Archon

by Benulis, Sabrina

“What do I do?” Angela said, frantic. “How do I fight her off?”

  “You can’t. You can’t do a goddamned thing.”

  “Can’t you?” she screamed back at him.

  “Do you think it will make a difference?” He gestured wildly at the darkness around them, but made no move to come any closer. When she realized why, it felt like all the life had already drained out of her. He was resigning himself to her death. She could see it in the new and shockingly distant expression on his face. “She’ll just murder you the next second I close my eyes,” he whispered. “It will either end here, or somewhere worse.”

  Feathers rustled overhead. Angela looked up, only to see Fury gazing at her sympathetically.

  “At least hide,” Kim said, despair in his voice. It was obvious he couldn’t help her without paying for his actions later anyway—and Angela understood his reasoning. Her death would be a blow, but not as terrible as one from Troy. He must have gone through this enough times that hoping for the best was no longer an option. “What the hell are you doing—”

  “Time’s up.” The Jinn dropped from the darkness, a maelstrom of feathers and incredible menace, leaving Angela less than a breath to dodge her. But Troy was enjoying the chase, and she let her escape, toying with her like a cat.

  Angela backed into the corner where Fury had been tugging at her prize.

  Maribel’s corpse knocked into her boots. She was half eaten, her rib cage exposed, and such a mess of blood that it was impossible to stare without throwing up. Angela choked down the bile rising into her mouth, desperately trying to regain her sanity. Troy continued to pace nearer and nearer, her expression now more business than games. For all her nasty sarcasm, she took murder seriously. Like Kim said, there would be no apologies.

  She’s just like any other predator. Beautiful and a hundred times smarter, but still a predator. Even if she’s immortal, she can die. She has weaknesses, limitations.

  The problem would be figuring them out in the space of a few seconds.

  She remembered Kim’s own attempt to save himself.

  Latin. It hurts her.

  But Angela didn’t know any Latin. Except . . .

  Anything. Anything is better than nothing.

  “Omnes relinquite spes,” Angela shouted.

  Troy shuddered like she’d been rapped on the knuckles. Her lip quivered up again, revealing her glistening teeth. “That was uncalled for,” she said, still advancing, though slower than before.

  Bind her. You can Bind her to yourself.

  But how?

  You know how . . . you made the Rules, after all.

  These thoughts. They had her voice, her inflections—yet—

  Angela gasped. It took less than a moment, but in that blinding flash of time she held Kim’s book again, gazing into the pages where the illustration of the Jinn gazed back at her, dark and terrible. The Binding. Its every word and intricate detail hovered before her anew, completely and mysteriously understandable, as if she’d known the ritual forever, merely forgetting for a convenient length of time.

  As if she’d written the words herself.

  A hideous growl interrupted her vision.

  Troy bounded across the gap between them and lifted into the air, descending with her wings wide and her hand pulled back, ready to strike. One blow would be enough to push Angela out of the picture permanently.

  But now Angela was ready.

  She grabbed a bone shard lying on the floor, lifting it just in time to collapse beneath Troy’s fury, her strong, relentless wing beats. Angela was almost crushed, given no space to breathe, the Jinn’s sharp nails biting through the thin fabric of her blouse. Blood welled beneath them, soaking into the cloth and warming her skin, but she’d made her mark. Troy’s hand had been sliced wickedly along the palm.

  The Jinn wrenched the makeshift knife from her hand. It clattered across the floor, unreachable.

  Then the world was feathers, shadows, and pain. The worst Angela had ever felt.

  She fought off her dizziness and pressed the Jinn’s bony hand tighter to the blood on her chest.

  “You are Bound,” she hissed back at Troy.

  They were face-to-face, and the Jinn’s eyes narrowed in rage. She attempted to free herself, but Angela held her tight, as if they were lovers. She was literally embracing Death, and Death would either be hers or rip her heart out if she made a single mistake.

  “You are Bound, and I am the one Binding you. We are One now in blood, according to the Law.”

  This sounds right. It’s right.

