At the top of the stairs was a flat brick wall. Dead ends of any kind had always made Jin claustrophobic, and this one was even worse because of the knife poised at his throat. He dared a glance back at the steep flight they’d climbed. From here, it looked like a very long and painful fall.

 

Mr. Bogum was speaking in tongues again, muttering under his breath as he skillfully eased open another hidden door. He shoved Jin into a tiny chapel and locked the door behind them. It was freezing inside and smelled overwhelmingly of chalky dust. Jin struggled to breathe, to swallow the bilious saliva in his mouth.

 

Ken could not be dead. That whole thing could not just have happened. Mr. Bogum could not be that evil.

 

Taehyung had said to trust Mr. Bogum. He’d said to go with him until he could come for Jin…

 

Mr. Bogum paid Jin no attention, merely made his way around the room, lighting candle after candle, genuflecting at each one, and continuing to chant in a language Jin didn’t know. The twinkling votives revealed that the chapel was clean and well maintained, which meant it must not have been too long since someone else had been up there. But surely Mr. Bogum was the only one on campus who would have a key to the hidden door? Who else would even know this place existed?

 

The red tile ceiling was sloping and uneven. Broad, faded tapestries cloaked the walls, depicting images of creepy half-man, half-fish creatures battling on a roiling sea. There was a small white altar up at the front, and a few rows of simple wooden pews ranked along the gray stone floor. Jin looked around frantically for an exit, but there were no other doors and no windows.

 

Jin’s legs were shaking with fury and fear. He was in agony over Ken, betrayed and lying alone at the foot of the stairs.

 

“Why are you doing this?” he asked, backing up against the arched chapel doors. “I trusted you.”

 

“That’s your own fault, dear,” Mr. Bogum said, roughly twisting Jin’s arm. Then the dagger was back at his neck and he was being marched up the chapel’s aisle. “Trust is a careless pursuit at best. At worst, it’s a good way to get yourself killed.”

 

Mr. Bogum pushed Jin toward the altar. “Now be a dear and lie down, would you?”

 

Because the knife was still too close to his throat, Jin did as he was told. He felt a spot of coolness on his neck and reached up to touch it. When he took his fingers away, the tips were red with dots of blood where the knife had pricked him. Mr. Bogum slapped his hand down.

 

“You think that’s bad, you should see what you’re missing outside,” he said, making Jin shudder. Taehyung was outside.

 

The altar was a square white platform, a single slab of stone no bigger than Jin himself. He felt cold and desperately exposed atop it, imagining the pews filled up with shadowy churchgoers waiting for his torture to take place.

 

Looking straight up, he saw that there was a window in this cavernous chapel, a large stained-glass rosette like a skylight in the ceiling. It had a complicated geometric floral pattern, with red and purple roses against a navy-blue background. It would have been a whole lot prettier to Jin if it had offered a view of the outside.

 

“Let’s see, where did I … ah yes!” Mr. Bogum reached below the altar and returned with a thick length of rope. “Don’t wiggle, now,” he said, waving the knife in Jin's direction. Then he set about securing Jin to four holes drilled into the altar’s surface. First each ankle, then each wrist. Jin tried not to writhe as he was tied down like some sort of sacrifice. “Perfect,” Mr. Bogum said, giving his intricate knots a firm tug.

 

“You planned all this,” Jin realized, aghast.

 

Mr. Bogum grinned as sweetly as he had the very first day Jin had stumbled into the library. “I would say it’s nothing personal, Seokjin, but actually, it is,” he cackled. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment alone with you.”

 

“Why?” Jin asked. “What do you want from me?”

 

“You, I just want eliminated,” Mr. Bogum said. “It’s Taehyung I want freed up.”

 

He left Jin on the altar and moved to a lectern near Jin's feet. He hoisted the Taehyung's family book onto the lectern and began rapidly flipping through the pages. Jin thought back to the moment he’d opened it and seen his face next to Taehyung's for the first time. How it had finally hit him that he was an angel. He’d known next to nothing then, and yet he’d felt certain that the photograph meant he and Taehyung could be together.

 

Now that felt impossible.

 

“You’re just sitting there swooning over him, aren’t you?” Mr. Bogum asked. He smacked the book closed and banged his fist on its cover. “This is precisely the problem.”

