It was on every digital news channel and carried by every current affairs broadcaster. We flicked from the British BBC through the Irish RTÉ News Now, to CNN and Fox and Sky and Al Jazeera, finding footage flashed up from around the world. It had started about an hour ago, it seemed. The flame was appearing randomly, scouring channels through the earth and disappearing as it smashed into hillsides. Even Russia Today had video of a fireball punching its way out of a mountain in what it claimed was Peru, spewing lava over the slopes below. None of the commentators seemed to have grasped that there was a single event; they talked about multiple random attacks taking place almost simultaneously, but I knew it was just one, flashing in and out of mundane space. Wherever it appeared the earth shook.

I cringed as drone footage showed a fireball ripping through the suburbs of Mexico City and houses crumbling into the streets in its wake. That’s people dying, I thought sickly.

“Spiteful son-of-a-bitch,” Egan breathed. “He’s trying to take us all down with him.”

“No,” I said, my lips numb. “I understand him. It’s inat.”

He looked at me balefully.

“It’s a Serbian word. It means…” Actually, yes, it could mean spite, but it was way deeper and darker than that. “It means never giving in, no matter what. Your Winston Churchill understood it.”

“Not my Churchill,” Egan rasped.

“‘We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’. It means never bowing your head, even when you’ve lost. Defiance, no matter what the cost. My people understand that.”

“It’s innocent human beings paying that cost!”

“Then blame Michael,” I said, my voice trembling. “He has Raphael to back him up. He has the whole of the Heavenly Host at his command. If he called them in they could probably take Azazel down like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Michael’s insisting on doing it single-handedly. Now that’s pride.”

He ran his hand through his hair and didn’t answer.

“…unofficially reported to have been raised to DEFCON 2,” said a grim-faced announcer on CNN.

“Oh, grand!”

“We have to go back to Rome,” I blurted, the words out of my mouth before I’d even thought it through.

“Why?”

“Because there’s one archangel left who hasn’t pitched in on either side,” I said in desperation.

“You mean Gabriel.”

“Yes. He could swing it. He could make the Pillar of the West stop. He could…” I didn’t know what he could do. Call off the Host? Fight alongside Azazel? “If he was freed… We have to talk to Gabriel.” I swallowed hard. “You’re going to have to break every last vow, Egan, and get us into his prison. We need to find out just how bad he wants to be free.”

For a long moment he just looked at me, wide-eyed. Then he nodded. “Okay then. I don’t know how we’re going to get there, but we can try.”

Oh you hero. “Where is he held?”

“Right under the Forum. He was brought back to Rome with the other loot from Jerusalem, and the Emperor Domitian gave him into the care of the Vestals.” He was talking to himself as much as to me; his focus was already elsewhere. Bending to the sofa, he threw the whole piece of furniture over onto its cushions, exposing the edge of the rug underneath. Flipping that, he revealed the old floorboards.

“Just perfect,” I said, shaking my head. I didn’t know if setting an angel to be tended by a group of professional virgins was genius or stupidity.

Egan went to the sideboard, removed a knife from the drawer and then bent, without explanation, to prize at the end of one of those boards.

I left him to it, walked into the kitchen, and opened the front of the washing machine to retrieve my clothes. It seemed petty, but I didn’t want to run around Rome in a borrowed bathrobe and no underwear. I pulled on each hot, wet garment in turn and then, with a grimace, expelled all the heat in them in a great puff of steam that left me dry and shaking and triumphant.

But now my intent needed to be grimmer.

Samyaza, I said inwardly.

No, came the faint answer—not a verbal response at all, just a twisting sensation of rejection.

You will do what I tell you. You started this. I will take everything I need of your power to do this.

He roiled within me, and I seized him, twisting. I was in no mood to argue.

When I walked back into the living room a little later, Egan was kneeling over a hole in the floorboards and unpacking a small bundle. I should have taken a moment to be impressed by his emergency preparations. He stuffed a wad of euros into his back pants pocket, checked through three passports for the one he wanted, and loaded a clip into a pistol.

“We can get a car from the village to Knock Airport,” he said, his voice hard. “That’s closest. It’s small, mostly pilgrimage flights. Every damn inch of international airspace is going to be locked down within the hour, if it’s not already, but we can try hijacking a private plane. Hope to make it through the panic without being shot down.” Then he looked up at me and lurched back up onto both feet. “Shite. Your eyes.”

