“Indeed I do.”
“Our friends,” Roland said, “Cam, Gabbe, and Molly have gone to Avalon to search for it. If you could help them locate—”
“You know as well as I that the angels must locate each artifact on their own, Sir Sparks.”
“I thought you’d say that.” He leaned back in his chair, eyeing Dee. “Please, call me Roland.”
“And I thought you’d ask. Roland.” She smiled. “I’m glad you did. It makes me feel as if you trust me to help you defeat Lucifer.” She tilted her head at Luce. “Trust is important, don’t you think, Lucinda?”
Luce looked around the table at the fallen angels she’d first met at Sword & Cross, epochs earlier. “I do.” She had once had a very different kind of conversation with Miss Sophia, who had described trust as a careless pursuit, a good way to get oneself killed. It was eerie how much the two resembled each other in body, while the words produced by their dissimilar souls differed so completely.
Dee reached for the halo in the center of the table.
“May I?”
Daniel handed over the piece, which Luce knew from personal experience was very heavy. In Dee’s hands, it seemed to weigh nothing.
Her slender arms were barely long enough to wrap around its gold circumference, but Dee cradled the halo like a child. Her reflection peered back dimly in the glass.
“Another reunion,” she said softly, to herself. When Dee looked up, Luce couldn’t tell whether she was content or sad. “It will be wonderful when the third artifact is in your possession.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” Arriane said, pouring something from a fat silver flask into her tea.
“That’s great-granddaddy’s route!” Dee said with a smile.
Everyone laughed, a little nervously.
“Speaking of the third artifact”—Dee looked down at a thin gold watch buried among her tangle of pearl bracelets—“did someone mention you all were rather in a hurry to move on?”
There was a clamor of teacups jostling back into their saucers, chairs being pushed back, and wings whooshing open around the table. Suddenly, the massive dining hall seemed smaller and brighter and Luce felt the familiar tingle run through her body when she saw Daniel’s broad wings unfurled.
Dee caught her eye. “Lovely, isn’t it?” Instead of blushing at being caught staring at Daniel, Luce just smiled, for Dee was on their side. “Every time.”
“Where to, Cap’n?” Arriane asked Daniel, tucking scones into the pockets of her overalls.
“Back to Mount Sinai, right?” Luce said. “Isn’t that where we agreed Cam and the others are supposed to meet us?”
Daniel glanced toward the door. His forehead wrinkled in agitation. “Actually, I didn’t want to mention this until we’d found the second artifact, but . . .”
“Come on, Grigori,” Roland said. “Let’s have it.”
“Before we left the warehouse,” Daniel said, “Phil told me that he received a message from one of the Outcasts who he’d sent to Avignon. Cam’s group was intercepted—”
“Scale?” Dee asked. “Still harboring fantasies of their importance in the cosmic balance?”
“We can’t be sure,” Daniel said, “though it does seem likely. We will set a course for the Pont Saint Bénézet in Avignon.” He glanced at Annabelle, whose face turned a shade of scarlet.
“What?” she cried. “Why there?”
“My marginalia in The Book of the Watchers suggest it is the approximate location of the third artifact.
It should have been Cam, Gabbe, and Molly’s first stop.”
Annabelle looked away and didn’t say anything else.
The mood turned serious as the group filed out of the dining room. Luce felt tense with worry for Cam and Molly, imagining them bound up in black Scale cloaks like Arriane and Annabelle.
Angel wings rustled along the narrow brick walls as they walked back down the endless hallway. When they reached the curved wooden doorway leading back outside, Dee swung open an iron circle covering the peephole and peered out.
“Hmmm.” She let the peephole swing shut.
“What is it?” Luce asked, but by then, Dee had already opened up the door and was gesturing for everyone to leave the peculiar brown house, whose soul was so much richer than its exterior suggested.
Luce went first and stood on the porch—which was really just a heap of frost-kissed straw—to wait for the others. The angels poured out of the doorway one at a time—Daniel arching his white wings back as he exited chest out, Annabelle tucking her thick silver wings fast to her sides, Roland bundling his golden marble wings around the front of his body like an invincible shield, and Arriane plowing through recklessly, cursing an unnoticed candle by the doorway that singed a tip of wing.
Afterward, all the angels stood together on the lawn and flexed their wings, glad to be out in the crisp air again.
Luce noticed the darkness. She was certain that when they’d entered the Foundation, the sun had not been far from rising. The church bells had chimed once more, announcing four o’clock, and the sky had been grasping for the precious gold of dawn.
Had they been inside with Dee for just an hour? Why was the sky now a dark, dead-of-night blue?
Lights were on in the white stone townhouses. People passed behind the windows, frying eggs, pouring cups of coffee. Men with briefcases and women with smart suits walked out their front doors and, without ever once glancing at the congregation of angels in the middle of the street, got into cars and drove away, toward what Luce assumed was work.
She remembered Daniel had explained that Viennese people could not see them when they were inside the Patina. They didn’t see the brown house at all. Luce watched a woman in a black terry cloth bathrobe and a plastic rain bonnet walk groggily toward them with her small furry dog. Her property bordered the overgrown pebble path that led to the front door of the Foundation.
The woman and her dog stepped onto the path.
And disappeared.
Luce gasped, but then Daniel pointed behind her, to the other side of the Foundation’s lawn. She spun around.
Forty feet away, where the pebble path ended, and the modern sidewalk picked up once again, the woman and her dog reappeared. The dog yapped hysterically, but the woman walked on as if nothing had disturbed her morning routine.
It was strange, Luce realized, that the angels’ whole mission was to keep her life that way. So that nothing happened to erase this woman’s world, so that she never even noticed how much danger she’d been in.
But while the people on the street might not have noticed Luce or the angels, they certainly did notice the sky. The woman with the dog kept glancing up at it worriedly, and most of the people leaving their houses wore slickers and carried umbrellas.
“Is it going to rain?” Luce had flown through pockets of rain with Daniel, warm showers that left them refreshed and exhilarated . . . but this sky was ominous, nearly black.
“No,” Dee said. “It isn’t going to rain. That’s the Scale.”
“What?” Luce’s head shot up. She squinted at the sky, horrified when it shifted and pitched. Storm clouds didn’t move like that.
“The sky is dark with their wings.” Arriane shuddered. “And their cloaks.”
No.
Luce stared at the sky until it began to make sense.
With a feeling akin to vertigo, she made out an undulating mass of blue-gray wings. They were smeared across the sky, thick as a coat of paint, blocking out the rising sun. The beats of the short brutish wings buzzed like a swarm of hornets. Her heart clenched as she tried to count them. It was impossible. How many hundreds hovered in the multitude above?
“We’re under siege,” Daniel said.
“They’re so close,” Luce said, flinching as the sky roiled. “Can they see us?”
“Not exactly, but they know we’re here,” Dee said nonchalantly as a small group of Scale swooped lower, low enough for them to see their shriveled, bloodthirsty faces. Cold eyes trolled the space where Luce and the others gathered, but when it came to the Patina, Scale seemed to be about as blind as the Outcasts.