 

“What’s wrong with you?” Jin strained against the ropes binding him to the altar. “What do you care about what Taehyung and I feel for each other, or who either one of us dates in the first place?” This psycho had nothing to do with them.

 

“I should like to have a word with whoever thought putting the fate of all of our eternal souls in the hands of one lovesick pair of infants was so brilliant an idea.” He raised a shaking fist high in the air. “They want the balance to be tipped? I’ll show them tipping the balance.” The point of his dagger gleamed in the candlelight.

 

Jin drew his eyes away from the blade. “You’re crazy.”

 

“If wanting to bring to a final head the longest, greatest battle ever fought means I’m crazy”—Mr. Bogum’s tone implied that Jin was dense for not knowing all this already—“so be it.”

 

The idea that Mr. Bogum could have any say in ending the battle didn’t add up in Jin’s mind. Taehyung was fighting the battle outside. What was going on in here couldn’t compare to that. Regardless of whether Mr. Bogum had crossed over to the other side.

 

“They said it would be Hell on earth,” Jin whispered. “The end of days.”

 

Mr. Bogum started laughing. “It would seem that way to you now. Is it such a surprise that I’m one of the good guys, Seokjin?”

 

“If you’re on the good side,” Jin spat, “it doesn’t sound like a war worth fighting.”

 

Mr. Bogum smiled, as if he’d expected Jin to say those very words. “Your death may be just the push Taehyung needs. A little push in the right direction.”

 

Jin squirmed on the altar. “You—you wouldn’t hurt me.”

 

Mr. Bogum crossed back toward him, and brought his face close. The artificial baby-powder old man scent filled Jin’s nose, making him gag.

 

“Of course I would,” Mr. Bogum said. “You’re the human equivalent of a migraine.”

 

“But I’ll just come back. Taehyung told me.” Jin gulped. In seventeen years.

 

“Oh, no you won’t. Not this time,” Mr. Bogum said. “That first day you walked into my library, I saw something in your eyes, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.” He smiled down at Jin. “I’ve met you many times before, Seokjin, and most of the time, you’re a downright bore.”

 

Jin stiffened, feeling exposed, as if he were on this altar. It was one thing for Taehyung to have encountered him in other lives—but had others known him, too?

 

“This time,” Mr. Bogum continued, “you had something of an edge. A genuine spark. But it wasn’t until tonight, that beautiful slipup about those agnostic parents of yours.”

 

“What about my parents?” Jin hissed.

 

“Well, my dear, the reason you come back again and again is because all the other times you’ve been born, you were ushered into religious belief. This time, when your parents opted out of baptizing you, they effectively left your little soul up for grabs.” He shrugged dramatically. “No ritual to welcome you into religion equals no reincarnation for Jin. A small but essential loophole in your cycle.”

 

Could this have been what Jimin and Hoseok had been hinting at in the cemetery? Jin’s head began to throb. A veil of red spots took over his vision and he heard a ringing in his ears. He blinked slowly, feeling even that tiny brush of his eyelids closing like a blast through his whole head. He was almost glad he was already lying down. Otherwise he might have fainted.

 

If this was really the end … well, it couldn’t be.

 

Mr. Bogum leaned close to Jin’s face, sending spit flying with his words. “When you die tonight—you die. That’s it. Kaput. In this lifetime you’re nothing more than you appear to be: a stupid, selfish, ignorant, spoiled little guy who thinks the world lives or dies on whether he gets to go out with some good-looking boy at school. Even if your death wouldn’t accomplish something so long-awaited, glorious, and grand, I’d still relish this moment, killing you.”

 

Jin watched as Mr. Bogum raised the knife and touched his finger to its blade.

 

Jin’s mind reeled. All day, there had been so much he needed to process, so many people telling him so many different things. Now the dagger was poised over his heart and his eyes grew fuzzy once again. He felt the pressure of the blade’s point against his chest, felt Mr. Bogum probing along his chest for the space between his ribs, and he thought there was some truth in Mr. Bogum’s maddening speech. To place so much hope in the power of true love—which he felt he was only barely beginning to glimpse himself—was it naïve? After all, true love couldn’t win that battle outside. It might not even be able to save him from dying right here on this altar.