  “The Creature is under my command. To assist when I ask in my need, to destroy when I demand to be avenged—”

  “You’re done, you bitch,” Troy screamed at her, nightmarish with rage.

  Yet her strength wasn’t what it had been before. Angela’s words were draining her.

  Angela wrestled her tighter, locking her violently like she was a dog beneath a chokehold. Troy’s voice was weaker now, but just as deadly. “I told you,” she screeched to Kim, “that she should die. She’s a danger—”

  “To be released,” Angela murmured into her long ear, “when I request death at last.”

  Troy stiffened, frozen by her words. A deep quiet filled the Bell Attic, and they gazed into each other’s eyes, both of them overwhelmed by the invisible tethers connecting their souls. Then Angela let her go, and Troy backed away, injured within and without. Her expression was that of a person violated. If Angela ever did release her, they both knew she’d be destined to die just as the Binding had warned. She now had a guardian, but one tied to her by force rather than affection—and she could barely explain how it had happened.

  Kim’s wide eyes were like golden pools, reflecting every bit of light.

  He must have certainly thought of Binding his cousin, but he’d also never been stupid enough to try. Now it was hard to tell who he feared more.

  Angela stood and brushed the bat feces off her skirt, her tights, her arm gloves. She was a real mess now, her shirt torn and bloody and her hair tangled all over again by the wind. She kicked some of Troy’s bones away, pointing at the Jinn. “And now, you’re going to take me to Tileaf,” she said, still gasping for breath, “and you’re going to make sure that Fae doesn’t strike me dead.”

  Troy’s wings snapped shut, echoing her anger. Surprisingly, a terrible smile crept across her face.

  She reached beneath the rags covering her chest.

  What is she doing? She can’t hurt me with weapons now.

  That was the Law, both according to Kim’s book and Angela’s own instincts.

  Yet Troy was acting like whatever she was about to reveal would hurt Angela even more than death. “Looks like you’re going to release me sooner than you expected,” Troy said, her words escaping her like evil steam.

  Then it appeared, swinging at the end of the crude chain around her neck.

  It was a gemstone more like a living eye than a crystal, its surface all emerald green iris and a pupil so dark it seemed fathomless. Kim was shouting something, but his voice grew fainter and fainter, while Angela’s mind sank deeper and deeper, falling into this cold Eye that watched her and the universe with an unnameable intelligence. All her wishes, dreams, and hopes seemed to swirl inside of it, and they flashed back at her, teasing and threatening to drive her mad under the power that they held. Had her soul ever felt so dark? Had anything ever held meaning other than this? Her brain felt like mush, and she was going mad for a single unbearable second, every element of existence suffocating her in a boundless ring.

  She was as astonished as everyone else when she strode up to Troy and ripped the Eye from her hand.

  It glazed over, returning to a blind rock.

  Troy went rigid as a cadaver. She slowly turned to Kim, but his face was almost the same shade of white.

  Angela slipped the chain around her neck. She and Troy were eye to eye once again. “It looks like this is mine.”

  No one said a word
the entire journey to Memorial Park.

  Nina—or Mikel—shuffled quietly behind everyone, gazing at the bridges and the rickety buildings, tiptoeing through puddles like she’d never encountered water before, taking the strangest pleasure in a rumble of thunder or the drone of the rain. Deeper and deeper, they descended into the lowest levels of Luz, tapping down slick stairways and taking side routes through stone tunnels only Kim seemed to know, the rats and roaches skittering away from their shoes and his light. Tileaf’s tree was the centerpiece of the Academy, yet it couldn’t be more hidden from the public, stuffed away in a crumbling, gated courtyard on the western outskirts of the school. When Kim stopped to open that gate—an enormous fence of iron with a tree engraved on the center lock—Angela was greeted with a grove even more dismal than the overgrown flower beds behind her parents’ mansion. Weeds and bushes tangled in and out of each other, their branches scraggly with neglect, scratching against the high stone of the walls. Poison ivy crawled up trunks of ancient maple and oak. The wind barely had a chance to filter down or toss foliage onto the moldy earth, and trees stood in clumps of unbearable, stuffy darkness, their leaves either bloody or black in the terrible light. Straight ahead, a tunnel made of embracing tree branches bored to the center of the grotto.

