Barach stood a long moment, as if weighing his op-tions, blinking his one remaining wrinkled old eyelid.
“Unbind her! She cannot breathe!” Daniel roared.
Barach growled and approached Luce. His age-spotted hands worked out a series of knots that neither Phil nor Daniel had been able to find. Luce felt no relief in her neck, though. Not until he began to whisper something, very low, under his rancid breath.
Lack of oxygen had made her feel faint, but the words tunneled into her foggy mind. They were an ancient form of Hebrew. Luce didn’t know how she knew the language, but she did.
“And Heaven wept to see the sins of Her children.” The words were almost unintelligible. Daniel and Phil had not even heard them. Luce couldn’t be sure she’d heard them right—but then, they were familiar.
Where had she heard them before?
The memory came to her faster than she would have liked: a different member of the Scale, sweeping Luce in a different body into an older cloak than this one. It had happened a very long time ago. She’d been through all this before, bound up and then released.
In that lifetime, Luce had gotten her hands on something she wasn’t supposed to see. A book, tied up with a complicated knot.
A Record of the Fallen.
What was she doing with it? What did she want to see?
The same thing she wanted to see now. The names of the angels who had yet to choose. But she hadn’t been permitted to read the book then, either.
Long before, Luce had held the book in her hands, and without knowing how, she had nearly untied its knot. Then came the moment when the Scale caught her and bound her in the cloak. She had watched his blue wings shudder with intensity as the angel tied and retied the book. Making sure her impure fingers hadn’t damaged it, he had said. She heard him whisper those words—the same strange words—just before he shed a tear over the book.
The gold thread had unraveled like magic.
She looked up at the craggy old angel now and watched a silvery tear slide from his eye down the maze of his cheek. He looked truly moved, but in a patroniz-ing sort of way, like he pitied the fate of her soul. The tear landed on the cloak, and the knots mysteriously un-knotted.
She gasped for air. Daniel yanked the cloak the rest of the way off her. She swung her arms around him.
Freedom.
She was still embracing Daniel when Barach leaned in close to her ear. “You’ll never succeed.”
“Silence, fiend,” Daniel commanded.
But Luce wanted to know what Barach meant. “Why not?”
“You are not the one!” Barach said.
“Silence!” Daniel shouted.
“Never, never, never. Not in a million years,” the angel chanted, rubbing his sandpaper cheek against Luce’s—right before Phil loosed the arrow into his heart.
EIGHT
HOW HEAVEN WEPT
Something thudded at their feet.
“The halo!” Luce gasped.
Daniel swooped down and snatched the golden relic from the ground. He marveled at it, shaking his head.
Somehow it had remained when the Scale angel and his strange, regenerating clothes had disappeared.
“I am sorry for taking his life, Daniel Grigori,” Phil said. “But I could not tolerate Barach’s lies any longer.”
“It was beginning to grate on me, too,” Daniel said.
“Just be careful with the others.”
“Take this,” Phil said, sliding the black satchel off his shoulder and handing it to Daniel. “Conceal it from the Scale. They are hungry for it.” When Daniel opened the satchel, Luce saw his book, The Book of the Watchers, tucked inside.
Phil zipped it up and left the bag with Daniel. “I will now return to stand guard. The wounded Scale could rouse at any moment.”
“You’ve done well against the Scale,” Daniel said, sounding impressed. “But—”
“We know,” Phil said. “There will be more. Did you encounter many outside the museum?”
“Their numbers are legion,” Daniel said.
“If you would let us use the starshots freely, we could secure your escape—”
“No. I don’t want to disturb balance to that extent.
No more killing unless in absolute self-defense. We’ll just have to hurry and get out of here before the Scale rein-forcements arrive. Go now, guard the windows and the doors. I will be with you in a moment.” Phil nodded, turned, and was gone, wading among the carpet of blue wings.
As soon as they were alone, Daniel’s hands searched Luce’s body. “Are you hurt?”
She looked down at herself, rubbed her neck. She was bleeding. The skylight’s glass had sliced through her jeans in a few places, but none of the wounds looked fatal. Following Daniel’s earlier advice, she told herself, It doesn’t hurt you. The stinging eased.
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “What happened to you?”
“Precisely what we wanted to happen. I held off the majority of the Scale while the Outcasts found this way in.” He closed his eyes. “Only I never meant for you to get hurt. I’m sorry, Luce, I shouldn’t have left you—”
“I’m fine, Daniel, and the halo is safe. What about the other angels? How many more Scale are there?”
“Daniel Grigori!” Phil’s shout rang out across the lofty room.
Luce and Daniel crossed the wing quickly, stepping over blue Scale wings to the arched threshold of the room. Then Luce stopped short.
A man in a navy blue uniform lay facedown on the tile floor. Red blood pooled around his head—red mortal blood.
“I—I killed him,” Daedalus stammered, holding a heavy iron helmet in his hand and looking scared. The visor of the helmet was slick with blood. “He rushed in through the doorway and I thought he was Scale. I thought I would just knock him out. But he was a mortal man.”
A mop and bucket on wheels lay tipped over behind the body. They had killed a janitor. Until then, in some ways, the fight against the Scale hadn’t seemed real. It was brutal and senseless, and yes, two Scale members had been killed—but it had been separate from the mortal world. Luce felt sick watching the blood seep into the grooves of the tile floor, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away.
Daniel rubbed his jaw. “You made a mistake, Daedalus. You did well to guard the door from intruders. The next one who comes in will be Scale.” He scanned the room. “Where are the fallen angels?”
“What about him?” Luce stared at the dead man on the floor. His shoes were freshly shined. He wore a thin gold wedding band. “He was just a janitor coming in to see about the noise. Now he’s dead. ” Daniel took Luce by the shoulders and pressed his forehead to hers. His breath came short and hot. “His soul has sped to peace and joy. And many more will be lost if we don’t find our friends, get the relic, and get out of here.” He squeezed her shoulders, then released her too quickly. She choked back a cry for the dead man, swallowed hard, and turned to look at Phil.
“Where are they?”
Phil pointed a pale finger skyward.
Dangling from a thick crossbeam near the shattered skylight were three black burlap pods. One of them bulged and swayed, like something trying to be born.
“Arriane!” Luce shouted.
The same sack bulged again, more violently this time.
“You will never free them in time,” a voice warbled from the ground. A Scale member with a fish face rose up on his elbows. “More Scale are on the way. We will bind you all in the Cloaks of the Just and handle Lucifer ourselves—”
A bronze shield thrown like a Frisbee by Phil nicked off a piece of the Scale’s scalp, sent him back into the pile of blue wings.
Phil turned to Daniel. “If you do need Scale assistance to unbind your friends, we’ll have more luck while their force is small.”
Daniel’s eyes burned violet as he flew around the wing, moving from one scaffolded restoration station to another, then to a wide marble table that looked like one of the museum restorers’ workstations. It was stacked with paperwork and tools—mostly useless after that night—which Daniel dug through with intense scrutiny, flinging aside an empty water bottle, a stack of plastic binders, a faded picture in a frame. Finally, his hands seized a long, heavy-duty scalpel.