 

But it had to. His heart still beat for Taehyung—and until that changed, something deep inside Jin believed in that love, in its power to turn him into a better version of himself, to turn him and Taehyung into something glorious and good—

 

Jin cried out when the dagger pricked his skin—then in shock as the stained-glass window overhead seemed to shatter and the air around him filled with light and noise.

 

A hollow, gorgeous hum. A blinding brightness.

 

So he had died.

 

The dagger had gone deeper than it had felt. Jin was moving on to the next place. How else to explain the glowing, opalescent shapes hovering over him, descending from the sky, the cascade of twinkles, the heavenly glow? It was hard to see anything clearly in the warm silver light. Gliding over his skin, it felt like the softest velvet, like meringue frosting on a cake. The ropes binding his arms and legs were loosened, then released, and his body—or maybe this was his soul—was free to float up into the sky.

 

But then he heard Mr. Bogum bleating, “Not yet! It’s happening too soon!” The old man had torn the dagger away from Jin’s chest.

 

Jin blinked rapidly. His wrists. Untied. His ankles. Free. Tiny shards of blue and red and green and gold stained glass all over his skin, the altar, the floor beneath it. They stung as he brushed them away, leaving thin trails of blood on his arms. He squinted up toward the gaping hole in the ceiling.

 

Not dead, then, but saved. By angels.

 

Taehyung had come for him.

 

Where was he? He could barely see. He wanted to wade through the light until his fingers found him, closed around the back of his neck, and never, never, never let him go.

 

There were just the living opalescent shapes drifting toward and around Jin’s body, like a roomful of glowing feathers. They flocked to him, tending to his body in the places where the shattered glass had cut him. Swaths of gauzy light that seemed to somehow wash away the blood on his arms, and on the small gash at his chest, until he was fully restored.

 

Mr. Bogum had run to the far wall and was pawing frantically at the bricks, trying to find the secret door. Jin wanted to stop him—to make him answer for what he’d done, and what he’d almost done—but then part of the silver twinkling light took on the faintest violet hue and began to form the outline of a figure.

 

A bright pulsing shook the room. A light so glorious it could have outshone the sun made the walls rumble and the candles rock and flicker in their tall bronze holders. The eerie tapestries flapped against the stone wall. Mr. Bogum cowered, but the shuddering glow felt like a deep massage, down to Jin’s very bones. And when the light condensed, spreading warmth across the room, it settled into the form Jin recognized and adored.

 

Taehyung stood before him, in front of the altar. He was shirtless, barefoot, clad only in white linen pants. He smiled at him, then closed his eyes and spread his arms out at his sides. Then, gingerly and very slowly, as if not to shock him, he exhaled deeply and his wings began to unfurl.

 

They came gradually, starting at the base of his shoulders, two white shoots extending from his back, growing higher, wider, thicker as they spread back and up and out. Jin eyed the scalloped edges, yearning to trace them with his hands, his cheeks, his lips. The inside of his wings began to glow with velvet iridescence. Just like in his dream. Only now, when it was finally coming true, he could look at his wings for the first time without feeling woozy, without straining his eyes. Jin could take in all of Taehyung’s glory.

 

He was still glowing, as if lit from within. He could still clearly see his violet-gray eyes and his full mouth. His strong hands and broad shoulders. He could reach out and fold himself into his love’s light.

 

He reached for him. Jin closed his eyes at his touch, expecting something too otherworldly for his human body to withstand. But no. It was simply, reassuringly, Taehyung.

 

Jin reached around his back to finger his wings. He reached for them nervously, as if they could burn him, but they flowed around his fingers, softer than the smoothest velvet, the plushest rug. The way he’d like to imagine that a fluffy, sun-drenched cloud would feel if he could cup it in his hands.

 

“You’re so … beautiful,” he whispered into his chest. “I mean, you’ve always been beautiful, but this—”

 

“Does it scare you?” Taehyung whispered. “Does it hurt to look?”

 

Jin shook his head. “I thought it might,” he said, thinking back to his dreams. “But it hurts not to.”

 

Taehyung sighed, relieved. “I want you to feel safe with me.” The glittering light around them fell like confetti, and Taehyung pulled Jin to him. “It’s a lot for you to take in.”

 

Jin bent his head back and parted his lips, eager to do just that.

