from his shoulders. He was the angel and the angel was him, and they spoke with the same shuddering voice.
:I’m sorry. Nothing you do can change this:
His wings unfolded and carried him away, ripping his hands from hers and leaving her in darkness.
But not alone. Alain stood beside her now, pale and translucent as milk and cobwebs. His eyes were black pits, all light extinguished, and when he spoke his gravelly voice was wet and drowned.
“Everything you’ve done is for nothing. You can’t save him, any more than I could save Blake. I held on—I held on tight, but it was no use. They consume us like moths, without even meaning it. But it’s all right—stay with me. Wait with me, and we’ll watch it all burn.”
But she was falling away from his outstretched hand, into a redlined darkness that went down forever.
Antja Michaela!
A snap, a wrench, and the world was back. She stood on the sidewalk, untouched by wind or rain, and watched herself slump in a stranger’s arms. Raindrops glittered in midair, frozen along with time.
The dark man stood beside her, a frown carving his beautiful face. “I warned you. Now look what’s happened.”
“You could have warned me earlier.” It didn’t hurt to speak here, outside of time and flesh. All her aches and bruises were far away, only dying echoes of pain.
“I could have. I could have blinded him, let him stand in the rain long after you were safe inside and you never would have known.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Do you know how many times I’ve saved you and your beloved? Do you know how many of the Brotherhood’s assassins I led astray after you first called me? How many other random perils I’ve shielded you from?”
Her mouth opened and closed silently. “You don’t,” he went on, his voice gentling, “because our arrangement was never about keeping score. It was about your safety, for as long as you wanted it, in exchange for a few eventual favors.”
“I don’t like your favors,” she whispered, hugging herself though she felt no chill.
“No one ever does, after the deal is struck. But you like your life, and your beloved’s life. I didn’t warn you earlier because I don’t want you to take me for granted. And I don’t want you to remain blind to problems that are within your power to solve.”
“It doesn’t look like I’ll be solving this one.” She stared at herself—mouth open, eyes rolled back, spine arching as if about to fall. She looked awful. Her collar gaped to show the swelling, handshaped bruises around her throat, the scratches the maniac’s nails had carved. Her cheeks were pale and splotchy, the skin around her eyes fragile as tissue under smeared makeup. So much, she thought wryly, for leaving a good-looking corpse.
“In a few seconds, the spell that’s soaked through your skin will reach your brain, and rupture. Not unlike an aneurysm. You’ll die quickly and in pain. When your corpse reaches the morgue—don’t worry, I think you’ll have a bruised, Ophelian sort of beauty about you—the doctors will discover a very high concentration of mania in your blood. And the police will want to know where it came from.”
“And they’ll go to Rainer.” She swallowed. “All this to cause trouble for him?”
He took her hand and squeezed it softly. “Forgive me, my dear, but this is hardly much effort as murders go. One death, quickly accomplished. I’m sure the spell was a tricky bit of work, but that’s practically its own reward to a good magician.”
“Who—”
She stopped even as the dark man tilted his head chidingly. “I think you can deduce that.”
And she could. It was clever: not only might the police trace the mania back to Rainer, but any serious investigation into their finances would stir up even more trouble. And though the police couldn’t catch Rainer, his absence would mean that control of mania would fall into the hands of his sometime business partner.
And a bit of revenge for a wasted glass of scotch thrown in for good measure.
She let out a long breath. Outside of her dying body, she could appreciate it. Admiration would fade when the pain of her death set in, she was sure.
“Oh no,” the man said. “You’re not going to die. That would be breaking our agreement, and I could never have that on my conscience. Look closely.”
She followed his pointing hand. If she concentrated she could see the magic moving through her body—not the quiet sparkle of her own