No Angel (17 page)

“Uh,” I said as Michaela drew her daggers out from under her skirt. “What exactly are you going to try?”

“To act as a channel for my angel,” Michaela replied. “And it requires a lot of concentration, so shut up.” Drawing a deep breath, she crossed her daggers in front of her heart, closed her eyes, and started to murmur under her breath in Latin.

I felt Krystal move to my side. “Can
you
tell what’s going on?” she whispered to me.

“Not really.” The angel had stretched all six wings over Michaela. Its fires brightened, burning so fiercely that I had to squint my own angelic eyes against the light. “But the angel looks a bit like it did when it hit Ms. Wormwood. I think it’s going to use Michaela as a bridge into our world again.” Hopefully, not in order to smite me for lustful actions. Or, worse, offer me make-out tips. It was bad enough having Michaela criticizing my technique; I didn’t need a giant ball of feathers doing it too.

Michaela’s chant quickened. She flipped her daggers around, touching the points to her own throat and chest. Light shot down the metal as the angel brushed her with the barest tip of a single feather—

Michaela’s eyes opened. They glowed pure white, without pupil or iris. Just for an instant, that infinitely old, infinitely calm gaze fell on me, and I felt as if my whole life had just been read like a book. Then the angel turned to Faith.

“You can save her.” It was still Michaela’s voice, but each word floated up from a deep, profound silence. “But you will lose her. Only by closing the Hellgate can she be freed.”

“But how can I—” Faith stopped, going ashen. “My father’s plan. To have me channel your power.”

The angel said nothing, merely looked at her.

Faith’s throat worked. “Will I die?” she asked in the barest whisper.

“Yes,” the angel said with a terrible, bone-deep certainty. “All things die.” It wore Michaela’s face like a mask, unchanging and expressionless. Thin wisps of smoke curled from the ends of her hair. “But you need not sacrifice your body. There is another way.” Its burning gaze swept over us all like a lighthouse’s beam. “The greatest light is love. If two become one, the darkness will be lifted.”

Krystal’s breath caught. “Faith and Raf. You said it yourself, Michaela, demons are fallen angels, which makes nephilim half angels, in a way. Two halves make a whole. That’s it, right? Together, they’d have as much light as a full angel, but it would be safer. That’s why Gabriel wanted Raf as well as Faith.”

“But we
tried
that.” Faith cast me a faintly accusing glance. “It didn’t work.”

“Light cannot pass through lies or doubt. You must choose willingly.” The angel took a step toward her, light fracturing around it as if its passage tore the very fabric of the world. It moved the dagger from its own neck so that the point rested gently in the hollow of Faith’s throat. Faith held very still, her shadow standing out sharp and black behind her. “And with open eyes.”

Light ran down the blade and into Faith. Wings burst from her back like a firework exploding. One pair, two, three—six wings, spreading as wide as the shine allowed. The angel’s light faded, leaving only the starlight and silver glimmer of Faith’s feathers.

Michaela coughed. Her skin was reddened as if with sunburn. She looked down at the dagger she still held at Faith’s throat and jumped back as if it had burned her. “Mother of God! If my guardian hurt you, I’ll—” The words died on her lips as she caught sight of Faith’s wings. “It worked?”

“And how,” Krystal said, subdued for once. “Michaela, your angel just told us Raf and Faith can close the Hellgate.”

Michaela stared at me.
“What?”

Faith’s eyes opened . . . all of them. In Heaven, I could see her angelic eyes emerge from under her wings. “Oh,” she said weakly. “Oh, that’s very strange.” She flinched as she stared about her in Heaven. “Raffi, that’s . . . you?”

“Yeah.” I’d kind of just accepted my own extra parts, not really thinking about how they appeared. Now, with Faith also bristling with eyes and wings, I grasped just how freakishly alien we were. Judging from Faith’s somewhat uncertain expression, she wasn’t sure how she felt about being able to see the whole me either. I pointed with a wing at the angel, now hovering above us. “And that’s what a full angel looks like, just to warn you. Personally, I think religion would be a lot less popular if they put
that
on stained-glass windows rather than winged dudes.”

“Blasphemer.” Michaela pushed back her dark hair, still sounding rather hoarse. “So now what?”

As if in response, the angel soared toward the main school building. It hovered there like a star, its light shining at a particular spot, waiting.

“Now we get divine guidance,” I said. “The angel wants to show us something.”

