“Silence!” he thundered, like some kind of cartoon monarch.

Raziel stirred next to me, his arm twitching for a moment, and I wondered if he was waking up. As long as he was unconscious, there was little I could do. The cavern was devoid of weapons.

I looked down at him, and he opened his eyes, his vision sharp and clear. His hand caught mine, out of the sight of Sammael’s mad eyes, and squeezed it tightly in reassurance.

I wasn’t reassured.

He was lying on a strange sort of dais—bedding made of twigs and grasses and larger branches—and I looked down at him in confusion at first, then in dawning horror as I realized what Sammael had planned.

I whirled around, trying to shield Raziel from his view. “You—you can’t! You can’t be planning on burning him!”

“He will die by fire,” Sammael said placidly.

I felt Raziel move behind me, and I tried to stay between him and Sammael, vainly trying to protect him. “Over my dead body.” Yes, it was melodramatic, but I was past trying to be cool. I wasn’t going to let him die.

But Raziel had struggled to his feet behind me, and I felt his hands clamp on my arms. “Stay out of this, wife,” he said in a rough voice, trying to push me out of the way.

I wasn’t moving. I did my best to dig in my heels, but of course my strength was pitiful next to Raziel’s, even moments after he’d regained consciousness.

He shoved me, hard, and I went sprawling onto the ground, the breath knocked out of me. I lay there for a moment, pissed off enough to forget the danger we were both in. You couldn’t breathe when you were dead, could you? Was it going to be like this? I didn’t want to die.

“Leave her alone.” Raziel’s voice sounded almost bored. “She has nothing to do with this—it’s between you and me.”

“It isn’t,” Sammael said. There was a brief softening in his face. “I do not wish you ill, Raziel. But if I am to regain redemption, the Fallen must be vanquished.”

“She’s not one of us.”

Sammael’s brief smile was almost sorrowful. “She is the Source.”

“If you kill us all, she’ll be no threat.”

“She must be punished. All the Fallen and their human whores must die.”

“She’s not human.”

My breath came back with a sudden, gulping whoosh. “Don’t,” I managed to choke out. “You don’t want to do this.” I was ignoring Raziel by this point, just as he was ignoring me.

But Sammael had drawn a huge sword, a weapon that looked like it had come from some medieval painting of an avenging angel. It had appeared out of nowhere, like some damned Star Wars light saber, and I ground my teeth. How could you fight a supernatural being, when the rules didn’t apply to them?

“You have to give him a weapon as well if you’re going to fight,” I protested, slowly getting to my feet. If I survived this, I thought, I’d be battered and bruised. Right now I could only wonder why it was taking me so long to rise to my full, fairly insignificant height.

“He’s not going to fight me,” Raziel said. “There are only two ways he can kill me—he can burn me, or he can cut off my head. But he’s too much of a coward to come close enough to strike me. Therefore it must be fire, and he has the right weapon.”

“But how—” I demanded, then saw Sammael raise the sword over his head, more like a medieval avenging angel than ever, with a—

Christ, a flaming sword of vengeance. Flames were licking along the blade, kept from Sammael by the broad hilt and nothing more.

“You know that whoever wields the sword will die by the flames as well,” Raziel said, seemingly unmoved by his imminent demise.

Sammael shook his head slowly. “Uriel has granted me redemption. I have followed his orders, and I will ascend to the heavens once more, cleansed of sin and the stench of mortals.”

“Don’t be a fool, Sammael. We are cursed by God. Even Uriel can’t change that.”

“I have faith,” Sammael said simply, and he slowly lowered the sword, pointing it toward Raziel and the funeral pyre.

It was enough. All I knew was that I couldn’t let this happen, couldn’t let the forces of ignorance win, not this time. “No!” I shrieked, diving across the floor, throwing myself at Sammael to stop him.

At the sound of my voice he automatically turned, the flaming sword between us. I felt it slice into me, and it was curiously painless, just heat and pressure as I stared into Sammael’s startled face. The flames were licking toward me along the shining metal of the sword that impaled my chest, and I reached up, grasping the blade, and pushed the fire back at him.

I could feel the heat but the blaze didn’t burn my hands as it moved back over the protective hilt, onto Sammael, onto the rough fabric of his clothing, erupting in flames.

He screamed, and yanked the sword free. I collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut. I was lying in a river of blood, and if I’d been able to speak I would have told Raziel to find something in which to bottle it. I was dying, and there would be nothing for the Fallen who counted on the Source for sustenance.

But I couldn’t speak. I was so tired. It seemed as if I’d been battling forever, and I needed to rest, but there was too much primal satisfaction in watching Sammael thrash and struggle in a conflagration. He was dying in hideous pain, and I guess there was enough Old Testament in me after all that I reveled in it.

“Allie. Beloved.” It was Raziel’s voice. I was probably already dead—there was no way he would call me beloved. After all, I’d been speared by a sword the size of Excalibur—even if it had missed my heart, it had to have done irreparable damage.

I felt him pull me into his arms, and I struggled, able to summon up a dying panic. “No,” I said. “There are sparks. . . .”

He ignored me, pulling me against him, and he put his hand over the gaping wound in my chest. I saw the last remaining spark jump to him, and I moaned in despair, even as the pressure in my chest grew harder, sharper. “This is ridiculous,” I said weakly. “Now we’re both going to die, and we aren’t cut out for Romeo and Juliet—”

“We’re not going to die.” I heard the pain in his voice, and I wanted to scream at him.

He pressed his hand against my chest, and the sudden pain was blinding, so powerful that my body arched, jerked, and then collapsed in his arms again. The bleeding had stopped, and I knew he’d healed me—somehow managed to close the wound, seal the tear.

But I was dying. He couldn’t stop that.

“No,” he said. “I won’t lose you. I can’t.” He pulled me against him, and his face was hard, cold, bleak. He reached out a hand and stroked my face gently, and I knew he was saying good-bye. And then he yanked his own shirt open and tore into his skin, ripping across the flesh so that blood spurted out.