Arriane stood with her feet balanced on her shovel and swayed back and forth. She watched the Outcasts and the other angels unearthing a tall interior column from the rocks.
Finally, Arriane closed her eyes and blurted out, “I’m the reason this sanctuary doesn’t exist anymore. I’m the reason it’s bad luck.”
“But—Dee said it wasn’t anyone’s fault. What happened?”
“After the Fall,” she said, “I was getting my strength back, looking for shelter, for a way to mend my wings. I hadn’t yet returned to the Throne. I didn’t even know how to do that. I didn’t remember what I was. I was alone and I saw this place and I—”
“You wandered into the sanctuary that used to be here,” Luce said, remembering what Daniel had told her about the reason fallen angels didn’t go near churches.
They had all been edgy at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. They wouldn’t go near the chapel on Pont Saint Benezet.
“I didn’t know!” Arriane’s chest shuddered when she inhaled.
“Of course you didn’t.” Luce put her arm around Arriane’s side. She was skin and bones and wings. The angel rested her head on Luce’s shoulder. “Did it blow up?” Arriane nodded. “The way you do . . . no”—she corrected herself—“the way you used to in your other lives.
Poof. The whole thing up in flames. Only, this wasn’t—
sorry for saying this—like, all beautifully tragic or romantic. This was bleak and black and absolute. Like a door slamming in my face. That’s when I knew that I was really kicked out of Heaven.” She turned to Luce, her wide blue eyes more innocent than Luce could remember seeing them. “I never meant to leave. It was an accident, a lot of us just got swept up in . . . someone else’s battle.”
She shrugged and a corner of her mouth curved mis-chievously. “Maybe I got too used to being a reject.
Kinda suits me, though, don’t you think?” She made a pistol with her fingers and fired it in Cam’s direction. “I guess I don’t mind running around with this pack of out-laws.” Then Arriane’s face changed, any trace of whimsy disappearing. She gripped Luce by the shoulders and whispered, “That’s it.”
“What?” Luce spun around.
The angels and the Outcasts had cleared away several tons of stone. They were now standing where thepile of rocks had stood. It had taken until just before dawn.
Around them rose the inner sanctuary Dee had promised they would find. The old, elegant lady was as good as her word.
Only two frail walls were left, forming a right angle, but the gray tile border on the floor suggested an original design that spanned roughly twenty square feet.
Large solid marble bricks made up the bases of the walls, where smaller crumbling sandstone bricks had once held up a roof. Weathered friezes decorated portions of the structure—winged creatures so old and worn they almost blended back into the stone. An ancient fire had scorched portions of the flared decorative cornices near the tops of the walls.
The now completely uncovered fig and olive trees marked the barrier between Dee’s broom-swept Arrowhead Slab and the excavated sanctuary. The two missing walls left the rest of the structure exposed to Luce’s imagination, which pictured ancient pilgrims kneeling to pray here. It was clear where they would kneeclass="underline" Four Ionic marble columns with fluted bases and scrolled caps had been built around a raised platform in the center of the tile. And on that platform stood a giant rectangular altar built of pale tan stone.
It looked familiar, but unlike anything Luce had ever seen before. It was caked with dirt and rocks and Luce could make out the shadow of a decoration carved on top: two stone angels facing each other, each the size of a large doll. They’d once been painted with gold, it seemed, but now only flecks of their former sheen remained. The carved angels kneeled in prayer, heads down, halo-free, with their beautifully detailed wings arched forward so that the tips of them were touching.
“Yes.” Dee took a deep breath. “That’s it. Qayom Malak. It means ‘the Overseer of the Angels.’ Or, as I like to call it, ‘the Angels’ Aide.’ It holds a secret no soul has ever deciphered: the key to where the fallen fell to Earth.
Do you remember it, Arriane?”
“I think so.” Arriane seemed nervous as she stepped toward the sculpture. When she reached the platform, she stood still for a long time before the kneeling angels.
Then she kneeled herself. She touched their wing tips, the place where the two angels connected. She shivered.
“I only saw it for a second before—”
“Yes,” Dee said. “You were blasted out of the sanctuary. The force of the explosion caused the first avalanche that buried the Qayom Malak, but the fig and olive trees remained exposed, a beacon for the other sanctuaries that were built in the coming years. The Christians were here, the Greeks, the Jews, the Moors. Their sanctuaries fell, too, to avalanche, fire, to scandal or fear, creating an impenetrable wall around the Qayom Malak. You needed me to help you find it again. And you couldn’t find me until you really needed me.”
“What happens now?” Cam asked. “Don’t tell me we have to pray.”
Dee’s eyes never left the Qayom Malak, even as she tossed Cam the towel draped over her shoulder. “Oh, it’s far worse, Cam. Now you’ve got to clean. Polish the angels, especially their wings. Polish them until they shine. We are going to need the moonlight to shine on them in precisely the right way.”
FOURTEEN
AIR APPARENT
Boom.
It sounded like thunder, the brewing of a dark tornado. Luce jumped awake inside the cave, where she’d fallen asleep on Daniel’s shoulder. She hadn’t meant to doze off, but Dee had insisted on resting before explain-ing the purpose of the Qayom Malak. Stirred from sleep now, Luce had the feeling that many precious hours had passed. She was sweating in her flannel sleeping bag. The silver locket felt hot against her chest.
Daniel was lying very still, his eyes fixed on the mouth of the cave. The rumbling stopped.
Luce propped herself up on her elbows, noticed Dee across from her, asleep in the fetal position, stirring slightly, her red hair loose and messy. To Dee’s left lay the Outcasts’ empty sleeping bags; the strange creatures stood alert, huddled at the back of the small space, their drab wings overlapping. To her right, Annabelle and Arriane were asleep, or at least resting, their silver wings entwined uninhibitedly, like sisters.
The cave was calm. Luce must have dreamed the rumbling. She was still tired.
When she rolled over, nestling her back into Daniel’s chest so that he was cradling her with his right wing, her eyelids fluttered shut. Then they flew open.
She was face to face with Cam.
He was inches away, on his side, head propped on his hand, green eyes holding hers as if they were both in a trance. He opened his mouth as if to say something—
BOOM.
The room trembled like a leaf. For an instant, the air seemed to take on a strange transparency. Cam’s body shimmered, both there and somehow not there, his very existence seeming to flicker.
“Timequake,” Daniel said.
“A big mother,” Cam agreed.
Luce sprang upright, gaping at her own body in the sleeping bag, at Daniel’s hand on her knee, at Arriane, whose muffled voice called out, “I’wuzznt me,” until Annabelle’s wing slapped her awake. All of them were flickering before each other’s eyes. Solidly present one moment, as insubstantial as ghosts the next.
The timequake had jarred loose a dimension in which they weren’t even there.
The cave around them shuddered. Sand sifted down from the walls. But unlike those of Luce and her friends, the physical properties of the red rock remained fixed, as if to prove that only people—souls—were at risk of being erased.