They were glowing green again, I knew. I smiled thinly. I could feel Samyaza’s power like coppery venom throbbing in my veins.

“We won’t need to fly.” If this works.

“What are you—”

“Trust me.”

“Oh, Milja.” He half-shook his head, appalled. “You mean like, ‘Beam me down, Scotty’? You can do that?”

“Samyaza will do what I tell him.” I wet my lips, searching for the words for what I knew instinctively. “When he gave himself up to the archangels, he surrendered his will. It’s like there’s no fight left in him. And I have him here.” I put my hand on my stomach, though it would have been more accurate to drop it a little lower.

“In your possession,” said Egan, somewhat sourly. “It had better be that way around, Milja.”

I nodded.

“Are you sure about this?”

No, I’m not. What other choice is there, though? “Yes.”

“Okay then. Give me a minute to pack.”

He vanished into the back of the house and I paced the floor restlessly as I waited.

When he returned, he’d changed into heavier clothes all in black, including a vest with an excessive number of pockets. He carried a small black sports bag too, and was stuffing both with a number of oddments—a flashlight, a scarlet can of spray paint, a roll of toilet paper. Tucked under his arm was the lightweight fleece jacket he’d brought back from Norway. He fixed me with a searching look.

“Where’s the mistletoe dart?”

“I stabbed the Adversary with it,” I admitted, warily. “Last I saw, it was still stuck in him.”

His eyes widened.

“I didn’t actually kill him or anything…”

Egan laughed. It wasn’t a big laugh, but it relaxed his face and returned a little warmth to his regard. “You never stop surprising me.”

Is that good?

“You should put the dressing gown back on, and fasten this over the top.” He tossed the jacket to me. “It’ll at least look a bit like you’re wearing a skirt. It’s not like I’ve got a spare dress lying around, and those leggings won’t do I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“Sure, we’ve got to drop in at the Vatican Museum before we go to the Forum.”

“What for?”

“The key. There’s only one, and it’s in Don Giuseppe’s office.”

My heart sank a little. “I can’t take us into the Vatican—it’s holy ground. The Host would know the second we did something that brash.”

“Some bits of it are holier than others. And let’s face it, the chance of us going unnoticed aren’t good anyway—there’ll be cameras and security all over. But if you want somewhere quiet that we both know… How about that small piazza behind our hostel? We can cross the river on foot.”

I nodded unhappily. I didn’t want to cross back into Vatican territory, with or without a possessing demon onboard. I didn’t want to face Father Giuseppe again. Something about that bland little man scared me; something that had nothing to do with the physical danger he and Vidimus represented.

But I followed Egan’s sartorial suggestion and did the jacket up as close as it would go. Which was pretty baggy. “Ready?” I asked.

“I doubt it.”

“Hold on tight to me.”

Egan slipped his arms around my waist with more reluctance than he’d ever yet shown. A few minutes ago we’d been on the verge of frantic and uninhibited passion, I thought with a pang; now he had to force himself to embrace me. The difference was my unnatural green eyes, of course, and what they betrayed lurking behind them.

I twined my arms around his neck and he shut his own eyes, pulling me closer with a sigh. A tiny, fugitive thrill echoed through my body.

“Take a deep breath,” I warned. Then, Samyaza. We’re going. Now.

The plunge into the airless nothingness between the folds of space was nothing short of vertiginous this time, as if I’d stepped off the lip of a coal-shaft. I knotted my hands around Egan, the only solid thing left to me, and felt the air drawn from my lungs in a long soundless shriek. I tried to hold a picture of the piazza in my head, but it shredded to tatters in the rush of the void and its colors were eaten by the darkness. Our fall went on and on, far longer than any before, and I could feel my chest burning with pain and my hands growing numb and Egan pulling from my weakening grasp. And I thought, We will die here.

Then we landed and light burst around us. I wrenched out of Egan’s grasp and fell to my knees on the stones, heaving for air.

I could hear the broken and incoherent words with which he tried to express quite how much he hated what had just happened. Then he grabbed my shoulders. “You okay?”

