Covenant

by Sabrina Benulis

  Father Schrader was visibly nervous now at the mention of the Archon. He tasted his water, licking his lips. “Miss Mathers, let’s not jump to conclusions and become overly emotional. The events of that horrid night are now lost to us, and we have the future of this Academy to consider. The proposition Camdon suggests is sensible at the very least. A student as admired and respected as yourself is doing no good rotting away in this empty sorority house. You would serve the world, and those like you, much more by becoming a mentor, a leader who could speak for those who are fast losing their voice. Don’t forget, there are many now who are well aware of the circumstances behind the loss of your family, your brother . . .”

  At the mention of Angela’s brother, everyone went silent again.

  Sophia chose this moment to reappear, staring at Angela from a shadowy corner. Her expression suggested only she knew the pain in Angela’s heart and how deep it went.

  Angela steadied herself, biting her lip. Tears welled in her eyes and she wished them away frantically.

  Camdon stood, his shadow casting itself across the table. “Angela, I know what it is to lose the people you love. And that’s why I am here on behalf of the Order, solemnly asking you for your help, to be our leader. Angela, do you know who I am? Do you recognize me at all, in any way?”

  Angela regarded him. His face was soft but handsome. Yet all she could see were his muddy hazel eyes.

  Recognition seared through her. She knew Camdon saw it behind her shocked expression.

  “That’s right. I’m Nina Willis’s brother. Her half brother to be exact.”

  Angela slumped back into her seat, dazed. In her mind, she saw Nina dying all over again, plummeting into Hell so that Angela could live. It had only been a painful year since then, but even now the memories were more like half-remembered nightmares, their details blurring and fading with the passage of time.

  Camdon took Lizbeth’s place by Angela’s side. Gently, he placed his large hand on top of Angela’s. “Angela, you were a good friend to my sister. She was a troubled girl, unpopular and bullied. But you chose to be her friend—even until the end. If you won’t do it for yourself, join the Order for people like her. For people like Janna. Give them something to belong to, and a renewed sense of pride.”

  Angela nodded, suddenly speechless.

  Camdon Willis left her side. “At least think about it. You have some time,” he said.

  Yet Angela could feel him staring intensely at her.

  As if that was the cue for everyone to leave, nineteen chairs slid away from the table and their occupants milled out of the room. Sophia followed them, hastily grabbed at coats and scarves set on the couches, and delivered them to their proper owners. Father Schrader was the last to leave.

  He took his hat from Sophia and slapped it onto his thick white hair, already grumbling about the cold. He buttoned his long black coat from the waist up.

  “The first snowfall in Luz in two centuries. The end is certainly nigh,” he muttered to himself.

  Angela stepped in front of him, blocking the front door. “Father Schrader . . . how is Stephanie doing? I . . . I’ve been curious . . .”

  They stood next to a statue so lifelike it could have been a real angel listening to their secrets, his marble hand cupped around his marble ear.

  Father Schrader glanced around furtively. “Not good, Miss Mathers. Not good. We can get nothing of sense out of her. No crucial information, not even a sentence worthy of note.” His face darkened. “If it hadn’t been for that demon, I would have said she was simply insane. Perhaps we should consider her fate to be a lesson: that pride indeed comes before the inevitable fall. Human beings were not meant to commune with angels, and vice versa. There are firm reasons why God has so definitively separated the two.”

  But what about the creatures who were in between?

  Angela’s mind flashed to Stephanie’s missing ex-boyfriend Kim. He’d called himself a half-breed. The forbidden offspring of a race of devils called Jinn and a human witch, he was an immortal vagabond who belonged nowhere. But Angela was sure Kim’s hatred of the Jinn had more to do with being an outsider like Angela than he’d ever admit. Perhaps that explained why he’d been searching for the Archon in the first place, even his crazy need to see Angela seated on the Throne of Hell in Lucifel’s place. Maybe what he’d really wanted all along was just to make a place for himself.

  For both of them.

