Page 24

T he frigid air was sharp and sweet, promising snow. Jules adjusted the collar of his black wool coat. The slim-fit Vatican uniform was an excellent cover, disguising that he was perhaps a little too hungry for a Roman noble. When they’d swept through St Peter’s Square, people had ducked their heads, afraid to look him in the eye.

Selene led the way across the Tiber via the Aelian Bridge only minutes after midnight. The Castel Santo Immortale rose up behind them, imposing in its rotund solidity. The carved demons along its length made his neck prickle. They passed a demon whose hair looked soft enough to touch. Jules pivoted, half expecting to catch it watching him, but it gazed into the distant horizon. The demon held a column upraised, and its billowing cloak almost gave the impression of wings.

But that would be silly , Jules thought. Demons don’t have wings.

Dressed as though for war, Selene strode ahead. Her black coat flared in the night breeze, revealing the shoulder holster for her gun. Matte-black guards were sculpted to her shoulders, detailed with delicate gold chains that glinted with her every movement.

Jules trailed a few steps behind, not only for the view of her blessed legs, but because he couldn’t help but linger. Rome was a glittering jewel. Gas lamps burning in ornate iron braziers lined the street, and for every balcony draped with a constellation of fairy lights, there were dozens more stained-glass lanterns flickering with real flame. Like on the front, Romans couldn’t depend on electric lights or telephones.

He noticed graffiti on the walls and cracks in the stucco. Plants tumbled from balconies. A few small restaurants and trattorias were still open for the late crowd, soft voices and clinking cutlery tumbling onto the street whenever someone opened a door. Outdoor tables had been folded away for the night, and only a few people sat on the steps, watching them without a word.

His shoulders unknotted as they passed from pristine cobbled streets to the grittier parts of town. It felt real to Jules. No pretty mask to hide a dirty truth.

Adjusting her holster, Selene ensured her usual white-handled gun was snug beneath her breast. A twin to the one strapped to her thigh, this one was white with black filigree and gold detailing—the Alleva family crest stamped into the grip.

She brushed her fingertip over the emblem of the Holy Vatican Empire and the Deathless God stamped on the grip of the black gun. This one was no less beautiful, matte black with delicate filigree in gunmetal grey, with subtle gold detail you could only see when the light hit just right.

‘You’re nervous,’ he said, eyes following the movement of her fingers.

Her eyes snapped up. ‘No.’

A smirk played across his lips. ‘Yes, you are.’

She strode down the street as though she owned it. Rome was her city. Its people hers to loathe and protect. Its streets hers to bleed and shed blood on, and only hers.

Damn anyone else who tried to kill someone on her streets.

If he hadn’t noticed Selene caress the emblem like some kind of touchstone, he would never have guessed. She was nervous . Which made him nervous. He glanced over his shoulder, checking for tails, but they were alone.

When Jules faced the front again, he was suddenly nose to nose with Selene. He skidded to a halt and gripped her waist. Arms crossed over her chest, she angled her chin up. He had no choice but to meet her steady gaze.

‘I am not nervous,’ she enunciated.

To disagree would be to take his life into his own hands. Her eyes glittered like the carapace of a nasty beetle. Go on , she challenged him, without ever saying a word. Her flash of irritation lit an answering spark in him, and, God help him, he wanted to provoke her. And not for the first time he questioned the wisdom of taunting a girl with carte blanche to kill him, and the rare skill to follow through.

‘We’re stepping into Rome’s filthy, disgusting underbelly.’ Her nose wrinkled. ‘Crawling down there with the dogs and the rats.’ Jules wanted to smile at her vehemence, but his will to live won out. ‘Even I have no place there,’ she finished softly.

He didn’t remember when they’d switched to French—probably around the time he started taunting her—but he enjoyed her accent in his language. Rome’s filthy, disgusting underbelly rang beautifully in his mother tongue.

He indicated her uniform, the distinctive sword crossing her back. ‘You don’t have to step out as the Butcher of Rome. So why?’

She smiled slightly, showing teeth. ‘I may have no place there, but I can still intimidate them.’

Jules nodded. Yep, he could see it.

She let out a puff of breath, blowing unbound hair off her cheek, and the tension eased palpably between them. She watched him expectantly.

He raised a questioning brow.

‘ So …? ’ she prompted.

He was still touching her. Carefully, he lifted one hand off her waist at a time. Looking at them as though they should be someone else’s problem.

Her brows crumpled in confusion. Not it.

Visibly losing patience, she said, ‘So, as you see, I’m not …?’ She waited expectantly for him to finish her sentence.