I nodded, still gulping oxygen. We had arrived, it seemed, exactly where we’d been aiming for. The little piazza, barely more than a junction of three alleyways. It was daylight, and it was drizzling; a cool rain that seemed like a balm after the emptiness, and a joke in comparison to Achill’s scything, horizontal precipitation.

My legs wobbled as he pulled me to my feet.

“Please, let’s not do that again,” he said.

“I’m not sure I could.”

“It worked though.” He laughed sourly. “And if we survive any of this, at least I’ll be able to boast that I’ve literally been to Hell and back.”

My stare must have been questioning.

“C’mon, Milja,” he said, shouldering his bag. “Where did you think your short-cut was taking us?”

Ohhh…

Nobody seemed to have witnessed us, so we gathered ourselves and slipped out onto the main street. The road was jammed with cars, the sidewalks frantic with pedestrians. A choral anthem of car horns bellowed from all around us. Everyone who could move seemed to be in a hurry, and most of them were heading in the same direction. I pulled up the hood of Egan’s jacket to keep the rain out of my eyes. We let ourselves be swept into the flow toward the bridge and over the Tiber. The only stationary people we encountered were in a crowd gathered at the window of an electronic goods store, staring at the television screens in the window. We paused briefly to crane our necks around others’ shoulders. Several of the onlookers were locked in loud Italian debate about what they were seeing, others only stood and stared and crossed themselves.

Hohhot in Inner Mongolia; Heidelberg in Germany; some city of fourteen million people in China that I’d never even heard of. The names scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

I dreaded to think what the Americans would do if and when a big U.S. city appeared on that list, and they decided they were under attack.

“Come on,” said Egan grimly, grabbing my hand. We pushed across the stationary traffic and onto the Ponte Vittorio Emanuelle II. The flow of pedestrians was that way too; toward Vatican City just over the water. Many were praying out loud. Everyone looked nervous. I glanced up and wondered at the strange look of the clouds overhead; they were clotted and writhing, like spoiled milk.

“Where’d all the people come from?” I gasped, bumping along at his elbow.

“Rome’s filling up with pilgrims for Advent; they come for the Papal Blessing. I’m guessing they’re heading for St. Peter’s Square right now. Happy birthday, by the way.”

“What?”

“You’re a December baby, aren’t you?”

Today’s date hadn’t even occurred to me. “How do you know?”

“I had a whole dossier on you to memorize when I was sent to Montenegro, remember.”

My mouth flapped a bit. I did remember. Of course, the Catholic Church had been keeping tabs on my family for years. I remembered Father Giuseppe’s barbed comment about watching out for Nephilim children.

“Birthdays weren’t a big thing in my family,” I said. “Our patron saint’s day is seen as much more important.”

“Who’s yours?”

The same one Vidimus looks up to: the Archangel Michael. Funny, that. “One who doesn’t like me.”

Egan stopped abruptly, pulling me into the lee of a statue’s plinth. He put a warm hand around the back of my neck, inside my hood, and pressed into me for a sudden kiss that took me wholly by surprise and made my heart flutter and sing. “Happy Birthday,” he whispered.

“Well, I am a bit worried how it will all end,” I said in a small voice, “but at least I’m spending it with the man I love.” And for a moment he smiled wonderingly and I smiled back, the weight of dread lifting.

It hurt when we let each other go. We walked on, keeping close.

“Are we going into the Square?” I asked. The agitated crowd was thickening, and I didn’t like that. Crowds of frightened people are dangerous.

“No. Going to slip in around the side. Come on, let’s cross here.” He led me to the right, away from the beckoning white dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, pushing against the flow now. We walked through streets where every chapel door stood open, thronged to the pavement, and every television shop and bar had a crowd of agitated viewers staring at the screens. Squabbles were breaking out. Motorists, stranded in the gridlock, stood and shouted at each other. A small public drinking fountain, one of the many that dotted Rome’s streets, had attracted a cluster of appalled onlookers and someone who was waving a Bible and preaching in loud Italian, and I saw that the gush of water was bright crimson.

This is it, I thought queasily. The End Times.

The Vatican Museum was behind and to the side of St. Peter’s, but we didn’t approach the gates. Instead Egan stopped across the road, between two shop fronts. “Back door,” he said.

It didn’t look like anything other than an ordinary blank door, wedged between two others in an eighteenth century facade. The sort of door that might lead to an upstairs office or set of apartments. It had an electronic keypad but no label or number.

