Olianna was unconscious. The sound Luce had heard was the Outcast being hit in the head.
Behind Luce stood an enormous black-cloaked figure. His face was craggy with wrinkles and looked impossibly old, layers of skin drooping under his dull blue eyes and below his protruding chin, beneath a mouthful of crooked black-and-yellow teeth. In his huge right hand was the flagpole he must have used as a weapon.
The Austrian flag hung limply from the end of the pole, fluttered softly against the surface of the roof.
Luce shot to her feet, feeling her fists rise even as she wondered what good they’d be against this enormous fiend.
His wings were a very pale blue, just a shade away from white. Even though his body towered over her, his wings were small and dense, spanning only a little farther than his arms could reach.
Something small and golden was pinned to the front of the man’s cloak: a feather—a marbled gold-black feather. Luce knew whose wings it had come from. But why would Roland have given this creature a pennon from his wings?
He wouldn’t have. This feather was bent and severed and missing some of its matter near the quill. Its point was maroon with blood, and instead of standing upright like the brilliant plume Daniel had given to Phil, this feather seemed to have withered and faded when it was attached to the gruesome angel’s black cloak.
A trick.
“Who are you?” Luce asked, falling to her knees.
“What do you want?”
“Show some respect.” The angel’s throat convulsed as if he meant to bark, but his voice came out warbled and faint and old.
“Earn my respect,” Luce said. “And I’ll give it to you.”
He gave her half an evil smirk and dropped his head low. Then he pulled down the cloak to expose the back of his neck. Luce blinked in the dim light. His neck bore a painted brand, which shimmered gold in the glow of streetlights mingled with the moon. She counted seven points on the star.
He was one of the Scale.
“Recognize me now?”
“Is this how the Throne’s enforcers work? Bludgeon-ing innocent angels?”
“No Outcast is innocent. Nor is anyone else, for that matter, until they are proven to be so.”
“You’ve proven yourself innocent of any honor, striking a girl from behind.”
“Insolence.” He wrinkled his nose at her. “Won’t get you far with me.”
“That’s exactly where I want to be.” Luce’s eyes darted to Olianna, to her pale hand and the starshot clenched in its grip.
“But it’s not where you will stay,” the Scale said haltingly, as if having to force himself to commit to their il-logical banter.
Luce snatched at the starshot as the Scale lurched for her. But the angel was much faster and stronger than he looked. He wrested the starshot from her hands, knocked her onto her back against the stone roof with one strong slap across the face. He held the arrow tip of the starshot up close to Luce’s heart.
They can’t kill mortals. They can’t kill mortals, she kept repeating in her head. But Luce remembered Bill’s bargain with her: She had one immortal part of her that could be killed. Her soul. And she would not part with that, not after everything she’d been through, not when the end was so near.
She raised her leg, preparing to kick him like she’d seen in kung fu movies, when suddenly he pitched the arrow and its bow straight over the edge of the roof.
Luce jerked her head to the side, her cheek pressing against the cold stone, and watched the weapon twirl in the air on its way into the twinkling Christmas lights of the Vienna streets.
The Scale angel rubbed his hands on his cloak. “Filthy things.” Then he grabbed Luce roughly by the shoulders and yanked her to her feet.
He kicked the Outcast aside—Olianna moaned but did not stir—and there, under her thin, trench-coated body, was the golden halo.
“Thought I might find this here,” the Scale angel said, snatching it up and thrusting it under the folds of his cloak.
“No!” She plunged her hands into the dark place where she’d seen the halo disappear, but the angel slapped her a second time across the face, sending her backward, her hair swinging over the edge of the roof.
She clutched her face. Her nose was bleeding.
“You are more dangerous than they think,” he croaked. “We were told you were a whiner, not courageous. I’d better bind you up before we fly.” The angel quickly slipped off his cloak and dropped it over her head like a curtain, blinding Luce for a long, horrible moment. Then the Vienna night—and the angel—were visible again. Luce noticed that beneath the cloak he’d been wearing, the Scale wore another, precisely like the one he’d removed and fastened around Luce. He bent down, and with the pull of a string, Luce’s cloak constricted around her like a straitjacket. When she kicked, convulsed, she felt the cloak become tighter.
She let out a scream. “Daniel!”
“He won’t hear you,” the angel chuckled mirthlessly as he stuffed her under one arm and moved toward the edge of the roof. “He wouldn’t hear you if you screamed forever.”
SEVEN
KNOT ANGELS
The cloak was paralyzing.
The more Luce moved, the more it constricted around her. Its rough fabric was secured with a strange rope that pinched her skin and held her body rigidly.
When Luce writhed against it, the rope responded, cinching tighter around her shoulders, squeezing her ribs until she could barely breathe.
The Scale angel held Luce under his bony arm as he scraped through the night sky. With her face buried in the fetid waist of the regenerated cloak the angel wore, she could see nothing, could only feel wind whipping across the surface of her miserable mildewed cocoon. All she could hear was wind-howl, punctuated by the beating of stiff wings.
Where was he taking her? How would she get word to Daniel? They did not have time for this!
After a while the wind stopped, but the Scale angel didn’t land.
He and Luce hovered in the air.
Then the angel let out a roar. “Trespasser!” he bellowed.
Luce felt the two of them dropping, but she could see only the darkness of the folds of her captor’s cloak, which muffled her cries of terror—until the sound of breaking glass halted even those.
Thin, razor-like shards sliced through her constricting cloak, through the fabric of her jeans. Her legs stung like they’d been cut in a thousand places.
When the Scale angel’s feet slammed into a landing, Luce shuddered with the impact. He dropped her roughly, and she landed on her hip bone and shoulder.
She rolled a couple of feet, then stopped. She saw that she was near a long wooden workman’s table piled high with fragments of faded cloth and porcelain.
She squirmed under its temporary shelter, almost suc-cessful at preventing her cloak from constricting more tightly around her. It had begun to close around her trachea.
But at least now she could see.
She was in a cold, cavernous room. The floor beneath her was a lacquered mosaic made of triangular gray and red tiles. The walls were a gleaming mustard-colored marble, as were the thick square pillars in the center of the room. She briefly studied a long row of frosted skylights that spanned the vast ceiling forty feet above. The roof was pocked by open craters of broken glass, revealing dark gray vistas of cloudy night on the other side. That must have been where she and the angel crashed through.
And this must be the museum wing the Scale had overtaken, the one Vincent had told Daniel about on the copper roof. That meant Daniel must be just outside—and Arriane and Annabelle and Roland should be somewhere inside! Her heart soared, then sank.
Their wings were bound, the Outcasts had said. Were they in the same shape she was in? She hated that she had made it here and couldn’t even help them, hated that she had to move to save them but that moving put her life in peril. There was perhaps nothing worse than not being able to move.