No, that arrogant priest was wrong.
Naamah thought of her as a daughter, not a cockroach.
The muscles in Naamah’s palm tensed. “I knew I should have killed the novice when I had the chance. He’s using you, you little fool. And it’s infuriating to watch.”
Stephanie choked on her words, holding on desperately. “No, Mother. I’ll be the one to do it, if that’s the case. To kill him. If he chooses Angela over me, it’s his loss.”
“Of course.” Naamah sighed, briefly petting her on the head.
“Most people deserve to die anyway.” Stephanie’s tone hardened, hurtful. “Even Brendan. Especially a weak moron like him. You told me the whole world needs a new finger on its pulse, but I’ve been thinking, why not just stop it for good? How much easier that would be.”
“True.” The demon’s own voice lowered to a whisper. “It’s the same world that abandoned you, after all. My little Stephanie. Your witch mother sold you to me like a piece of meat, orphaned you, leaving her little cursed blood head for dead—and I thanked her for you by draining her like a pigeon. But then—I have the means for that, don’t I?” Naamah laughed, and the rolling muscles of her hand hinted at the blades buried beneath her skin. “You should take pride in the fact that you’ve been mine at all. I taught you everything you know, even the ideals of the Prince herself. If you happen to be the Archon, well, that’s a deserved bonus on my part. But—”
Stephanie stiffened. “But?”
Naamah’s reminders were just like her blades. The demon had mentioned Stephanie’s birth mother to make a point: Stephanie’s bitterness was a part of her now, important to them both, the reason for so much of her happiness and the spur toward her future.
She could barely remember the facts of her past, mostly relying on Naamah’s word. But all she’d ever held on to was the idea that her mother had sold her to a demon in exchange for one night of meaningless sex. Unfortunately for her mother, even demons sometimes delivered justice where it was due.
Stephanie had been all of three years old. Filthy, starving, and utterly alone.
Naamah had been the angel who’d saved her, or so she’d thought.
“Story time.” Naamah lifted Stephanie’s head by the chin, forcing them to look at each other, much like she had when Stephanie was small. Her adoptive mother’s black eyes were large and mesmerizing, hypnotic. But her red eye shadow resembled the blood on the walls, and it was difficult to stare at that contrast for long without withering beneath it. “When I was a chick, I had a brother.”
“A brother.”
Why did that sound so awkward when Naamah said it?
“Yes. And I guess you could say, I loved him. However, the Second War arrived when we were still young, and my mother was obligated to make a sacrifice in Lucifel’s service. You see, our Prince has always survived on the essence of others, but those sources must be replenished. Her only”—Naamah lifted a finger—“weakness. At the time, we were low on hostages, prisoners of war, and criminals. That left children—chicks. Unlike adults, we were relatively useless, and when it came down to it, my brother possessed none of my admittedly meager talents or accomplishments. And so my mother readily offered him as the sacrifice, consoled by the simple fact she could always bring another chick into the world to take his place.”
Naamah smiled down at her, teeth blazingly white.
“In the end, he was of more use to us dead than alive. Though that never changed my feelings for him. Or my mother’s.”
Stephanie’s breath felt like it had stopped. Terror pounded inside of her, aching to burst out. “Are you—are you saying that if I’m not the Archon—you’ll kill me?”
The demon only stared back at her.
Beneath Stephanie, the pigeon twitched in the mess of its own feathers, aching for someone to put it out of its misery.
“Think carefully about what you want,” Naamah continued at last, her tone abnormally soft. “You want to be the Archon. And if you are the Archon, and you take the path of Ruin, I will stand by your side, of course. Yet there are many demons loyal to Lucifel who will also try to kill you—and in the most certain and painful way possible—long before you ever set a toe on her Throne. And that’s only if you manage to open the Book without risking your sanity. Ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth the cost, daughter of mine. Ask yourself if you can stare into the eyes of death and not regret your desires. Before it’s too late for us both.”
“Regrets,” Stephanie said in a numb echo. She slid out of Naamah’s embrace and picked up the dying pigeon. The bird was gasping for air like a little fish. Exactly like she had felt seconds ago. “You just want to protect me from being disappointed.”
“That’s one way of seeing it.”
Naamah allowed her words to sink in heavily.
“The human way.”
But Stephanie was the Archon. In all of history, no blood head had shown Stephanie’s supernatural promise, her ability to learn and grow in the ways of the other Realms, and none could compete with her either. Why would Angela Mathers be any different? The best thing that girl could hope for would be for Kim to use her and throw her to the side. Something he’d never tried with Stephanie, tellingly enough, even if sex alone held them together.
Fate always had a reason for working out one way or another.
There was a reason she and Kim were so much alike. There was a reason Naamah had become her mother. And there was a reason Stephanie had taught herself to kill so easily. Now, it was time to upgrade—the Archon had to be as ruthless as the Devil herself. To choose the path of Ruin, you needed the conscience of a killer.
None at all.
Naamah had made that clear from the beginning. Perhaps the moment was now. Otherwise, even her mother might not find her useful anymore, and Stephanie wanted her love as a living, breathing person—not a corpse.
