Page 19 of The City in Glass

“You have not known many children, and it is not a toy.”

She slid it back into the glass cabinet in her heart, and immediately a tide of relief swelled over her. Safe, as safe as she could make anything, and she sat for a moment with her arms wrapped around her body, clutching herself tight. It was warmer with her book inside her rather than set on fire, and she stared through the darkness to where the angel sat.

“I know you like destroying things very well. Why would you stop me?”

“I wouldn’t destroy something that was mine,” he said with a scornful note in his voice.

“Then what is yours?”

A long silence. The darkness shifted in front of her, perhaps as if he were shaking his head, perhaps as if his hands twisted together restlessly in his lap.

“Properly, nothing. We are forbidden gifts or payment. What we have, we have from the start.”

“Except you.”

She reached for him, and without sight, she touched his shoulder, slid her fingers down to the left side of his chest. Vitrine considered, and then she dug her taloned fingers into the scarring over his heart, seeking the flesh to rip it open. The angel grunted with pain, one hand coming up to wrap around her wrist, but he didn’t stop her. She tolerated the grasp of his fingers to feel the way they trembled, and she did not withdraw her claws from his skin until his blood soaked into the fibers of his shirt, mingling with the rain, plastering it to his body.

He held on when she pulled back, only releasing her when she shook him off, and the sound he made, angry and exalted—she could feel it in his blood, that part of him that needed her—went straight to her core. It could crack glass, it could spill ink, and she leaned back against the rock wall.

“Go. Leave.”

She heard the angel sigh like the sound of a wind rushing down a narrow valley. There was no other sound, but there was suddenly more space around her, more air to breathe.

She slept for a while, and when she woke up, the air was drier, and she could no longer hear the rains outside. Vitrine realized that she had slept them out, and perhaps that was a mercy.

She made her way out of the tunnel, and she yelped when she almost tripped over the angel, who was sitting on the ledge. He turned to look at her, his face solemn.

“You are awake. I thought you might wait out the year.”

“I still might,” she said stubbornly. “Why are you still here?”

“You know the answer to that.”

He no longer sounded angry about it, which disturbed her in a way that she couldn’t quite define. He was tired, it was written in every line of his face. He was impatient, as she could tell from the hoarse catch in his voice. He was lonely, which she had not guessed angels might be when they were apart from their own kind. He was not angry, and she scowled.

“You deserve it. You should not have destroyed my city.”

Instead of responding, he turned towards the ruins again.

“You have a great deal of work to do. What comes next?”

He reminded her that once, one of the noble families had caused to be built a colonnade where each of the supporting pillars was an angel carved from marble. They were not real angels, of course, only even-featured, blank-eyed men and women in draping robes carrying the weight of the entablature on their noble heads. Real angels came like a storm, like a nightmare, like the end of the world, and he looked a little less like them now, a little more like a patient stone statue that bore the firmament on his head.

“You don’t look much like an angel anymore,” she said, refusing to give him the pleasure of knowing how he resembled something she had once loved in Azril.

“I am an angel. That is exactly what I look like. And I ask you. What comes next?”

There was a part of her that wanted to tell him to rot in the anchoress cells. Enough women had, the ones who were imprisoned in the cliffs rather than choosing them willingly. Sometimes the lower cells flooded towards the rear, filling with silted water that rotted the skin off their feet.

Instead, she looked down at the city, her work barely a dent in what would need to be done, and then she looked back at the angel, a storm, a disaster, pure and noble power shaped to look like a handsome man.

“Next, I go home.”

Wordlessly, he followed her down the cliff, his wings spread like a sheltering shadow over her as she descended in the form of a black kite.

TEN

It distressed Vitrine how much of the city had to come down. A good lot of it already had in the years she had been burying and restoring, but Azril, thanks to its love of fire and the scouring waves from the sea, had always preferred to build with stone rather than with wood.