Rapture

“Actually, Dee, we can’t stay for tea. We’re in a bit of a hurry. See—”



Daniel stepped forward. “Has the news reached you about Lucifer? He is attempting to erase the past by carrying the host of angels forward from the time of the Fall to the present.”



“That would explain the shuddering,” Dee murmured, filling another teacup.



“You can feel the timequakes, too?” Luce asked.



Dee nodded. “But most mortals can’t, in case you were wondering.”



“We’ve come because we need to track down the original location of the Fall,” Daniel said, “the place where Lucifer and the host of Heaven will appear. We have to stop him.”



Dee looked strangely undeterred from her tea service, continuing to divvy up the cucumber sandwiches.



The angels waited for her to respond. A log in the fire splintered, cracked, and tumbled from the grate.



“And all because a boy loved a girl,” she said at last.



“Quite disturbing. Really brings out the worst in all the old enemies, doesn’t it? Scale coming unhinged, Elders killing innocents. So much unpleasantness. As if all you fallen angels didn’t have enough bother to with. I say, you must be awfully tired.” She gave Luce a reassuring smile and gestured again for them to sit down.



Roland pulled out the chair at the head of the table for Dee and sat down in the seat to her left. “Maybe you can help us.” He motioned for the others to join him.



Annabelle and Arriane sat beside him, and Luce and Daniel sat across the table. Luce slid her hand over Daniel’s, twining her fingers around his.



Dee passed the final cups of tea around the table.



After a clattering of china and spoons stirring sugar into tea, Luce cleared her throat. “We’re going to stop Lucifer, Dee.”



“I should hope so.”



Daniel grasped Luce’s fingers. “Right now we’re searching for three objects that tell the early history of the fallen. When brought together, they should reveal the original location of the Fall.”



Dee sipped her tea. “Clever boy. Had any luck?” Daniel produced the leather satchel and unzipped it to reveal the gold-and-glass halo. An eternity had passed since Luce dove into the sunken church to pry it from the statue’s head.



Dee’s forehead wrinkled. “Yes, I remember that. The angel Semihazah created it, didn’t he? Even in prehis-tory, he had a biting aesthetic. No written texts for him to satirize, so he made this as a sort of commentary on the silly ways mortal artists try to capture angelic glow. Amusing, isn’t it? Imagine bearing a hideous . . .



basketball hoop on your head. Two points and all of that.”



“Dee.” Arriane reached into the satchel and pulled out Daniel’s book, then thumbed through it until she found the notation in the margin about the desideratum. “We came to Vienna to find this”—she pointed—“the desired thing. But we’re running out of time and we don’t know what it is or where to find it.”



“How splendid. You’ve come to the right place.”



“I knew it!” Arriane crowed. She leaned back into her chair and slapped Annabelle, who was politely nib-bling at a scone, on the back. “As soon as I saw you, I knew we’d be okay. You have the desideratum, don’t you?”



“No, dear” Dee shook her head.



“Then . . . what?” Daniel asked.



“I am the desideratum.” She beamed. “I’ve been waiting such a long time to be called into service.”



TEN



STARSHOT IN THE DUST



“You’re the desideratum?” Luce’s cucumber sandwich fell from her fingers and bounced off her teacup, leaving a glob of mayonnaise on the lace-embroidered table-cloth.



Dee beamed at them. There was an almost impish gleam in her golden eyes that made her look more like a teenager than a woman many hundreds of years old. As she pinned a shiny strand of red hair back into her chignon and poured everyone more tea, it was hard to fathom that this elegant, vibrant creature was also, in fact, an artifact.



“That’s how you got the nickname Dee, isn’t it?” Luce asked.



“Yes.” Dee looked pleased. She winked at Roland.



“Then you know where the site of the Fall is?” The question brought everyone to attention. Annabelle sat straighter, elongating her long neck. Arriane did the opposite, slumping lower in her chair, elbows on the table, chin resting on clasped hands. Roland leaned forward, tucking his dreads behind one shoulder. Daniel clenched Luce’s hand. Was Dee the answer to every question they had?



She shook her head.



“I can help you discover where the Fall took place.” Dee set her teacup down in its saucer. “The answer is within me, but I am unable to express it in any way that I or you can understand. Not until all of the pieces are in place.”



“What do you mean, ‘in place’?” Luce asked. “How will we know when that happens?”



Dee walked over to the fireplace and used a poker to return the fallen log to its place inside. “You will know.



We will all know.”



“But you at least know where the third artifact is?” Roland passed around a plate of sliced lemons after dropping one into his tea.



“Indeed I do.”



“Our friends,” Roland said, “Cam, Gabbe, and Molly have gone to Avalon to search for it. If you could help them locate—”



“You know as well as I that the angels must locate each artifact on their own, Sir Sparks.”



“I thought you’d say that.” He leaned back in his chair, eyeing Dee. “Please, call me Roland.”