  The path to Tileaf’s oak was more inhospitable and gray than gravel; nothing but dirt, puddles, chunks of old cobblestones, and the fog curling beneath a steady haze of rain. Kim started down the pathway with a sigh, pushing Angela back when she tried to step ahead of him.

  Without warning, Troy peered from a spot in the trees, glowering at her.

  Shortly after, the Jinn scampered away into the darkness, twigs popping beneath the weight of her feet and hands.

  Kim’s next sigh was heavier than ever. “You should never have Bound her to you.”

  Jealous. He might actually be jealous.

  “What is this thing?” Angela plucked at the Eye lying against her chest. The chain felt like a rope of ice around her neck. “She thought it would kill me, or make me crazy.”

  “You’re already crazy,” Kim said softly, “just like you warned.”

  Or maybe he feels guilty about giving me up for dead. I know I certainly would.

  “Does it have something to do with the Archon?”

  “We never said you’re the Archon, Angela.”

  “Then explain how I Bound Troy and stayed sane when she waved this in front of my face.”

  Kim unbuttoned his white collar. His sculpted cheekbones seemed to glow, full of moonlight that didn’t exist, a trait he’d probably inherited from his father. It seemed the corpselike pallor of a Jinn’s skin had its own special beauty. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, but as quietly as if he were talking to himself. “The Archon is a reincarnation of Raziel, an angel. And you have his blood-red hair, his blue eyes, his memories, but—”

  “You could be wrong.”

  He examined her sharply. “What?”

  “You could be wrong, just like Troy said. Maybe the Archon has Raziel’s features and memories because he’s possessing her, but she’s actually a reincarnation of someone else. Maybe he gave the Archon his features so that she’d be recognized as someone important—so that everyone would think she’s Raziel—because that was the person they remembered. Because they’d never seen the other one.”

  Kim shook his head. He shivered a little. “There is no one else. Mikel said it herself. Israfel is alive and Lucifel is caged. That leaves us with Raziel.”

  “Is there someone more powerful than them?”

  He laughed. “God.”

  He must be right then. There is no one else. But I know I’m not Raziel, even though he must be protecting me from killing myself.

  “Kim.”

  “What is it?” He continued to pace ahead of her, tall and blurred by the fog. The tone of his voice wasn’t encouraging, but Angela couldn’t stop herself anymore. Some secrets had to come out in the open.

  “I never really thought about this. I mean, it happened only once that I can remember—”

  He stopped, turning around to face her. Branches framed his strong figure, groping like skeletal arms. He appeared tense again, waiting for anything.

  But could he even be surprised at this point?

  “When I was eleven years old,” Angela said, “I tried to kill myself with a gun. It didn’t work, like always, but the pistol kicked back, and I knocked myself unconscious. Like I explained to you before, whenever I was unconscious, I would dream. And almost always I dreamed of the angels you saw in my paintings. But that time—was different from all the rest.”

  Angela wrapped her arms around her shoulders.

  She could still hear the gun firing, the sound of it almost bursting her eardrums.

  “Go on,” Kim said gently. The park could have been waiting with him, its silence suggesting that even the trees listened and considered.

  “It was only for a minute, but I thought I saw another angel. He said something to me, which was strange, because the others never spoke to me at all. But it’s been so long—and I was so disappointed with surviving . . . I can’t remember what it was, or if he really said anything in the first place. If that makes any sense.”

  “So you’ve seen three angels?” The way Kim stared at her, she felt like Troy was crushing her all over again.

  “I guess.”

  “But you can’t remember a single detail of what he said? Even the feelings he tried to communicate to you?”

  “Maybe . . . that I had to stay alive.” Angela examined her hands, and it seemed impossible that she’d ever held a gun at all. “Because people needed me.”

  “Then why did you keep trying to kill yourself?”