  Angela shivered, almost feeling his touch in the drafts against her neck. It was impossible not to remember his golden eyes, his firm hands, or even the way he’d whispered in her ear. Everything about him had been suspicious, even his odd human name. Yet some kind of strange attraction had compelled Angela to listen and believe him, even to trust, as if their futures depended mysteriously on each other. She’d wanted to know so much more about him, but after the battle with Lucifel that had almost killed Angela, Kim had simply disappeared, leaving her with a thousand questions and no one able or willing to answer them.

  Or maybe—and Angela shivered with an entirely different kind of feeling this time—maybe his past had just finally caught up with him.

  She forced herself to finally ask one of those many questions. “Have you heard anything about Stephanie’s old boyfriend, Father Schrader? His name was Kim . . .”

  Father Schrader raised an eyebrow again. This time, he stared at Angela as if he could see right through her. “That one—I knew he was trouble from the start. No. None of us have heard a peep from that strange young man since Halloween night of last year. We’ve simply accepted the fact that he either escaped the island somehow or died in his attempts.”

  “I see. Well, thank you anyway. I was just curious. And by the way, Father—” Angela snagged him by the sleeve of his coat. “If I were to visit with Stephanie, what are the institution’s hours during the week?”

  Father Schrader gave Angela another long and wary look. “They allow visitors on Thursdays,” he said quietly.

  “Thank you,” Angela said, letting go of his sleeve.

  Father Schrader turned to leave but stopped abruptly, as if the oddest thought had just occurred to him. He regarded Angela again with a strange mixture of fear and awe, but then shook his head as if telling himself that whatever he thought he’d seen, he was surely mistaken.

  Angela watched him leave the house and walk into the snowy night. The street was so silent, the universe could have been swallowed into nothingness. Overhead, wind whistled through gables on the roof, and to her left ocean water frothed weakly beneath a grate, half of its fury quenched by a blockade of ice in the sluice. The snow fell in a constant silvery stream.

  Angela held out her hand. A flake kissed her skin and melted, leaving a tiny puddle behind.

  Overhead, a crow screeched into the night.

  Angela glanced up, scanning the darkness as a sudden fear clenched at her heart.

  Without warning, two strong hands gripped her shoulders from behind and she screamed.

  Five

  We’d determined our fears were only yesterday’s sorrows. But even so, without telling Her, I began counting the inevitable days to our good-bye. —SOPHIA

  “Good Lord, you’re a nervous wreck,” Camdon cried, spinning Angela around to face him.

  She almost collapsed against him, desperate for air and weak in the knees.

  “I thought you’d left with the others,” Angela said, gasping angrily. Her heart thundered in her chest. She pushed him away, steadying herself, still envisioning Troy swooping down from the blackness to wring her neck. “And why are you still here anyway?” Angela said, even less gently this time. “Didn’t Sophia find your coat?”

  How much did he hear when I was talking to Father Schrader?

  Camdon smiled wryly. His expression revealed nothing. “I had to use the bathroom unfortunately, and your odd friend Sophia pointed me to the second floor. I’m the one who should be peeved, Angela. It’s me—not you—who has to walk home in the cold
alone.”

  “Next time, drink less water,” Angela said.

  She stepped around him, trying to get back into the house. Despite its draftiness and the horrible furniture, it was much more cheerful than Luz’s new bone-chilling winter.

  Camdon didn’t budge. “Angela, are you going to the Christmas Ball this Saturday night?” he said, his voice softer than the snow.

  Angela paused at the threshold of the door. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t have a date.”

  “And that means?”

  “You’re really going to make me ask you point-blank? You know how tough that is for a man, don’t you?”

  Angela stepped inside the house and shut the door.

  She stood, thinking, and then opened the door again to Camdon’s bewildered face and said briskly, “I’ll let you know.”

  Angela didn’t allow him time for a reply. She shut the door one last time and escaped back to the hearth room where Sophia waited with a paper in her hands.

  “What was that all about?” Sophia said, amused.

  “Camdon asked me to the Christmas Ball this Saturday evening. I told him I’d think about it.”