Chapter 29

T
he angel led us to the gates of Hell itself.

“This is a
really
bad idea,” I moaned, eyeing the grim portal. The matte-black surface of the door swallowed all light. There was no handle, no lock; only a single, red LED, glowing like a demonic eye over a fingerprint scanner. Gothic letters were chiseled deep into the stone above the door. Two simple words, warning all who read them that beyond the forbidding portal lay unimaginable horrors:

Teachers’ Lounge

“I think she wants us to go in,” Faith said, glancing at the angel. The celestial being was bouncing up and down in Heaven over the door, like a dog desperate to be taken for a walk. She put her ear against the door. “I can’t hear anyone inside. It’s safe.”

“Safe?” I yelped. “Are you nuts? Look at the place!”

“It’s a door,” Michaela said. She was still leaning on Faith’s shoulder for support. “No wonder you are overcome with terror.”

“You can’t see it like we can,” I snapped. I waved a couple of wings at the thick, ominous fog that curled through Heaven above the teachers’ lounge. It was so dense that it blocked my angelsight, hiding the room beyond from view. “It’s a place of darkness. Evil.”

“I think it must be the heart of the Hellgate.” Faith pushed at the door, but it didn’t budge. “Don’t worry, Raffi. Didn’t you hear what the angel said? As long as love binds us together, we’re as powerful as the angels themselves.”

Yeah, but does it?
said a tiny, traitorous thought in my head. I squashed it down, but a nagging doubt remained. Nothing had happened when we’d kissed in the old shrine. And if we weren’t in love already, I really didn’t see how a romantic date to the school staff room would help.

Krystal was fiddling with the fingerprint scanner. It let out a disapproving
bloop
, and she hissed in frustration. “I hope the angel realizes we can’t just walk through the wall.”

“You can’t,” I said, staring up at the still-bouncing angel. I had the feeling it was trying to tell me something . . . “But maybe some of us can. Faith, remember when I jumped in front of you during the game?”

“Yes?” Faith’s puzzled expression cleared into sudden enlightenment. “Oh! You teleported across the clearing!”

“Not exactly.” I spread all six wings, their light shimmering in the gloomy corridor. “I flew. It was pure instinct, but I somehow leaped into Heaven for a second, and landed back on Earth somewhere else.”

Krystal face-palmed. “Four-dimensional being. Of course! You can go
over
things by moving in the fourth dimension. Like we can just step over a line drawn on a piece of paper, moving in three-dimensional space to get around a two-dimensional object.”

“Uh, if you say so. Anyway, I think I could do it again.” Experimentally, I beat all six wings downward at once—and found myself hovering in Heaven, looking back down at Earth.

“Raf?
Raf!
” Krystal yelled, sounding panicked. Both she and Michaela were swiveling their heads, trying to work out where I’d gone.

“It’s okay.” Faith was staring directly at me with her angelic eyes. “He’s up there. Raffi?”

I folded my wings again, dropping down to Earth. Krystal yelped as I appeared out of nowhere next to her. “Faith and I can get in.” I glanced at the angel above our heads. “Michaela, I really need to ask your guardian something. Can you translate the response?” She nodded, and I hesitated for a second, wondering how I could tell if the angel was even listening to me. “Uh . . . hey, you up there. Can you do me a favor?”

Michaela squeezed her eyes shut in pain. “Did you really just start a prayer of supplication for divine intervention with ‘Hey, you up there’?”

I decided to ignore that. “Can you watch over Michaela and Krystal for a bit?” I asked the angel. “Just in case the Headmistress goes after them while Faith and I are busy.”

The angel’s wings briefly enfolded Michaela. “Yes,” she said simply. The angel retreated, and Michaela swayed on her feet. Faith hurried to support her. “I need to lie down now.”

“Krys, can you get her back to her room? Actually, you’d both better wait there, it’s too dangerous to hang around here. We’ll meet up with you once we’ve investigated.”

“Okay.” Krystal took over the job of supporting Michaela, who leaned on her a lot less gratefully than she’d done on Faith. Krystal squeezed my hand briefly. “Good luck, Raf. Be careful.”

“You bet.” Faith had already flown over the door. I flapped my own wings to lift myself briefly out of the normal world, landing again next to Faith. “I really hate that.” I rubbed my arms, half expecting to find them blistered and burned. “It’s like jumping through an inferno.”

