“You thought you could keep us out,” Vengeance snarled. “You fool. We are inevitable.”
Miss Virtue bared her teeth at the angel, and Bitter got that sense again that they were sharper than they should be. “You are apocalyptic,” the principal growled. “I have no desire to see you reduce their world to ruin, as you do so well.”
Vengeance snaked its head to one side and blinked at her slowly, each of its yellow eyes scaling down, then back up. “The world always ends,” it said. “It is of no consequence. Never place your loyalty with flesh.” The angel was beginning to sound like it was running out of patience. There was a horrifying indifference coating all its words, and Bitter realized that it had none of the righteousness it had first spoken to her with when it had scorched its way out of the painting. It didn’t sound like it was on a crusade of justice anymore—it sounded like it was there for a cleanup job and they were getting in its way. “You don’t care about us,” Bitter said slowly. “You were only protecting me because I’s useful to you. You don’t care about humans in general.”
“Humans don’t care about humans in general,” Vengeance spat, animosity dripping from its voice. “We are restoring what your people already contaminated. It is a cycle, it is a ritual, and yes, it is bloody. But a new world springs up in the clots of it.”
“You have killed enough,” Miss Virtue said, her voice darkening. “Innocent people have died for your hunt.”
“What are a few lives for the greater good?” Vengeance replied, its yellow eyes unmoving. “We executed a monster.” It glanced toward the mayor. “We will execute another. And another, until Lucille is cleansed, until the purge is complete.”
“You want to drown the streets in endless blood.” Miss Virtue curled her lip. “You call that justice?”
“Yes,” the angel hissed. “You have watched the humans for decades! Their world is corrupt. What else but blood can wash it clean?” Its smoke pulsed and rippled, bulging out from its body. “You interrupt the hunt, traitor. Leave us now.” Bitter watched in horror as Vengeance turned to the mayor, whose spine finally gave out as he crumpled to the floor, saliva dribbling from his mouth, fear rendering him incoherent. Miss Virtue stepped in front of the man. Even with all her height, she looked tiny compared to Vengeance, who towered above her in unnatural feet of compressed smoke and paint and blood.
“Step aside,” Vengeance commanded.
Miss Virtue didn’t move. “No. This hunt needs to end, angel. Return to where you came from, and take the others with you.”
Vengeance’s scaled face sharpened with hostile intent. A cold foreboding filled Bitter’s heart. “It going to kill her,” she whispered, almost to herself.
Aloe’s hand was sweating in hers, damp and firm. “It wouldn’t,” he replied, but there was no certainty in his voice.
“You doh understand,” Bitter said, her voice thin. “It won’t let anything stand in its way.” She was beginning to understand how single-minded Vengeance was, how little it mattered what any of them said to it, why it had been unmoved when she’d begged for Mr. Nelson’s life in the alley. The angel simply did not care. It could not be convinced or debated with.
“Step aside, traitor,” Vengeance said coldly. “Or you will be gutted like the humans you betrayed us for.” The angel had been translucent this whole time, willow branches sweeping through its form, but now it raised its claws and they became solid, more solid than reality, the air around them warping with their new weight. All sound evaporated from Bitter’s throat. She thought she was screaming for it to stop, but her mouth was empty, stretched open and futile. Miss Virtue didn’t move. Vengeance swiped down, so fast that Bitter didn’t see its arm move. One moment it was raising its claws, and the next they were embedded in Miss Virtue’s stomach, hooked right below her rib cage. The atrium fell silent as a howl choked and died inside Bitter.
Miss Virtue should have screamed. She should have screamed, skewered on the end of an angel’s arm. Her voice should have filled the air with agony, but instead her head jerked back, the tendons in her neck stretched and thick, then snapped forward, and Bitter heard bones crack. Miss Virtue was smiling wider than should have been possible for a human.
“Many thanks, sib,” she said to Vengeance, and her voice was an unfamiliar metallic thing, iron grating over stone. “I have been starved for so long.” Her suit went up in ghostly white flames that lit up the atrium, and as her clothes burned into nothing, her flesh turned gray, her skin calcifying into stone, her hair and eyes hardening into rock. Vengeance roared and ripped its limb from her torso. There was a wet and sickening sound as its claws broke off in Miss Virtue, leaving seeping wounds on the angel’s limb that leaked white smoke. Vengeance stumbled back, its yellow eyes flickering wildly.
“Impossible,” it said. “You were stripped.” The smoke cauterized its wounds, leaving a stump where its claws used to be.
Miss Virtue’s body was flaring out, expanding into an unfamiliar shape, stone groaning as her bones gave way to something else, something very loudly not of this world. “It was a terrible fall,” she concurred, her deadened eyes fixed on Vengeance. “No other angels to sacrifice a piece of themselves so I might regain a memory of what I used to be.”
Behind her, the mayor’s eyes rolled into white as he went into a dead faint.
Bitter and Aloe backed up until they bumped into Sunflower. Aloe’s hand was clenched tightly around Bitter’s.
“What the fuck?” he choked out. “What is she?”
“Like I said,” Sunflower said through tight teeth, her arms folded. “That’s not a human.”
Miss Virtue was now as tall as Vengeance, standing several feet above the rest of them. With a grinding rumble, wings started to extend from her back, four on each side, snapping open in a cloud of silvery dust. Bitter flinched when she saw that each wing was tipped with more of Miss Virtue’s eyes, that searing gray she had come to know so well. Her jaw went slack with awe. “You’re an angel,” she gasped, shock gathering under her tongue.
Miss Virtue glanced down at her and, much to Bitter’s surprise, winked. “Do not be afraid,” she said, the words clanging into the air.
For the first time since Bitter had called it out of the painting, Vengeance looked unsure. It took a few steps back, its smoke bubbling uncomfortably. A flake of Bitter’s dried blood detached from the corner of its mouth and floated down to the grass. She watched it fall, a low ringing sound building in her ears.
Had it been barely a day ago that she’d cut her arm open and fed the angel out of the painting? How strange, that one desperate and reckless act had led to so much destruction. Mr. Nelson was still alone in the alley. Eddie was somewhere with the Assata kids, and Bitter still didn’t know how she would tell her friend that they’d left him there, with only Alex’s jacket and no breath in his chest. Theron was dead, and none of them knew what that meant, if that was justice, if that would make anything better for anyone. They had all been trying to fix things in their own ways, but this? Whatever this was, wherever they had all landed, this had given them no answers, no solutions. All they had now were broken worlds and shattered stories.