Rapture

SEVEN KNOT ANGELS

The cloak was paralyzing.

The more Luce moved, the more it constricted around her. Its rough fabric was secured with a strange rope that pinched her skin and held her body rigidly.

When Luce writhed against it, the rope responded, cinching tighter around her shoulders, squeezing her ribs until she could barely breathe.

The Scale angel held Luce under his bony arm as he scraped through the night sky. With her face buried in the fetid waist of the regenerated cloak the angel wore, she could see nothing, could only feel wind whipping across the surface of her miserable mildewed cocoon. All she could hear was wind-howl, punctuated by the beating of stiff wings.

Where was he taking her? How would she get word to Daniel? They did not have time for this!

After a while the wind stopped, but the Scale angel didn’t land.

He and Luce hovered in the air.

Then the angel let out a roar. “Trespasser!” he bellowed.

Luce felt the two of them dropping, but she could see only the darkness of the folds of her captor’s cloak, which muffled her cries of terror—until the sound of breaking glass halted even those.

Thin, razor-like shards sliced through her constricting cloak, through the fabric of her jeans. Her legs stung like they’d been cut in a thousand places.

When the Scale angel’s feet slammed into a landing, Luce shuddered with the impact. He dropped her roughly, and she landed on her hip bone and shoulder.

She rolled a couple of feet, then stopped. She saw that she was near a long wooden workman’s table piled high with fragments of faded cloth and porcelain.

She squirmed under its temporary shelter, almost suc-cessful at preventing her cloak from constricting more tightly around her. It had begun to close around her trachea.

But at least now she could see.

She was in a cold, cavernous room. The floor beneath her was a lacquered mosaic made of triangular gray and red tiles. The walls were a gleaming mustard-colored marble, as were the thick square pillars in the center of the room. She briefly studied a long row of frosted skylights that spanned the vast ceiling forty feet above. The roof was pocked by open craters of broken glass, revealing dark gray vistas of cloudy night on the other side. That must have been where she and the angel crashed through.

And this must be the museum wing the Scale had overtaken, the one Vincent had told Daniel about on the copper roof. That meant Daniel must be just outside—and Arriane and Annabelle and Roland should be somewhere inside! Her heart soared, then sank.

Their wings were bound, the Outcasts had said. Were they in the same shape she was in? She hated that she had made it here and couldn’t even help them, hated that she had to move to save them but that moving put her life in peril. There was perhaps nothing worse than not being able to move.

The Scale angel’s muddy black boots appeared before her. Luce peered up at his towering figure. He bent down, smelling like rotting mothballs, his dull eyes leer-ing. His black-gloved hand reached for her—

Then the Scale angel’s hand fell limply—as if he had been knocked out. He lunged forward, crashing heavily into the workman’s table, pushing it back, exposing Luce. The severed sculpture head that had apparently struck the Scale rolled eerily to rest on the floor near Luce’s face, seeming to stare into Luce’s eyes.

As Luce rolled back under the table, more blue wings blurred in her peripheral vision. More Scale. Four of them flew in tawdry formation toward a recessed alcove about halfway up the wall . . . where Luce now saw Emmet standing, brandishing a long, silver saw.

Emmet must have thrown the head that had saved her from the Scale! He was the trespasser whose entrance through the ceiling had enraged her kidnapper. Luce had never thought she’d be so happy to see an Outcast.

Emmet was surrounded by sculptures on platforms and pedestals, some shrouded, some scaffolded, one newly beheaded—and by four impossibly old Scale angels, hovering closer to him in the air, cloaks extended, like shabby vampires. These stiff black cloaks seemed to be their only weapon, their only tool, and Luce knew well it was a brutal one. Her pained breathing was evidence of that.

She suppressed a gasp as Emmet pulled a starshot from an unseen quiver in his trench coat and held it out in front of him. Daniel had made the Outcasts promise not to kill the Scale!

The Scale backed slowly away from Emmet in the air, hissing, “Vile! Vile!” so loudly that it caused Luce’s captor to stir on the table above her. Then the Outcast did something that amazed everybody in the room. He aimed the starshot at himself. Luce had seen Daniel sui-cidal in Tibet, so she knew something about that emotion’s desperate atmosphere, the defeated body language that accompanied a gesture so extreme. But Emmet seemed as confident and defiant as ever as he looked from one leathery Scale face to another.

The Scale became emboldened by Emmet’s strange behavior. They hovered ever closer, blocking the thin Outcast from Luce’s view with the slow intensity of vul-tures approaching a carcass on a desert highway. Where were the other Outcasts? Where was Phil? Had the Scale already done away with them?

