“What’s in the duffel bag?” Cam pointed to the navy blue canvas bag strapped over Vincent’s shoulders.
Phil motioned for Vincent to drop the duffel bag on the center altar. It landed with a heavy thwump. “In Venice, Daniel Grigori asked me whether I had any food for Lucinda Price. I have been regretting that all I had to offer was cheap unhealthful snacks, the kind of foods my Italian model friends prefer. This time, I asked a mortal Israeli girl what sort of things she liked to eat. She led me to a something called a falafel stand.” Phil shrugged and his voice lilted in a question at the end.
“Are you saying I’m looking at a solid brick of falafel?” Roland raised a doubtful eyebrow at Vincent’s bulging bag.
“Oh no,” Vincent said. “The Outcasts also purchased hummus, pita, pickles, a container of something called tabbouleh, cucumber salad, and fresh pomegranate juice.
Are you hungry, Lucinda Price?”
It was an absurd amount of delicious food. Somehow it felt wrong to eat on the altars, so they spread out a smorgasbord on the floor and everyone—Outcast, angel, mortal—tucked in. The mood was somber, but the food was filling and hot and exactly what all of them seemed to need. Luce showed Olianna and Vincent how to make a falafel sandwich; Cam even asked Phil to pass him the hummus. At some point, Arriane flew out the window to find Luce some new clothes. She returned with a faded pair of jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt, and a cool Israeli army flak jacket with a patch depicting an orange-and-yellow flame.
“Had to kiss a soldier for this,” she said, but her voice didn’t have the same showy lightness it would have if she’d been performing for Gabbe and Molly, too.
When none of them could eat any more, Dee appeared in the doorway. She greeted the Outcasts politely and rested a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “Do you have the relic, dear?”
Before Daniel could answer, Dee’s eyes found the goblet. She lifted it and twirled it in her hands, examining it carefully from all sides. “The Silver Pennon,” she whispered. “Hello, old friend.”
“I take it she knows what to do with that thing,” Cam said.
“She knows,” Luce answered.
Dee pointed to a brass plate that had been welded into one of the broad sides of the goblet, and muttered something under her breath, as if she were reading. She ran her fingers across a hammered image depicted there.
Luce inched forward for a better look. The illustration looked like angel wings in free fall.
At last, Dee looked up to face them with a strange expression on her face. “Well, now it all makes sense.”
“What makes sense?” Luce asked.
“My life. My purpose. Where we need to go. What we need to do. It’s time.”
“Time for what?” Luce asked. They’d gathered all the artifacts now, but she didn’t understand any better what they had left to do.
“Time for my final act, dear,” Dee said warmly.
“Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it, step by step.”
“To Mount Sinai?” Daniel rose from the floor and helped Luce to her feet.
“Close.” Dee shut her eyes and took a deep breath, as if to draw the memory from within her lungs. “There’s a pair of trees in the mountains about a mile above Saint Catherine’s Monastery. I’d like for us to convene there.
It is called the Qayom Malak. ”
“Qayom Malak . . . Qayom Malak,” Daniel repeated.
The word sounded like kayome malaka. “That’s in my book.” He unzipped the satchel and flipped through some pages, muttering under his breath. At last, he held it out for Dee to see. Luce stepped forward to take a look. At the bottom of the page, about a hundred pages in, Daniel’s finger pointed at a faded note scribbled in a language Luce didn’t recognize. Next to the note he had written the same group of letters three times: QYWM’ ML’K’. QYWM’ ML’K’. QYWM’ ML’K’.
“Well done, Daniel.” Dee smiled. “You knew it all along. Though Qayom Malak is much easier for modern tongues to pronounce than—” She made a string of complicated guttural noises Luce couldn’t have replicated.
“I never knew what it meant,” Daniel said.
Dee looked out the open window, at the holy city’s afternoon sky. “Soon you will, my boy. Very soon you will.”
THIRTEEN
THE EXCAVATION
Throosh of wingbeats overhead.
Tendrils of ambling cloud sliding over skin.
Luce was soaring across darkness, deep in the drug-like tunnel of another flight. She was weightless as the wind.
A single star hung in the center of a navy sky, miles above the belt of rainbow light near the horizon.
Twinkling lights on darkened ground seemed impossibly far away. Luce was in another world, ascending into infinity, lit up by the glow of brilliant silver wings.
They beat again, thrusting forward, then back, carrying her higher . . . higher . . .
The world was quiet up here, like she had it all to herself.
Higher . . . higher . . .
No matter how high, she was always canopied by the warm silver winglight overhead.
She reached for Daniel, as if to share this peace, to caress his hand where it always rested, clasped around her waist.
Her hand met her own bare skin. His hand wasn’t there.
Daniel wasn’t there.
There were only Luce’s body, and a darkening horizon, and a single distant star.
She jolted from her sleep. Aloft, awake, she found Daniel’s hands again—one holding her waist, the other higher, draped across her chest. Right where they always were.
It was late afternoon—not nighttime. She and Daniel and the others climbed a ladder of puffy white clouds that obscurred the stars.
Just a dream.
A dream in which Luce had been the one flying. Everybody had these dreams. You were supposed to wake up just before you hit the ground. But Luce, who flew in real life every day, had awakened when she realized she was flying under her own power. Why hadn’t she looked up then, to see what her wings looked like, to see if they were glorious and proud?
She closed her eyes, wanting to return to that simpler sky, where Lucifer wasn’t thundering toward them, where Gabbe and Molly weren’t gone.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Daniel said.
Her eyes shot open, back to reality. Below, the red granite peaks of the Sinai Peninsula were so jagged they looked like they were made of shards of broken glass.
“What is it you can’t do?” Luce asked. “Find the location of the Fall? Dee’s going to help us, Daniel. I think she knows exaclty how to find it.”
“Sure,” he said, unconvinced. “Dee’s great. We’re lucky to have her. But even if we find the Fall site, I don’t know how we’re going to stop Lucifer. And if we can’t”—
his chest heaved against her back—“I can’t go through another six thousand years of losing you.” Throughout her lives, Luce had seen Daniel brooding, frustrated, worried, passionate, brooding again, tender, diffident, desperately sad. But she had never heard him sound defeated. The dull surrender in his tone cut into her, sudden and deep, the way a starshot sliced through angel flesh.
“You won’t have to do that.”
“I keep picturing what we’re looking at if Lucifer succeeds.” He fell back slightly from the formation they were flying in—Cam and Dee taking the lead, Arriane, Roland, and Annabelle just behind, the Outcasts fanned out around them all. “It’s too much, Luce. This is why angels choose sides, why people join teams. It costs too much not to; it weighs too heavily to soldier on alone.” There was a time when Luce would have turned instinctively inward, made insecure by Daniel’s doubt, as if it suggested a weakness in their relationship. But now she was armed with the lessons from their past. She knew, when Daniel was too tired to remember, the mea-sure of his love.