Finale

He couldn’t think. He had to save her. No one had been around to stop the Black Hand from branding him. Scott wouldn’t let the same thing happen to Nora.
    The old woman walked over to Scott, her heels clicking on the floor in a slow, deliberate cadence. Deep grooves cut her skin. Watery green eyes peered out from sunken sockets. “You
don’t think she should show allegiance by example?” A faint, challenging smile curved her lips.
    Scott’s heart hammered. “Make her show it through action.” The words just came out.
    The woman tilted her head to one side. “What do you mean?”
    At the same time, Nora’s voice slipped into his head.
Scott?
she said nervously.
    He prayed he wasn’t making things worse. He licked his lips. “If the Black Hand had wanted her branded, he would have done it himself. He trusted her enough to give her this job.
That’s good enough for me. We can spend the rest of the day testing her, or we can get this war started already. Not one hundred feet over our heads lives a city of fallen angels. Bring one
down here. I’ll do it myself. Brand him. If you want fallen angels to know we’re serious about war, let’s send them a message.” He could hear his own ragged breathing.
    A slow smile warmed the old woman’s face. “Oh, I like that. Very much. And who are you, dear boy?”
    “Scott Parnell.” He edged down the collar of his T-shirt. His thumb brushed the warped skin that formed his brand—a clenched fist. “Long live the Black Hand’s
vision.” The words tasted like bile in his mouth.
    Placing her spindly fingers on Scott’s shoulders, the woman leaned in and kissed each of his cheeks in turn. Her skin was damp and cold as snow. “And I am Lisa Martin. I knew the
Black Hand well. Long live his spirit, in all of us. Bring me a fallen angel, young man, and let us send a message to our enemy.”
    It was over soon.
    Scott had helped chain down the fallen angel, a skinny kid named Baruch who looked about fifteen in human years. Scott’s greatest fear had been that they would expect Nora to brand the
fallen angel, but Lisa Martin had swept her into a private antechamber.
    A robed Nephil had placed the branding iron in Scott’s hands. He’d gazed down at the marble slab and the fallen angel manacled to it. Ignoring Baruch’s cursing vows of revenge,
Scott repeated the words the robed Nephil at his side murmured in his ear—a load of crap that compared the Black Hand to a deity—and pressed the hot iron onto the fallen angel’s
bare chest.
    Now Scott leaned back against the tunnel wall outside the antechamber, waiting for Nora. If she stayed in there more than five minutes, he was going in after her. He didn’t trust Lisa
Martin. He didn’t trust any of the robed Nephilim. It was clear they’d formed a secret society, and Scott had learned the hard way that nothing good came of secrets.
    The door creaked open. Nora walked out, then threw her arms around his neck and held on tightly.
Thank you.
    He held her until she stopped trembling.
    All in a day’s work,
he teased, trying to soothe her in the best way he knew how.
I’ll put the U.O.ME in the mail.
    She sniffled a laugh. “You can tell they’re really excited to have me as their new leader.”
    “They’re in shock.”
    “Shocked that the Black Hand left their future up to me. Did you see their faces? I thought they were going to start weeping. Either that, or throw vegetables at me.”
    “So what are you going to do?”
    “Hank is dead, Scott.” She looked at him straight on, then dried her eyes by running her fingers under them, and he saw a flash of something in her expression he couldn’t nail
down. Assurance? Confidence? Or maybe, outright confession. “I’m going to celebrate.”

C HAPTER

1
    T ONIGHT
    I ’M NOT A PARTY GIRL. THE EARSPLITTING MUSIC, THE gyrating bodies, the inebriated smiles—not my thing. My
ideal Saturday night would be at home, snuggling on the sofa and watching a rom-com with my boyfriend, Patch. Predictable, low-key . . .
normal
. My name is Nora Grey, and while I used to
be an average American teen, buying my clothes at the J. Crew outlet and spending my babysitting money on iTunes, normal and I have recently become perfect strangers. As in, I wouldn’t know
normal if it marched up and poked me in the eye.
    Normal and I parted ways when Patch strolled into my life. Patch has seven inches on me, operates on cold, hard logic, moves like smoke, and lives