What sounded like thick and heavy fabric being torn echoed loudly through the room. The Scale hovered motionlessly, their broad, overlapping cloaks like the gaping mouth of an Announcer that led somewhere terrible and sad. Then a slicing sound cut through the air, followed by another tearing sound—and then the four Scale angels spun like rag dolls toward Luce, their jaws slack, their eyes open, their cloaks mutilated and ripped open to expose black hearts and black lungs twitching spasti-cally, streaming pale blue blood.

Daniel had told the Outcasts they could not use their starshots to kill the Scale, but he had not said the Outcasts could not hurt them.

The four Scale angels fell in a clump to the floor like puppets whose strings had been snipped. Luce looked up from where they lay, struggling to breathe, to the alcove, where Emmet was wiping black Scale blood from the fletchings of his starshot. Luce had never heard of anyone using the butt end of a starshot as a weapon—and apparently neither had the Scale.

“Is Lucinda here?” Luce heard Phil call out. She looked up to see his face glowing through a crater in the roof.

“Here!” Luce shouted up to him, unable to keep herself from lunging as she did so, causing her cloak to cinch even more tightly around her throat. When she grimaced sharply, the cloak tightened a little more.

A huge leg drooped over the edge of the table, its black boot swinging into Luce’s face, striking her flush on the nose, bringing tears of pain to her eyes. Her captor was awake! This realization, coupled with the sudden pain that half blinded her, caused Luce to push back more deeply under the table’s shelter. When she did so, her cloak closed all the way around her throat, pinching her trachea completely shut. She panicked, gasped uselessly for air, writhing now that it didn’t matter if the cloak constricted anymore—

Then she remembered how she’d discovered in Venice that she could hold her breath for longer than she’d thought possible. And Daniel had just told her she could will herself to overcome that limitation anytime she wanted. So she did it; she just did it; she willed herself to stay alive.

But that didn’t stop her captor from knocking the sheltering workman’s table aside, sending pottery and the severed limbs of ancient sculptures flying.

“You look . . . uncomfortable.” He grinned, revealing blood-slick teeth, and extended a black-gloved hand toward the hem of Luce’s cloak.

But the Scale angel froze when a starshot fletching burst through the place where, only a moment before, his right eye had been. Blue blood jetted from the emptied socket, down onto Luce’s cloak. He cried out, staggered wildly around the room, arms flailing, the backward starshot protruding from his wizened face.

Pale hands appeared before her, then the sleeves of a ratty tan trench coat, followed by a shaven blond head.

Phil’s face betrayed no feeling as he dropped to his knees to face her.

“There you are, Lucinda Price.” He gripped the collar of the binding black cloak and lifted Luce up. “I had returned to the palace to check on you.” He set her atop a nearby table. She immediately fell over, not able to hold herself upright. Emmet righted her with as little emotion as his colleague had.

At last she could afford to take a longer view. In front of her, three shallow stairs led down to an expansive main chamber. In its center, a red velvet rope sectioned off a towering statue of a lion. It was reared up on two feet, teeth bared toward the sky mid-roar. Its mane was chipped and yellowed.

Blue-gray wings coated the floor of the restoration wing, reminding Luce of a locust-covered parking lot she’d seen one summer after a Georgia rainstorm. The Scale weren’t dead—they had not vanished into starshot dust—but so many of them were unconscious the Outcasts could barely tread without crunching their wings.

Phil and Emmet had been busy, incapacitating at least fifty of the Scale. Their short blue wings twitched occa-sionally, but their bodies did not move.

All six Outcasts—Phil, Vincent, Emmet, Sanders, the other Outcast girl, whose name Luce did not know, even Daedalus with his bandaged face—were still on their feet, brushing pieces of tissue and bone from their blue-splattered trench coats.

The blond girl, the one who’d helped nurse Daedalus back to health, grabbed a barely breathing female Scale angel by the hair. The old hag’s moldy blue wings trembled as the blond Outcast battered the Scale’s head against a marble pillar. She shrieked the first four or five times her head struck the stone. Then the shrieks petered out and her bulged eyes rolled back in her head.

Phil struggled with the black straitjacket fastened around Luce. His quick fingers made up for his lack of sight. An unconscious Scale angel fell from somewhere above her, his battered cheek coming to rest between her neck and shoulder. She felt hot blood trickle onto her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut and shuddered.

Phil kicked the angel off the table, sending him into Luce’s one-eyed captor, who still staggered clumsily around the room, groaning, “Why me? I do everything right.”

“He has the halo—” Luce started.

But Phil’s attention jerked back to the sickly mass of Scale angel wings, where a portly Scale with hair like a monk had risen and now advanced on Daedalus from behind. A coarse black cloak hung over the Outcast’s head, ready to drop.

“I will be right back, Lucinda Price.” Phil left Luce in her binds on the table and nocked a starshot in his bow.

