Rapture (Fallen 4)

Their wings were bound, the Outcasts had said. Were they in the same shape she was in? She hated that she had made it here and couldn’t even help them, hated that she had to move to save them but that moving put her life in peril. There was perhaps nothing worse than not being able to move.

The Scale angel’s muddy black boots appeared before her. Luce peered up at his towering figure. He bent down, smelling like rotting mothballs, his dull eyes leer-ing. His black-gloved hand reached for her—

Then the Scale angel’s hand fell limply—as if he had been knocked out. He lunged forward, crashing heavily into the workman’s table, pushing it back, exposing Luce. The severed sculpture head that had apparently struck the Scale rolled eerily to rest on the floor near Luce’s face, seeming to stare into Luce’s eyes.

As Luce rolled back under the table, more blue wings blurred in her peripheral vision. More Scale. Four of them flew in tawdry formation toward a recessed alcove about halfway up the wall . . . where Luce now saw Emmet standing, brandishing a long, silver saw.

Emmet must have thrown the head that had saved her from the Scale! He was the trespasser whose entrance through the ceiling had enraged her kidnapper. Luce had never thought she’d be so happy to see an Outcast.

Emmet was surrounded by sculptures on platforms and pedestals, some shrouded, some scaffolded, one newly beheaded—and by four impossibly old Scale angels, hovering closer to him in the air, cloaks extended, like shabby vampires. These stiff black cloaks seemed to be their only weapon, their only tool, and Luce knew well it was a brutal one. Her pained breathing was evidence of that.

She suppressed a gasp as Emmet pulled a starshot from an unseen quiver in his trench coat and held it out in front of him. Daniel had made the Outcasts promise not to kill the Scale!

The Scale backed slowly away from Emmet in the air, hissing, “Vile! Vile!” so loudly that it caused Luce’s captor to stir on the table above her. Then the Outcast did something that amazed everybody in the room. He aimed the starshot at himself. Luce had seen Daniel sui-cidal in Tibet, so she knew something about that emotion’s desperate atmosphere, the defeated body language that accompanied a gesture so extreme. But Emmet seemed as confident and defiant as ever as he looked from one leathery Scale face to another.

The Scale became emboldened by Emmet’s strange behavior. They hovered ever closer, blocking the thin Outcast from Luce’s view with the slow intensity of vul-tures approaching a carcass on a desert highway. Where were the other Outcasts? Where was Phil? Had the Scale already done away with them?

What sounded like thick and heavy fabric being torn echoed loudly through the room. The Scale hovered motionlessly, their broad, overlapping cloaks like the gaping mouth of an Announcer that led somewhere terrible and sad. Then a slicing sound cut through the air, followed by another tearing sound—and then the four Scale angels spun like rag dolls toward Luce, their jaws slack, their eyes open, their cloaks mutilated and ripped open to expose black hearts and black lungs twitching spasti-cally, streaming pale blue blood.

Daniel had told the Outcasts they could not use their starshots to kill the Scale, but he had not said the Outcasts could not hurt them.

The four Scale angels fell in a clump to the floor like puppets whose strings had been snipped. Luce looked up from where they lay, struggling to breathe, to the alcove, where Emmet was wiping black Scale blood from the fletchings of his starshot. Luce had never heard of anyone using the butt end of a starshot as a weapon—and apparently neither had the Scale.

“Is Lucinda here?” Luce heard Phil call out. She looked up to see his face glowing through a crater in the roof.

“Here!” Luce shouted up to him, unable to keep herself from lunging as she did so, causing her cloak to cinch even more tightly around her throat. When she grimaced sharply, the cloak tightened a little more.

A huge leg drooped over the edge of the table, its black boot swinging into Luce’s face, striking her flush on the nose, bringing tears of pain to her eyes. Her captor was awake! This realization, coupled with the sudden pain that half blinded her, caused Luce to push back more deeply under the table’s shelter. When she did so, her cloak closed all the way around her throat, pinching her trachea completely shut. She panicked, gasped uselessly for air, writhing now that it didn’t matter if the cloak constricted anymore—

Then she remembered how she’d discovered in Venice that she could hold her breath for longer than she’d thought possible. And Daniel had just told her she could will herself to overcome that limitation anytime she wanted. So she did it; she just did it; she willed herself to stay alive.

But that didn’t stop her captor from knocking the sheltering workman’s table aside, sending pottery and the severed limbs of ancient sculptures flying.

“You look . . . uncomfortable.” He grinned, revealing blood-slick teeth, and extended a black-gloved hand toward the hem of Luce’s cloak.

But the Scale angel froze when a starshot fletching burst through the place where, only a moment before, his right eye had been. Blue blood jetted from the emptied socket, down onto Luce’s cloak. He cried out, staggered wildly around the room, arms flailing, the backward starshot protruding from his wizened face.

Pale hands appeared before her, then the sleeves of a ratty tan trench coat, followed by a shaven blond head.

Phil’s face betrayed no feeling as he dropped to his knees to face her.

