17

CLAIRE

Failure. No, stop. There is always another way, another path. Think, Julia, think.

Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE

Claire was not hovering. Of course not. Claire did not hover. However, with one of—no, now two of her people off to try to cajole the god that had tried to eat her, Claire decided to maintain vigilance at Walter’s desk. Vigilance, yes. That was it.

“Ma’am, you’re makin’ the jars jiggle something fierce.” Walter’s howling baritone succeeded in sounding both apologetic and plaintive at the same time. He had one of his massive hands steadying a shelf, and Claire flicked her gaze down to where she was rapping her knuckles on the desk distractedly—and with force, and had been for some time, judging by the pain in her hands.

She clasped her hands together to still them. “Very sorry, Walter. I was somewhere else.”

“This is a place for somewhere elses,” Walter said, shoulders relaxing. He paused to straighten each jar just so on the nearest shelf before dusting his hands off. “I . . . I take it you ’n’ Miss Brevity got yourselves an idea, then.”

“A bad idea, but then most of ours are.” Claire grimaced. “Your . . . judicious inattention was helpful, Walter.”

“Glad to hear it and also don’t have any idea what you’re gabbing about.” Walter put a finger to the side of his nose.

“Of course.” Claire smiled ruefully. “In any case, Hero and Rami are off procuring . . . well, you could say a room of one’s own.”

“Aw, good for them!” Walter slapped the counter, which sent boisterous vibrations rattling the jars again. “I was rootin’ for them . . . and you, of course. Those relate-in-ships you humans get up to was always kinda fuzzy to me, but—”

“Not—not like that.” Claire bit down on her laughter. A shame Rami wasn’t here—she would have paid good money to see the Watcher blush. “I mean a realm. They’re scouting for the Library.”

“Oh.” Walter’s face fell into craggy consideration. “So yer following in Mrs. Poppaea’s path?”

“Of a sort.” Claire smiled ruefully. “Hopefully with more success.”

“You thinkin’ Mister Ramiel and Hero will find a realm?”

“With any luck. Hero could talk his way into London Tower.”

“An’ you . . . figured out the god thing?”

Claire hesitated at the waver in Walter’s deep voice. “The god—”

The jars in the office rumbled with a deafening chime as Rami and Hero returned. Claire felt the nerves that had been squeezing her chest ease and she schooled her face before turning around.

“I presume since you dallied that means you were success—”

Claire stopped short. Hero and Rami were sodden from the waist down and smelled distinctly of algae and bile. They both had the waxen survivor look that places like the dead labyrinth realm tended to impart. But that wasn’t the part that caught Claire’s voice in her throat and pierced her heart.

Ramiel’s feathers were white.

One imagined an angel’s feathers as white: this wasn’t that. Angel feathers were supposed to be soft, immutable white, the pristine, untouched shade of hopeful, holy things. The bits of feather and fluff remaining to poke out ragged between the folds of Ramiel’s trench coat were the white of nothing. Each pinion was a hollow cell, and the barbs of each feather stood out like lace ghosts. His comfortable gray feathers had turned translucent.

“Rami—” Claire started, then stopped again. She looked to Hero, half expecting him to be holding the angel up. Rami was standing on his own strength, much like a body rigors into death. Hero kept a hand and an inscrutably soft gaze on him.

Claire reached out tentatively. Her hand hovered above a clutch of ghost feathers on his chest but was afraid to land. “What happened?” she asked Hero without removing her gaze from those feathers.

“We slipped through one of the labyrinth’s cracks.” Hero’s answer was serious and subdued. It was worse when Hero was serious.

“Ah.” Claire dropped her hand by fractions.

“Heaven.” Rami’s voice was a husk of its former self as he answered the unasked question. “I saw the Creator. She was home. Whole. She looked at me and I—” He stopped short, craggy features appearing to crumble into the shifting sands of grief. He closed his eyes briefly. “I turned away.”

“It was an illusion, love,” Hero repeated softly.

She had sent them on this errand. Beneath Claire’s palm, Rami’s chest was still solid and warm, still as real as his feathers weren’t. She felt him shift awareness. His eyes focused on her, still silver-gray and angelic and perhaps even more heaven-lost than usual. Now was the time he would need her to say something philosophical, something restorative and true. Both of them looked at her like they were waiting for a lifeline of wisdom, a deeper truth to make what they’d seen make sense. But that would just be placing her understanding above their own, giving Rami another god to look to. And Claire felt nothing like a god. Her back hurt too much, for one.

So instead she said, “To hell with them, then. Bugger realms and bugger the gods that made them.” Rami startled beneath her fingertips, and Claire’s smile felt brutal on her lips. “Let’s burn them all behind us.”