In an instant, he had shoved himself between Daedalus and the Scale angel.

“Drop the cloak, Zaban.” Phil looked as fierce as he had when he’d first appeared in Luce’s parents’ backyard. Luce was surprised to realize they knew each other by name, but of course, they must have once all lived in Heaven together. That was hard to imagine now.

Zaban had watery blue eyes and bluish lips. He looked almost gleeful at finding the starshot pointed at him. He slung the cloak over his shoulder and turned to face Phil, freeing Daedalus to pick up a spindly Scale angel by the feet. He swung the old angel around in a circle three times, then sent him crashing through the eastern window, out into a tower of scaffolding below.

“Threatening to shoot me, are you, Phillip?” Zaban’s eyes were on the starshot. “You want to tip the balance toward Lucifer? Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Phil bristled. “You don’t matter enough for your death to tip the balance.”

“At least we count for something. All together, our lives make a difference in the balance. Justice always makes a difference. You Outcasts”—he smiled in mock pity—“stand for nothing. That is what makes you worth-less.”

That was enough for Phil. There was something about this Scale he couldn’t endure. With a grunt he loosed the arrow toward Zaban’s heart.

“I stand opposed to you,” he muttered, and waited for the blue-winged geezer to vanish.

Luce waited for the vanishing, too. She’d seen it happen before. But the arrow glanced off Zaban’s cloak and clattered to the floor.

“How did you—?” Phil asked.

Zaban laughed and pulled something out from a hidden breast pocket in his cloak. Luce leaned forward, eager to see how Zaban had protected himself. But she leaned too far and slid off the table. She landed on the floor on her face.

No one noticed. They were staring at the small book Zaban produced from his cloak. Propping herself up slightly, Luce saw it was bound in leather, the same shade of blue as Scale angel wings. It was bound with a knotted golden cord. It looked like a Bible, the kind Civil War soldiers used to stuff in their breast pockets in hopes the books would protect their hearts.

This book had done just that.

Luce squinted to read its title, squirming a few inches closer on the floor. She was still too far away.

In a single movement, Phil retrieved his starshot and swatted the book out of Zaban’s hand. By a stroke of luck, it landed a few feet away from Luce. She wriggled again, knowing she couldn’t pick it up, not the way the cloak was binding her. Still, she had to know what its pages contained. It seemed familiar, as if she’d seen it long, long before. She read the golden letters on its spine.

A Record of the Fallen.

Now Zaban ran for it, stopping short of Luce, who lay exposed in the center of the floor. He glared at her and pocketed the book.

“No, no,” he said. “You don’t get to look at this. You don’t get to see all that’s been accomplished by Scale wings. Nor what’s left to do to achieve the ultimate harmonious balance. Not when you’ve spent all this time too busy to take note of us, to take note of justice, selfishly falling in and out of love.”

Though Luce hated the Scale, if there was a record of the fallen, she burned to know whose names were on those pages, to see where Daniel’s name was tallied now.

This was what the fallen kept talking about. A single angel who would tip the scale.

But before Zaban could hurtle any more criticism at Luce, a pair of brilliant white wings filled her vision—

an angel descending through the largest hole in the skylight.

Daniel touched down in front of her and eyed the cloak imprisoning her. He studied her constricted neck.

His muscles strained through his T-shirt as he tried to tear the cloak away.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Phil lift a small pickax from a nearby table and slice it across Zaban’s chest. The Scale angel swerved, trying to spin out of range. The blade connected with his arm. The blow was so powerful it severed Zaban’s hand at the wrist. Sickened, Luce watched the pale slack fist thump to the floor.

Aside from the blue blood streaming, it could have belonged to one of the ravaged statues.

“Tie that on with one of your knots,” Phil taunted as Zaban fumbled after his missing appendage among the battered, unconscious bodies of his sect.

“Is it hurting you?” Daniel tore at the knots binding Luce.

“No.” She willed it to be true. It almost was.

When brute force didn’t work, Daniel tried approaching the cloak more strategically. “I had the loose end just a moment ago,” he muttered. “Now it’s riddled up inside the cloak.” His fingers inched across her body, feeling close and far away.

Luce wished that her hands, over any other part of her body, were free so she could touch Daniel right now, soothe his anxiety. She trusted him to free her. She trusted him to do anything.

What could she do to help him? She closed her eyes and drifted back to the lifetime in Tahiti. Daniel had been a sailor. He had taught her dozens of knots in their quiet afternoons on the beach. She remembered now: the alpine butterfly, which made a straight loop in the middle of a rope with two lobed wings on either side, good for carrying extra weight on a line. Or the lover’s knot, which looked simple, heart-shaped, but could only be untied using four hands at once; each one had to loop a strand through a different portion of the heart’s core.