Egan pulled a canister of spray-paint out of his vest pocket. “This is where I hope they haven’t changed the passcode recently,” he said.

“I’m pretty lucky with that sort of thing. They haven’t.”

He raised an eyebrow, then punched the keys; a six-digit number. The door clicked, and he opened it just far enough to insert his arm and spray the aerosol can upward, with precision.

We entered the hallway on a waft of volatiles and I cast the ruined security camera a single, unfriendly glance. Egan shut the door, sealing us off from the street. The sudden silence was unnerving.

“Here’s hoping security are all watching the TV too.”

The interior passage was short, barren, and ended in a set of narrow steel elevator doors. He led the way there, punched the button, and sprayed the camera lens inside the dingy metal interior the moment it opened. Then he dug the toilet roll from the bag and laid it carefully end-on in the door tracks to stop them closing.

“If we take the lift it’ll definitely set off a warning in security,” he said. “We’re going to have to climb down.”

“Down?”

He didn’t answer; his actions spoke for him. Bending to a maintenance hatch set into the scuffed floor, he used a Leatherman-type folding tool to prize the little latch up and unlock it. A square of darkness yawned at our feet. The elevator doors thumped repeatedly at my back, trying to close but thwarted by the roll of tissue.

Egan pulled out a flashlight and stuck his head into the hatch to have a brief look around. “Right so, there’s a ladder on the wall at the back there. You’ll have to feel with your feet. It’s not that far. Move to the side when you get to the bottom.”

I didn’t like the thought of going first. “Can I have a light?”

He shook his head. “Cameras in the bottom corridor.”

Sliding into that open throat was uncomfortable, and even when I found the rungs with my feet I needed a hand down from Egan, supporting me as I scrabbled with blind fingers to the back wall. The ladder was grease-coated metal and bit into my skin. And despite his reassuring words it seemed to descend a long way into near-total darkness; I eventually worked out it was a good thirty feet, more than enough to cripple me if I fell. The shaft stank of oil and metal.

The square of light overhead cut out and I felt the vibration of Egan’s feet on the rungs as he descended above me. We were in pitch darkness. I opened my unnatural eyes as wide as I could, but could see nothing. There was no option other than working my way down one step at a time, careful never to trust my grip on the oily rungs until I had arms wedged tight enough to take my weight. And I couldn’t help imagining what would happen if the elevator somehow started to come down on top on me.

When my feet finally met solid floor I ducked gratefully aside and listened to Egan descending to join me. The stone felt uneven beneath my feet.

“Okay?” he whispered, finding my arm and giving it a squeeze.

“Yeah.” I wanted to grab him and touch his face, to reassure myself that there was more to him than just his voice and his hand and the smell of his skin.

He crouched at my feet; I could hear him rummaging around in his bag. “Right so, there are cameras in this corridor but the lights don’t trigger from this end unless the lift comes down. When we get to the far end there’s another locked door, and the moment that opens the lights will come on in here, so we need to get through it quickly. I’m going to be wearing infra-red goggles so I’ll lead the way. Watch your footing; the floor’s old and very uneven. Okay?”

“Uhuh.”

“And can you keep your eyes closed, Milja? I can see the green. I don’t know if it’s enough to show up on camera, but let’s be careful.”

I shivered. “Alright.”

“The shaft exit here’s at about shoulder height. I’ll boost you up and follow.”

With his help and a lot of fumbling, I crawled out onto what felt like flagstones and stood, relieved to be out of the lift shaft. My groping hand felt what seemed to be a wall of old, crumbly bricks—then a stone upright, and a gap beyond. A doorway? The smell up here wasn’t grease and machinery but damp cellar.

I heard Egan scramble to my side, then he took my hand. “This way.”

He didn’t lead off through the doorway, to my slight surprise, but past it. I tried to make sense of the echoes and the brush of my fingers, held out to the side. We were in a corridor of brick and stone, which seemed to take a dead straight line. There were many openings off it though, enough of them to make me think of a row of prison cells. But we walked and walked, and I could not imagine a prison corridor that long.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

“We’re actually down on the Imperial Roman level. This used to be a road outside the city walls, but the ground’s risen since those days. When they started building St. Peter’s they dealt with hillsides and stuff by slabbing over and backfilling to bring it up to level. So it all went underground.”

