Avi Marie's Arc

Chapter 15 of 30

The rift hung open above the black towers. Avi Marie knew the path led up through it, to the angels who ordered her mortal dead. But she did not know the way in. Only one being did: her superior, the angel who trained her, who once stood over her shoulder and taught her to watch a mortal. Now he stood cornered in his own courtyard, and he alone knew how to reach the ones above. "You've read the ledger," she said. "You know I won't stop. Show me the way through the rift." He folded his hands. "You think the door opens for anyone who asks. It does not. And I would sooner die than lead you to them." Azrael stepped forward. He dressed in white, but his face held no softness. He had watched someone he loved emptied by the stolen object, and he wanted its keepers as badly as she did. "He means it," Azrael said, flat. "He's more afraid of them than of dying here." "Then we don't ask him," Petra said. The archivist had guarded this man's secrets for seven years, then handed Avi Marie the proof to end him. She pulled a thin card from inside her charcoal suit. "His travel writ. Found it in the sealed room, under the plate. Every crossing needs one. His name. His seal." Avi Marie took the card. Her superior's stillness cracked. He reached for it, one step, before Malphas planted his hooves in his path. "Sit," the goat said. His red eyes did not move. "You lost the eastern fields to men who sign papers. I know what a paper can do." Avi Marie held the writ to the light. The seal matched the one on the metal plate. "You didn't need to speak," she told her superior. "You wrote it all down yourself. Same as the order to blind me." He went white. "That writ carries my name. If you cross under it, they will know I let you." "Good," she said. She turned her horse toward the broken sky. The animal carried its own light, the same light that had shielded her below. The rift's torn edges glowed blue and calm, clouds drifting inside it. Her superior called after her, and now the silence was gone from him. "They will hollow you the moment you arrive. You have no idea what waits." Avi Marie tucked the writ beside the ledger. "You knew the way and wouldn't give it. So I took it from your own hand." She looked back once. "Stay here with the men you served. I'm going up to meet them." The horse climbed. The courtyard fell away below. Ahead, the rift opened wider, and the pale sky beyond it waited. She had wanted him to lead her. Instead she carried his name past his own gate, into the reach of angels she had never seen.