“I guess our human halves aren’t built for heaven.” Faith was already poking through the coats hung up behind the door. “Come on, help me search.”

“For what?” There was a small kitchen area in one corner of the room, with a humming fridge and a couple of cabinets. I opened one of them, discovering nothing more sinister than an enormous carton of bodybuilder’s protein powder with a note stuck to it:
Oleander, if you so much as touch this, I’ll practice discus with your spleen—Hellebore
. This was probably not what the angel wanted us to see.

“I don’t know! The angel said we had to ‘choose with open eyes.’ There must still be some secret hidden away that we need to—Raffi, Ms. Henbane’s got a pentagram on her key chain!”

“Yeah, she’s a Satanist. Don’t ask.” Closing the cupboard door, I tried to open the fridge. The handle resisted me. Something inside was jamming the mechanism. I tried to peer inside with angelsight, but was foiled by the dark clouds still masking the room. “I don’t think she’s dangerous, though.”

“There has to be something in here.” Faith rifled through the layered memos pinned to the notice board as if expecting to find one with the heading
RE: HELLGATE, CLOSING OF.
“A hidden summoning circle with my mother’s real name, or, or a diary, or—”

The fridge door finally sprang open. I stared at the contents. “Or a body.”

“I think that’s a little unlikely,” Faith said, not looking up from the notices.

“No, I mean, literally, there’s a body. In the fridge.” She was curled into a tight ball of sticklike limbs and bony spine, completely filling the small space. One of her hands had flopped out when I’d opened the door. “It’s Ms. Vervaine.”

Faith’s horrified eyes met mine. In the same moment, I heard footsteps approaching the door. There wasn’t even time to kick the fridge closed again. Spreading our wings, we both leaped into Heaven, disappearing from normal sight just as the fingerprint scanner outside beeped.

That weird fog still shrouded everything, but the combined light of our wings was bright enough to cut through it somewhat, letting us see what was going on down below. Hovering invisibly above the mortal world, I watched as Ms. Hellebore came into the teachers’ lounge, whistling. Her tune broke off midnote as she saw Ms. Vervaine’s lifeless, limp hand sticking out of the fridge. “Oh, not again,” she said in tones of deep disgust. Shaking her head, she poked the hand back in, shut the fridge door, and started mixing herself a protein shake.

“Ms. Hellebore?” Whispers carried weirdly in Heaven, but I could still make out the shock and confusion in Faith’s voice. “Ms. Hellebore killed Ms. Vervaine? Is she
another
demon?”

Before I could respond, the fingerprint scanner beeped once more. “Vervaine’s in the fridge again, Oleander,” Ms. Hellebore said without looking around.

“Lazy cow.” Ms. Oleander didn’t so much as glance at the fridge. “And at a time like this.” Faith and I stared at each other as Ms. Oleander heaved a large bucket up onto the table with a grunt. There was a biohazard symbol printed on the side. She peeled back the lid. “Can I have some of your protein powder?”

“No. It’s disgusting enough watching you as it is.”

“Squeamish, Fury?” Ms. Oleander said, scooping diced offal out of the bucket and into a large cereal bowl. “I thought your type loved blood.” The door beeped and slid open yet again. “Henbane, didn’t you tell Vervaine to stay out of the fridge?”

“Oh, honestly.” Ms. Henbane gave a sniff of disdain as she swept past on her way to the coffee machine. “One of these days I’m going to
bury
her body while she’s taking one of these little rests. It would serve her right to come back and find it half decayed.” She poured coffee into a mug. It had a picture of a little red devil surrounded by hearts on its side. “If the rest of us can expend the effort to stay in possession, why can’t she?”

“What d’you expect of a Sloth?” Ms. Oleander said with her mouth full. “Well, the Headmistress will expect her at this war meeting. Henbane, go haul her up.”

“Excuse me?” Ms. Henbane said, looking offended. “I don’t take orders from you, Glutton. Go get her yourself.”

“Hen, you know it takes Oleander forever to reconnect to her digestive system,” Ms. Hellebore said wearily. “And I’m possessing far more muscle groups than you bother to control. It’ll be fastest if you go.”

Ms. Henbane swore under her breath in a foreign language, but put her coffee cup carefully down on the work top. She straightened, closing her eyes—and dropped dead.

“Prideful cow,” Ms. Oleander muttered, eyeing Ms. Henbane’s collapsed corpse with dislike. “Thinks she’s better than the rest of us.”