“What are these doors?”

“Tombs. The Romans buried their dead outside the walls, along the roadside. If you follow the passages far enough, this connects up to St. Peter’s tomb on the other side of the basilica.”

I pictured the rows of gaping graves on either side of us as we passed. Those people, dead so long ago—ancestors, perhaps, of those we’d seen on the streets above. If I dared open my eyes would I see their ghosts looking out at me? Would they rise up and condemn me, if they knew, for the chaos and terror I’d brought on the world of their children? I knew my own forebears would. They’d dedicated their lives to keeping Azazel enchained. They’d carried that burden and that fear. They’d sacrificed everything, and I’d thrown it into the wind. The thought churned over in my belly, indigestible and threatening to rise up my throat. In this inky blackness there was no distraction and no escape. The silence seemed to hiss with the taunts from priest and archangel that I’d tried so hard to ignore.

‘That is why we watched over you, after all.’

‘Nearly as pretty as your mother. How exactly did she die?’

“Egan,” I said in a small voice. “Do you remember what Father Giuseppe said about Vidimus watching my family for Nephilim?”

His step slowed. “Yes.”

Father Giuseppe hadn’t just meant the danger of me bearing Azazel’s children. “Did they think I might be one?”

He sighed—not exasperation, but as if letting out a breath he’d been holding a long time. “To our right there—there’s a doorway. Duck your head. There’s a big stone at the threshold and then a step—two steps down.” He drew me off the path, under a stone lintel, into a space that made small, enclosed echoes, and then around into a corner. I heard a scuffling, and then suddenly there was light on my eyelids.

I opened them, blinking, to see Egan holding a lit flashlight, his fingers across the glass to cut down the illumination. A huge pair of black, complex goggles dangled from a strap in his other hand. His face, very close to my own, looked pale and deathly serious.

From the corners of my eyes I glimpsed ancient brick walls, plastered in parts. A near-featureless cell.

“You’re not his daughter,” he said gently. “If you’d been one of the Nephilim it would have shown up a long time ago, believe me.”

I nodded.

I am not his daughter. But I easily could have been.

“My mother died when I was nine,” I said, the words furred like dust on my tongue. “I remember her crying for weeks; she wouldn’t talk to us, she wouldn’t let us near her. Then one day she walked out into the snow in a blizzard; my father searched for her and brought her back before she froze, but she developed pneumonia and it killed her.”

Egan waited.

“She was four months pregnant, and she was terrified. Scared enough, guilty enough, to try to murder herself and the baby.”

He sucked his lips in and said nothing.

“Everything he tried on me…he’ll have done it to her, won’t he? The dreams and… He’d have tried it on with every woman in my family, all the way back to the beginning. Desperately looking for someone who’d fall in love with him and set him free.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, Milja.”

“You never said anything.”

“To be honest, I assumed you knew.” He looked pained. “It’s sort of obvious, when you think about it.”

Yes. And maybe I did know.

I looked at the floor. “I didn’t think about it. I didn’t want to think. I don’t ever think about my mother. I hardly remember her. Papa put all the photos away. We never talked about her after she died.” And now I know why.

We sent her memory into the wilderness to be forgotten. Both of us. What must Papa have felt? Did he blame her, or Azazel?

How could he have made himself carry on looking after the demon who’d seduced and killed his wife? It must have torn him up inside, like eating glass. I never knew. He never let me see.

It must have nearly killed him, realizing that the same thing was about to happen to me too.

I hurt him more than I ever knew. Oh Papa.

The fruit of knowledge tasted rotten on my lips.

And Mama… I threw her out of my Eden and set an angel with a burning sword to make sure she never came back in.

If Samyaza hadn’t been wrapped around my fear like a snake guarding an egg, I probably wouldn’t have brought myself to recall it, even now.

Egan tipped to brush my hair with his lips. “If it helps, in all the years that Vidimus has been monitoring your family, there’s been no sign that he ever fathered a child with any of them.”

“Maybe she was weaker than the others. She was an outsider, from Belgrade.” Maybe that’s why I was weak.

“I’m afraid I can’t vouch for the unborn child, one way or the other.”

I rubbed at my dry, itchy eyes.

