I’m tempted by the ridiculous urge to knock, like maybe if I act normal, things will be normal. I’ll knock, and Anna will answer it all serious and ask us what we’re doing here at this late hour, but then she’ll take us back to Angela’s room, and Angela will look up from where she’s sprawled on her bed, reading, and she’ll say, Really, you guys? You’re really so paranoid that you couldn’t wait until morning?
I could knock, and then there wouldn’t be anything evil on the other side of that door.
Christian shakes his head slightly. What do you feel? he asks.
I open my mind. The minute I lower my defenses—which I wasn’t even aware I had up—sorrow floods me, a deep penetrating pain, so fierce it makes me gasp for air. I lean against the wall and try to delve inside the suffering, to identify its source, but all I get is an image of a woman’s body floating facedown in the water, her dark hair spreading out around her head. The angel—oh yes, definitely an angel—is not Samjeeza, that much I know. His sorrow is different from Sam’s, angrier, a rage caught up in an agony that’s centuries old and still red hot, but it’s also more controlled than Sam’s, less self-pitying, like he’s channeling his emotions into something else: a purpose. A desire to destroy.
There’s a Black Wing, I say to Christian silently, careful to keep the words flowing only between us, the way Dad taught us to do. Grade-A sorrow. That’s about all I can get—it overwhelms everything else. What about you? Can you tell what somebody’s thinking in there?
There are at least seven people in that room, he says, closing his eyes. It’s hard to sift through.
“I told you that you’re not welcome here,” a voice says suddenly, low and frightened. “I want you to leave.”
“Come now, Anna,” responds another voice—an older man, from the sound of it, with the slight lilt to his speech that Dad has. “Is that any way to treat an old friend?”
“You were never my friend,” Anna says. “You were a mistake. A sin.”
“Oh, a sin,” he says. “I’m flattered.”
“I rebuke you,” Anna says. “In the name of Jesus Christ. Begone.”
This annoys him. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. This isn’t about you.”
“Then what is it about?” This from Angela, steady and crazy calm considering there’s a Black Wing in her living room. “What do you want?”
“We’ve come to see the baby,” he says.
Christian and I exchange troubled glances. Where is Webster?
“My baby?” Angela repeats, almost stupidly. “Why?”
“Penamue would like to see the wee thing, as would I. I’m the grandfather, after all.”
Holy crap, I think. Phen’s here. And … does that mean that the other angel is Angela’s father?
“You are nothing to him, Asael,” Anna spits out. “Nothing.”
At the name Asael my brain floods with every piece of information I’ve gathered about this guy over the past year: the collector, the big bad who would stop at nothing to recruit or destroy all of the Triplare from this world, the brother who usurped Samjeeza as the leader of the Watchers. Very dangerous, I can practically hear my father saying. Without pity. Without hesitation. He takes what he wants, and if he sees you, if he knows what you are, he will take you. I want to run, that’s my instinct—run, run down the stairs and out the door and not look back—but I clench my teeth and stay right where I am.
“He’s not here,” Angela says, like she’s only irritated at this intrusion and not terrified out of her mind. “You could have simply called, Phen, and I would have told you that. You didn’t have to make the trip all this way.”
Asael laughs. The sound makes my skin crawl. “We could have called,” he repeats, amused. “Where is the baby, then, if not here?”
“I gave him away.”
“You gave him away? To whom?”
“To a nice couple in a profile I picked at the adoption agency, who desperately wanted a kid. The dad’s a musician; the mom’s a pastry chef. I liked the idea that he’d always have music and good food.”
“Hmm,” Asael says thoughtfully. “I believe that Penamue was under the impression that you were going to keep the child. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” answers a voice I wouldn’t have recognized as Phen’s if I didn’t know it was him speaking. He sounds like he has a bad cold. “She told me she was keeping it.”
“Him,” Angela corrects. “And I changed my mind, after it was clear that you were going to bail on me.” She can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Look, I’m not the maternal type. I’m nineteen years old. I go to Stanford. I have a life. Being strapped with a kid’s the last thing I want. So I gave him to some people who’d take care of him.”
I can’t see, but I can imagine Angela standing there, that carefully blank expression she gets when she’s hiding something, her hip pushed out a bit to one side, her head cocked like she can’t believe she’s still having this oh-so-boring conversation. “So it looks like you wasted your time,” she adds. “And mine.”
There’s a moment of silence. Then Asael starts to clap, slowly, so loudly I flinch every time his hands strike each other.
“What a performance,” he says. “You’re quite the actress, my dear.”
“Believe me or don’t,” she says. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Search the apartment,” Asael says, an untroubled calm to his voice, like still water on the lake, which doesn’t reveal the turmoil under the surface. “Look in all the nooks and crannies. I believe the baby is here, somewhere.”
I hear people moving away from us, down the hall, and then the noise of tossing furniture and breaking glass. Anna starts to whisper to herself, soft and desperate, something that I vaguely recognize as the Lord’s Prayer.
We should do something, I send to Christian.
He shakes his head again. We’re outnumbered. There are two full angels, Clara, and your dad said we wouldn’t be able to beat even one of them in a head-to-head fight. Then add in a few what I am betting are Triplare. We wouldn’t stand a chance in there.
I bite my lip. But we have to help Angela.
He shakes his head. We should figure out where Web is. That’s what Angela would want us to do, he says. I can feel his desire to run away, the way he’s been conditioned to in this situation, and I can feel his fear, almost panic at this point, rising in him. He’s not afraid for himself. He’s afraid for me. He wants to put me in his truck and drive far away from here. He knows if we stay it will all play out like his vision, which ends with me covered in blood, staring up at him with glassy eyes. He can’t let that happen.