“By all means,” said Raziel smoothly, trying to bury his faint throb of alarm – what unpleasantness were they talking about, precisely? And now he saw that in addition to the expected hangers-on in the audience, all the First Wavers who’d been in psychic contact with the Council were here too. He could sense their deep tremor of worry; the expectation had been that Raziel would be firmly ensconced in power by the time their betrayal was found out.

“Good. You and Charmeine may take a seat,” said Isda, nodding at a nearby pew.

Being given permission to sit in his own cathedral grated; Raziel did so in moody silence. Charmeine perched beside him, looking straight ahead.

Isda and the rest of the Twelve stood in a row, their backs to the pews. The tall stained-glass windows in front of them glimmered in the sun; it was here, exactly, that the Second Wave had arrived, mere days ago. “Now, please,” called Isda in her low voice.

The stadium doors to the side opened and a long line of almost a hundred angels were led in – all in their human forms, with their hands cuffed behind them. Raziel sat up straight, his pulse quickening in surprise as he recognized the remainder of the traitors: the angels that he’d been using Kylar, the assassin, to do away with. Though a diverse group, the traitors all believed that angels didn’t have the right to use humans for their own purposes, and were committed to helping humanity, even if it meant the extinction of their own kind. Raziel had gotten their names by chance over a year ago, from a rogue who’d been captured and had then turned in the others to save himself. Raziel had had him killed anyway, of course, but it had been a very useful meeting all the same.

The nature of the “unpleasantness” was now only too clear. The Council had been aware of the rogues’ identities from the start; it had seemed politic to pass the information across. And they’d know that only a rogue – in this case, Nate – could have helped the half-angel with her near-disastrous attack on the gate. As a result, the traitors had escalated themselves out of being a matter that could be taken care of quietly, and into one that merited a public statement. The Council would have drawn the rogues to them easily enough; one of the most annoying things about the Twelve was how their psychic call tugged on you, like it or not.

Gazing at the traitors, Raziel wondered why they stayed imprisoned in their chained human forms – and then realized uneasily that the Council had something to do with that too. In a subtle undercurrent that he’d missed before, he could feel them working together to exert some kind of mental hold on the captured angels, preventing them from shifting.