“Milja, what do you want to do?” He sounded calm. “I’m going to let you take the lead on this. D’you still want to help him?”

Are you still on Azazel’s side? I asked myself. Can you still love him?

I took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter.” I forced myself to look him in the eye. “We should hurry. We’ve got an Apocalypse to stop.”

* * *

Ten minutes and three ruined cameras later we escaped out of the corridor into the bottom of a service stairwell, where Egan shed his goggles, vest and other equipment, packing them swiftly away into the little sports bag, and donned instead a black clerical cassock and dog-collar. He hung the bag over his left shoulder and tucked the pistol inside the open zip, easily to hand.

“Come on.”

Our way through the Vatican Museum seemed familiar from my previous visit; corridors, staircases, courtyards, too many ostentatious artworks I didn’t understand. The crowds were missing from the public galleries though. We passed only a few people, almost all of whom seemed in a hurry and weren’t interested in us. A single middle-aged museum security man hailed us at one doorway, but even with him speaking Italian it was obvious that he was asking anxiously for news, not challenging our passage, and Egan shook his head grimly as he answered.

We reached the windowed gallery outside Father Giuseppe’s office, the one with all the Classical statues. A reddish gloom washed the still air. There was a lone figure in residence; the wizened old priest we’d met before. He was staring out of the high window at the sky and fingering the cross about his neck.

Egan strode ahead of me, his footfalls firm but not hurried enough to cause alarm. He had the gun out from under his arm and pointed at the old priest before even I realized what he was doing.

“Don Giuseppe?” he asked, once recognition and realization had surfaced in the cleric’s eyes. “Dov’è?”

There was a lot of denial in Italian. I could follow the body language: He’s not here, I don’t know where he is, I can’t do anything to help you.

I looked out of the window and saw what he’d been staring at; the sky was an inflamed pink, like a sunset arrived hours early, and clotted all over with tiny, dark red clouds. I’d never seen weather like it.

“Apri la porta.” Egan made an economical gesture with the muzzle at the office door. His demeanor was calm, almost reassuring, but he had the gun. The older man backed away, groping for the key-chain attached to his sash.

“Pezzo di merda,” he muttered under his breath.

“Bless you too, father,” said Egan.

The moment the office door was unlocked and ajar, Egan shoved the old man inside. I held my breath, listening for any noise from within, but there was nothing, and Egan signaled me to follow him.

The room was as I remembered it; large and almost empty. The big desk where I’d sat for Egan's interrogation had been cleared of even the laptop.

“Shut the door all but a crack,” Egan told me. “Listen out for anyone coming.”

We were in a dead-end here, I realized uncomfortably.

I watched Egan put a hand on one shoulder and propel the old priest to the back wall. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. Twitching one of the huge grey tapestries aside, he bunched it onto a large hook, exposing a painted wooden wall into which was set what looked like the dial of an old-fashioned safe. Egan gave one handle a cursory try. “Aprirlo,” he commanded.

The priest waved his hands. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t know the combination.

“Sei sicuro?” asked Egan, stepping back to point the gun at his knee.

“No!” I yelped, making them both look at me, startled. “You don’t have to do that!”

Egan’s face was hard and unreadable, but he waited as I hurried over.

“How many numbers?” I asked. “I can do it, I think.”

“Four and then a turn to the stop. I’ve watched him.”

A while back—weeks, months, but it felt like a lifetime—Roshana had asked me if I’d bothered playing the lottery, and warned me off making my preternatural luck too obvious. A four-number safe combination was not much more difficult than the Mega Millions or the Powerball, surely, even if they did have to come in the right order? No, strike that—With some effort, I squashed the urge to calculate the odds.

“Does it start to the right or the left?”

He hesitated. “Right. I think.”

“Okay.” I squatted down in front of the dial and twin brass handles. I was an engineer by training; of course I’d been interested in how combination safes worked. Who wouldn’t be?

Egan motioned the old priest to stand in the corner out of the way.

Four numbers, anywhere between 0 and 130. So chances are, five turns right to the first integer, four left to the second, three right, two left…and one right to the stop.

I just have to guess which numbers.

Great.

Forty-seven. I spun the dial to the right, around and around.

One.

Twenty-five.

Thirteen.