‘Oh! Nervous,’ he guessed. Her expression darkened. ‘You’re not nervous. Right. Sorry, I was wrong.’

She seemed mollified.

As her footsteps retreated, Jules tipped his head back. He let his eyes unfocus and stared between the stars into the darkest void he could find. So that was what it felt like to have your life flash before your eyes? By the time he caught up to Selene at the next intersection, she’d smothered her nervous tic—crushing it beneath her will.

‘I got you these.’ She drew a pair of black gloves from her pocket.

His lips curled slowly and he took them, smoothing his thumb over the supple leather. Gloves made of the same impossibly soft leather she wore. The snug fit made his fingers look long and strong, concealing the telling scars without hindering his movement.

He flexed his fingers, adjusting them at the wrist. ‘Thank you.’

She tore her gaze from his hands and met his eyes. ‘You’re welcome. Before we arrive … You already know there are secrets. Compromises we’ve made for peace.’ She glanced at him from beneath her lashes. ‘Ones that … that I’m not exactly proud of.’

She had the hollow-eyed look of someone deeply ashamed of her doubts. Perhaps she felt it was a failure of her faith—but he disagreed. Jules was quietly impressed that after a lifetime under the Vatican’s thumb she thought to question what had been handed to her so easily.

Her next words made him draw a sharp breath.

‘Where we’re going you’ll meet half-demons, part-demons and others with barely a drop of demon blood in their veins—’

He gripped the brick wall, holding himself steady. ‘So it’s true? They … breed with us?’

There were always rumours. Sometimes tabloids that turned up at the front speculated in licentious detail about the Caspian Tsarina’s demonic features, and her pointed teeth that she filed down daily to look smooth and pretty. None of it true. He had witnessed her power with his own eyes. She’d looked entirely human until she hadn’t .

Because you’re like me , Stigmajka.

He thought about the wide eyes around the training courtyard earlier. Pride had flooded him, but now he wondered how he’d kept up with Selene. She was Vatican-trained. Everyone knew exorcists were more than human. Their magic made them superior to others. Faster, stronger. And from what Selene had said in the library he knew they were martyrs. They sacrificed their own bodies for the ability to fight demons.

Selene nodded, a flicker in her eyes. ‘Yes. And they can be powerful.’

Jules rubbed his hand over his jaw, crushing down his panic as best he could. ‘What kind of power?’ he asked, his voice surprisingly steady. Meanwhile, his traitor heart dashed itself against his ribs. Surely she’d hear it.

‘Similar to high-level demons. Fire. Or weather. Or ice.’ She paced away, then returned. ‘Sometimes they control creatures. Or plants. The corpses of ravens.’

He had no such abilities. Only an aptitude for knowing just when to strike. And perhaps strength and speed that outstripped his fellow soldiers. And maybe healing.

Selene shifted, again touching her gun. ‘They’re dangerous.’

Jules looked up sharply. ‘You kill them?’

‘No, but …’

Her expression was strange, but the limpid quality of her eyes in the lamplight made him think it was not about him. This was all her—and some inner conflict she didn’t want to own.

Heart thundering, he waited for her to continue.

‘When we allow them to live, we must ensure they’re no threat. Do you understand?’ Jules nodded, but he wasn’t certain it was true. His mind crowded with thoughts, making it difficult to focus. ‘I—’ She bit her lower lip. ‘Oh, never mind.’ She pivoted and strode on.

The world felt as though it had been ripped out from under him. He had to pull himself together before Selene looked back, and so he battled hopelessly to get his recalcitrant heart under control.

But then she was there, drawing off her glove to press cool fingers to his forehead. He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch.

‘You’re hot,’ she murmured.

‘So are you.’ He could picture her rolling her eyes. ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’

‘All right.’ She sounded doubtful but lowered her hand.

They walked in silence through the quiet night-time streets. Up a cobbled incline, down an unexpected flight of ivy-strangled steps, and the world seemed to right itself. As they passed through a puddle of buttery light, a symbol stamped into the cast-iron lamp post caught his eye. He traced the shape. An upright key.

Keys were everywhere in Rome. Selene’s own coat of arms had a set of three keys wrapped in the coils of a serpent. But this one looked different. The teeth of the key resembled an intertwined ‘E’ and ‘K’. Why did those letters spark meaning to him? Then he remembered Matteo Alleva’s notebook. Elysian . Kairos .

‘Selene—’ He lengthened his stride and caught up with her, guiding her by the elbow to the next lamp post. He indicated the symbol. ‘What’s this?’

‘It symbolizes that the compact between the Vatican and part-demons holds sway here. These streets are not entirely our own.’ She began to turn away, but he stopped her.

