through your mouth,” she said, “There’s no way to avoid the smell.”
I saw her, finally, standing before me. The world had stopped shaking, and the darkness had fallen away just enough that my eyes weren’t totally useless. The first thing I noticed were the wings on her back. They were dark, like her hair, but her eyes were bright and luminous, shining with silvery light.
She extended a hand, and I saw tattooed markings along her wrist, also glowing with light to match her eyes. “Dagon, right?” she asked.
I watched her hand, then looked at my own. Her markings were like mine, but they weren’t exactly the same. They were called brands, and all angels had them; it was an easy way to identify another angel’s House, and lineage. Whoever this was, she wasn’t firstborn—meaning unlike me, she had been human before ascending to angelhood—but she was a Lightbringer.
I took her hand and shook it. “That’s right,” I said, “Who are you?”
“I’m Isla,” she took my hand. “I doubt if you remember me.”
I examined her as the rumbling around us slowly settled. It never left, however. It was always there, a constant churning, like the stomach of a hungry beast grumbling for food. “Wait…” I said, “You’re—”
“—the one with the wonky wing.” Even in the dark, I could tell she was smiling.
That’s weird. “I was just dreaming…”
“About me? Yeah. I was dreaming about you too.”
A sharp pain stabbed me in the side of the head again, forcing me to grimace. “Wait, wait,” I said, holding my head. “Why are we dreaming? Where are we?”
“It’s not coming back to you as quick as it came to me, huh?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No. Dammit. What’s happening to me?”
“Can you remember what the last thing you were doing was?”
Glimpses of a road flashed before my eyes. There was a road, and a van… Arael, and Zephon were there. Cari. Her face lingered in my mind’s eye, her lightly tanned skin, her vibrant, sharp, dangerous eyes… her full lips.
Distantly, a roaring horn blasted into my consciousness, only to fade away after a few seconds.
“The Wretched,” I said. “There was a Wretched… I had to drive it away or it would’ve killed them.”
Isla nodded. “Good, good. Remember. It’ll help you get your bearings. Just don’t summon the Light again—that’ll only make things worse.”
An awful, sickening sound like rushing water gushing through pipes rippled somewhere above my head. Somewhere close.
“I got its attention,” I said, “The Wretched let them go and came after me… it chased me for hours, like it had my scent.”
“They do that. Like flies on crap; sometimes they don’t let you go.”
“But I… I got away. I lost it in the mountains… didn’t it?”
“Did you?”
I thought I had, but then I remembered… it was faster than me. I had wanted to try to lose it in the mountains, but the Wretched had my scent. I was getting tired, and it wasn’t. I searched for a cave, for an opening in the mountains I could use, but the Wretched caught up to me. I remembered the sound it made as it approached, that awful horn.
The sound of it had weakened me. I felt my wings droop. I felt myself fall. Then the Wretched swooped in behind me, opened its mouth, and—
“—wait a second,” I said, “Are you telling me—”
“—we’re in its stomach? Yeah. We are.”
I watched her for a long moment, unblinking, just staring. Then our surroundings started slowly coming into view, the darkness retreating from my slowly clearing vision. We were standing in a cavern of flesh and cartilage, dark, and humid, and hot. I could barely breathe, despite keeping my nose closed to the environment.
“How is this possible?” I asked. “This isn’t how stomachs work.”
“Angels aren’t meant to have stomachs,” Isla said, “Don’t try to make sense of it.” She scanned the cavern. “Anyway, I don’t think this is… real.”
“Real?”
“You were dreaming before. I think we’re still dreaming now. It’s what this thing does. It makes you dream while it… digests you.”
“If we’re dreaming, how are we talking?”
Isla stared at me, her luminous eyes among the only points of light in this entire dark, and awful place. “I don’t know how to explain it… but I heard you dreaming. I don’t know how long I’ve been in here for. The only thing I did know, and it took a minute to figure out, was where exactly I was and what was happening to me.”
I looked around again, my mind already