I’M SORRY, I sent them. I’M SO—

Then something smashed into the gunman’s face and knocked him off his feet.

A piece of rubble the size of a bowling ball. Flung by Walker. An explosion had wrecked the room opposite the head of the stairs. In one move I pulled the scimitar out—felt the tissues scream—and thrust it straight through the assassin’s midriff and into the wooden floor.

OUT! NOW!

Madeline had struggled to her feet and Walker had come back down the stairs and pulled the glass shard out of her. The twins were huddled between the two of them. My most perverse self said: That’s the proper picture. That’s how it should have been. Walker and Maddy and the twins. You don’t love anyone enough. You don’t have love. Just fucking curiosity. Like your mother.

NOW!

But all the ground-floor exits were covered. The house was encircled by thirty Angels at least, and all the ammunition was silver. Even with our speed we’d be hit. The woods beyond had a beautiful darkness and large, indifferent sentience.

FUCK! FUCK!

ROOF. THEY’RE CLOSE ENOUGH. OVER THEM.

If we could get up on the roof there was a chance we’d be able to jump clear of their perimeter. It wouldn’t guarantee not getting hit, but they were less likely to be looking over their own heads than at the building’s obvious exits.

We went back to the stairs, Zoë on my hip, Lorcan clinging to Walker’s back. Madeline had recovered from whatever had debilitated her. Plaster and brick dust swirled.

OH GOD.

Half the front wall of Carmel and Rory’s room had been blown away and the fresh smell of the night came in mixed with the stink of gunfire. Carmel’s body had been ripped in half—though by the explosion or by Trish and Fergus it was impossible to tell.

OH GOD.

We’d all felt it, a moment before seeing it. Trish’s body, splayed, dead. One arm was bent awkwardly under her, her head twisted to the left, mouth open, fat tongue lolling. Thirty or forty bullet-holes, the ether still migrained from where the silver had gone into her, the terrible reaction that touched all of us in our mouths and nostrils, bittered our saliva, turned our guts.

There was no time. There was the fact of the death—everything that was Trish—that had been Trish—began the rush together, the panicked gathering in us so we would know all that we’d lost—but there was no time, no time—bullets spattered the wall behind my head and a searchlight’s beam swung—

THIS WAY!

Down the landing a second flight led up to another floor. Four more bedrooms, a half-plumbed bathroom, a tiny water-closet, ladders and tarps, bare plaster, an exercise bike, a brass curtain rod … Zoë, clinging tight to me, was trying to find room to accommodate Trish, lying like that with her tongue out it meant it meant that thing that happens to the humans that happens but and what will where will she go—

HERE. UP.

Walker had found the hatch in the ceiling that led up into the attic or loft. He set Lorcan down, bent his knees, leaped, straight up. The hatch crashed open. He got a purchase and hoisted himself up.

KIDS.

Lorcan first, tossed up by Madeline. Then Zoë, full of gossiping adrenaline. IT’S ALL RIGHT, ANGEL, WE’RE GETTING OUT OF HERE.

Three skylights. We would have very little time. No time, really. Three or four seconds, maybe, before the first shooter spotted us.

Madeline was first out. I passed Zoë up to her (felt her LIE FLAT ON YOUR TUMMY, SWEETHEART) then Lorcan.

GO!

Walker. I didn’t argue. A second later I’d joined Madeline and the kids, prostrate on the cold shingles. It was better than it might have been: two of the house’s half-dozen chimney stacks shielded us on two sides. We had to go simultaneously. Fast, high, hard. Three at once (and the twins) would be more confusing. Spread their fire. Make them miss. The lies you tell yourself. The necessary lies.

YOU HOLD VERY TIGHT. BOTH OF YOU—UNDERSTAND?

Walker took Lorcan again. Zoë scrambled onto my back, wrapped her arms around me. It was a fifty- or sixty-foot jump. Hit the ground running. Eighty yards to the trees. And then? And then? The RV was no good to us in this state, and there were still two hours to moonset. Two options: get back to the change site, pick up the clothes and get as far away as possible, or fuck the change site (which they’d more than likely have covered), hit the nearest house and take our chances killing the inhabitants and stealing their clothes. Clothes. The inability to drive with these hands and feet. Practicalities. Like a group of happy idiots you could never ditch. You’ve got to laugh. Except when you’ve got two three-year-olds laughing’s not always an option.

READY?

YES.

NOW!

We jumped.

As with all actions performed because other options have ceased to exist, it was a relief. I had time to notice a torn sheet of hurrying cloud just below the moon (while the moon reminded me I hadn’t eaten enough), and, glancing down, to pick out the upturned face of one of the Angels, a young man not more than twenty, wearing some sort of protective headgear (a cross between a boxer’s headguard and a cycle helmet) that framed a sweet, sharp-featured, androgynous face. He was looking up in just the way he would’ve looked up—freckled, wide-eyed—at a spectacular firework when he was little.

Walker hit the ground a split-second before me. Madeline landed close. The forest rushed towards us like a crowd storming a barricade, full of love. Gunfire and wildly swung searchlights and a voice screaming some order over and over in Italian that mine wasn’t good enough to catch.

Then the tiny detail of something sharp going into the back of my left thigh—before everything went black.

Part Three

The Prophecy

27

Remshi

WHICH WAS WHY my sweet Justine had kept shtoom. If I found love again, she thought, there would be no room in my life for her. And what would finding Talulla—Vali reborn—be if not love?

“I know why you didn’t tell me what we were doing in Europe,” I said to her, when I came up from the vault, when I came back from death. “What I was doing in Europe. I know why you didn’t tell me about Talulla.”

She was in the study, naked, on her hands and knees, scrubbing at the bloodstains with bleach and a brutal-looking brush I didn’t even know we owned. It was just after one a.m. There was no sign of last night’s bodies. Without looking up, she tossed me a roll of garbage bags, which I caught. We don’t drop catches, especially when thrown by one of our own.