Anna was a long blur of movement, her ruby necklace gleaming against her chest like a drop of angelic blood. Her seraph blade moved so quickly in her hand that Ari’s eye could not catch it—it seemed a silvery shimmer painted against the air. The thought appeared in Ari’s mind: I could accept dying here, right now, as long as it meant that Anna would live.
Once she had had the thought, and knew in an instant that it was utterly true, everything became clearer. A new energy flowed into her; she redoubled her attack, using her khanda to harry a tall Watcher whose white robes were stained with blood. She plunged her blade into its chest.
And heard Anna scream her name. She twisted around, her blade still in the Watcher, and saw another of them rising up behind her, a once Iron Sister raising a barbed black staff to plunge it into Ari’s back. Ari yanked her khanda free, leaving the first Watcher to sink to the ground, but there was no time—the second Watcher was upon her, the staff coming down—
The Watcher crumpled, hitting the ground with the force of a felled tree. The staff clattered from its hand. Ari looked immediately to Anna. Surely Anna had come from behind to injure the Watcher, to keep it from hurting Ari. And Anna was there, her seraph blade in hand, but she was still too far from the fallen Watcher to have touched it. Her face was a mask of shock and even fear. Ari had never seen her look afraid before.
“What on earth?” Anna whispered, and Ari realized all the Watchers were falling. Folding like puppets with cut strings, collapsing onto the bloodstained grass. And then, before either Anna or Ari had even lowered their weapons, came a terrible ripping sound. From the fallen bodies of the Iron Sisters and Silent Brothers the Chimera demons emerged: some crawling out of open mouths or eyes, one tearing its way free from an open wound in a shower of blood.
Ari backed up, half in revulsion, half readying herself to battle the Chimeras, as they emerged, chittering and blood-slicked, their fangs flashing. They were smaller than she’d imagined, the size of piglets, and she raised her khanda high—only to be startled when they turned to flee like a pack of rats, slithering and hopping across the damp grass of the cloister, scrambling up the walls to vanish onto the roof.
Silence fell. Ari stood over the bodies of the Silent Brothers and Iron Sisters, who lay as still as effigies. She could hear no sound from inside the abbey, nothing that explained what had just happened—had Cordelia reached James? Had Belial been killed? Something had happened, something huge—
“Ari!” Anna caught Ari by the arm, swinging her around so they faced each other. Anna had dropped her seraph blade; it sputtered in the grass like a dying candle, but she didn’t seem to care. She touched Ari’s face—Anna’s hand was crusted with dried blood and dirt, but Ari leaned into the touch, into Anna. “I thought you were going to die,” Anna whispered. “That we were both going to die.” Her dark hair tumbled into her blazing blue eyes; Ari wanted nothing more in this moment than to kiss her. “And I realized—I would sacrifice myself in a moment. But not you. I could not bear to lose you.”
“And I could not bear to lose you,” Ari said. “So there will be no sacrificing yourself. For my sake.” She let her khanda fall from her hand as Anna pulled her close; her hand stroked Ari’s hair, which had come loose and fell about her face.
“You will not leave me,” Anna said fiercely. “I want you to stay, with me, at Percy Street. I do not want you to move to some flat somewhere, with sconces—”
Ari was shaking her head, smiling; she could not believe they were having this conversation now, but when had Anna ever waited to say what she thought needed to be said?
She raised her face to Anna’s; they were so close together she could feel the brush of Anna’s eyelashes. “No sconces,” Ari said. “No flats in Pimlico. Just us. Wherever you are is home to me.”
Cordelia screamed.
The blade went into James with a sickening noise, the awful shearing of bone and muscle. Cordelia felt it through her body as if she were the one stabbed; as James sank to his knees, she threw herself at the invisible wall separating her from the High Altar, threw herself against it as if it were glass that could shatter, but it held her back, pinning her in place.
James was on his knees, his bloody hands locked around the hilt of Cortana. His head hung down; Cordelia couldn’t see his face. His grip on the weapon tightened, his knuckles whitening. As Cordelia flung herself against the barrier that separated them, he wrenched savagely at the sword, and she could feel the blade shear against bone again as he pulled it free.
He gazed for a moment at the blade, slick with blood, before opening his hand to let it clatter to the floor. He raised his head and stared at Cordelia as the blood pulsed slowly from the wound in his chest.
His eyes were silver. As he spoke, blood bubbled to his lips; his voice was thick, but recognizable. Belial’s voice.
“What,” he said, his gaze flicking incredulously from the blade to his own bloody hands, “is this?”
“You’re dying,” said Cordelia. She found that she was no longer afraid of Belial. She was no longer afraid of anything. The worst that could happen had happened. Belial would die, and James with him.
“It’s impossible,” he said.
“It’s not impossible,” Cordelia said. “It’s three wounds from Cortana.”
There was a roaring sound in the distance, growing louder and louder. Cordelia could feel a trembling in the earth deep beneath her feet; off to the side, with a soft rattling sound, the dead archbishop collapsed into a dusty pile of rotted vestments and bones.
“A human soul could not overpower my will,” Belial hissed. Blood ran down his chin. “My will is immutable. I am an instrument of God.”
“No,” said Cordelia. “You were an instrument of God.”
Belial’s whole face shook, his mouth trembling, and in that moment, Cordelia seemed to see through the illusion of James, to the angel that Belial had once been, before he had chosen power and war and the Fall. His silver eyes were wide and confused and full of a fear so complete it was nearly innocence. “I cannot die,” he said, wiping the blood from his mouth. “I don’t know how to die.”
“Nor does anyone living,” said Cordelia. “I suppose you will learn like the rest.”
Belial slumped forward. And the roof of the abbey came off, or seemed to—it had been there, and now it was not, though there had been no sound of it ripping away, no breaking of stone. It was simply gone, and Cordelia stared up at a sky like a whirlpool—it had been black with opaque clouds, mazed with dark lightning, but the clouds were parting. She could see the gleam of blue, a clear cold sky, and then a shimmer—a ray of sunlight. It pierced the windows of the abbey and laid a shining golden bar across the stone floor.
Belial threw his head back. Above him, white clouds parted, illuminated by ice-bright winter sun, and with the light on his face he looked as if he were caught between agony and joy, a martyr’s look. As he got to his feet, he seemed to step out of James’s body, like a snake shedding its skin. James slid soundlessly to the floor of the altar, and Belial rose and stepped away, now unrecognizable. He was a burning dark light in the shape of a man, lifting his hands up, up toward the sky, toward the Heaven he had turned away from so very long ago.
“Father?” he said.
A spear of light broke through the clouds. It shot downward like lightning, like a flaming arrow, and plunged into Belial. He seemed to catch alight, his shadow burning, and he howled aloud in agony, “Father, no!”