The cloak was so tight Luce could not move a muscle. His fingers trolled the collar, tightening it further.

Daniel cursed at how it pinched her neck.

“I can’t,” he finally cried out. “The Scale straitjacket is comprised of infinite knots. Only one of them can unbind it. Who did this to you?”

Luce jerked her head toward the blue-winged angel howling to himself, staggering in a corner by a marble faun. The starshot fletching still protruded from his eye.

She wanted to tell Daniel how her captor had taken out Olianna with a flagpole, then bound her up and brought her here.

But she could not even speak. The cloak was too tight.

By then, Phil had the whining angel in his grasp, gripped by the collar of his blood-wet cloak. He slapped the Scale three times before the Scale ceased his self-pitying moans and pulled back his blue wings in alarm.

Luce saw that a thick ring of dried blue blood had formed around the place where the starshot fletching protruded from his socket.

“Unbind her, Barach,” Daniel ordered, recognizing Luce’s captor immediately, making Luce wonder how well they knew each other.

“Not likely.” Barach leaned away and spat a stream of blue blood and a couple of sharp and tiny teeth out onto the floor.

In a flash, Phil had a starshot trained between the angel’s eyes. “Daniel Grigori instructed you to unbind her. You will oblige.”

Barach flinched, eyeing the starshot with disdain.

“Vile. Vile!”

A dark shadow fell over Phil’s body.

Hazily, Luce processed the sight of another Scale angel, the craggy old hag with moldy blue wings. She must have roused after she’d been knocked out. Now she came at Phil with the same pickax he’d used on Zaban—

But then the Scale angel vanished into dust.

Ten feet behind her, Vincent stood with an empty bow in hand. He nodded at Phil, then turned back to scour the carpet of blue wings for movement.

Daniel turned to Phil and muttered, “We need to be careful about how many we take out. The Scale do matter in the balance. A little.”

“Unfortunate,” Phil said, strange envy in his voice.

“We will keep the killing to a minimum, Daniel Grigori.

But we would prefer to kill all of them.” He raised his voice for Barach’s ears. “Welcome to the realm of sightlessness. The Outcasts are more powerful than you think. I would kill you without a second thought, without a first one, even. However, I will ask again: Unbind her.”

Barach stood a long moment, as if weighing his op-tions, blinking his one remaining wrinkled old eyelid.

“Unbind her! She cannot breathe!” Daniel roared.

Barach growled and approached Luce. His age-spotted hands worked out a series of knots that neither Phil nor Daniel had been able to find. Luce felt no relief in her neck, though. Not until he began to whisper something, very low, under his rancid breath.

Lack of oxygen had made her feel faint, but the words tunneled into her foggy mind. They were an ancient form of Hebrew. Luce didn’t know how she knew the language, but she did.

“And Heaven wept to see the sins of Her children.” The words were almost unintelligible. Daniel and Phil had not even heard them. Luce couldn’t be sure she’d heard them right—but then, they were familiar.

Where had she heard them before?

The memory came to her faster than she would have liked: a different member of the Scale, sweeping Luce in a different body into an older cloak than this one. It had happened a very long time ago. She’d been through all this before, bound up and then released.

In that lifetime, Luce had gotten her hands on something she wasn’t supposed to see. A book, tied up with a complicated knot.

A Record of the Fallen.

What was she doing with it? What did she want to see?

The same thing she wanted to see now. The names of the angels who had yet to choose. But she hadn’t been permitted to read the book then, either.

Long before, Luce had held the book in her hands, and without knowing how, she had nearly untied its knot. Then came the moment when the Scale caught her and bound her in the cloak. She had watched his blue wings shudder with intensity as the angel tied and retied the book. Making sure her impure fingers hadn’t damaged it, he had said. She heard him whisper those words—the same strange words—just before he shed a tear over the book.

The gold thread had unraveled like magic.

She looked up at the craggy old angel now and watched a silvery tear slide from his eye down the maze of his cheek. He looked truly moved, but in a patroniz-ing sort of way, like he pitied the fate of her soul. The tear landed on the cloak, and the knots mysteriously un-knotted.

She gasped for air. Daniel yanked the cloak the rest of the way off her. She swung her arms around him.

Freedom.

She was still embracing Daniel when Barach leaned in close to her ear. “You’ll never succeed.”

“Silence, fiend,” Daniel commanded.

But Luce wanted to know what Barach meant. “Why not?”

“You are not the one!” Barach said.

“Silence!” Daniel shouted.

“Never, never, never. Not in a million years,” the angel chanted, rubbing his sandpaper cheek against Luce’s—right before Phil loosed the arrow into his heart.