She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She looked to Adron, but the man set his eye on the ground in front of him and refused to look up. The incubi looked ahead, and while they traded glances with Mia, she couldn’t find any meaning in them. Kas didn’t grunt or click, and kept walking.
Julisa had made a point, and it’d resonated with them.
“Yosepha and Galon came down from Heaven to visit, on their own,” Mia said. “I bet you thought angels were all righteous, pompous, demon-killing warriors until you met them.”
“What is your point, unmarked?” Julisa asked.
“My point is, the angels weren’t nearly as simple as you thought they were. They had more going on in their heads than you figured. And I bet there’s more going on in demon heads than you’re considering, yours included. I bet there’s lots of demons out there who don’t like fighting nearly as much as you think. I bet there’s lots of demons out there who, yeah sure, still have that instinct to fight and hunt and kill, but still want to have a peaceful place to rest their head, and socialize with other demons. I bet–”
“Demons are not humans. We are simple creatures.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Julisa glared back over her shoulder at Mia, and Mia met her glare with her own. This was a strange argument. Maybe it was being surrounded by the statues of ancient beings that put them in an existential mood. Whatever the reason, Mia knew Kas was an angry, bitter demon, who’d suffered something in his past that’d turned him off to the careless violence so many other demons indulged in, sometimes with suicidal recklessness. And Adron had liked Hannah, probably more than he admitted to himself.
The incubi? She wasn’t sure about them. They seemed to be mostly along for the ride.
And Vin. There was something going on in that demon’s head, and much as Mia couldn’t put a finger on it, she knew it was there. Sighing, she touched her necklace, the leash that bound him, and watched the titan’s tail sway as he walked. Maybe…
Vin stopped. The group stopped. There was something white in the distance.
Mia held her breath, and the group went silent. Not a sound, no movement. Everyone stared past the statues to the white, and waited. But the white didn’t move.
Vin moved first, and the group followed. Closer and closer, past dozens, maybe hundreds of the titan statues, until the things in the distance came into view.
White, big, feathery wings. From a distance, only the white had been visible, but red came into view, glistening in the puffs of blue fire above. Red on corpses.
“Oh god!” Mia hopped off Kas’s back, ran past Julisa and Vin, and fell to her knees beside the angels. A couple men and a couple women, all in their potram clothes, and all dead. They were covered in claw marks, head to toe. Their chests were ripped open, too, or cut open, and hearts removed.
“They died recently,” Kas said, squatting beside her. A few days was all it took for a corpse’s flesh to melt away in Hell. Far less for a remnant. And blood only took hours.
“Someone closed their eyes,” Adron said.
Mia blinked at the bodies. “What?”
“Their eyes. It’s rare to die with closed eyes. Someone closed them. And the cut marks on their chests. Only a sharp blade can do that.” Adron drew his sword and showed the edge to Mia. Scratch, dented, and half blunt.
“So an angel sword?”
“I’m guessing. It could have been an aera weapon, but then why close their eyes?”
Sighing, Mia set a hand on an angel’s shoulder and stood up.
“For a second, I thought it might have been Yosepha. But…” But Yosepha had no wings and wouldn’t for weeks, maybe months. “What does this mean?”
No one said anything.
She examined the bodies further. How much she’d changed, from barely being able to watch David’s autopsy, to literally lifting bloody silks to look for more wounds. The bodies were not in good condition. Mangled, twisted, broken, and covered in blood.
“The scratch marks seem… kinda small?”
Kas checked another corpse. “Yes, but this one’s arm and leg are broken, and”–he pressed a giant hand against the woman’s side–“many ribs are broken. They were mauled, and beaten to death.”
“Beaten? What kind of demon does that?”
“None,” Faust said. “No hellbeast, either, not like this.” He checked another body. “Throat cut, but I don’t think it was deep enough to kill. Whatever fight happened, it wasn’t a normal fight. Something grabbed them and threw them around. The claw marks are incidental.”
“They fought something,” Gallius said. “A group of angels? Four died. Their fellow angels cut out their hearts so no one else would eat them? They–” He squatted down and tilted an angel’s head. “Oh. Move their hair.”