Page 38 of The City in Glass

Angels did not roll their eyes, but this one came close.

“I’ll let him know,” he said, disappearing after Alex into the narrow twisting alleys.

The angel kept Alex alive, and observing from the dark corners and deep doorways, Vitrine could see that that was no easy trick. Fragile, she had thought him, and there would always be something fragile about him in the heart, apt to break, and so cheap he would hand it to almost anyone.

In a mostly futile effort to protect that frail heart, the angel put a sword in his hand, and in the cramped courtyards of the Mazes, under the jeering of the returned pigeons and the girls swinging their bare legs out the windows, he taught him how to use it. Sitting with her arm slung around the shoulders of a girl who would put the whole of the city on its back for her skills on the stage, Vitrine considered the strange pair circling each other below, Alex too eager, the angel already resigned to correcting another foolhardy lunge.

“He’s more patient than I thought he would be.” Vitrine watched the angel haul Alex to his feet yet again. There seemed to be no end to the number of times he was willing to do it.

“You weren’t here yesterday,” the girl snugged up to her side said. “The little idiot tried to do some kind of silly jumping lunge and nearly ran himself through. His master turned the air red with curses.”

Imagine, an angel cursing. Vitrine gleefully put it away to hold over his head later. Below, Alex went down on his knees, the angel’s own sword flicking up to touch his throat, then away. Without hesitation, Alex rose, and the way he called for the angel to come again was nothing short of a command.

His master, the girl had called the angel, but Vitrine doubted it. The angel was no one’s master, no matter what fire danced at his fingertips.

Almost as if he had heard her, the angel raised his eyes to find Vitrine sitting on the windowsill, her red silk wrap trailing down the dirty brick like a spill of blood. The part of herself she’d put in him shone, and with a shout of triumph, Alex locked the angel’s blade with his, shoving him back two paces and forcing the angel to meet him with a startled cry.

“There,” Alex cried, sounding even younger than he was. “And when was the last time anyone forced you to yield?”

“Never save once,” the angel replied, turning away from Vitrine decisively. “Here. It doesn’t mean anything if you can’t do it again.”

Alex never could, but he quickly found that fighting men or creatures that pretended to be men was far easier than fighting an angel. The first time he killed someone he ended up puking out his guts in the alley with the angel standing guard over him. On his other side, Vitrine looked him over critically, taking in his bent back and the sweat on his brow.

“He’s not very good at this.”

The angel bristled.

“Why must he be good at this? What sort of monster should he be that he takes joy or ease in such a thing?”

“Well, perhaps he’d be like you.”

“Angels do not take pleasure in slaughter.”

It had been some time since they’d spat at each other like this. Vitrine found she had missed it, and she eyed him with a sharp grin, rubbing Alex’s back as he heaved.

“No? We take pleasure in what we are good at, and I have seen you excel at little beyond the ending of lives.”

“You know nothing of the purpose I fill.”

She pursed her lips prettily, and she lifted her hand from Alex’s back only to bring it back down silvered with claws, long ones, hooked, that she had borrowed from one of the deadly smilers, the great cats that haunted the plains of the south. The blow came within a hairsbreadth of the back of Alex’s head but the angel snatched her wrist and held it in an iron grip, the look of shock and fury on his face so funny she laughed. Vitrine shook him off, stepping back and sweeping out her skirts like a girl well pleased with the one who’d had her against the wall.

“Look at what a good little nursemaid you are. How skilled, and how caring.”

The angel growled, a sound like lions, but Alex moaned, staggering up and wiping his mouth shakily.

“Who are you speaking to? I thought I heard someone—”

“You heard nothing worth hearing. Here. Drink some water.”

Alex staggered to the fountain and drank gingerly, nodding when he kept it down. He’d have the scar from the cut scabbing over on his neck the rest of his life. He’d always hear the other man’s last gasping breath in his dreams. He would never really feel safe again. Still, he was the same boy, and Vitrine felt a new pang of affection for him. Her city was always her city no matter what had happened to it, and this was still Alex, no matter what had happened to him.

Vitrine put a slip of paper in the angel’s hand along with a scatter of stars made of hammered gold. She’d found them when they were digging out the foundations for a new hospital on the north end of the city. She didn’t know whose throat or wrist they had circled in the great long ago, but they were beautiful, gleaming gently in the angel’s palm. What an impossible sky he would make, solemn without any hint of dawn or dusk to threaten his constancy. With a night like him, no one would worship the day.

“Here. Take him to this address. He can get food and some sleep in a proper bed for once.”

The angel gave her a suspicious look.

“Only a meal and some sleep?”