Page 26

S parrow drew a silver lighter from his pocket as Selene’s footsteps faded. ‘She hates the brandings,’ he murmured. ‘I think she sees it as demons escaping natural justice.’

Jules shook his head. ‘That’s not true.’ He remembered the internal conflict underlying her words, the faint flutter of expression behind her inscrutable mask. ‘She doesn’t like the brutality of the solution.’

Even as he said it, he knew he was right. She hated what the Vatican did to part-demons. It was cruel where Selene was not. Uncompromising at times, and hell-bent on success, but never wilfully cruel.

Demon offspring are an abomination before God. Her cutting words echoed in his ears, but more memorable was her quiet relief when she told him she had never been asked to kill the children.

Instead of responding to that, Sparrow said, ‘You’re a long way from the front.’

Jules tried to keep the tension from his shoulders, but Sparrow’s knowing gaze was hot on his neck. When he’d schooled his expression, he turned.

Sparrow tapped out a cigarette and set it at the corner of his mouth, flicking the flame but not lighting it. He watched Jules with an openly curious eye. Sparrow was twenty-five at most, but something about him spoke of experience in life and all things.

Jules felt out of his depth. ‘What gave me away?’

Sparrow huffed out a low laugh, extending the lighter to Jules, who took it curiously. He turned it over in his hand, as though expecting to see what Sparrow wanted him to. It was unadorned, without sigil or design. Flawless silver. He raised his eyes. Sparrow took the cigarette from his mouth, setting it on the window ledge. ‘Keep looking.’

Jules glanced back at it, and as his eyes relaxed, instead of the shiny silver he saw himself reflected back. And he saw what Sparrow saw. The soldier. He flicked his gaze away to the window, to the door, to Sparrow, never settling as he sought danger. Even now, he was waiting for the next attack.

He lit the flame, letting a bitter smile curl his lips.

‘Yeah … Yeah, I see.’ Jules protected the flame with his hand and extended it to Sparrow.

Retrieving the cigarette he’d set aside, Sparrow put it between his lips and leaned in without taking his eyes off Jules. Its golden light lit the planes of his face and dark hair. Those high cheekbones. His scarred brow and sightless eye.

Dieu, he’s beautiful , Jules thought again.

He was also tall. Almost inhumanly so. And Jules had to remind himself that there was no almost about it. Selene had said, It would make it easier if they all looked like monsters, wouldn’t it? That Sparrow was so striking was the point.

Seeing the direction of Jules’s gaze, Sparrow pointed to his own ruined eye. ‘Rome,’ he explained, making the entire city culpable for the damage. He still stood close, tipping his head to breathe smoke toward the ceiling.

There was something about Sparrow that made Jules’s muscles unwind. He struck Jules as capable. If Jules only watched him, he could allow Sparrow to watch the windows and the doors, no?

Yes, that felt right.

So he watched Sparrow as the man shifted closer, corralling him back toward the wall. Jules pressed a hand against Sparrow’s chest, halting his approach.

Sparrow laughed softly but didn’t push it.

And even though Sparrow stilled, he did not move away.

Jules could feel the heat of his smooth skin and the heavy thud of his heart beneath his fingers. He glanced down, seeing the ridge of collarbone disappear into the neck of his shirt.

Sparrow let him look, then, ‘Have you slept with her?’ He cocked his head toward the door. Jules didn’t reply and Sparrow took his own meaning from that, laughing in a dark rumble that sounded like far-distant thunder. ‘That’s a no, then. Have you ever slept with another man?’ The question sounded darkly taunting.

Jules narrowed his eyes slightly as the tall man backed him up toward the wall. Selene was nowhere in sight. He was silent a moment, evaluating him. ‘I have. In the past.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But my tastes are rather specific these days.’ He thought of Selene, and the kiss he’d stolen. It had cost him a few bruised ribs. Still worth it. ‘But I wanted to try it and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, so if you think you’re getting to me with this, then—’

Sparrow’s hand settled on his hip, pressing him back against the wall in a reversal of Jules and Selene earlier.

He broke off. Then, ‘ Oh .’

Sparrow’s lips curled just slightly at the corners as realization dawned. ‘ Oh ,’ Sparrow echoed, his deep voice full of amusement. ‘Yes. I was hitting on you. Not teasing you. Well, maybe a little.’

‘I see that now.’ Jules felt his neck heat up, but laughed before he let embarrassment take hold. It felt easier to hold Sparrow’s intense gaze now—the pale eye and the ruined one. ‘Thanks.’

‘You know where to find me, if—’

‘Yeah. I do.’ He couldn’t ignore a coil of lust.

If he’d been here alone, maybe he’d take him up on the offer. Just for fun. But he wasn’t. He was here with Selene, and when he thought of her he pictured the light gilding her cheekbones and the full curve of her lower lip. The way the lantern light had limned her hair. She was bright and vital and dangerous. And so he was glad not to be alone, because that would mean being without her. Aware of the play of emotions across Jules’s face, Sparrow took a step back, sitting on the window ledge. ‘It’s something of a miracle,’ Sparrow mused. ‘That you’ve survived Rome this long.’

‘Is Rome really so bad?’ Moving to the standing globe beside Sparrow’s desk, Jules traced the route the train had taken from Nice to Rome. It already felt so long ago. Then he found Ostrava, which felt like a different life entirely.

‘Well, surviving Rome is one thing. Surviving her is quite another.’