The dial accepted a final turn right, and stopped. I twisted both handles and they gave, opening the double leaves of what was revealed to be a glass display cabinet. Sloped shelves lined in scarlet velvet met our eyes. LEDs flicked on.

I caught my breath, the thump of my heart loud now that I was paying it attention.

“Well done,” Egan breathed.

“What is this lot?” I asked, frowning at the shelves as Egan slid the glass door aside. Most of them were empty, though labeled in Latin as if exhibits had once been stored there.

“Relics.” He reached in and grabbed a pair of linked metallic keys from their velvet nest. “Vidimus has been collecting anything that might be a viable weapon for centuries now.”

I frowned at one of the few items visible; a fragile-looking arrow with a bronze head, whose card read PARIS SAGITTA. “There aren’t very many of them.”

“Yeah… I’m thinking they’ve been passed out for emergency use.” He sounded grim. “Let’s get out of here.”

He kept his gun pointed at the old priest as he led the way back across the room. But he never reached the door I should have been guarding. There was a thump, it jumped open, and something flew into the room. There came a vivid flash, and a report so loud that it felt like my head had exploded—for a moment I was blinded, deafened and reeling. Then I blinked, contracted my pupils, and shook the silence from my ears. A great green rage swelled up inside me.

Egan, who’d been a lot closer to the point of detonation and knocked back by the blast, lay against the desk, one arm over his face, groaning. My natural instinct should have been to rush over and see if he was injured, but that’s not what I did. Samyaza squirmed inside me like a dragon threatening to hatch, and I felt his fire roaring to the tips of my fingers. I stalked to the door, yanked it open and stepped out into the gallery.

Straight into the guns of the men readying to rush the room.

If they were surprised I’d withstood the stun grenade, they still managed to grab me and throw me to the ground. I got a confused glimpse of lots of guys in black—at least a half-dozen of them, all armed, black boots everywhere. But I was already speaking. My mouth opened and the words spilled out, sweet as honey, caustic as saccharine. I spoke in no language I’d ever heard; it was more than half music, a lilting rising river of words, green as grass, and the voice was not my own. It was an angel’s words and an angel’s voice. It flowed with an inhuman strength, filling the gallery like poison, pouring into their ears. Over my own words I heard them groan and cry out—at first with what sounded like delight, and then mounting distress. One of the men crouched over me fell back, dropping his gun and clutching wildly with both hands at his crotch. His face was flushed beet-red. He arched and twisted and lost his footing altogether, crashing suddenly to the floor, clawing at his own groin.

I pushed myself up onto hands and knees and no one stopped me. Still the music poured out of my throat in a demonic glossolalia. I looked at the men staggering and falling around me and felt no pity, no remorse. Not even for the one clearly fitting, his heels drumming the parquet floor and foam slopping from between his parted lips.

The pagan marbles seemed to writhe at the corners of my chartreuse vision, marble hands sliding over marble thighs. Pan pushed Selene down and rutted her white ass, Laocoön thrashed in the grip of the sea serpent, Maenads gang-banged Orpheus.

They were crying now, the men with any breath left in their lungs. They were clawing at their own flesh. Ecstasy had tumbled over the edge into agony, unbearable. I stalked up the gallery, moving from one to the next, watching men convulse and pass into unconsciousness, plucking the pistols from their hands and tossing them away across the floor. Right at the back of the group I found Father Giuseppe, his hands clamped over his ears, crouched beyond the humping figures of Hercules and Iolaus. He was the only one, I realized, that hadn’t had his hands occupied by weaponry. Now he glared at me with rage and terror from between the upraised points of his elbows.

I let my voice drop to silence. The writhing marble figures fell still—if they had ever truly moved, if I hadn’t just been imagining it—and a quiet fell that was only broken by the faintest whimpers and groans. What have I done? I asked myself, but it was the smallest of interior voices. The seething, righteous satisfaction of the angel within me all but drowned it out.

“I guess you count me as your foe now, Father.” There was no way he could hear me.

“Puttana del diavolo!” he mouthed.

“Now that’s quite rude,” I admonished. I reached out and caught his face between my two hands. He couldn’t ward me off without uncovering his ears, so there was nothing he could do to stop me pulling his face and mine together. I kissed him with my poisonous lips and Father Giuseppe slid bonelessly to the floor, spasming like his men.