“You knew from the start what kind of person I was,” Stephanie hissed at Naamah. “Well, if you need proof that I’m the Archon, you’ll have it soon enough. There’s no way some scarred bitch is going to take that Throne away from me.”
One twist of her hands snapped the bird’s neck.
She tossed the body back onto the floor, breathing hard.
Naamah smiled in her terrifying way, gathering Stephanie close for a surprisingly affectionate embrace, her voice cool and comforting. “There, there. Don’t feel guilty for being ambitious, dearest.”
The demon’s cold lips met her cheek.
Stephanie fought with her shivers again, unable to stop when the tears reappeared. Soon, deep sobs followed, her anguish increasing whenever she glanced up and saw only darkness. There was still a shred of conscience in her. It was stupid and pathetic, but for the first time in a long time, she wished the bird was still alive, flying free. She knew she probably could have staked her claim some other way, and it made her sick enough to die.
To imprison herself in the blackest pit imaginable.
“As they say . . .” Naamah actually sounded proud. “Like mother, like daughter.”
Thirteen
Witches are defined by blindness.
—THE DEMON PYTHON, TRANSCRIBED FROM The Lies of Babylon
Kim lifted his hood, letting the rain stream onto his cheeks.
The weather had never looked so foul. It was as if all the darkness in the universe had gathered around Luz, intending to swallow it whole. From his spot on the veranda porch, the city spread out to the west, glimmering with decay and a dampness that never seemed to disappear. Lights from thousands of candles flickered dimly, struggling to brighten a world that could no longer tolerate it, and the towers twisted around him, some leaning so precariously it was a miracle they hadn’t tipped into the abyss below. Many poor souls would be swept into the ocean tonight. Even within the Academy grounds, poverty equaled death, the most needy students forced into dormitories that would put a wet jail cell to shame. If the water rushed in—an accident no matter how much the Vatican was
at fault—then the will of God would certainly determine the survivors.
“Enough of patience . . .” Troy said. Her hiss sounded faintly above him, erupting from a sagging gable. She herself was lost amid the silhouettes of other statues, some of them perched with the same predatory talent. “Your newest mate had better come.”
“She will come,” Kim whispered back, unable to stop seeing Telissa’s arm. Her ring. He struggled with the bile in the back of his throat.
“. . . or I will break her open myself . . .”
Then Troy was gone. Like a shadow.
Kim scanned the second level of the Bell Tower, unable to find her yellow eyes boring into him. Fury stood alone, preening her black feathers near a saintly carving, her occasional croaks almost imperceptible below the storm.
“You’re nervous.” Stephanie appeared by his side without warning, her ponytail streaming behind her in the wind. Now that the Halloween party had ended, she’d slipped back into her sorority overcoat, its red pentacle glittering beneath the lights of the chapel. More so than ever, he noticed her skirt, too short and flapping in the breeze. Her legs were long, soft. That—and her demonic friend—was all she had in the end, when he really thought about it. “Don’t be. I have everything under control.”
“You weren’t under control this afternoon.”
She’d been crying again, and deservedly so.
“This won’t be like last year. I’ll allow Nina Willis to be present—for Angela’s sake—but she won’t perform the actual summoning.”
“You’re going to use her as the Sacrament?” He shook his head, chuckling softly. “No matter what you do, this time there’s going to be a real challenge. The demon is using you, Stephanie.”
She glared directly at him, calm and dangerous. They both knew his words were also a challenge. “And I’m using you. But I don’t see you complaining.”
Touché. But that warning would be his last kindness. She was repeating his mother’s mistakes all over again, and though it would be fascinating to watch her go down the same path, his lingering feelings justified a red flag of some kind. Even if Stephanie, like all ambitious witches, was too power hungry to notice it.
“You know, I never asked you,” she said, her eye shadow running with the rain. “Why did you get involved with me to begin with? Was there any reason beyond the obvious benefits?”
She was mistaken if she thought his loyalties went deeper than her usefulness.
But with Stephanie, there was also that hidden question, and this time it centered around her desire to be the Ruin—a perverse desire that had attracted him along with her attributes in the very beginning, but had died considerably even before his night with Angela Mathers. Now, Angela’s paintings haunted him most of all, perhaps more than his latest glimpse of Troy’s blood-encrusted mouth. The gray angel especially clung to his nightmares, screaming the obvious. Somehow, in some way, Angela had seen Lucifel. The Black Prince herself.
And if Stephanie was asking whether that really mattered, then, yes.
Yes. It did.
“There was no other reason,” Kim whispered. “Besides the thrill of putting you in your place, tell me, Stephanie, how does it feel to be on the other side of a lie?”
Stephanie stared at him. She lifted her hand as if to smack him violently across the face.
Then she lowered it, trembling with the effort. “Whatever you say, the truth remains. I own this school. I own you.” She spoke in the same monotone she often used after visiting her demon. Like all the brightness in her life had been stamped flat. “And I allow you to sleep with other women and smirk about it because it’s fun—knowing that I could crush you, and them, like flies at any second.”
“Flies. How ironic. They are her symbol, you know.”