“And I thought you’d ask. Roland.” She smiled. “I’m glad you did. It makes me feel as if you trust me to help you defeat Lucifer.” She tilted her head at Luce. “Trust is important, don’t you think, Lucinda?”



Luce looked around the table at the fallen angels she’d first met at Sword & Cross, epochs earlier. “I do.” She had once had a very different kind of conversation with Miss Sophia, who had described trust as a careless pursuit, a good way to get oneself killed. It was eerie how much the two resembled each other in body, while the words produced by their dissimilar souls differed so completely.



Dee reached for the halo in the center of the table.



“May I?”



Daniel handed over the piece, which Luce knew from personal experience was very heavy. In Dee’s hands, it seemed to weigh nothing.



Her slender arms were barely long enough to wrap around its gold circumference, but Dee cradled the halo like a child. Her reflection peered back dimly in the glass.



“Another reunion,” she said softly, to herself. When Dee looked up, Luce couldn’t tell whether she was content or sad. “It will be wonderful when the third artifact is in your possession.”



“From your mouth to God’s ears,” Arriane said, pouring something from a fat silver flask into her tea.



“That’s great-granddaddy’s route!” Dee said with a smile.



Everyone laughed, a little nervously.



“Speaking of the third artifact”—Dee looked down at a thin gold watch buried among her tangle of pearl bracelets—“did someone mention you all were rather in a hurry to move on?”



There was a clamor of teacups jostling back into their saucers, chairs being pushed back, and wings whooshing open around the table. Suddenly, the massive dining hall seemed smaller and brighter and Luce felt the familiar tingle run through her body when she saw Daniel’s broad wings unfurled.



Dee caught her eye. “Lovely, isn’t it?” Instead of blushing at being caught staring at Daniel, Luce just smiled, for Dee was on their side. “Every time.”



“Where to, Cap’n?” Arriane asked Daniel, tucking scones into the pockets of her overalls.



“Back to Mount Sinai, right?” Luce said. “Isn’t that where we agreed Cam and the others are supposed to meet us?”



Daniel glanced toward the door. His forehead wrinkled in agitation. “Actually, I didn’t want to mention this until we’d found the second artifact, but . . .”



“Come on, Grigori,” Roland said. “Let’s have it.”



“Before we left the warehouse,” Daniel said, “Phil told me that he received a message from one of the Outcasts who he’d sent to Avignon. Cam’s group was intercepted—”



“Scale?” Dee asked. “Still harboring fantasies of their importance in the cosmic balance?”



“We can’t be sure,” Daniel said, “though it does seem likely. We will set a course for the Pont Saint Bénézet in Avignon.” He glanced at Annabelle, whose face turned a shade of scarlet.



“What?” she cried. “Why there?”



“My marginalia in The Book of the Watchers suggest it is the approximate location of the third artifact.



It should have been Cam, Gabbe, and Molly’s first stop.”



Annabelle looked away and didn’t say anything else.



The mood turned serious as the group filed out of the dining room. Luce felt tense with worry for Cam and Molly, imagining them bound up in black Scale cloaks like Arriane and Annabelle.



Angel wings rustled along the narrow brick walls as they walked back down the endless hallway. When they reached the curved wooden doorway leading back outside, Dee swung open an iron circle covering the peephole and peered out.



“Hmmm.” She let the peephole swing shut.



“What is it?” Luce asked, but by then, Dee had already opened up the door and was gesturing for everyone to leave the peculiar brown house, whose soul was so much richer than its exterior suggested.



Luce went first and stood on the porch—which was really just a heap of frost-kissed straw—to wait for the others. The angels poured out of the doorway one at a time—Daniel arching his white wings back as he exited chest out, Annabelle tucking her thick silver wings fast to her sides, Roland bundling his golden marble wings around the front of his body like an invincible shield, and Arriane plowing through recklessly, cursing an unnoticed candle by the doorway that singed a tip of wing.



Afterward, all the angels stood together on the lawn and flexed their wings, glad to be out in the crisp air again.



Luce noticed the darkness. She was certain that when they’d entered the Foundation, the sun had not been far from rising. The church bells had chimed once more, announcing four o’clock, and the sky had been grasping for the precious gold of dawn.



Had they been inside with Dee for just an hour? Why was the sky now a dark, dead-of-night blue?



Lights were on in the white stone townhouses. People passed behind the windows, frying eggs, pouring cups of coffee. Men with briefcases and women with smart suits walked out their front doors and, without ever once glancing at the congregation of angels in the middle of the street, got into cars and drove away, toward what Luce assumed was work.



She remembered Daniel had explained that Viennese people could not see them when they were inside the Patina. They didn’t see the brown house at all. Luce watched a woman in a black terry cloth bathrobe and a plastic rain bonnet walk groggily toward them with her small furry dog. Her property bordered the overgrown pebble path that led to the front door of the Foundation.