  Sophia’s face blanched with shock.

  “Oh, stop it,” Angela hissed. “He’s Nina’s half brother and . . . I feel like I owe him.”

  “You mean you feel like you owe it to Nina,” Sophia said, sighing. She spread her skirt and sat on the couch next to Angela. Silently, Sophia gazed into the fire, letting the light play on her preternaturally smooth skin and flicker in her fathomless gray eyes. At times like these, Angela remembered with a distant kind of terror that Sophia wasn’t quite human at all but a Book in the form of a person. “And maybe you should go,” Sophia said, her very human voice breaking the spell. “No need to stay here in this creaky house while everyone else dances the night away.”

  “But you’d be by yourself,” Angela said.

  Sophia smiled. “I was alone long before I met you, Angela. I am sure I will be alone long after we part.”

  Angela shook her head. “We won’t part. I’m not going anywhere. That’s such a pessimistic way to think.”

  “I know,” Sophia whispered. She clenched the paper tighter.

  “We’ll find you a nice dress and you can come with me. I’d rather have you as a date than Camdon,” Angela said, winking.

  Sophia didn’t laugh.

  “What is this?” Angela snatched the paper from her friend’s hands, sensing it was responsible for Sophia’s sudden change in mood. She perused the odd script, her eyes narrowing. “What is this? A joke? Sophia?”

  Sophia stared into the fire.

  Angela inspected the paper. It was obviously very old and felt like parchment. The scripting was in English, but written with an unsteady hand that suggested the writer had never tried the language before. The words were terse and all the more terrible for it.

  Angela Mathers, you will enter the door. Or Sophia will die.

  That was all.

  Angela blinked. All at once, she saw the door from her vision, and the dark stairs that led down, and down, and down. She saw Sophia standing in front of them in her terrible beauty as the Book of Raziel, telling Angela not to enter, her face saying to run away whatever the cost as she slammed the door shut.

  That door? But who could have known about the vision I had?

  “This is ridiculous,” Angela said heatedly. “You’re the Book of Raziel. You can’t die . . . Can you?”

  Sophia turned away. “Flip over the paper,” she whispered.

  On the reverse side, a very familiar poem had been written in pale ink.

  Blackbird escapes hungry

  The Fly of doom

  Her hellfire smoke eager

  To scorch, consume

  All but the One seeing

  Who will assume

  The mantle and title of Covenant,

  Ruin.

  “Kim left me this poem before he disappeared,” Angela said, her mouth suddenly bone dry. She forced Sophia to look at her again. “Where did you find this paper?”

  “It was on the table where you and the others had been eating. It was on your plate, deliberately placed there. Along with something else.”

  Sophia left the couch and returned with a large but very dead black snake. She held the snake like a rope, allowing Angela to grasp it by the tail.

  The moment it touched Angela’s hands, it disintegrated to black ash and slipped between her fingers.

  As Angela watched the ash fall, her heart seemed to drop out of her, plummeting with it.

  What other warnings did she need? The crow at the windowsill, the bleeding Grail, the vision of the door, and now this. Fate was moving, and Angela didn’t want to move with it.

  “No,” Angela said. “I’m so happy.” She looked at Sophia. “We are happy.”

  “But did you really think the dream would last forever?” Sophia said softly. “Angela, I am the Book of Raziel, and I must be opened in time. The universe continues to crumble. Don’t be mistaken by the beauty of the snow—the world is freezing slowly but surely, but as always, Luz will suffer first. It is all coming to an end. The only question that remains is, ‘How fast?’ Israfel is alive, and all of Heaven and Hell and the Realms in between wait for you, the Archon, to open me and make your ultimate choice. Just because we haven’t found how to do so, either Lock or Key—that doesn’t mean it isn’t important anymore. There is no hiding, Angela. If Heaven doesn’t find you time and again, Hell will. There is no escape from any of it—ever.”