  She turned from him and faced the gate to the park, its iron bars faintly discernible in the mist. Nina approached them slowly, still keeping a safe distance from Kim, her eyes glowing like crimson dots. “If you had been in my position, you’d have known it was a lie.”

  So an angel didn’t want her to die. But now Angela knew there was much more behind that than kindness. From what she’d seen of Troy and Naamah, and even Mikel, real angels didn’t care about you. Not as much as they cared about what you could do for them. The situation was searingly ironic. And even more ironic, the closer Angela crept toward being the Archon, the more Kim had started to disbelieve. Either he was afraid the search might be over, perhaps because it meant Troy’s teeth in his neck, or he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her.

  His kiss met the top of her hair, followed by the warmth of his arms, embracing her from behind. “Don’t take my actions in the chapel the wrong way. I didn’t want you to die. I just try not to get attached anymore.”

  “Then why do you look at me like that?”

  But the more he looked, the more it felt right. And the more Angela learned about angels, the more it felt foolish to love an elegant, dazzling creature who would probably never love her in return.

  Angela had given up suicide, dreams, and family. Now she was even giving up on her angels despite being closer to them than ever.

  She barely knew herself anymore.

  Kim sighed in her hair. “I thought I had everything figured out, and you’re changing that for me yet again.” His thin lips touched her cheek. “Don’t mistake me—I want you to be the Archon, Angela. You and I work well together. In fact, we’re a lot alike.”

  “How?” she said, truly desperate to know.

  “Well—” Kim tugged her by the hand, urging her to keep walking. “Both of us have suffered from prejudice and abuse because of how different we look. My mother and I”—his tone became grim—“we were cast out of village after village because of me. They said I was a child of the Devil—which wasn’t so far off. But my mother deserved a little better than that.”

  Village after village. A child of the Devil.

  Kim was conjuring a world of superstition and witchcraft that had only recently returned. How old was he? Hundreds of years
. . . and yet he hadn’t grown tired of living yet. That fact was almost as incomprehensible as his paternity.

  “—and then there is the matter of your parents. You were so appalled that I killed my father, yet you’ve done exactly the same—”

  “It wasn’t the same.” Angela let go of his hand. Tileaf’s oak loomed ahead, its massive trunk seeming to grow the closer they came until it was thicker than seven people could hug with their arms touching finger to finger. Branches grew from it in a gnarled mess that spread almost as far as the roots, their thick bark coiling and curling through the strong-smelling earth like sea serpents. The tree was dying, but sparse tufts of brown and green leaves still clung to it, rustling in the slightest breeze. There was a silence here that hinted of death and sickness. Every spoken word felt like a sin. “It wasn’t the same at all.”

  “You mean they didn’t deserve to die for how they treated you? I know they abused you.”

  His cool face questioned her, wondering.

  Angela stopped to let Mikel walk ahead of them, the angel’s red eyes gathering in the tree with awe. “But that’s where you and I differ, Kim. They didn’t deserve to die.” Angela slipped the Eye beneath her blouse, letting its chill touch her heart. For once, her bitterness felt like it belonged. “They deserved worse.”

  Her lips said it like a prayer.

  “They deserved to suffer.”

  Twenty

  From the highest of heights they fell;

  Stars longing to clothe themselves in Nature’s garb.

  Fairest of creatures who dance on mortal Earth,

  Are those Untamable Ones who sing of the trees.

  —VARIOUS AUTHORS, Songs of the Fair Folk

  “When Tileaf appears don’t act frightened . . . or show that you’re upset . . .”

  “. . . is she in pain, dying like this . . .”

  “Torture . . . would be the better word . . .”

  Troy etched the Blood Circle into the dirt, directly in front of the Fae Queen’s tree, trying her damnedest not to run over and rip Sariel’s mouth out of his head. His every word annoyed her, her palm twitched from the cut Angela had dared to inflict on her, and her pride wasn’t doing so well either. She traced lines through the soil, finger shaking, drawing the sigils that would protect the bitch from the harm she deserved.