 

The loud slam of a door interrupted them. Mr. Bogum had found the stairs. Taehyung gave a slight nod and a blazing figure of light darted through the secret door after the man.

 

“What was that?” Jin asked, gaping at the trail of light fast fading through the open door.

 

“A helper.” Taehyung guided his chin back.

 

And then, even though Taehyung was with him and he felt loved and protected and saved, he also felt a sharp stab of uncertainty, remembering all the dark things that had just happened, and Jungkook and his thundering black minions. There were still so many unanswerable questions running through his mind, so many awful events he felt he’d never understand. Like Ken’s death, poor sweet innocent Ken, his violent, senseless end. It overwhelmed Jin, and his lip began to quiver.

 

“Ken’s gone, Taehyung,” he said. “Mr. Bogum killed him. And for a moment, I thought he’d killed me, too.”

 

“I would never let that happen.”

 

“How did you know to find me here? How do you always know how to save me?” He shook his head. “Oh my God,” he whispered slowly as the truth slammed into him. “You’re my guardian angel.”

 

Taehyung chuckled. “Not exactly. Though I think you were giving me a compliment.”

 

Jin blushed. “Then what kind of angel are you?”

 

“I’m sort of in between gigs right now,” Taehyung said.

 

Behind him, the remaining silver light in the room pooled and split in half. Jin turned to watch it, his heart thumping, as the glow finally gathered, as it had around Taehyung's figure, around two distinct shapes:

 

Jimin and Hoseok.

 

Hoseok's wings were already unfurled. They were broad and plush and three times the size of his body. Feathery, with softly scalloped edges, the way angels’ wings looked on greeting cards and in movies, and with just a hint of the palest pink around the tips. Jin noticed them beating very lightly—and that Hoseok’s feet were a few inches off the ground.

 

Jimin’s wings were smoother, sleeker and with more pronounced edges, almost like a giant butterfly’s. Partially translucent, they glowed and cast shifting opalescent prisms of light on the stone floor beneath them. Like Jimin himself, they were strange and alluring, and totally badass.

 

“I should have known,” Jin said, a smile sweeping across his face.

 

Hoseok smiled back, and Jimin gave Jin a little curtsy.

 

“What’s going on out there?” Taehyung asked, registering the worried expression on Hoseok’s face.

 

“We need to get Jin out of here.”

 

The battle. Was it not over yet? If Taehyung and Hoseok and Jimin were all here, they must have won—right? Jin’s eyes flashed over to Taehyung's. His expression gave nothing away.

 

“And someone needs to go after Bogum,” Jimin said. “He could not have been working alone.”

 

Jin swallowed. “Is he on Jungkook’s side? Is he some kind of … devil? A fallen angel?” It was one of the few terms that had stuck with him from Mr. Bogum’s lecture.

 

Taehyung’s teeth were clenched. Even his wings looked stiff with fury. “No devil,” he muttered, “but hardly an angel, either. We thought he was with us. We should never have let him get this close.”

 

“He was one of the twenty-four elders,” Hoseok added. He lowered his feet to the ground and tucked his pale pink wings behind his back so he could sit down on the altar. “A very respectable position. He kept this part of his well hidden.”

 

“As soon as we got up here, it was like he just went crazy,” Jin said. He rubbed his neck where the dagger had nicked him. 

 

“They are crazy,” Hoseok said. “But very ambitious. He’s part of a secret sect. I should have realized it sooner, but the signs are very clear now. They call themselves the Zhsmaelim. They dress alike, and all have a certain … elegance. I always thought they were more show than anything else. No one took them too seriously in Heaven,” he informed Jin, “but they will now. What he did tonight was grounds for exile. He might be seeing more of Jungkook and Yoongi than he bargained for.”

 

“So Yoongi’s a fallen angel, too,” Jin said slowly. Out of everything he’d learned today, this made the most sense.

 

“Jin, we’re all fallen angels,” Taehyung said. “It’s just that some of us are on one side … and some of us are on the other.”

 

“Is anyone else here on”—he swallowed—“the other side?”

 

“Seo-joon,” Hoseok said.

 

“Seo-joon?” Jin was stunned. “But you were friends with him. He was always so charismatic and great.”

 

Taehyung only shrugged. It was Jimin who looked concerned. His wings beat in a sad, agitated way and sent forth a brush of dusty wind. “We’ll get him back someday,” he said quietly.

