Leo fell to his knees and bowed his head.
Moll’s whole being was focused on the angel sticking from the wall. Her face went through this series of changes, from shock to fury, back to shock. Tears welled in her eyes and ran down, cleaning trails in her smoke-stained face.
Molly had admitted once that she had lost her faith in anything divine. Someone had said something to Moll about how she had to find her faith to survive and to protect the ones she loved, faith to control the death magics. I was pretty sure it had been her daughter. Now there was this massive angelic being hanging out of the church wall.
Bruiser’s heart rate sped beneath my fingertips.
Eli’s heart pounded steady but hard, as if it wouldburst. He moved closer to me. I felt his position change through our bond. His shoulder touched mine. There was no calm in him now. No dark pools of battle readiness. Just... wonder. Maybe reverence.
The other vamps stared but stepped back and away, breathing as humans. I felt their reactions through the bond of the Dark Queen.
Hayyel was fully formed, twelve feet tall, his right leg and his body partially out of the wall, his left leg, hip, and up to his armpit still trapped in the plaster and red brick on the other side of... elsewhere. His head hung, his beautiful hair loose and catching the light of the candles. His hawklike wings were both free, but the flight feathers were gone, the pinions burned away to the metacarpals, the flesh blistered and leaking.
Where he was still attached to the wall, cracks radiated out into the plaster from his black skin. He was as unmoving as the marble statue he had spoken through the first time I came to this sanctuary. As unmoving as the vampire kneeling at the tip of his scorched wings.
Leo reached out, slowly. With one finger he touched the blackened feathers. They crumbled into dust. But his finger wasn’t burned and his body didn’t go up in flames. Leo. In a church with his vamps, touching an angel. Not on fire.
“Yes. That was Angie,” Molly said, answering my question. “Angie said to give Leo the key that was found here. She said he would use the key to open the silver chain.” Her voice was carefully neutral. Because her double-gened witch daughter had called with a solution to a problem she should not know about. And she should be asleep. And guarded by her aunts.
With my one good hand I opened the flap in my armor that held the key we had removed from the marble angel statue. It was covered with my blood, but so was everything else.
Eli took it from me and knelt at Leo’s side. “Leo,” he said gently. “Leo?”
The former master of the city raised his human-looking eyes to his friend, his former primo. “My George,” he said softly, the look of wonder lighting his face. “The angel...”
To Leo, I said, “The key is silver, made from the thirty silver coins paid to Judas Iscariot. The chain is silver from the coins too. Ordinary silver is toxic to vamps. This will... Thismaybe worse.”
Leo turned his head to me in the curiously birdlike way vamps have when they aren’t aping humans. “I know this.”
Molly said, “The shackling is a powerful death magic working. If you unlock the chain, you and the other vamps may go up in flames. The chain might be only thing keeping you all from burning to ash.”
Leo smiled sadly. “The black magic that made my kind took our souls.Youknowthis. The chain made from the silver bartered for the redeemer’s death, and the black magic that made my kind, gave us eternal life, stole our souls, and partially bound the angel. With the chain unlocked we may all die, yes. Or”—he shrugged slightly, like a raven fluttering its wings—“we may find our souls. Those who have gone before may finally rest rather than continue to wander the place of the dead.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“He,” Leo said, again touching a burned feather, “was first bound in Jerusalem over two thousand years ago bound with that silver of Judas Iscariot’s betrayal. A second binding was attempted soon after, and the result was Krakatoa. Other attempts were made during the Crusades. There was a fire the night of one such black magic ceremony and Constantinople burned. The key was lost in the battle, or so it is said.”
As Leo was speaking freely, I assumed Mainet’s bindings were undone. Hayyel stared at the vampire as the outclan priest told his story.
“The next attempt to bind the Angel of the Most High, so far as I know, was here, on this land, long ago, before the church was built on this spot, when Immanuel was still my son. It is said that ceremony required the sacrifice of three human virgins.”
Three,I thought.Like the three skulls on the map and the three skulls in Angie’s dream.
“Perhaps the black magic ceremony that created Immanuel the False, the night he lost his life to theu’tlun’ta, wasthat same night.” Leo shrugged again. “There were certainly other attempts to bind and use the holy messenger.
“We did not know where the key was located, only that Joses brought it to this city when he visited. The Son of Darkness placed the key to our creation somewhere in New Orleans, hidden during the time that Soledad dreamed, and also created her beautiful statues. But when Joses was bitten by the arcenciel, he lost his sanity and the key was lost to us as well. In return, his blood gave to those who drank it, visions of potential futures and glimpses of the past.
“Once, when I drank of him, I saw Joses Santana, in the past, placing the key in a groove of marble, and covering the damage with plaster. I did not know it was in a statue of an angel, created by Soledad.” Leo made a soft sound of amusement. “He would have found that amusing, ironic, macabre, to place it in an angel.
“And there the key resided, there rested the angel, but... Hayyel was lost to us. I knew from my own visions that a war woman was coming, but not that you, Jane Yellowrock, were she. Not until you appeared as the half-form lion warrior. When I first laid eyes on that form of you, I knew that our end or our redemption was at hand.”
Okay,I thought.Leo’s timeline worked.
Leo held out his hand for the key. Eli placed it into his palm.
Leo tilted his head forward a fraction of an inch.“Je comprends,”he said to the angel on the wall, as if Hayyel had spoken to him. And maybe he had.
Leo reached out and stroked the angel’s burned wings. He shuddered and nodded as if in agreement with more unspoken words. The former master of the city stood from where he knelt and looked around.
