It all comes back to that damned angel. I glare him down, and he smirks back at me like a too-suave young man caught with his hand up a pretty lady's corset at a party. He's the heart of all this. MSTM, the Prince of Ravens, center of the angel cult. It would be lovely it we had even the remotest inkling who he was, let alone how to counter him.

I slide my hand into my pocket. The moment my fingertips make contact with the matches there, a visceral pulse of threat seizes me. I whip around. Colson II is glaring at me. Directly at me, making eye contact like he scarcely did when I interrogated him. Several other students are watching me as well. I've interrupted their Sunday worship services, and whatever Colson II was communing with. My tongue mutters an apology of its own accord as I beat a hasty retreat. Fleeing isn't glorious, but neither is getting lynched by a collective of disgruntled churchgoers. I'll take a demon anyday.

Exie stares at me with wide eyes when I rejoin her. Clarice is eyeing up the gold gilding on the nearest picture frame.

"We need to go," I say in a lowered voice. Exie doesn't question me—just nods. It takes both of us to pull Clarice from her ogling, but standing in her view of the gold seems to do it, at which point she too registers the threat. Going back to Exie's room doesn't feel safe enough. Those doors are thick, but I don't trust a teacher not to knock on ours, then question why Exie has two other girls over. My face heats up at the notion, so I shove the impure thought aside. Then I pause and secretly entertain it again. If we're dealing with a fallen angel here, maybe impure thoughts can dupe him into thinking we're on his side.

Exie pauses in front of her doorway as I make to pass it by. "Where are you going?" she whispers.

"I have a place."

She takes my word for it, likely against her better judgment. When we reach the hall's end, I pretend to admire the stained-glass windows as an excuse to shoulder-check for any students who might be surveilling us. It's almost lunch. People have gravitated towards the dining hall, and if we can get this conversation over with, we can use the bell as cover for our reintegration into the student body. As I'm looking over the stained glass, though, something snags my eye.

There's a book in this window spread, and I've seen it before. The first time I snuck out of my room at night, I saw another on the opposite end of the school, but this isn't just a matter of repeated motifs. This angel is posed differently, and in the daytime with good lighting, I can actually make out the book's design. To nobody's surprise, it bears an angel. The ornamentation is identical to that on the hymnal and Miranda Bible, but there's something different about this book. It's bigger, for one. Much bigger, requiring the stained-glass angel to hold it in both hands. And rather than the beaten-leather brown of both the angel-books we've acquired thus far, this one is red. Blood-red. The very color sends a shiver up my spine.

"Have we seen one like that yet?" I say.

"One what?" says Exie.

I point her to the book. In doing so, I notice more things. The angel in question isn't hiding in a corner as ancillary design. It's sitting front and center on a panel, and across from it, I spot another the moment I'm actually looking. Two books.

"It could just be decorative," says Exie, but even she sounds like she doubts the statement.

"How many are there?" says Clarice.

"At least three. Come on." I spin on my heel and make an effort not to sprint down the hallway towards the dormitory at its other end. I spot the book I once noticed there immediately. It too has a counterpart, a bit more subtle, but identically designed. I backtrack and veer into the lobby. The stained-glass panels on either side of it have a book each.

"Six?" says Exie.

"That's not a holy number," says Clarice. "It's never six in churches. Always seven. Unless they're using the devil's number, but I haven't seen that here yet."

"The chapel," says Exie, and we all look at one another.

I don't want to return to the chapel. Colson II is there, along with whatever threatened me when I contemplated fire. But the chapel also hunkers in the shadow of the school's biggest stained-glass amalgamation, a two-story rose window with more angels than the rest of this place combined. I never thought to check it for clues, but I should have. There are stained-glass angels all over the school. Mrs. Hardwork has mentioned them—something about a famous author who used this place as inspiration because it had so much angelic representation in its decorative glass. Something about the memory niggles at me, but I can't pin down why.

"Are you still wearing the cross I gave you?" says Clarice.

I nod. Exie's eyebrows jump up, but I care less about my honor here than my own self-preservation.

"Then we should be safe?" says Clarice.

"You phrased that like a question."

"Well, I can't guarantee anything."

"Are you protected?"

"Oh, no. I don't wear crosses anymore." She gives me a too-innocent smile that masks the backstory she told me this morning. I'm not going to make her wear crosses after that.

"And you're okay with the risk?" I say, because I can't not check.

Clarice shrugs. "What are they going to do to us? You've seen how small he is."

She's referring to Colson II, I'm guessing, though none of the other students were particularly jacked. Clarice would probably be fine, but if it came down to a zombie chase, I wouldn't be winning any medals, either. My stamina lies somewhere between the level of the Lambsdon sewers, and the catacombs they overlay.

