The House of Shattered Wings

She knew that face. She’d seen that man—she foundered, for a moment, struggling to recall his name. Théodore. Théodore Ganimard. She’d seen him in passing, going in and out of Selene’s office at odd hours—part of the network of spies and informants that kept Selene apprised of what was going on in the city: Madeleine knew most of them—a side effect of being up at odd hours herself.

Claire laid something by the body’s side, negligently. “He had this on him.”

It was a heavy, polished disk of wood: a minor artifact, used for tracking down whoever bore it; except that on the wood’s surface were engraved the arms of Silverspires: the sword of Morningstar against the silhouetted spires of Notre-Dame. Madeleine had one exactly like it in her trouser pocket. “A tracker disk,” she said numbly. Once, it would have pulsed to the rhythm of magic, but the wood was blackened and charred; and the magic quite gone from it.

“They are given to dependents of Silverspires.” Claire’s face hadn’t moved.

“He . . .” He was dead with the disk on him, and it didn’t matter anymore whether Claire knew. “He was one of our informants.”

Claire nodded. “I thought so.” Behind her, the assistant made a note on the clipboard—his broad face creased in thought.

On the marbled skin of the corpse were the same marks she’d seen on Oris’s forearms: the perfect circle with a sharper wound in the center. They’d have been smudged with blood once, but now that everything had been cleaned, nothing was left but the imprint of the wound. Fangs, Aragon had said. Snakebites. But no snake had just one fang—and why strike someone repeatedly?

She foraged in her bag by touch; found a sealed mirror, and undid the clasp while keeping her eyes on the corpse’s face. The angel breath was like fire in her nostrils; descending into her wasted lungs and wringing them from the inside out—she was bent over, gagging and coughing with the strength of it, already longing for something else the mirror couldn’t provide, for the sheer potency of angel essence. . . .

She looked up through eyes streaming with tears. The corpse in front of her was shining. There was no other word. Every wound was outlined in a thin, scattered radiance: not the furious blaze of infant Fallen, or even the stately glow of mature ones like Selene and Emmanuelle, but faint and faded like glow worms. “Magic?” she asked. “This was done by a spell?”

Claire, who had been watching her in silence, shook her head. In Madeleine’s new sight, she shone, or rather, the space between her breasts did. An artifact within a locket, hidden under her clothes; not a surprise, for the mortal head of a House.

Madeleine whispered the words of a spell, willing the magic to show her how they had died. Nothing happened. For a moment she feared she’d cast the wrong thing; and then the corpse lit up like a bonfire, washing the entire room in radiance. Claire cried out, and then there was darkness again, shot through with painful afterimages.

“Magic killed him,” she said, slowly, hoarsely, forcing the words through what felt like a mouthful of burning sand. “Like being burned. A blast of Fallen power so strong it stripped him bare.” And blasted the tracker disk, too, rendering it unusable. The human body wasn’t meant to hold Fallen magic; in the long run, people who absorbed too much angel—or too much angel essence, or both—died.

Claire said nothing.

“The Fallen who died in Silverspires—” Madeleine said, the words torn out of her mouth before she could think them through. “—he died when his magic was taken away from him.”

Claire nodded. She didn’t seem surprised. She reached out, and gently folded the sheet back over the corpse. “You’ll want to see the others, too,” she said.

She opened another drawer: a woman, with the same dead eyes staring upward at Madeleine, filmed over by the haze of death; the same mysterious circle wounds.

Madeleine knew her, too. Hortense Archignat, another of Selene’s informants.

Gritting her teeth, Madeleine whispered the words of the spell again, bracing herself—and felt the same blaze of magic spreading from the wounds, incinerating the internal organs and then dying down to that sickly glow.

“Something . . .” She breathed in, willing her heart to stop hammering against her chest. “Something that kills. Humans, by overwhelming them with magic until their bodies shut down. Fallen—”

“With the reverse,” Claire said. She threw something on the body, negligently—but of course she never did anything negligently. “She had this on her.”

Another tracker disk—Madeleine reached out, expecting to see the arms of Silverspires, but the engraving on it was a hawthorn tree circled with a crown. “Hawthorn,” she said. Some informants made ends meet by working for several Houses, and Hortense Archignat must have been one of them. The heads of Houses might not like this state of affairs—or trust them with their secrets—but they were pragmatic enough to make use of what tools they had. “I don’t understand—” she said, hoping to hide her confusion.