“There you are, Lucinda Price.” He gripped the collar of the binding black cloak and lifted Luce up. “I had returned to the palace to check on you.” He set her atop a nearby table. She immediately fell over, not able to hold herself upright. Emmet righted her with as little emotion as his colleague had.

At last she could afford to take a longer view. In front of her, three shallow stairs led down to an expansive main chamber. In its center, a red velvet rope sectioned off a towering statue of a lion. It was reared up on two feet, teeth bared toward the sky mid-roar. Its mane was chipped and yellowed.

Blue-gray wings coated the floor of the restoration wing, reminding Luce of a locust-covered parking lot she’d seen one summer after a Georgia rainstorm. The Scale weren’t dead—they had not vanished into starshot dust—but so many of them were unconscious the Outcasts could barely tread without crunching their wings.

Phil and Emmet had been busy, incapacitating at least fifty of the Scale. Their short blue wings twitched occa-sionally, but their bodies did not move.

All six Outcasts—Phil, Vincent, Emmet, Sanders, the other Outcast girl, whose name Luce did not know, even Daedalus with his bandaged face—were still on their feet, brushing pieces of tissue and bone from their blue-splattered trench coats.

The blond girl, the one who’d helped nurse Daedalus back to health, grabbed a barely breathing female Scale angel by the hair. The old hag’s moldy blue wings trembled as the blond Outcast battered the Scale’s head against a marble pillar. She shrieked the first four or five times her head struck the stone. Then the shrieks petered out and her bulged eyes rolled back in her head.

Phil struggled with the black straitjacket fastened around Luce. His quick fingers made up for his lack of sight. An unconscious Scale angel fell from somewhere above her, his battered cheek coming to rest between her neck and shoulder. She felt hot blood trickle onto her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut and shuddered.

Phil kicked the angel off the table, sending him into Luce’s one-eyed captor, who still staggered clumsily around the room, groaning, “Why me? I do everything right.”

“He has the halo—” Luce started.

But Phil’s attention jerked back to the sickly mass of Scale angel wings, where a portly Scale with hair like a monk had risen and now advanced on Daedalus from behind. A coarse black cloak hung over the Outcast’s head, ready to drop.

“I will be right back, Lucinda Price.” Phil left Luce in her binds on the table and nocked a starshot in his bow.

In an instant, he had shoved himself between Daedalus and the Scale angel.

“Drop the cloak, Zaban.” Phil looked as fierce as he had when he’d first appeared in Luce’s parents’ backyard. Luce was surprised to realize they knew each other by name, but of course, they must have once all lived in Heaven together. That was hard to imagine now.

Zaban had watery blue eyes and bluish lips. He looked almost gleeful at finding the starshot pointed at him. He slung the cloak over his shoulder and turned to face Phil, freeing Daedalus to pick up a spindly Scale angel by the feet. He swung the old angel around in a circle three times, then sent him crashing through the eastern window, out into a tower of scaffolding below.

“Threatening to shoot me, are you, Phillip?” Zaban’s eyes were on the starshot. “You want to tip the balance toward Lucifer? Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Phil bristled. “You don’t matter enough for your death to tip the balance.”

“At least we count for something. All together, our lives make a difference in the balance. Justice always makes a difference. You Outcasts”—he smiled in mock pity—“stand for nothing. That is what makes you worth-less.”

That was enough for Phil. There was something about this Scale he couldn’t endure. With a grunt he loosed the arrow toward Zaban’s heart.

“I stand opposed to you,” he muttered, and waited for the blue-winged geezer to vanish.

Luce waited for the vanishing, too. She’d seen it happen before. But the arrow glanced off Zaban’s cloak and clattered to the floor.

“How did you—?” Phil asked.

Zaban laughed and pulled something out from a hidden breast pocket in his cloak. Luce leaned forward, eager to see how Zaban had protected himself. But she leaned too far and slid off the table. She landed on the floor on her face.

No one noticed. They were staring at the small book Zaban produced from his cloak. Propping herself up slightly, Luce saw it was bound in leather, the same shade of blue as Scale angel wings. It was bound with a knotted golden cord. It looked like a Bible, the kind Civil War soldiers used to stuff in their breast pockets in hopes the books would protect their hearts.

This book had done just that.

Luce squinted to read its title, squirming a few inches closer on the floor. She was still too far away.

In a single movement, Phil retrieved his starshot and swatted the book out of Zaban’s hand. By a stroke of luck, it landed a few feet away from Luce. She wriggled again, knowing she couldn’t pick it up, not the way the cloak was binding her. Still, she had to know what its pages contained. It seemed familiar, as if she’d seen it long, long before. She read the golden letters on its spine.

A Record of the Fallen.

Now Zaban ran for it, stopping short of Luce, who lay exposed in the center of the floor. He glared at her and pocketed the book.

“No, no,” he said. “You don’t get to look at this. You don’t get to see all that’s been accomplished by Scale wings. Nor what’s left to do to achieve the ultimate harmonious balance. Not when you’ve spent all this time too busy to take note of us, to take note of justice, selfishly falling in and out of love.”