The House of Shattered Wings

Silence; and a cold touch against her hand; and the smell of orange blossom, sickeningly close. Raising her gaze, she found him holding the knife against the back of her hand, driven down until he’d broken the skin. “You forget yourself,” Asmodeus said. His hand, wrapped around the knife’s blade, was utterly still; but why would he have trembled? “But never mind. It’s not Elphon I am concerned about.”


“Me?” Madeleine watched the blood—a vivid red, like Asmodeus’s tie—smear itself against the paleness of her skin. She ought to have cared. She ought to have felt pain, but she was just so tired. “What could you possibly want with me, Asmodeus?”

“A washed-out alchemist addicted to angel essence?” He smiled at her shock. “Do credit me with a reasonable information network, Madeleine. You belong here. It’s high time you came back to us.”

As what, a corpse in a coffin? As a blank-minded, obedient fool like Elphon? But she’d known all along—Hawthorn, and Asmodeus, never let go of what was theirs—and what were twenty years to a Fallen, after all? “You might save yourself the trouble,” she said. “Kill me and resurrect me, like Elphon.”

“I would, if it worked on mortals.” He smiled, again. “Which leaves me with . . . more prosaic tools.” The knife tensed against her hand, but did not draw further blood.

“You ought to know that won’t work,” Madeleine said. She wished she had the confidence to believe that; and he knew it.

“You’d be surprised what does work. In the depths of pain and darkness, what kind of spars people can seize and never let go of . . .” Another sharp-toothed smile; and then, to her surprise, the knife withdrew. “But I have other means.”

Magic? Could he use a spell to render her docile? Not impossible, after all; there were precedents. . . .

But he cast no spells. He didn’t move. She felt the air between them fill up with magic, with radiance and warmth like a summer storm; a feeling she remembered from her meeting with Morningstar; that sense of vast insignificance and terrible satisfaction at the same time, that transcending joy that someone like him should have noticed someone like her . . .

No.

“A truth like a salted knife’s blade . . . Tell me, Madeleine, does your calf still pain you?”

Madeleine’s hand moved toward her leg; stopped.

Asmodeus bent forward, the warmth becoming so strong it was almost unbearable. “I know every wound you bear from that night, Madeleine—the knuckle-dusters that shattered your ribs, here and here and here . . .” His hand lingered, quite softly, on her three broken ribs, the ones that hadn’t quite healed, that would never heal. “. . . the knife that slipped into your calf, here and here”—a touch on the scars of her calves, heedless to the trembling in her entire body—to have that obscene parody of love, of friendship that wouldn’t stop—to know he wouldn’t stop, even and especially if she said anything, the effort of holding herself silent and still through her rising nausea—“and the other cuts, the ones on your arms and chest, the ones that healed”—a touch here, a touch here and there; his hand, with fingernails as sharp as a blade, resting on her chest, just above the heart. “You haven’t asked me how I know.”

She spoke, dragging her voice from the faraway past. “Why would I?”

“Oh, Madeleine.” Asmodeus shook his head. He didn’t withdraw, or make any effort to move his hand. “It was a dark, lonely night, and the citizens of Paris were keeping their heads down, as they always do when it’s obviously House business.”

“Someone was there,” Madeleine said. If she moved, if she pulled away from him, would he drive that knife into her chest? And would it matter quite so much? Perhaps that was the cleaner ending, after all, the death she’d craved for all of twenty years. “What does it matter, Asmodeus?” She didn’t say she had no more patience or fortitude for his games, but if she had broadcast the thought, it would have been a scream.

“Because I was there,” Asmodeus said.

“I don’t understand.”

“You heard me quite correctly. I was there. I carried you, all the way into Silverspires.”

“That was—that’s a lie,” she said, more sharply than she’d meant to. “Morningstar—”

Asmodeus’s laughter was darkly amused. “Morningstar was away. Do you really think he came halfway across the city to find you dying on the cobblestones? Why? Because he smiled to you once, gave you the charm treatment? He was like that with everyone. He wouldn’t have known you two seconds after his back was turned.”

He had been kind to her; had offered her the asylum of the House—no, no, that wasn’t it—memory, merciless, conjured the scene again; Morningstar’s distant, distracted courtesy.

“This is the first and greatest of Houses, Lady Madeleine. The safest place in Paris.”

A boast, nothing more: as Asmodeus had said, a grandiloquent statement of pride in himself, in his House.

No. No. That couldn’t be.

She’d heard—footsteps—she’d felt—the warmth of magic—hands, taking her, the grunt as her body shifted and he bore her full weight—and the world spinning and fading into darkness. “No,” she said. “No.” That’s a lie, she wanted to say, but what reason would he have for lying?