In an instant, he had shoved himself between Daedalus and the Scale angel.
“Drop the cloak, Zaban.” Phil looked as fierce as he had when he’d first appeared in Luce’s parents’ backyard. Luce was surprised to realize they knew each other by name, but of course, they must have once all lived in Heaven together. That was hard to imagine now.
Zaban had watery blue eyes and bluish lips. He looked almost gleeful at finding the starshot pointed at him. He slung the cloak over his shoulder and turned to face Phil, freeing Daedalus to pick up a spindly Scale angel by the feet. He swung the old angel around in a circle three times, then sent him crashing through the eastern window, out into a tower of scaffolding below.
“Threatening to shoot me, are you, Phillip?” Zaban’s eyes were on the starshot. “You want to tip the balance toward Lucifer? Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Phil bristled. “You don’t matter enough for your death to tip the balance.”
“At least we count for something. All together, our lives make a difference in the balance. Justice always makes a difference. You Outcasts”—he smiled in mock pity—“stand for nothing. That is what makes you worth-less.”
That was enough for Phil. There was something about this Scale he couldn’t endure. With a grunt he loosed the arrow toward Zaban’s heart.
“I stand opposed to you,” he muttered, and waited for the blue-winged geezer to vanish.
Luce waited for the vanishing, too. She’d seen it happen before. But the arrow glanced off Zaban’s cloak and clattered to the floor.
“How did you—?” Phil asked.
Zaban laughed and pulled something out from a hidden breast pocket in his cloak. Luce leaned forward, eager to see how Zaban had protected himself. But she leaned too far and slid off the table. She landed on the floor on her face.
No one noticed. They were staring at the small book Zaban produced from his cloak. Propping herself up slightly, Luce saw it was bound in leather, the same shade of blue as Scale angel wings. It was bound with a knotted golden cord. It looked like a Bible, the kind Civil War soldiers used to stuff in their breast pockets in hopes the books would protect their hearts.
This book had done just that.
Luce squinted to read its title, squirming a few inches closer on the floor. She was still too far away.
In a single movement, Phil retrieved his starshot and swatted the book out of Zaban’s hand. By a stroke of luck, it landed a few feet away from Luce. She wriggled again, knowing she couldn’t pick it up, not the way the cloak was binding her. Still, she had to know what its pages contained. It seemed familiar, as if she’d seen it long, long before. She read the golden letters on its spine.
A Record of the Fallen.
Now Zaban ran for it, stopping short of Luce, who lay exposed in the center of the floor. He glared at her and pocketed the book.
“No, no,” he said. “You don’t get to look at this. You don’t get to see all that’s been accomplished by Scale wings. Nor what’s left to do to achieve the ultimate harmonious balance. Not when you’ve spent all this time too busy to take note of us, to take note of justice, selfishly falling in and out of love.”
Though Luce hated the Scale, if there was a record of the fallen, she burned to know whose names were on those pages, to see where Daniel’s name was tallied now.
This was what the fallen kept talking about. A single angel who would tip the scale.
But before Zaban could hurtle any more criticism at Luce, a pair of brilliant white wings filled her vision—
an angel descending through the largest hole in the skylight.
Daniel touched down in front of her and eyed the cloak imprisoning her. He studied her constricted neck.
His muscles strained through his T-shirt as he tried to tear the cloak away.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Phil lift a small pickax from a nearby table and slice it across Zaban’s chest. The Scale angel swerved, trying to spin out of range. The blade connected with his arm. The blow was so powerful it severed Zaban’s hand at the wrist. Sickened, Luce watched the pale slack fist thump to the floor.
Aside from the blue blood streaming, it could have belonged to one of the ravaged statues.
“Tie that on with one of your knots,” Phil taunted as Zaban fumbled after his missing appendage among the battered, unconscious bodies of his sect.
“Is it hurting you?” Daniel tore at the knots binding Luce.
“No.” She willed it to be true. It almost was.
When brute force didn’t work, Daniel tried approaching the cloak more strategically. “I had the loose end just a moment ago,” he muttered. “Now it’s riddled up inside the cloak.” His fingers inched across her body, feeling close and far away.
Luce wished that her hands, over any other part of her body, were free so she could touch Daniel right now, soothe his anxiety. She trusted him to free her. She trusted him to do anything.
What could she do to help him? She closed her eyes and drifted back to the lifetime in Tahiti. Daniel had been a sailor. He had taught her dozens of knots in their quiet afternoons on the beach. She remembered now: the alpine butterfly, which made a straight loop in the middle of a rope with two lobed wings on either side, good for carrying extra weight on a line. Or the lover’s knot, which looked simple, heart-shaped, but could only be untied using four hands at once; each one had to loop a strand through a different portion of the heart’s core.
The cloak was so tight Luce could not move a muscle. His fingers trolled the collar, tightening it further.
Daniel cursed at how it pinched her neck.
“I can’t,” he finally cried out. “The Scale straitjacket is comprised of infinite knots. Only one of them can unbind it. Who did this to you?”
Luce jerked her head toward the blue-winged angel howling to himself, staggering in a corner by a marble faun. The starshot fletching still protruded from his eye.
She wanted to tell Daniel how her captor had taken out Olianna with a flagpole, then bound her up and brought her here.
But she could not even speak. The cloak was too tight.
By then, Phil had the whining angel in his grasp, gripped by the collar of his blood-wet cloak. He slapped the Scale three times before the Scale ceased his self-pitying moans and pulled back his blue wings in alarm.
Luce saw that a thick ring of dried blue blood had formed around the place where the starshot fletching protruded from his socket.
“Unbind her, Barach,” Daniel ordered, recognizing Luce’s captor immediately, making Luce wonder how well they knew each other.
“Not likely.” Barach leaned away and spat a stream of blue blood and a couple of sharp and tiny teeth out onto the floor.
In a flash, Phil had a starshot trained between the angel’s eyes. “Daniel Grigori instructed you to unbind her. You will oblige.”
Barach flinched, eyeing the starshot with disdain.
“Vile. Vile!”
A dark shadow fell over Phil’s body.
Hazily, Luce processed the sight of another Scale angel, the craggy old hag with moldy blue wings. She must have roused after she’d been knocked out. Now she came at Phil with the same pickax he’d used on Zaban—
But then the Scale angel vanished into dust.
Ten feet behind her, Vincent stood with an empty bow in hand. He nodded at Phil, then turned back to scour the carpet of blue wings for movement.
Daniel turned to Phil and muttered, “We need to be careful about how many we take out. The Scale do matter in the balance. A little.”
“Unfortunate,” Phil said, strange envy in his voice.
“We will keep the killing to a minimum, Daniel Grigori.
But we would prefer to kill all of them.” He raised his voice for Barach’s ears. “Welcome to the realm of sightlessness. The Outcasts are more powerful than you think. I would kill you without a second thought, without a first one, even. However, I will ask again: Unbind her.”