did Azrael have feelings?
The little girl nodded. “Yes.
That’s her. Sophia.” She called Jordan by her real name. Mimi felt chills up her
spine.
Ted knelt before the girl.
“How did you know her?”
“She lived over there,” the
little girl said. “ with her grandma. We were scared of the lady. Sophia
too.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. They took
her.”
“Who?”
The girl wouldn’t
say.
“ Propon familiar,” Mimi said gently, in the coercive tones of the sacred language. Tell your friends. She
used compulsion. She didn’t want to bring any harm to the girl, but they had to know. “Nothing
will happen to you. Tell us what you remember.”
“Bad people. A man and a woman. They took her away,” the girl said in a flat voice. “On
Monday.”
The Venators exchanged sharp
glances. They had arrived in Rio that day.
“And this grandmother of hers
. . . is she still here?” Mimi asked.
“No. She went away a few days
later.” The little girl looked at them with large, fearful eyes. “Sophia said there would be
people coming for her, good people and bad people. We weren’t sure what kind you were at first.
But she told us the good people would be with a beautiful lady, and you would give me a toy dog,”
the girl said haltingly.
“She told you we were coming?”
Mimi demanded.
“When the good people come,
she said to give them this.” The little girl removed an envelope from her pocket. It was grubby
and streaked with dirt. But the handwriting was beautiful calligraphy script, the kind usually
found on ivory envelopes that announced a bonding.
It was addressed to Araquiel .
The Angel of Judgment, Mimi
knew. Also called the Angel with Two Faces. The angel who carried both dark
and light within him.
Kingsley Martin.
FIFTEEN
Schuyler
The look on Jack’s face when
she broke the glass was a mixture of shock and pride, but Schuyler only allowed herself a quick glimpse. She had to stop thinking about him and concentrate on what
she was doing. She had leaped out of the room and into the sky, landing on a trellis and jumping
off the roof to the ground. She was running outdoors, in the middle of the party, a blur of pink
to the party guests.
It was past midnight and the
festivities had taken a darker turn, that moment at every unforgettable gathering when it seems
anything and everything is available to anyone and everyone. There was a raucous feeling of wild
abandon in the air, as the Bollywood stars shimmied and shook, their bellies undulating in
serpentine curves, and a hundred drummers on wooden-barrel dhol drums beat a steady
and seductive rhythm.
Schuyler couldn’t put a finger
on it, but there was something almost sinister about how hypnotic the music was, its attraction
bordered on menacing. Listening to it was like being tickled too hard, when the tickling stopped
being funny and became a form of torture, and the laughter unwelcome and
uncontrollable.
She burst through a line of bhangra dancers, cymbals clanging, and knocked down one of the costumed
stilt-walkers, barely missing a crew of torchbearers standing guard by the perimeter.
But everywhere she went, he
was right behind her.
“A
heartbeat away. Schuyler!”
She heard his voice clearly in
her mind. Jack would use the glom on her. It wasn’t fair. If he had said her name out loud, maybe
she would forgive him, but to know that he was in her mind, that it came as easily to him as
before , unnerving .
She ran past tiger tamers and
fire-eaters, past a group of drunken European nobles fat with blood, their human
familiars left to swoon by the river walls. This wasn’t a party anymore, this was something else. Something evil and depraved . . . an orgy, a paean to monstrous indulgence, pernicious and
wicked. And Schuyler couldn’t help but feel that there was something – someone, egging
everyone on, right to the edge of