in the first place. Sorry. I don’t have the stomach to kill other people or myself. I’m not that—crazy.”
Angela slumped, her head cradled by a hand. “Great. Well, thanks anyway.” She peered between her fingers. “Let me guess? We’re not friends anymore? You’re scared to death of me?”
Nina reached for the jester doll and displaced it from the shelf again. She took off its hat, jingling the bells. “I didn’t say that.”
“Were we even friends to begin with?”
“Either way, it’s too late now.” Nina picked at the doll’s hair, another cautious glaze coming over her eyes. Rain began pattering gently against the window. “So you said that angels are real.”
That’s why you came in the first place. Stephanie isn’t a complete liar after all.
Angela touched the painting again. The angel had an expression of wounded pride, his heavy-lidded eyes gazing back at her almost in contempt. Even the lines of his lips were so engrained in her by now, she barely had a thought process as she drew them. The art had become automatic. Full of life, yet ultimately lifeless. It was time for more. “Why else would I have those dreams? Sometimes I feel like they’re memories. Not necessarily mine. They have that kind of nonsensical quality to them. Always images that mean nothing in particular, like seeing the angels drink or sleep. Scenes from a movie reel I never watched.”
“Oh.”
“You’re disappointed?” Angela allowed an edge of annoyance in her voice.
“Um—” Nina paused. “No. Not like you think. I don’t see angels, and I’m not a blood head, so there’s no controlling them or summoning them myself. But—”
She paused again, clutching the jester doll.
Angela waited for her to rediscover her nerves, but soon she couldn’t help it anymore. “Not every blood head can do stuff like that. I think the prophecy is mostly crap.”
“Do you?” Nina’s voice shook a little. She was looking down at her feet, searching for something again. Maybe the sanity they’d lost tonight. Most people didn’t ask a new friend to kill them or reveal that their dreams were a step from reality. “I’ve heard voices—and seen people—for a year now. Women. Men. Children. Everyone you can imagine. Most of the time, their voices all blend together, like they’re shouting at me. And they usually talk about terrible things I don’t understand, keeping me from sleeping most of the night.” She ran a hand through her hair, tearing out some strands from her bun, as if stressing the real cause of her bloodshot eyes and frazzled appearance. “But lately, I’ve been able to hear them more clearly, and I’ve figured out that they’re waiting for someone. To let them out of wherever they’ve been locked up for so long.”
This time, Angela felt an odd shiver of fear. Death didn’t scare her, yet the dead did.
How strange.
“That’s—”
“Crazy?” Nina said. She plucked at the doll’s clothes.
“That’s why you came here to visit. Isn’t it?” Angela folded her arms, pacing toward the window. “To find out if I could hear or see the same things?”
Nina went silent for a while, and the rain continued, gentle, droning.
Angela stared at her own reflection in the glare on the glass, startled to find that her eyes looked larger, warped by the optical illusion. And in that illusion, she was standing in front of the ominous, black clouds, and their lightning and rain was part of her fine hair, now tangled by a sharp and relentless wind. Her forehead held a crown of fallen stars—candles, flickering in some nearby windows.
“They’ve been saying that She’s coming,” Nina said at last.
The words sounded too soft. Whispers that were more like shadows.
“You’re talking about the blood head in the prophecy,” Angela said. “So it’s a woman? I guess you should tell the priests. They’d be grateful.”
“No. They’d cut out my voice box.”
“So they know already?”
“Some of them.” Nina left the bed and pressed a hand against the glass next to Angela. Maybe she could also feel the sudden cold out there, leeching through the pane. “There have been rumors that this bad weather, the killer in the city, the unstable sea—that it’s all an omen that She’s finally coming and the darkness in the world is welcom
ing the Ruin. That it’s on the move. Which means people like you and me will continue to suffer, seeing and hearing all sorts of nightmares. We’re just symptoms of the world’s sickness. Get it?”
“So . . . the priests know this. Is that why the Academy humors witches and blood heads?” Angela couldn’t bear the idea that her suspicions were correct. If Nina wasn’t lying, and if the dead were complaining, and if she was dreaming of angels and unable to die, then maybe the Ruin really was coming into Her dark heritage. Maybe the Vatican was simply waiting for Her to make the move that would define Her once and for all—hopefully at the Academy—and then stamp Her flat before everything got out of hand.
But would it really be so easy? Someone like Stephanie, a person used to privilege, wouldn’t go down without a fight.
Then again, neither would I.
“Is that,” Angela said, “why Kim is dating Stephanie? Sleeping with the enemy. That kind of thing?”
“You don’t think she’s the One?” Nina said, horrified yet again.
It was doubtful, but— “Maybe I should ask him.”
Nina rounded on her fast. “You’d have to be a fricking moron, Angela. He’s not like the other novices. If we’re right, he’d probably cut out your tongue just to shut you up.”
“So? What do I care about that?”
They stared at each other.
Nina was the first to speak again. “Talking about this stuff is one thing. Acting on it’s another. I told you. Don’t go near him. Stephanie will have your head.”
“Then she already wants it. That Lyrica Pengold saw us talking.”
“Oh, God. Don’t. Don’t do it. He might even use you just to piss Stephanie off. Their relationship isn’t exactly ideal—”
The thump on the door startled them both.
“Hold on a second,” Angela said, walking over to the door and grasping the knob. It rattled as she turned it, echoing the irritable twist of her wrist. “Who is it—”
A dead rat lay at the threshold of the door, its throat torn open. Blood, maybe even redder than the blood on her blouse, drooled from the hole near its head, seeping between the floor boards. Angela realized she was still staring at it as the student with the silver slippers stepped out of the shadows and in front of the doorway. She was holding a box, stuffed with fabrics and sewing materials. Either she hadn’t seen the rat—
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