  Angela held Sophia’s dainty hands. “I’ve already made my decision. No matter what Lucifel does to me, no matter what Kim said, I refuse to be the Ruin and rule over a new Hell. So now, all we have to figure out is how to open you, the Book of Raziel, and prevent Lucifel from destroying everything. I won’t let you die.”

  Sophia’s eyes were downcast. “I have no fear for myself,” she said, sounding oddly distant. “Besides, I did tell you I would always be by your side. I suppose we both have promises to keep.”

  “Exactly.” Angela tried to ignore Sophia’s uncertain tone. “So it’s settled then.”

  “Not at all.” Sophia shook her head. “I think you should talk to Stephanie, Angela. She was possessed by Lucifel, remember. Perhaps she can help you to stay one step ahead. I think it’s crucial that you stay alert considering what has happened. Not everyone is on the Archon’s side. Think about it—who left that note for you? An enemy, of course. And obviously that enemy could have been anyone in this room tonight. The Devil’s reach goes far . . .”

  “Either way, I don’t care.” Angela’s hand burned, and the Grail throbbed beneath her glove. “I’ll go through any door if that means you won’t die. The only difficulty now is finding it.”

  Sophia wouldn’t look her in the eye. “Sometimes, it’s not that easy.”

  “What do you mean? It seems pretty straightforward to me.”

  “Sometimes, it takes more than decisiveness to turn back the wheel of fate. You say you will go through this door, but—perhaps I don’t want you to. Perhaps you shouldn’t.”

  “You won’t die,” Angela hissed. “I’m not letting that happen.”

  Sophia opened her mouth and then seemed to decide on something else to say. “Angela, I am quite capable of taking care of myself. I did exist in Hell for a few millennia, after all, even if that was against my will. Whether a dark talisman or not, that snake was alive when I found it. So—as usual—I took matters into my own hands. If that’s what it takes for me to be by your side and keep my own promise, then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll try to get rid of the snakes in our path. The only problem is that they won’t ever stop coming. Until you—the Archon—end this madness, it will only get worse.”

  Angela didn’t have to ask exactly what had happened. Sophia was capable of all kinds of things she couldn’t quite understand. That snake—magical or not—hadn’t stood a chance.

  This is it, Angela sai
d to herself ominously, staring down at the ash. This is the beginning. But of what? If only I could change everything, keep this moment, and never let it go.

  They were on the verge of something terrible, and Angela didn’t quite know what it was. Is that what the door symbolized? Or was it something worse? And if it was a real door, and it led to somewhere awful, how long had Angela and Sophia been approaching it? Hopefully, Stephanie would know.

  Enter the door or Sophia will die? That wasn’t fair for anyone. And why couldn’t they just tell Angela where to find the door in the first place? Maybe Sophia was right. Maybe—it was some kind of trap. But . . . Angela couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.

  Sophia took the paper back and perused it, a storm brewing behind her narrowed eyes.

  “Anyway, I want to know who left that paper here,” Angela said, suddenly angry all over again. Her suspicion cast itself on every last person who’d been at the table.

  Sophia looked back at Angela, her gaze piercing and her voice firm. Her words seemed to echo from a faraway place—the same one where she’d warned Angela not to enter the terrible door. “I doubt you’ll find out just yet. But if you do, keep this in mind. No matter how harmless they might appear—never trust a snake.”

  Thursday arrived with disturbing quickness.

  Angela went through the motions of two days pretending that all was well, but her burning left hand consistently began to say otherwise. Besides the concerned glances of Sophia, Angela oddly had nothing to contend with. The Order had given her breathing space—probably until the holidays were over—and there were no crows following her, or phosphorescent yellow eyes gleaming back at her from the darkness.

  Yet something wasn’t right.

  Angela felt even more claustrophobic than usual, walking down the ice-slicked streets, and the faces that turned to regard her expressed constant fear and distaste, just like Camdon had pointed out. Even worse, the entire city of Luz hummed like a live wire with anxiety. The snow refused to let up, the cold increased ever so imperceptibly by the day, and the announcement had officially been made that citizens had to survive on whatever remained on the island until the spring thaw.