“Whose?”
He smiled. “Lucifel’s.”
Stephanie’s courage evaporated, but for a mere second. “She has no power anymore. She’s caged, and when I prove myself to be the Archon, I’m going to go to Hell, slaughter her, and take her goddamned place.”
An insane idea. Maybe Stephanie had already tried to open the Book after all. It wouldn’t surprise him if the demon had brainwashed her into such foolishness, half hoping the wish would come true. Kim understood better than anyone else what it meant to be schooled in shadows.
“And if she escapes that cage? How will you deal with her then?”
Silence.
“Because she will find you.” Kim ran fingers through the wet mess of his hair. “And then she will extract the information she needs out of you, and suck your life away without a touch. By all accounts, it will be a painful way to go.”
“Why do you care?” Such a soft whisper. For the second instance since Kim had met her, Stephanie sounded truly anguished. The first was when she’d slept with him and then sat up all night crying, like a little girl who’d had her candy taken away. As if he’d forced her into bed at gunpoint. But whatever had taken place with the demon this Halloween night, something had changed. She was blatantly hurt and failing miserably at hiding the scars. “You never tried before. Why start now?”
Kim grabbed her hand before she could leave the balustrade. “What will you do if Angela is the Archon?”
Stephanie ripped her arm away. Her lips quivered. And then her jealousy finally won out over her pain. “I’ll kill her. But it doesn’t even matter. She’s not the One. And we’ll prove it tonight. And then she’ll have no choice but to serve me for four long, miserable years. Now make sure everything is ready, priest,” she said, her tone so soft, but so fatal. “It’s time to teach your newest girlfriend a lesson.”
Westwood’s leading blood head marched back inside of the chapel, dignified.
Yet, despite her confidence, the night could turn out to be a disaster in many ways.
If Stephanie misplaced even one of her carefully planned steps . . .
Kim lifted his hood again, its edges flapping in front of his face. Above him, Fury screeched into the incoming storm, lifting into the air and spiraling up, up, up into the black and gray clouds.
Human evil could be terrifying, but also so petty compared to the real thing.
Fourteen
This is the night of spirits. This is the hour when veils are thin. Far be it from me to make demands on what I cannot understand.
—ARCHBISHOP GREGORY T. SOLOMON, UNOFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE
“Someone might die tonight,” Nina said, muttering to Angela under her breath. Her eyes looked even more bloodshot than usual, practically crimson, and her hair stuck out from its bun in a hundred messy tangles. “Or so I’ve been told. I had the worst dreams you can imagine early this morning. There were so many people talking to me. Young. Old. Ugly. Pretty. And they all looked the same as when they died—frozen in time. The worst are the people who’ve drowned. Their skin has this nasty bluish color to it.”
Angela kept her fingers wrapped around the doorknob. Soft light emerged from below it in a strip, like the orange hue of a dying fire. She’d chosen to be deliberately late, missing the dancing, the drinks, and the music.
Now the silence suggested she’d missed a little too much.
They stood on the creaking stairwell, two young women surrounded by a vertical shaft of stones, as if they were two Rapunzels locked away in their tower. Rain seeped through little chinks in the rock, sliming the interior. It was cold, almost chillingly so, but that could have had more to do with Stephanie summoning spirits than the actual weather. Above them, lost to the murky shadows, the stairwell continued to a third chapel and the Bell Attic. Below, there was little but cobwebs and the occasional window.
“Did you happen to see any angels?” Angela said, careful about what she might be insinuating. “Any that died? Maybe—tragically?”
It sounded even crazier out loud than in her head. And she felt a little guilty, aware of how she shouldn’t keep shoving her own much happier dreams in Nina’s face. Last night, she’d seen the bronze-haired an
gel and had been fascinated by his strange anger and the petulant smile on his lips. The black makeup around his eyes was even more intricate than she remembered, precise circles of shade and ink that brought out the unbelievable sea of his irises. His wings were so perfect, and she’d awakened wondering at their softness; the way that down would feel, caressed between her fingers. It was probably heaven compared to the ghostly visitations that haunted Nina.
“Angels,” Nina said, taking one last drag of her cigarette before they entered the room. Her hands shook, peppering her boots with ash. “No, sorry. I don’t even think they can die.” She raised her eyebrows. “Can they?”
“Apparently so.” Angela grabbed the cigarette and pitched it down into the darkness.
Nina watched it tumble away, sucking in her bottom lip. “You really do hate those things, don’t you?”
“Smoke. It brings back bad memories.” She turned the knob.
“Like of the fire that didn’t kill you?”
Exactly. And if Stephanie pisses me off enough, maybe I’ll try another.
Angela sighed, pushing the door open. “Let’s get this over with already.”
She’d expected more of a dungeon atmosphere, but the deconsecrated chapel glowed cozily with the light of hundreds upon hundreds of candles. They had been set in ritualistic semicircles throughout the room, framing a pathway that led to an even larger, closed circle, complete with a pentacle carved deep into the floor.
There were no signs of a party. Not even a broken bottle or two.
Just the faint odor of herbs and alcohol.
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