Page 26 of The Shade of Things
Those were the three angels who’d set the damnation of our kind in motion when they couldn’t outright murder this batch of Lilith’s progeny. Even the KH had a trap laid within it, constructed by the angels, one that I’d been lucky and wise enough to escape. The thought of actually meeting these divine beings? Yikes.
“How did you find them?” I said, my voice strange.
“You don’t find angels,” Arlo said. “They find you. I showed them the cracks in the seams. They made me the cracks in the seams.” He let out a laugh. A single “ha” that went on and on, twisting and turning like an ancient melody.
I was horrified.
I was transfixed.
The laughter cut out to a shocking silence.
Creepy as that was, it had nothing to do with my visit. “What does the Ascendant do?”
Arlo never got the magic amplifier because the device was stolen when Tatiana was on her way to deliver it to him, but he must have known what it was capable of.
Giant eyes snapped open on the ceiling and I jumped, my hand on my heart. They were swirls upon swirls upon swirls.
I screwed my lids shut tight, terrified I’d fall into his madness.
“You seek it?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Foolish girl.” A velvet touch stroked over the top of my head, and I shuddered. “Leave the monsters in the dark,” he said.
I snapped my eyes open, tamping down my irritation. “Banim Shovavim aren’t monsters. That’s angel prejudice, not truth.”
Before I could press him again about the Ascendant, the ground rippled, and a low moan swam around me.
The air became moist, the moan raspy, as if Arlo struggled for breath.
A door opened in the wall, and Pyotr beckoned at me almost desperately with a neon yellow sock.
Two hands made of that mix of light and dark that was Arlo gripped my shoulders so hard that I hissed. “Leave!”
I jerked free and bent my knees, arms thrown wide, surfing the quaking ground. I wasn’t retreating without an answer to the most important question. “What happened to the Ascendant after it was stolen from Tatiana? Where could it be?”
“Miriam!” In the doorway, Pyotr jumped up and down like a little kid who had to pee.
Spurts of black and white exploded around me like blood in a Tarantino film.
I held my ground for a moment longer, but an answer was pointless if I died obtaining it. Hunched over, with my hands protecting my head, I lurched my way to Pyotr and safety.
Just before I stepped across the threshold, a whisper skittered across my skin like dried leaves. “‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’”
I jerked back around, but Pyotr hauled me out and slammed the door. Something hit it from the other side hard enough to almost punch through before the door disappeared. The gargoyle slid onto the rocky ground, blotting his forehead with the neon yellow sock.
I rested my trembling hand against the restored rock face. Stars wrapped in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a play about betrayal. Ignoring the alarm bells in my head, I scrounged up half-buried lectures from my English lit degree. Cassius is convincing Brutus to join the assassination plot by saying that it’s not fate or destiny but a weakness of character—people perceiving themselves as underlings—that keeps them from action.
How was this the answer to the Ascendant’s location?
“He”—Pyotr paused until I nodded that I understood he meant Arlo—“will be like that for all eternity.”
“For what? Hubris?” Flying with angels. Delusions of grandeur. I shook my head. “Are there others like him?”
“No. More would be…bad for Kefitzat Haderech.” Pyotr pressed the damp sock into my hand and unsteadily got to his feet.
With that he patted my head and lumbered off, leaving me to wonder if Arlo’s last words referred to the Ascendant or something much worse.
