I grabbed Kirby by the shoulders as I began searching for the wound. I grabbed the hem of their shirt, yanking at the top of their scrubs as I searched for the source of the attack. “Where is it!”
Kirby twisted away, smacking my hands. They tore the mask from their face, hair still under a scrub cap. I expected the fluorescent lights to reveal their chalky, bloodless coloring, but instead, their cheeks flushed with agitation and sweat. “Get off me, you freak! Let me shower off. I—”
“Silas!” I looked over my shoulder, searching for the angel. “Silas, Kirby is—”
A deep voice cautioned me. “Marlow, wait—”
“Useless,” I said, smacking him away. I had to focus on the flesh and blood of the now.
Kirby yanked my hair to the side, searching for evidence of a cordless headphone or unseen counterpart. I ignored them as they demanded, “Who is Silas? Mar, what’s wrong? Did you take something? For fuck’s sake, if you’ve been getting through your Pantheon books with lines of coke, Iswear to God—”
“Don’t swear to God!” I practically shrieked.
The angel tried to get my attention once more. “They’refine.”
Liar.
Silas grabbed my arm, forcing me to look at him. I struggled for a moment, but he held me firm until I went limp. He said, “Kirby is safe. They’re healthy. They’re covered in horse blood,” he said.
My throat bobbed. “You knew they were fine, and you still let me have a meltdown in the middle of the hospital.”
“I was just stopping the nurse you terrorized from calling security. We have roughly three minutes to get out of here before the police are the least of our worries.”
I looked both ways as if I’d see angels standing on both ends of the hall. “How do you know?”
He lifted a muscled forearm and unbuckled the leather clasps securing the white leather cuff to his wrists. It slid free, revealing a tattoo in a language I couldn’t understand that I was almost certain hadn’t been there before.
As I stared, the curious ink transformed. He tapped it twice.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“It’s in tongues,” he said. “The language of angels. It’s how we get our information.”
I flinched at the term that had been hurled at me from the pulpit. The shapes continued to shift, and with it, so did my understanding. Heavenly Amber Alerts, angelic text messaging, godly billboards and alarms were carved into their very skin.
A second image, one of Silas being cuffed by the Phoenicians as he’d been stripped of his powers, now made perfect sense. Heaven couldn’t help an angel they couldn’t reach.
“And it tells you—”
“Everything we need to know,” he said. “How far away ‘allies’ are so we know how long we have to wait for backup. Ittells us our mission. It issues assignments. They have the same message I have, which means I haven’t fallen. Not officially.”
I sucked in a breath to argue, but he cut me off.
“We don’t have time for me to teach you a new language, but the others are closing in, and they know you’ve declared yourself the antichrist.”
I stared into Silas’s halo-gold eyes, searching for any signs of deception.
I found none. If he was telling the truth, I’d royally fucked up, and I had only moments to get my best friend out of the hospital, into my car, and far away from wherever the heavenly host could find them.
“Kirby.” I returned to them, pleading, “We have to go right now.”
Distant beeping wafted in from behind double doors. I suppressed a gag at the iron scent and gods-knew-what-else that had leaked onto Kirby’s clothes. They made no attempt to conceal their frustration as they said, “I am ten seconds out of surgery, Mar. I barely ditched my gloves and apron before you accosted me. Give me a second to shower off, and I’ll meet you by the lockers.”
Silas’s eyes flared. He shook his head once. We were out of time.
My fingers tightened around Kirby’s arm, nails biting into their shoulder. I needed them to see every drop of wild desperation coursing through me. My voice was hoarse as I begged, “Please hear me when I tell you that nothing has ever mattered more than this. What do I have to say to get you in the car with me right now?”
“More than my dad dying?” Kirby asked, eyes narrowing.
