His expression went from humanish to something other. Something that made my flesh want to crawl off my body and hide in a corner, mewling. Everyone shifted back and away from the statue that was no longer just a statue.
“Hear my words,” he said. “Against the directives of the Most High, against mandates that bound my kind from interfering withhis humans, I thought to intervene. I thought to stop the blasphemy of the darkest blood magic on the night of the creation of the drinkers of blood. I thoughtmyactions were right and more holy than the instructions of the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent,I AM.
“I acted alone.” The three words were filled with a bitter pathos.
“In my sin, I was trapped by the magic the magicians wielded. I was bound with the silver that had been paid for the redeemer’s death. For my sin, I was left here and not here, neither heaven nor Earth, bound by the cursed silver. I have been attended from time to time, by the host, yet I am unable to join them. I am stuck in time, with the humans and their world.I am alone.
“Nearly two millennia later, I thought I haddiscovered a way to bring about the reversal of my sin. I thought to save a Mithran from destruction and end the reign of the Sons of Darkness,” Hayyel said. “I nearly succeeded. He was ready to become outclan, a Mithran who would lead all of his kind into purity. But”—he met my eyes and I stepped back farther—“a creature who is the darkness of your kind took him and ate him.”
That was a lot of information, but I latched on to the last part. “Immanuel?” I asked.
The silver chain flashed with black light and vanished. The ebony-toned statue glinted pure white, black, white, a stuttering change, like a lightbulb going off and on. Hayyel groaned as if in pain. His body froze into place again. The stone-hard white marble no longer wore the angel’s face. In the arched ceilings I heard an echo of a faint, “Yes...”
“Are you trappedhere, in this statue?” I asked.
The angel didn’t answer.
***
Bruiser and Eli and I were sitting in the SUV, still parked at the curb, in silence, our eyes on the church. Quint and Fawn, both looking a little pale and a lot spooked, were at the front and back bumpers, the vamps in the team dispersed in the shadows, keeping watch.
“Should we steal the statue?” I asked. “Take it with us?”
“Was the angel actuallyinthe statue or was it just angel-magic?” Eli asked. “A short-term way to communicate with us?”
“He said he was trapped by the silver, and he didn’t mention the statue,” Bruiser said. “How does one free a trapped angel?”
“How did it get trapped in the first place?” Eli asked.
“And what is this for?” Bruiser asked. He held up a small, shining-bright silver key, the ornate kind from the eighteen hundreds, with a fancy thumb hold and big teeth. It was large enough to be a gate key, about five inches long. “It was in a recess, a rough-carved slot in the marble of the statue’s base, and was covered with very ancient plaster to seal it in place.”
I had replaced the Jesus talisman in my pocket, wrapped in the hanky, before we left. It had returned to room temperature after Hayyel disappeared, and when I pulled it out, it didn’t get hot again. I wasn’t sure what that meant, except that maybe Hayyel wasn’t tied to the key or the statue. Or maybe only to the key when it wasinthe statue?
I held out my hand. “May I?”
Bruiser placed it in my palm.
“It’s silver,” I said, turning the key over and over, “shiny, not tarnished.” Not hot, not cold, just slightly warmer than ambient air from being in Bruiser’s pocket and his hand.
“If the age of the plaster is an indication, it was in place a long time. But, plaster of Paris should have tarnished the silver badly,” Bruiser said. “It shouldn’t be bright, as if newly polished, even if it was only in the plaster for a little while.” He studied the pic of the statue’s base on his cell again. “But the plaster where it was hidden was clearly old. Very old.”
“Could it be the key that secured the binding chain around Hayyel’s waist?”
Bruiser stared at the key in my hand. “That makes sense. Though the chain on the statue appeared small, its true size may not be relative to what we saw.” No one replied and he continued. “The chain appeared to be bright too. Perhaps Hayyel used the location of the key to manifest inside the statue when the crucifix-talisman was brought near.”
“Like a witch working, hidden in place for a single event?” I asked. “Yeah, yeah, I can see that.”
Eli, who had been watching the surroundings, glanced at me and asked, “More important from a timeline position, why would an angel try to protect Immanuel, a blood drinker, who, according to everything we know, was a lazy, selfish, woman-chasing fanghead?” He glanced at me and back outside. He was riding shotgun, sitting in the passenger front seat, a shotgun loaded with silver-shot flechette rounds across his lap, watching for attack around us.
“We’ve already figured out that Leo’s kid was eaten earlier than we thought,” I said, “and that means theu’tlun’taskinwalker was in place longer than we thought. All of our conclusions about the timeline were off. Some of them by several millennia, if I understood what Hayyel said about the night he was chained.”
Eli murmured something into his comms and then said, louder, “Maybe Immanuel, when he was born of Leo’s body, in the human way and not the vamp way, was named after Christ because he was supposed to be special in some kind of spiritual way. And instead he was a lazy woman-chaser. Maybe when there was a complete personality change, it was so welcome that Leo didn’t notice.”
“That—”
Leo popped in from the shadows, standing next to the SUV.
We all flinched. Quint cursed quietly, her lips moving in the darkness. Fawn snorted with amusement at her and said something.