“Shut up, Oleander, or I’ll break your jaw. I don’t need you stirring up trouble.” Ms. Hellebore cracked her huge knuckles.

A group of lower-year teachers that I didn’t know personally came in as she spoke. They sat down at the far end of the table, grumbling amongst themselves about the interruption to their day. Not one of them so much as batted an eyelid at the bodies on the floor. “You heard the Headmistress. It’s more important than ever to work together, or we’ll all end up like the succubus.”

“I heard she got burned so badly, she’ll never be able to possess anyone again,” one of the other teachers chimed in. “She was only five years away from finishing her service here too.”

“And I’ve only got two to go until I’m released,” Ms. Hellebore said, raising her voice to address the room at large. “So if any of you worms puts a
feather
out of line, I will personally rip your tentacles off and floss with them. I’m not having any of you ruin the Prince’s big day.” She grinned wolfishly. “He’s sure to be
very
grateful to those who prepared the way for him. I think I’ll ask for a nice war. I rather fancy visiting France.”

“You say that like there’s still a chance our little nephil will agree to bind with him.” Ms. Oleander gnawed nervously at her thumbnail. “You saw the light over at the old shrine. That has to have been Dante’s pet, ruining all our plans. I don’t understand why the Headmistress wouldn’t let me eat the spare nephil the instant he left the sanctified ground, just to be safe.”

“Always thinking with your stomach. Our nephil
definitely
wouldn’t trust us ever again if you ate her friend in front of her. Anyway, the boy’s got a father, you know. He’d be bound to raise a fuss, and do you know how much money it would cost to hush that up? Asking an Avarice demon as powerful as the Headmistress to part with that much cash is like asking you to go on a diet.” Ms. Hellebore leaned back in her chair, looking unconcerned. “The Headmistress said she’d take care of the nephilim and she will. When have you ever known her to fail?”

“There’s a first time for everything. I still think there’s even odds on all of us finding ourselves cut loose from our host bodies and thrown back in the Pit before the end of the week.” Ms. Oleander stared glumly into her bowl. “If this is going to be my last meal, I should have brought ketchup.”

“There,” interrupted Ms. Henbane, sitting up again. “She hadn’t gone far down.” As she spoke, Ms. Vervaine climbed stiffly out of the fridge. “Oh, for Beelzebub’s sake, Vervaine, get yourself under control. You’re not even
trying
to look human.”

“Why bother?” croaked Ms. Vervaine. Frost cracked off her clothes. “No pupils here.” She rubbed at her eyes with one stiff hand, her arm moving as jerkily as a puppet with half its strings cut. “Too bright. Why?”

“You’ve frozen your corneas again,” Ms. Oleander began—and then she looked sharply up from her bowl. “Wait. It
is
brighter.”

Faith clutched my arm. “Raffi, I think they can tell we’re here!”

With horror, I realized that Faith was right. The darkness surrounding the teachers’ lounge had thinned considerably, driven back by our combined angelic glow.

Every one of Ms. Hellebore’s impressive muscles tensed. “Dante’s pet,” she growled. Shadows flickered around her outline—

As one, Faith and I beat our wings hard, hurling ourselves higher heavenward as tentacles erupted from the mortal plane like a giant squid breaching out of the ocean. The grasping limbs missed our dangling feet by inches before sinking back out of sight. The mortal world blurred by under us as we fled as fast as our wings could carry us.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Michaela yelped as we dropped into normal space inside her room. She whirled, daggers flashing.
“Sancte Michael Archangele—”

“No, it’s us!” I said from the floor. Michaela’s daggers had missed me by inches. At least I’d managed to land on something soft. “Sorry, Krys,” I added, rolling off of her. “You okay?”

“Fine!” Krystal squeaked. “Never better!” Face red, she scrambled to her feet, ignoring my outstretched hand. She cleared her throat, occupying herself with brushing at her clothes. “Did you guys manage to find anything out?”

Faith and I exchanged glances. “The good news is that your angel is right,” Faith said. “The demons are afraid Raffi and I will close the Hellgate together.”

“They are?” Michaela’s eyebrows shot up—and then drew down again. “Wait, demons? Plural?”

“That’s the bad news,” I said grimly. “
All
the other teachers are demons.”

Michaela and Krystal stared at us.

In the silence, the knock at the door sounded as loud as a gunshot.