“Seriously, though,” said Eligor, “that horn must have been a worry. I had the feather in my safe in my office. Couldn’t have been more protected. But someone took it away from me anyway. And I had the devil of a time getting it back—if you’ll excuse the expression.”
“So, the horn isn’t here,” I said, forcing myself into their little tete-a-tete. “So I guessed wrong. It was worth a try.”
“There were moments I almost had respect for you, Doloriel.” Anaita had returned to her calm, emotionless voice. The weird thing is, I could still hear bits of the childlike tones that we all knew, that soothing, sweet voice still submerged in the goddess persona, like a toddler fallen down a well. “But ultimately, you were a mistake from the beginning. I should never have let you continue to exist.” She shook her head. “Did you really think I would keep the horn somewhere you or some other sneak-thief could reach it? Hide it in my house? In a museum? Or here?” She laughed, and I heard something then that I hadn’t heard before, even in her rages—the sound of something that had nothing human in it. “Since the Grand Duke and I made our bargain, the horn has never been out of my keeping. Never! An army of angels could not have taken it from me—or an army of demons.” She placed her hand over her heart. The spot began to glow. “You, with your sad little tricks. Sammariel hid my feather in a hidden pocket, folded into time! How clever! Did it never occur to you that if he could perform such a trick with a mere fraction of my power, I might be capable of things you could not even grasp?”
And then she reached into her own chest, as effortlessly as reaching into a coat to pull out a wallet. A moment later, she withdrew her hand. Sparkling, shining with a sickly pale glare, the horn lay in her palm. All I could do was stare at it. If I hadn’t been yards away from her I might have been able to reach out and touch it, but it was hopelessly beyond my grasp. “Here, annoying angel. Is this what you wanted? To buy back your demon sweetheart?”
“Why?” I said. “If you knew—if you knew all this already—why go to so much trouble to frame me?”
“Frame you? You have not been accused of half of what you’ve actually done, Doloriel. And as for what you’ve done to me, by my divinity, if you spent eternity in the lowest pits of Hell, you couldn’t possibly pay for that. You’ve spoiled so much. Even when you were alive, you were a thorn in my side.”
My eyes slowly lifted from the horn to her face. “When I was alive?”
“But now, the loose ends will be cut off, or burned away.” She lifted her other hand, the one without the horn. It had a strange waviness to it, as if I saw it from several directions at the same time, or through thick glass. “Horseman, you have no business here, so depart. You have my feather. I still have your horn. Our bargain is still in place.”
“I’ll be going, I promise,” said Eligor, grinning. “But I confess I find this fascinating. I’ll watch a bit longer, but I won’t interfere.”
“As you wish.” She looked down at Ed Walker, still prostrate on the floor. “And you have done well, little pilgrim. Kainos will survive. But you will behave yourselves from now on, and treat me with the respect your creator deserves.”
“I knew it.” I said it loudly.
Anaita turned just the slightest bit toward me. “Silence. You are no longer important, Doloriel. You are the first loose end that will be trimmed.” She lifted her hand toward me, spreading her fingers, so I started talking fast.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “I knew it would all come down to the same old shit. It’s not even real evil—it’s just selfishness.” I pulled myself up into a half-crouch. I was still too far away to do anything but get burned to ash, but if you gotta go, you might as well do it upright. “You actually think that what you want is more important than what anyone else wants, and you think that having power proves it. The last important angel who fell, the Adversary—that was what he thought, too. People act like it’s some kind of terrifying, incomprehensible evil, but it’s not. It’s the same greed you see in a sandbox full of children. ‘Give me that! I want all the toys! Mine!’”
“I told you to be silent, Doloriel.” A little heat crept back into her voice. “You cannot even grasp what I’ve created here. The mistakes of the Highest—I’ve fixed them. It was worth every death, every deception. With you and your friends gone, Heaven will never find this place. Little angel, spiteful little angel. You cannot grasp the beauty, the perfection, of what I’ve made!”
I stood. It was painful. “And you’ve failed to grasp a few important things yourself, my lady. For one thing, everything you’ve just said has gone straight to Heaven. Because the lines of communication have been open this whole time.” I pointed to the Mecca cube, which had at some point begun to glow in its open cabinet, a thin but vibrant pale, pale violet-blue, like the first shift from dawn to daytime sky. “In fact, I believe that you’ve just made what’s called a full confession.”
Her entire face changed, twisting in fury that even Eligor might not have been able to match. “What?”
“Oh, and one other thing.” I’d been wondering what had kept him so long, but there Sam was, standing just behind her. “This.”
But instead of simply knocking the horn from her hand as we’d planned, Sam reached through Anaita with the God Glove. I shouted out in surprise—he wasn’t supposed to use it anywhere near her—but my voice was lost in the sudden wail of anger and shock from Anaita as Sam’s glowing hand forced its way through her body from behind, making her writhe like a hooked fish—no, an electric eel, sparking and discharging—then knocked the horn out of her grasp. It bounced across the floor, a simple object apparently obeying simple laws of physics, and landed only a yard from me.
“You!” she shrieked, turning to see Sam, still caught with his glowing hand sunken in her body. She did something I couldn’t quite make out, lashing out with her arm; there was a burst of white light, a great crack of heat and sound, and Sam went flying across the room. She staggered, but pulled herself upright again, looking around as if for her real enemy, someone more significant than a mere advocate angel. “Traitors! Thieves!”
By now I had the horn in my hand. I turned to Eligor, who was watching the whole thing with a gleeful expression. “You want this? I want Caz!”
“Throw it to me.”
“Not until I have her! Don’t fuck with me now, Horseman! No tricks! I want her, the real thing, the Countess, just like you promised!”
“Little angel,” he said, “you are no fun.” A moment later Caz appeared, pale hair flying as she tumbled to the floor. She lay on her side, gasping. It sure looked like her, and there was nothing else I could do to make certain before Anaita turned us all into ashes. I tossed him the horn. It flew end over end across the room, but before it even landed in Eligor’s hand it was peeling apart into flecks of light, being absorbed back into the Grand Duke’s person. For a moment I thought I even saw his real face, horns now proudly in place once more. That’s all I’ll say about it. Then the Vald face returned.
“And now I’ll let you have the rest of your fun,” he said. “Because things are about to get crowded.”
He vanished. Caz didn’t. I couldn’t really enjoy it, though, because a very, very unhappy Anaita was only a few feet away from me.
Suddenly light began to stream down from above. The roof and upper floors of the house peeled apart and began flying away, up into the sky, and as they rose I could see a thousand bright, winged shapes falling down toward us through the swirling snow.
Something hit me, smashed me to the floor. Anaita stood over me, her beautiful face now something else entirely. “First what you love—then you,” she said, and every word was a serpentine hiss. She reached out her hand, the invisible air rippling and bulging around it, and then flung something toward Caz where she lay on the floor.