 

“What about Ken?” Jin asked, feeling a knot of tears in the back of his throat.

 

But Taehyung shook his head, squeezing his hand. “Ken was mortal. An innocent victim in a long, pointless war. I’m so sorry, Jin.”

 

“So that whole fight out there …?” Jin asked. His voice choked. He couldn’t bring himself to really talk about Ken yet.

 

“Just one of many battles we wage against the demons,” Hoseok said.

 

“Well, who won?”

 

“Nobody,” Taehyung said bitterly. He picked up a large shard from the stained-glass ceiling and flung it across the chapel. It shattered into a hundred tiny fragments, but it didn’t seem to have released any of his anger. “Nobody ever wins. It’s close to impossible for one angel to extinguish another. It’s just a lot of beating until everyone gets tired and calls it a night.”

 

Jin jolted when a strange image flashed into his mind. It was Taehyung being struck directly on the shoulder by one of the long black bolts that had hit Ken. He opened his eyes and looked at his right shoulder. There was blood on his chest.

 

“You’re hurt,” he whispered.

 

“No,” Taehyung said.

 

“He can’t get hurt, he’s—”

 

“What is that on your arm, Taehyung?” Jimin asked, pointing at his chest. “Is that blood?”

 

“It’s Ken’s,” Taehyung said brusquely. “I found him at the foot of the stairs.”

 

Jin’s heart constricted. “We need to bury Ken,” he said. “Next to his father.”

 

“Jin, honey,” Hoseok said, standing up. “I wish there were time for that, but right now, we’ve got to go.”

 

“I won’t abandon him. He doesn’t have anyone else.”

 

“Jin,” Taehyung said, rubbing his forehead.

 

“He died in my arms, Taehyung. Because I didn’t know any better than to follow Mr. Bogum to this torture chamber.” Jin looked at all three of them. “Because none of you told me anything.”

 

“Okay,” Taehyung said. “We’ll make things as right for Ken as we can. But then we need to get you far away from here.”

 

A gust of wind filtered down from the gash in the ceiling, causing the candles to flicker and making the remaining shards of glass in the broken window sway. In the next moment, they fell in a rain of sharp splinters.

 

Just in time, Hoseok glided off the altar and came to stand at Jin’s side. He seemed unfazed. “Taehyung's right,” he said. “The truce we called after the battle applies only to angels. And now that so many know about the”—he paused, clearing his throat—“um, change in your mortality status, there are a lot of bad ones out there who’ll be interested in you.”

 

Jimin’s wings lifted him off the ground. “And a lot of good ones who will come out to help fend them off,” he said, gliding toward Jin’s other side as if to reassure him.

 

“I still don’t get it,” Jin said. “Why does it matter so much? Why do I matter so much? Is it just because Taehyung loves me?”

 

Taehyung sighed. “That’s part of it, as innocent as it sounds.”

 

“You know everyone loves to hate a happy pair of lovebirds,” Jimin chimed in.

 

“Honey, this is a very long story,” Hoseok told him, the voice of reason.

 

“We can only give it to you a chapter at a time.”

 

“And like with my wings,” Taehyung added, “you’ll have to awaken to a lot of it on your own.”

 

“But why?” Jin asked. This conversation was so frustrating. He felt like a child being told he would get it when he was older. “Why can’t you just help me understand?”

 

“We can help,” Jimin said, “but we can’t unload everything on you at once. Like how you’re never supposed to shock a sleepwalker into wakefulness. It’s too dangerous.”

 

Jin wrapped his arms around himself. “It would kill me,” he said, offering up the words the rest of them were circumventing.

 

Taehyung put his arms around him. “It has before. And you’ve had enough close encounters with death for one night.”

 

“So what? Now I just have to leave school?” He turned to Taehyung. “Where will you take me?”

 

His brow furrowed, and he looked away from him. “I can’t take you anywhere. It would draw too much attention. We’re going to have to rely on someone else. There’s one mortal here we can trust.” He looked at Jimin.

 

“I’ll get him,” he said, rising.

 

“I won’t leave you,” Jin said to Taehyung. His lip quivered. “I’ve only just gotten you back.”

 

Taehyung kissed his forehead, igniting a warmth that spread through his body. “Luckily, we still have a little time.”