Madeleine was a sagging weight between Philippe and Isabelle, her breath going fainter and fainter as time passed; her weight a hindrance. He feared they’d both let go, and she’d tumble down the stairs to Heaven knew where.
“They haven’t followed us,” Isabelle said, beside him.
Philippe shook his head. He’d half expected to see ghosts again, but even Morningstar wasn’t there. It was eerily unexpected. The khi currents there weren’t faded as they were in the rest of the House; they gently lapped at one another in a never-ending circle; and there was a vague sense of magic, nothing major. Just… silence. Waiting, though he couldn’t have told what for. “They won’t come. Not here.”
Isabelle took in a sharp breath, but did not ask him how he knew. “But they’ll be waiting outside, won’t they?”
“Of course.”
“Why are they trying to kill us?”
“I don’t know,” Philippe said. He pushed his shoulder upward, to readjust Madeleine’s weight. “I’m just the vessel, and probably even less than that.”
“But you knew what it was.”
“No, Madeleine did.”
There was silence, at those words. “Yes. She did.”
A further silence. He needed to speak up: it was now or never. “Thank you,” he said.
Isabelle turned, surprised. “Why?”
“For coming for me.”
“You mistake me.” Isabelle’s voice was cold, but her hands shook. “I came because Emmanuelle needed you. Because it was the only way.”
“You’re not a good liar,” Philippe said, before he could stop himself. There was no answer from her; not the explosion he had half dreaded. “You could have come on different terms. Selene gave me up, didn’t she? She thought I was dead. She thought I was guilty.”
“I don’t care about what Selene thinks.” Isabelle’s voice was low and fierce. “I know you wouldn’t—”
Wouldn’t he? He wasn’t sure. If it was the way forward; if it could open the way to Annam… He was honest enough to know he would do whatever was necessary. “I don’t have your scruples,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if she still had any.
“No.” Isabelle laughed, shortly and without joy. “You don’t. You’re fortunate.”
She was Fallen, and she would pull away from him eventually; she would take her cues from Selene and the House. And yet…
She had come back for him. Had argued with Madeleine for him; had casually swept aside all of Selene’s suspicions and doubts as if they meant nothing; and had stood for him over standing for the needs of the House. That counted for something, surely? Surely she wouldn’t turn into another Morningstar or Asmodeus…
They reached the bottom of the stairs, hearing their steps echo in a space that was far vaster than the little they could see. Philippe tried to call more wood to him, but there was nothing there; just that breathless, expectant pause after someone had spoken; an answer, waiting to be uttered.
“There is something,” Isabelle said. She shifted so abruptly that Philippe almost didn’t react in time, and Madeleine slid down halfway to the ground. He caught her, the muscles in his arms burning.
“I can’t see—” And then he didn’t need to strain, because the soft radiance from her skin increased a thousandfold; not slowly like the rising of the sun, but with the speed of a shutter removed from a lamp; from darkness to light in heartbeats. He closed his eyes; it was almost too much.
When he opened them again, he was alone with Madeleine; Isabelle was a few paces ahead, moving toward the center of the room.
Like the church above, it was a room of pillars and arches; smaller and more intimate, the arches pressing down on the ground with the weight of the earth, the smell of damp and rot almost overbearing. It was not large, and most of it was filled with graves: the stones of the floor were meticulously laid out, each with a name and a prayer, and letters whose gold had flaked away with time.
In the center…
In the center was a stone bed, not unlike the one he’d been pinned to in the dragon kingdom — except that this one was occupied already, by an ivory skeleton lying in the darkness with its arms crossed over its chest, one hand over the other, as if protecting its rib cage from depredations.
“Isabelle?”
She didn’t turn. “Can’t you feel it?” she asked.
It trembled in the air: a touch of heat, a butterfly’s wings of fire, caressing his cheeks; an irresistible attraction to the locus of power in the center of the room. Bones. Angel bones.
He was halfway to the stone bier before he realized he’d left Madeleine. He turned back. She was lying in shadow, on the folded edge of his cloak — at least he’d remembered to wrap her in something, to keep away the damp — and then it had hold of him again, was reining him in like an unruly horse, pulling him to the center of the room.
Power. Magic, all that he had ever wanted, with the prickly incandescence of a thornbush. It would hurt if he grasped it, but once he did so the world would be at his feet; he would dispel the pall over his heart with a wave of his fingers, would go back to Indochina in less than the time it took to draw breath; would make Asmodeus scream and writhe as he had done with a mere look….
Chung Thoai’s sad, regal face swam out of the morass of his thoughts. It’s stronger than you, he said, shaking his head, his chipped antlers shining in the darkness.
The Dragon King hadn’t referred to the bones, of course; but still… Still, a part of him stood, trembling; remembered what it had felt like to be hungry and not eat, to be thirsty and not drink; to feel power in every bone and sinew, and not use a drop of it.
This.
This was weaker than him.
When he opened his eyes, he stood mere inches from the stone bier, watching the bones. They looked old, though that hardly meant anything: slight and fluted, with the reinforced rib cage clearly visible; fused in odd places, a skeleton that was almost, but not quite, human, with the ridges, tapering off, that had once marked the beginnings of wings. A Fallen; but then, there had never been any doubt of that. There was no visible wound, no indication of how their owner had met his end. Merely magic, burning raw and naked, a fire he dared not touch.
“Isabelle—”
He couldn’t see her face, but he could feel her: engrossed, as he was, in the power that emanated from the bones, reaching out to touch them. “Isabelle,” he said. “Wait—”
Her hand had already connected. Fire leaped from the bones into her; so that, for a moment, she stood with vast wings billowing behind her, wreathed in smoke that shouldn’t have been.
A noise, like a soft patter of rain: the bones were crumbling one after another, falling onto the stone table: mere dust, not angel essence, just the remnants of something that had died long ago.
“Isabelle.”
Slowly, she turned, her lips stretching in a familiar, arrogant smile; and in that moment, looking at the power that streamed from her like water, he knew exactly who the bones had belonged to.
Morningstar.
EIGHTEEN. THE SALTY TASTE OF TEARS
FOR a moment Philippe stood frozen, looking at Isabelle. The light was already trembling, on the cusp of extinguishing itself, its persistent whispers fading into silence, its secret traceries absorbed into her skin. He tried to whisper her name, but the light held him fast — the light, and the ageless reflection in her eyes, the same storm of power he’d always seen in Morningstar’s gaze, a conflagration that promised him anything he’d ever wanted.
There was something behind her, a shadow that was growing, even as the light sank down and died, even as the dust on the stone bed scattered under the breath of a wind that came from nowhere: something that wasn’t wings, or light. Something…