KORALIN STEPS THROUGH the clock and into the room slowly, like she’s expecting a firing squad.
I turned off most of the lights, just leaving on the ones that illuminate Aki and the area by the sofas.
She spots Aki.
“Rainier, darling, are you all right? Has he hurt you?”
“I didn’t hurt him, but the genius shot a hole in his own foot.”
She starts to go to him, but I cut her off.
“He isn’t taking visitors and he isn’t Rainier. Don’t call him that.”
“He’s my son. I’ll call him whatever I like.”
“Your son is dead. So’s your daughter. I know. I killed her.”
She looks at me for a moment like she doesn’t believe me and then turns back to Aki.
“That was a terrible thing for you to do. Still, she was lost to me a long time ago.”
“It’s funny you should say that. You’re the last thing she talked about. She wanted me to tell you that she was sorry. She said that you scared her and her father and she wanted to get you back for it, but now she was sorry. What was she so sorry for? Taking the Druj?”
“She was always her father’s daughter. They were just alike. Always weak and worried. Always apologizing.”
“But not Rainier.”
“Rainier was a good boy. He was strong like his mother. He understood how the world was and what was necessary for the family.”
“He was that important and you let him die. Take you off the mother-of-the-year list. What happened to him?”
She walks back and forth, looking past me at Aki. But she doesn’t try to go to him.
“It was an accident. Rainier was reckless and headstrong, like all children. He went to a chemical plant and stole a large amount of ammonal, aluminum, and ammonium nitrate. He was going to use it to blow up the Springheel home. Can you imagine? It would have been such a merry thing, ending that ancient family line not with sorcery, but with something so mundane. But Rainier didn’t know how to properly handle the material. There must have been a spark or a flame. Perhaps one of his witless friends lit a cigarette. There was an explosion. That was the true tragedy of his death. It was so common and petty as to be obscene. It was a human death.”
“That’s got to be a bad way to go for you.”
She turns to me, looking every bit the ironclad matriarch that frightened Eleanor so much that she’d rather be a bloodsucker than a daughter.
“It’s the worst possible way for a Geistwald.”
I look at Aki and back at Koralin.>“I’m not the angel I used to be. I showed you my dirty little secret back at the hotel for a reason. The truth is that my wounds are getting worse, not better.”
“And you don’t want Mason or your generals to see you getting weak. I get that.”
“When Father threw us out of Heaven, all he gave us was a hole in the ground. I built Hell out of my sheer will, the same way he created Heaven. But now I’m falling apart.”
“And so is Hell.”
“The king is the land. The land is the king. The dying king is the death of the land. It’s an old story.”
“If you want a damned doctor, why don’t you go to Kinski? He has God’s divine-light punch-bowl glass. Wouldn’t that help?”
He laughs.
“Uriel is just sentimental enough to help me. That’s why he fell for you people in the first place. But the truth is, I’m not looking for that kind of help. What I want is to go home. But I can’t simply abandon Hell. The fallen are my responsibility. I can’t leave them to Mason and chaos and self-destruction. When I’m gone, Hell will need a new Lucifer.”
“If this is going where I think it’s going, then fuck you and every other blackhearted angel in the universe.”