"Just keep the matches handy," finishes Clarice.

I don't have the heart to tell her that matches are the reason I fled my conversation with Colson II. I can fill her and Exie both in when we've finished counting bloody books with angels on them.

Both my companions seem to be waiting on me, so I grit my teeth and stride back towards the school's chapel. By the time we reach it, a couple of the students have drifted away. A fair handful remain, and I pity them even harder. Given the home situations most people here must come from, I now wonder how many have turned to religion in hopes that God will save them. When your parents are shit enough to send you to a place like this, the promise of a happy afterlife is a pretty sweet deal.

But for all my fears, we don't need to reach the chapel to get a good and proper view of the giant stained glass. My heart begins to sink. It starts in its rightful place and migrates down my chest, through my stomach and into my intestines. From there, it takes a skip down to the floor and just keeps sinking. Maybe it'll find our holy water down there somewhere. In the middle of the rose window is a single stained-glass book. I've glanced at it before. Glanced over it, really, as my brain wrote it off as a bible and refused to register further details. It's not a bible. Well, it might be, but it's a giant one if so, with a carmine cover and an angel embossed on not one but both sides. That explains why every book we've seen thus far has an angel visible.

Nobody's reading the book this time. The angels all around it are absorbed in their own daily enterprises, which seem to range from healing priests to smiting cows to pouring holy water over worshippers. Or unholy water, as the case may be. My eyes track around the circle until they come to rest on the stained-glass wedge directly above the book. There's a falling angel there. The heavens glow above him as he sheds a trail of feathers, white at the top, but darkening towards the bottom as if his wings themselves are losing their shine. But his face, rather than anguish, bears a hatred that makes every inch of my skin crawl. I can see why this guy could lose his ticket into heaven. And I could see why he might try to take revenge.

The fall. The fall of...

"Exie," I say. "Who was the famous author who took inspiration from this place?"

"T.H. Ackerley," she replies without a pause. "The Apocryphal Cathedral in Fallen Angel."

"Mastema."

"What?"

"The angel is Mastema. MSTM." It's dawning on me all at once. Mrs. Hardwork's voice droning through the most formative and thought-provoking works to come out of southern Englemark near the end of the 18th Century. Mr. Ackerley's reclusive nature. His selection of this cathedral—the only building in his travel radius to depict the fall of Mastema in its stained glass. I haven't seen another falling angel in this church here. I'm just calling it a church now. The harder I peer at the angel here, the more his facial features seem to align with the painting just beneath him. What he has to do with the book between them is anyone's guess.

"Who's that, though?" says Exie. "Mastema."

"I have absolutely no idea."

"Helpful."

"You're welcome."

"I haven't seen him in my reading. Unless we count MSTM."

"I haven't, either," pipes up Clarice.

I groan. "Great. So we have a name now, and it nets us absolutely nothing. Fabulous. We're just doing so fantastic here."

"What do we know from the bible?" says Exie.

"He's a judgemental bastard, for one." I slap my forehead as the revelation smacks me. "Shit. He's judging people."

"Do we know that?"

"Colson told me."

Exie takes a deep breath. Clarice sits down—on the floor—and looks at me expectantly.

I fill them in on my conversation with Colson II. Exie's frown deepens steadily throughout, and even Clarice stops staring at the gilding again and furrows her brow up at the stained glass. I'd love to see her make off with this school's stained glass. It would be the most delightful sabotage.

"So let me get this straight," says Exie when I finish. "This school has revived an ancient cult worshiping a fallen angel who likes to judge people, and who is now judging people again. Judging students, specifically, who may or may not be lured here for that express purpose, and who leave the encounter traumatized enough to lose all personality. The teachers are in on it, and this building was presumably constructed as a base of operations. The cult has generated English bibles we're not told to read, hymnals we've never sung from, and a variety of paraphernalia—"

"Wait," I say. "Clarice? Where's that necklace?"

She points back towards our room. I spin on my heel, and the others once again trot after me. Both make confused noises as I stride clean past the dormitories and turn down the hallway on the other side. I'm not talking where a teacher might overhear us. I barely pretend to watch the windows again before I wrench open the door to my not-so-secret hideout and usher my friends inside. Only once I've shut us in do I turn to them.

"Justice for the fallen," I say. "On the necklace. They're not just worshiping, you guys. They think an angel was cast out of heaven wrongly, and they're trying to get him accepted back up in the skies."

Like this chapter if you'd steer clear of Colson II

Comment if you had a guess adjacent to what's going on!