She was unconscious. He shook her leg, panicking. “Miss! Miss!” He was just a driver. He didn’t know what to do with madwomen, it was far beyond him, and now maybe he’d killed her—
She stirred.
“ Alhamdulillah,” he breathed. Praise God.
But his praise was short-lived. No sooner did Eliza push herself upright—blood was streaming from her nose, garish and slick, over her mouth and down her chin—than she lapsed straight back into that otherworldly raving, the sound of which, the driver would later claim, tore at his very soul.
“Rome,” said Karou, as soon as Zuzana and Mik came back into the room. “The angels are in Vatican City.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Zuzana replied, choosing not to give voice to her first thought, which had to do with the happy prevalence of chocolate in Italy. “And have they gotten hold of any weapons yet?”
“No,” said Karou, but she looked worried. Well. Worried was one of the things she looked. Add to the list: overwhelmed, exhausted, demoralized, and… lonely. She had that “lost” posture again, her shoulders curled forward, head lowered, and Zuzana did not fail to note that she was turned away from Akiva.
“The ambassadors and secretaries of state and whatever have all been talking each other to death,” Karou elaborated. “Some in favor of arming the angels, some opposed. Apparently he hasn’t made the greatest impression. Still, private groups are lining up to pledge their support, andtheir arsenals. They’re trying to get access to make offers, but have so far been denied—at least, officially. Who knows who might have bribed a Vatican insider to get word to Jael. One of the groups is this angel cult in Florida that apparently has a stockpile of weapons at the ready.” She paused, considering her words. “Which doesn’t sound scary at all.”
“How did you find all this out?” Mik marveled.
“My fake grandmother,” Karou answered, indicating her phone, plugged into the wall. “She’s very well connected.” Zuzana knew about Karou’s fake grandmother, a grand Belgian dame who’d had Brimstone’s trust for many years, and who was the only one of his associates with whom Karou had a real relationship. She was stupendously rich, and though Zuzana had never met her, she felt no warmth for her. She’d seen the Christmas cards she sent Karou, and they were about as personal as the ones from the bank—which was fine, whatever, except that Zuzana knew that her friend craved more, and so she wanted to neck-punch anyone who disappointed her.
She only half listened while Karou told Mik about Esther. She watched Akiva instead. He was sitting up on the deep ledge of the window, the shutters drawn behind him, his wings visible, drooping and dim.
He met her eyes, briefly, and after she got past the first jolt she always got from looking at Akiva—you had to battle your brain to convince it he was real; seriously, that’s what it was like, looking at Akiva; her brain wanted to be all Pshaw, he’s obviously Photoshopped, even when he was right in front of her—a dragging sadness seized her.
Nothing could ever be easy for these two. Their courtship, if you could even call it that, was like trying to dance through a rain of bullets. Now that they’d finally come to the brink of an understanding, grief dragged a new curtain between them.
You can’t drag the curtain back. Grief persists. But you can crash through it, can’t you? If they had to suffer, Zuzana wondered, couldn’t they at least suffer together?
And when the knock came at the door—their food—she thought that maybe she could help. At least with physical proximity.
“Just a minute,” she called out. “You three, into the bathroom. You don’t exist, remember?”
There followed a brief whispered argument that they could simply glamour themselves, but Zuzana would hear none of it. “Where would they put the food, with an enormous chimaera taking up half the floor, an angel perched on the window ledge, and a girl on the bed? Even if you’re invisible, you still have mass. You still take up space. Like, allthe space.”
And so they went, and if the room was small, the bathroom was much more so, and Zuzana saw fit to arrange them within it as she chose, pushing Karou by the small of the back and then giving Akiva an imperious look and toss of her head that said, You next, and she pressed them together into the shower and shut them in. It was the only way Virko could fit into the room, too. It was all perfectly reasonable.
She closed the bathroom door. They’d have to take it from there. She couldn’t do everything for them.
AN OFFER OF PATRONAGE
“Patience, patience.”
Thus had Razgut counseled Jael half a day earlier. Patience.Even then, he’d been feeling the pinch of impatience himself. Now, with two full days gone by since their arrival, it was more of a stab. He’d belittled Jael for his expectations, but secretly he was beginning to worry.
Where were all their offers of patronage? Had he miscalculated? This was all his own plan. Only arrive in glory, he had said, and they will fall all over themselves to give you what you want. Oh, not the presidents, not the prime ministers, not even the Pope. They would roll out every red carpet, yes. There would be no shortage of bowing and scraping, but the powers that be would have to practice caution when it came to arming a mysterious legion. There would be scrutiny. Oversight.
Committees.
Oh, give me a half-mad butcher of a tyrant, thought Razgut, at his wit’s end. Only save me from committees!
But while presidents, prime ministers, and popes entertained them, the quicker, darker currents of the world’s will should have been shaping themselves into action. Private groups, the crazy ones, the hellfire chasers, the doomsday gloaters. They should have been lining up, sending offers, paying bribes, getting word to the angels no matter what it cost them. Take us! Take us first! Burn the world, flay the sinners, only take us with you!
The world was rife with them, even on a normal day, so where were they all? Had Razgut misjudged humanity’s love affair with the end of the world? Was it possible this pageant would not play out quite so easily as he had thought?
Jael had been in foul humor, pacing the suite of magnificent rooms, alternating cursing with icy silence. He kept the cursing low, to his credit, doing nothing “un-angelic” that might ruffle the feathers, so to speak, of their pious hosts. He played his part whenever called upon: the diplomatic posturing, the feasting, the dazzling. The Catholic Church seemed determined to match pageant with pageant, and certainly their costume collection won the day. If Razgut had to endure one more ceremony clinging to Jael’s back and listening to an old man in a fancy gown drone in Latin, he thought he might scream.
Scream and let himself be seen, just to spice things up.
So it was with a churning gutful of… hope… that he observed the curious shuffle-dance of faintheartedness being performed in the doorway by one of the Papal Palace servants.
A step forward, a step back, arms aflutter, chickenlike. The man was one of the few approved to enter their chambers and see to their needs, and he had until now kept his eyes fixed on the floor in their “holy” presence. Razgut had thought, on several occasions, that he could probably release his glamour and not even be noticed. That was the level of discretion these servants displayed. They were very nearly ghosts, though the thought of such an afterlife made Razgut bilious.