The Armies of Heaven Read Online Free Page A

or not, Operation Quintessence is now in motion.” His voice grew louder as he mounted the stairs. So as not to look like the eavesdropper she was, she slipped around the corner, back into the bath, and ran straight into Lively.
    The demoness raised an eyebrow as Love caught herself against the doorframe to keep from bowling her over. “Back for another?” She eyed Love’s robe pointedly as she undressed.
    Love blushed furiously, hating to be caught doing something stupid, and hating it more that Lively’d caught her. “I decided not to leave my clothes for the laundress.” She picked up the garments she’d left and began tugging them on beneath her robe. “I’ve barely worn them, and they do enough for us around here.”
    Lively shrugged and stepped into the oil-glistening water, her belly surprisingly large without a dress draped over it.
    “Hot water isn’t good for the baby.” Love spoke before she could stop herself. Damn it. Who cared what happened to Lively’s stupid baby? Anazakia might have forgiven the girl for sneaking into Vasily’s bed and pretending to be her in order to get pregnant with his seraphic seed, but Love still held a grudge on her friend’s behalf.
    “Really?” Lively paused halfway in with a worried expression and put her hand over her stomach. “I don’t know much about these things.”
    “It’s probably all right if you only stay in a few minutes. But you don’t want to get overheated.”
    “Thanks.” Lively lowered herself onto the tiled seat inside the steaming pool. “I guess you know a lot about babies.”
    Love shrugged. “I’ve only ever been Ola’s nanny, but I always had a lot of younger cousins around to take care of.”
    “I was the youngest in my family.” Lively leaned back against the rounded depression in the tile.
    Love stopped listening, her mind running over what Belphagor had said, that her people believed they’d been visited by messengers of God. She wasn’t sure who the Malakim were in the context of a literal Heaven, but back home, she’d heard plenty about them from her own family.
    They didn’t call themselves the Malakim among the Roma, but from the descriptions Anazakia and the others gave when they spoke of them, Love knew exactly who they were. They’d hung on the fringes of the Traveler communities for centuries, though there’d been more of them lately. They posed as friends of the Roma, promising deliverance from their oppressors in the form of a new prophet or preacher, or even a motivational speaker: the next big thing, the thing that would change their luck or their lives.
    What it changed was the amount of money in the Roma’s pockets, and not from less to more. It kept them praying to God for help—waiting for the day he’d step in and deliver them and make them rich—instead of fighting against injustice. It kept them from looking for their own deliverance.
    And on the other side were the gypsies who believed in magic and divination, who spoke of the “unseen world.” She’d thought them equal fools. The only thing Love had believed in was science and technology; all the rest, all those invisible things one was supposed to take on faith, she’d thought nonsense. But it was the magical realm that had turned out to be true, and not the spiritual.
    Belphagor had mentioned a gypsy feud. It was, of course, the oldest one around: the Old Ways versus the new. The magical believers were part of the underground network Belphagor always spoke of, and these were the contacts Love had exploited, playing their game and thinking all the while it was nothing more.
    Before she and Ola were taken, Love had received a spate of odd messages suggesting the ones who called themselves True Believers had begun to sway the magical believers toward the honey-dripping tongues of the Malakim. It had been causing a rift in communications between the gypsy underground and the Fallen underground—though Love hadn’t believed in the Fallen at the