He traced the letters for her to see. ‘ Elysian . Kairos .’

She stilled. ‘ Dio Immortale . I think you might be right.’

He straightened, his jaw tight. ‘If they’re here—in Rome, I mean—does that mean we can live in harmony with demons? If … if we create offspring together, doesn’t that mean we’re not so different?’

That was a whole new horror he refused to consider. The scars on his arms seemed to throb with his stumbling heartbeat.

‘What?’ Her brows drew together. ‘No. It doesn’t mean that at all …’ She selected her words carefully. ‘Don’t mistake my … regret … for hesitation. Demon offspring are an abomination before God.’ There was no waver in her voice. ‘I know it’s distasteful. It’s a complication. But their existence doesn’t change why I was created. I was born to kill demons.’

He knew Selene didn’t like shades of grey. But part-demon children …? That made it messy.

‘And the children?’ he asked quietly.

‘I cannot personally kill each and every one of them.’

‘But you would if you could?’

She didn’t speak for a long moment, still walking half a step ahead of him. Eventually she said softly, ‘I might try.’ He could see the side of her face and the shift in her expression. ‘Thankfully … I have never been asked to do so. I hunt the demons who’ve broken through, and nothing will stop me from doing that.’

Stopping abruptly, she pounded her fist against a studded wooden door flanked by potted palms.

His stomach knotted as the echo of her knock sounded. They were going to meet demons.

A judas window slid open in the door, framing a set of dark eyes.

Selene didn’t say a word, and for a moment neither did the woman beyond the door. Jules had the impression she was deciding whether to pretend Selene wasn’t there at all. Finally, the door swung open.

‘ Ciao, Giulietta. Dov’è Sparrow? ’ Selene seamlessly switched back to Italian.

Giulietta was a slender woman, her slinky black dress draping low between her breasts so that he could see the slight dip of her ribs beneath smooth brown skin. Aside from the dress, she wore the ugliest expression Jules had ever seen on a beautiful woman. And every inch of it aimed at Selene.

Selene, for her part, wore her dead-eyed look. The one Jules associated most with her mask—pretending she was only a Vatican exorcist and nothing more. Which begged the question: mask or shield?

‘ Cosa vuoi, troia? ’ Giulietta spat at Selene.

‘Oh, shit,’ Jules whispered in his mother tongue, backing up to get out of the danger zone.

Selene shot him a bored look.

Giulietta seemed to notice him for the first time. Her expression shifted to something sultry and heavy-lidded. ‘And who are you , cute boy?’ she asked in heavily accented French.

‘I’m alive. And I’d like to stay that way,’ Jules replied in Italian.

‘You trained the fun right out of him,’ Giulietta sneered at Selene. ‘Sparrow’s on the roof. He’ll be so pleased to see you.’

Selene was already gone, and her voice drifted back. ‘About as pleased as I am to see him.’

After a last glance at the woman, Jules caught Selene at the top of a flight of spiral stairs. She didn’t appear to notice—or care—but when they reached the top landing, she gave him a measured look. ‘Stay on guard, cute boy .’ Her hand hovered near the gun at her thigh.

She waved him onto a busy rooftop terrace ahead of her. Rome was spread out beneath them, glimmering in the dark. Flowering plants had been brought outside, their leaves lit in yellows and golds from dozens of brass lanterns. And all around the edges, banisters were wrapped with tiny lights. But none of it really registered as his focus narrowed on the screaming youth being branded with an iron across his back. The boy’s voice broke from the agony, and Jules realized what Selene hadn’t said. This was how the Vatican bound the power of part-demons.

Jules was knocked back on his heels by the wrongness of it.

Half turning from the horror of the scene, Jules noticed a man with a presence unlike any he’d felt before. He stood to the side with one arm draped over the banister, watching the branding with a taut expression, and held a cigarette pinched between two fingers. Blue smoke trailed into the night. He looked up sharply when Selene stepped onto the terrace.

With a broken yell, the young woman wielding the branding iron dragged it away from the boy’s skin and plunged it back into a burning brazier. The assembled people cheered, surging around the boy to embrace him and ruffle his hair. More than one jostled to pour drinks down his throat.

But Jules’s attention was focused on the man with the cigarette.

He was beautiful.

That was the only way to describe him, with his knife-edge jaw and column of throat that dipped into an open-necked shirt. Light from a brazier illuminated pale scars that sliced through his brow and one eye. Jules could feel his attention as he watched them approach with an eye that burned like blue fire in stark contrast to the milk-white of his ruined eye. And yet it took nothing from his looks.

If anything, it made him more handsome.

And the impression that he saw everything even more unnerving.