“Time she is a-wasting, angels,” Dee said through tight lips.
The pebble-eyed nun bared veiny gums at the angels and fumbled with something on the base of the beam.
Daniel shoved the satchel into Luce’s hands, then positioned her behind Dee. The older woman didn’t cover Luce exactly—the top of her head came only as high as Luce’s chin—but Luce got the idea and ducked. The angels unleashed their wings with brutish speed as they fanned out on both sides—Arriane and Annabelle veer-ing left, Roland and Daniel diving right.
The giant cross was not a pilgrim’s penitential bur-den. It was an enormous crossbow, filled with starshots meant to kill everybody there.
There was no time for this to register with Luce. One of the nuns released the first shot; it sizzled through the air, heading for Luce’s face. The silver arrow grew larger in Luce’s vision as it swirled closer in the air.
Then Dee jumped.
The tiny woman spread her arms open wide. The starshot’s dull tip collided with the center of her chest.
Dee grunted as the arrow—harmless to mortals, Luce knew—glanced off her tiny body and clattered to the ground, leaving the transeternal sore but unharmed.
“Presidia, you fool,” Dee shouted at the nun, dragging the arrow backward with her high heel. Luce leaned down to pick it up and slipped it inside the satchel. “You know that won’t hurt me! Now you’ve annoyed my friends.” She gestured broadly at the angels darting forward to disarm the costumed Elders.
“Stand down, defector!” Presidia replied. “We require the girl! Surrender her and we will—” But Presidia never finished. Arriane was at the Elder’s back in a flash, brushing the habit from her head, taking her white hair in each of the angel’s fists.
“Because I respect my Elders,” Arriane hissed through her clenched jaw, “I feel I must prevent them from embarrassing themselves.” Then she lifted off the ground, still holding Presidia by the hair. The Elder kicked the air as if pedaling an invisible bicycle. Arriane pivoted and slammed the old woman’s body into the cornice of the church’s façade with such force it left an indention when she collapsed in a twisted heap, hands and legs sticking out at grisly angles.
The other incognito Elder had dropped the cannon-cross and was trying to escape, running hard for an alley in the opposite corner of the plaza. Annabelle took up the cross and became a javelin thrower, rearing back like a tightening coil, springing to release the heavy wooden T.
The cross arced through the air and speared the fleeing Elder in her sloping spine. She fell forward and convulsed, impaled by the replica of an ancient instrument of execution.
The courtyard fell quiet. Instinctively, everyone turned to look at Luce.
“She’s okay!” Dee called, raising Luce’s hand in the air as if the two of them had just won a relay race.
“Daniel!” Luce pointed at a flash of white disappearing behind Daniel’s back, into the church. As the double doors slowly shut, an elderly monk they hadn’t noticed could be heard ascending the staircase inside.
“Follow him,” Dee shouted, stepping over Presidia’s mangled corpse.
Luce and Dee ran to catch up to the others. When they entered the church, it was dark and silent. Roland pointed toward a flight of stone steps in the corner. They opened into a small stone archway, which led to a longer staircase. The space was too cramped for the angels to spread their wings, so they picked their way up the steep steps as quickly as they could.
“The Elder will lead us to Sophia,” Daniel whispered as they ducked under the stone archway to the darkened staircase. “If she has the others—if she has the relic—” Dee laid a firm hand on Daniel’s arm. “She must not know of Luce’s presence. You must prevent the Elder from reaching Sophia.”
Daniel’s eyes flickered back at Luce, then up to Roland, who nodded swiftly, rocketing up the stairs as if he had run through old stone fortresses before.
Barely two minutes later, he was waiting for them at the top of the cramped staircase. The Elder lay dead on the floor, lips blue, eyes glassy and wet. Behind Roland, an open doorway curved sharply to the left. Someone on that landing was singing what sounded like a hymn.
Luce shivered.
Daniel motioned for them to stay back, peering past the edge of the curved stairway. From where she stood, pressed against a stone wall, Luce could see a small portion of the chapel beyond the landing. The walls were painted with elaborate frescos, lit by dozens of small tin lamps suspended by beaded chains from the vaulted ceiling. There was a small room with a mosaic of the cruci-fixion spanning the entire western wall. Beyond this was a row of highly decorated vaulted columns several feet wide, portioning off a second, larger chapel that was hard to see from here. Between the two chapels, a large gilded shrine to Mary was covered in flower bouquets and half-burned sacramental candles.
Daniel cocked his head. A flash of red swished past one of the columns.
A woman in a long scarlet robe.
She was bending over an altar made from a great marble slab adorned with a white lace sheet. Something lay on that altar, but Luce could not tell what it was.
The woman was frail but attractive, with short gray hair cut in a fashionable bob. Her robe was cinched at the waist with a colorful woven belt. She lit a candle at the front of the altar. The flowing sleeves of her robe slipped up her arms as she genuflected, exposing wrists adorned with stacks and stacks of pearl bracelets.
Miss Sophia.
Luce pushed off Daniel to climb one step higher, desperate for a better view. The wide columns ob-structed the majority of the chapel, but when Daniel helped her just a little farther up the stairs, she could see more. There were not one but three altars in the room, not one but three scarlet-robed women ritually lighting candles all around them. Luce didn’t recognize two of them.
Sophia looked older, more tired than she had behind her librarian’s desk. Luce wondered briefly if it was because she had gone from surrounding herself with teenagers to running with beings who hadn’t been teenagers in several hundred years. That night, Sophia’s face was painted, lips like blood. The robe she wore was dusty and dark with rings of sweat. Hers had been the chanting voice. When she started up again in a language that sounded like Latin but wasn’t, Luce’s whole body clenched. She remembered it.
This was the ritual that Miss Sophia had performed on Luce the last night she’d been at Sword & Cross.
Miss Sophia had been just about to murder her when Daniel came crashing through the ceiling.
“Pass me the rope, Vivina,” Miss Sophia said. They were so consumed by their dark ritual that they did not sense the angels crouched along the stairs outside the chapel. “Gabrielle looks a little too comfy. I’d like to bind her throat.”
Gabbe.
“There is no more,” Vivina said. “I had to double bind Cambriel here. He was squirming. Ooh, he still is.”
“Oh my God,” Luce whispered. Cam and Gabbe were there. She assumed the presence of a third robed lady meant Molly was there, too.
“God has nothing to do with this,” Dee said under her breath. “And Sophia is too crazy to know it.”
“Why are the fallen being so quiet?” Luce whispered.
“Why don’t they resist?”
“They must not realize that this place is not a sanctuary of God,” Daniel said. “They must be in shock—
I know I would be—and Sophia must be using it to her advantage. She knows they’re worried that anything they do or say might make the church erupt into flames.”
“I know how they feel,” Luce whispered. “We have to stop her.” She started for the door, emboldened by the fresh memory of Elders they’d destroyed outside, by the power of the angels behind her, by Daniel’s love, by the knowledge of the two relics they had already discovered. But a hand clamped her shoulder, drawing her back into the corridor.