Let him take that to the confessional, I said to myself.

Then I looked back down the length of the gallery, through the carnage, just in time to see the office door swing open and Egan stagger out, blinking wildly. He was holding his gun but he clutched at the door jamb, clearly struggling to regain his balance.

“Egan?” I called, my throat suddenly as raw as if I’d been drinking acid. He looked around, not answering or seeming to hear, rubbing at his face instead, and he glanced up with a start as I got closer. His eyes were horribly bloodshot, and he couldn’t stop blinking. He pointed at his left ear and shook his head, grimacing.

It was a good thing the flashbang had deafened him, I thought. God knows what he’d have heard through the half-open door otherwise; I’d been so intent on retribution that I hadn’t given a thought to his safety. Now that realization made me feel queasy.

Catching his face in my hands, I kissed his lips and his eyelids and then both his ears. Be healed, my love.

“Milja?” His voice was husky. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell did you do to them?” His embrace was tight.

Malificium, I said to myself. Uriel would understand. “I sang to them,” I said, my voice shaking.

“Mother of God,” he whispered, his gaze flicking over the scene of devastation. “These are men I know, Milja. Will they be alright?”

“I don't know.” I should have felt far more guilty than I actually did, I’m sure. There was a time not so long back when I’d have been consumed by guilt—but not now. Blame Samyaza. Maybe.

“Ah shite.” He shook his head. “We should probably go now.”

“Have you got the key?”

“Yes.”

He retrieved his little bag of tricks and we picked our way one last time up the gallery. I wanted to get out fast, before anyone regained consciousness. Egan was more inclined to examine the fallen men—a face here or there caught his attention, and he stooped once and picked up what looked like a bronze knife that was strapped to the chest of someone’s body-armor.

“Is that a relic?” I asked, uneasily. It looked clean, but it stank of blood. I could smell it. I wondered how Egan could bear to touch it, but he didn’t seem bothered.

“Yeah.” He stooped again and came up with a long pole. “Recognize this?”

It was the spear of Saint George, from Lalibela. The one that had pierced both Azazel and Penemuel. The one I’d used to kill Roshana. I shrank back, my gorge rising. “Put it down!”

“Why d’you say that?”

“I…” I had no words for the sense of threat that rose off that slender weapon like a black smoke. My skin crawled at its proximity. “I don’t…”

A voice came roaring up the marble stairwell at the end of the gallery, shattering our conversation: “SAMYAZA!”

Oh crap. I was noticed, then.

I turned on my heel and walked to the top of the stairs. If it had been just me, ordinary me, I would have run away. I would have tried to hide. I would have been afraid. But with that green light filling up my soul, I was not entirely myself. And the challenge made the hairs on my spine rise like the hackles of a dog.

The Archangel Raphael bounded into view on the landing below, looking—well, just impossibly handsome and romantic. He was rocking a long black leather coat, and appeared disheveled and flustered. Clearly we’d interrupted something important—the end of the world, presumably. He stopped when he saw me on the flight above him. “Samyaza?” he called again, but he didn’t sound as certain.

“No, it’s still me,” I said. “Hello, Raphael.”

He stared, frowning. “Milja? Is that you? I heard…” Then his frown fell away as his eyes widened. “You possessed her?”

“No, he did not.” I knew my eyes were blazing green fires. “I took him.”

In a dash too fast for even my vision to follow he was up at the top of the stairs with me, within arm’s length, staring. “How is that possible?” he demanded, pacing a circle around me. “How did you do that?”

“You don’t know everything, then?” I smiled, though the expression felt twisted as though someone else was trying to work my muscles. “Good. Now keep out of the way—I have things to be getting on with, Raphael.”

“No.” His silver eyes shimmered like pools of mercury. “Milja, he is eating you up from the inside. Your mind and then your body. I cannot permit this.”

“You can’t stop me. You are not allowed.”

“I’m afraid I can.” His hand was suddenly around my throat, tightening. “I’m sorry.”

No!

That was when Egan rammed Saint George’s spear through the Pillar of the East’s ribcage from back to front.

“So am I,” he said, as Raphael staggered, slipped, vomited blood and crashed to his knees, releasing me. He lowered the angel to the floor, bending over him. “Forgive me,” he said, and he meant it.