The House of Shattered Wings

“Isabelle!” Emmanuelle said, sharply. “You can’t—”

Philippe stifled a bitter laugh—and he wasn’t sure whether it came from him or Nightingale. “See what you have?” he said. “See what Morningstar shaped; what all Fallen are, in the end? Perhaps your House doesn’t deserve to survive. Perhaps none of them do.” He rose, brushing his hands against the cloth of his trousers, as if he could remove the dust he’d breathed in the chapel. “I’m sorry, Emmanuelle. I don’t have more than this.”

He left, without looking back.

*

ISABELLE caught up with Philippe in the corridor. “You can’t leave.”

Philippe turned, stared at her. There was no illumination in the corridor, but, every two or three breaths, Isabelle’s skin would gradually brighten: a slow, lazy radiance that would throw underwater reflections on the flower wallpaper. It was . . . eerie, not least because she had never done that, not even at the height of her powers; back in that single, bloody night in the Grands Magasins where his life had changed.

“I can if I want to,” he said. And he had to. Before Selene found him and imprisoned him, once again. Before this House—and the rage Nightingale felt when he stood within its walls—was his undoing.

“You—” Isabelle shook her head. “You made a promise, remember?”

He had, but it had been to a different person. And perhaps he shouldn’t have made it at all. He owed nothing; not to her, not to this House. “I promised to help you. To keep you company, until you could work things out.” Philippe shook his head. “You’re all grown up now, Isabelle.”

“Why? Because of what happened in the crypt? Because I touched a body? Is that what worries you?”

No, not that—it was her entire behavior: the light, streaming out of her, the ageless glint in her eyes, the way she held herself. What she had said, to Emmanuelle and Madeleine; the casual way she spoke of exorcising a ghost that bothered her, not understanding any of Nightingale’s suffering, or the magnitude of Morningstar’s betrayal. Nightingale had been wronged, and all she could ask herself—instead of questioning the House and its ways, or the acts of Selene’s master—was how to remove this inconvenient obstacle from her path.

Like them. She had become just like them.

No. She had always been like them, and he had been too blind to see it.

“I’m still the same,” Isabelle said. “I—” She raised her hand, the one with the fingers missing; worried at the gap with her other hand, as she always did under stress. “Why can’t you see it?”

Because she was changing, and she scared him stiff. Because he couldn’t be quite sure when it had happened—when, in the seemingly endless night that had sharpened his entire being to a thin pretense of what he once had been—she had become a Fallen in her own right, like Selene, like Oris.

Like Asmodeus.

Was it when she’d touched Morningstar’s bones? A simple answer, that—that power was its own corruption, but of course there were no simple answers. “You’ve changed,” he said, simply. There was nothing else he could say that she would understand.

“I haven’t.” Isabelle’s voice was grim. “I warned you once before: this is my House, Philippe, and the only place where I feel safe. I will defend it.”

“You weren’t this”—he struggled for words—“categorical before. You didn’t go to see Selene back then, did you?”

She held his gaze, unflinchingly. “Perhaps I should have.”

He sighed. “It hasn’t got much to do with you in any case, Isabelle. I’m just—” Tired. Tired of it all, of their stupid power plays and reputation games; tired of wondering where he fit into all this and never finding an answer. “I can’t go on like this.”

And of course, it wasn’t true. Because it wasn’t just weariness, but also her. What she had become; the power she effortlessly wielded—and the effortless cruelty that surfaced, like a scorpion sting, in the moments he least expected it.

He couldn’t face that, not anymore.

Isabelle’s face was a mask, all emotions smoothed out of it. “You—you could offer Selene your help. I’m sure she would pardon you, take you into the House—”

“I don’t want to be in a House!” He hadn’t meant to shout it, but the words slipped out, as treacherous as a wet knife blade. “A House took me, once. Tore me from my home and marched me all the way here, to fight in a stupid, senseless war; and left me with nothing, not even a mouthful of food or a scrap of cloth to call my own.”