‘Now you sound like Giulietta,’ Jules replied, an edge of reproach in his words.

Sparrow’s chuckle was low and did things to Jules’s stomach. ‘Selene. Exorcists. The Vatican . That’s all I mean.’

Jules circled the room. It was clear this was not Sparrow’s bedroom, but it felt more intimate than an office. He could see a conservatory through a pair of French doors and what appeared to be a small jungle growing beneath the glass.

Sparrow stepped into his path, nodding toward his bicep. ‘Can I see?’

‘See what?’ Jules asked.

‘Your brand.’

‘My what ?’

‘You have a brand.’ He drew a circle around his own bicep, just where Jules’s thorns were on him. ‘Here.’

Jules shook his head, a fresh wave of uncertainty rising in a tide that threatened to drown him. He had no brand. Only demons had brands. ‘No, I have a scar .’

Sparrow looked confused for a moment, his ruined eye beautifully pale as he watched Jules sharply with the good one. He was more handsome for his flaws. The scar through his brow made the hard lines of his face and the soft fullness of his lips look like something out of a painting. ‘Show me?’ Sparrow asked quietly.

Jules swallowed, forcing down the hollow cry that wanted to claw its way out. Without taking his eyes off him, Jules dropped his jacket over the back of a chair and undid his shirt buttons, shrugging the white shirt off his shoulders so that his bicep was exposed. For a moment he hesitated, not wanting Sparrow to see the number of marks on his arms, but it was his shame to bear. There was no use hiding what he’d done. So, averting his eyes from Sparrow and staring into the darkness beyond the window, Jules removed his shirt completely.

The hushed hiss of air between Sparrow’s teeth revealed the moment Sparrow saw the marks. Jules resolutely raised his chin an inch, not looking at him.

But then Sparrow took half a step closer, and Jules couldn’t not look to see. Anger darkened Sparrow’s brow, and his good eye had sharpened to something dangerous. ‘Who made these marks?’

‘I did.’

‘You did them to yourself?’

Jules nodded. ‘They mark the dead.’

‘The dead,’ Sparrow echoed.

‘The ones I killed.’ The demons I killed.

Sparrow’s expression opened with realization, then he turned his attention on Jules’s thorns and said nothing more about it. ‘These—’ He traced one of the lines lightly with his index finger. ‘How long have you had them?’

‘As long as I’ve been alive, just about.’ Sparrow gave him a look, doubt clouding his expression. ‘I was abandoned when I was a baby. The doctors think I was only a day old. These were already carved into my flesh.’ He glanced at the scar, his brows pulling together.

Sparrow saw the question in his eyes and his own softened. ‘Your mother did it, most likely in the minutes after you were born.’

Jules raised both hands in a warding gesture and stepped back, knocking over a Murano glass lamp that smashed with a dramatic rain of sparks. He righted it and backed away toward the door, still holding one hand up between them. Sparrow’s mouth opened as if to speak, but Jules cut him off. ‘Don’t.’

‘Jules—’ Sparrow followed him, grasping his wrist and pushing his hand down.

Jules was tempted to deliver an elbow to his cheekbone, but he did have such lovely cheekbones. The thought was feverish, there and gone again like tattered cloud whisking across the sky.

‘Not another word.’

His chest expanded with gasping, ragged breaths. It felt too hard to breathe.

He had pushed this feeling away since that day on the battlefield. Now Sparrow stood in front of him, the blue of his eye burning like Baliel’s flames, and Jules knew he wouldn’t be able to run anymore.

Sparrow’s hand was gentle as he settled it against the back of Jules’s neck, but his fingers were unyielding.

Jules couldn’t move. His eyes burned, the edges of the world blurring slightly. He shook his head. No .

He wanted to run. But he was held in place by Sparrow, whose eyes were gentle and solemn as he confirmed his nightmare. The voices of soldiers echoed through his mind. Lacroix. How many kills? He traced his own fingertips down his forearm, feeling the faintest ridges.

In four years? Not hundreds. Thousands .

‘Just—’ Sparrow began.

‘ No .’

Sparrow sighed, tipping his head back as frustration tightened his jaw. Reaching for Jules’s shirt, Sparrow dropped it over his shoulders, concealing the damning scar once more. Jules clutched it to himself as though the starched cotton could cover up unfortunate truths.

‘Does Selene know?’

Numbly he shook his head.

‘Good. At least there’s that.’ Sparrow’s expression was dark. ‘She’s their creature through and through. You cannot trust her. You should stay here with—’

‘With people like me?’ Jules snarled, his lips curling back from his teeth. He held his forearm an inch from Sparrow’s nose, forcing him back a step. ‘You think I’d be welcomed here with a thousand demon deaths written across my skin?’

Sparrow’s expression twisted and he looked away. Jules had found his mark. He always did. No matter what strange affinity he and Sparrow shared, there would be no home for him here. He had locked the door on that possibility before he knew it existed and thrown away the key. Had sacrificed all that to be the Holy Vatican Empire’s loyal soldier, giving them his every waking hour for four years. And more than once he’d tried to give them his blood.

But he’d never managed to die, unlike everyone else he had come to love. Farah killed by demons, Kian killed by Baliel.

His heart fluttered like a caged bird against the bars of his ribs. Half human, half demon. And not enough of either to count for anything.

‘ What? ’ Sparrow said, his voice rough. His blue eye darkened with some emotion Jules couldn’t quite name. Angry perhaps? Furious, even—and Jules realized he’d spoken the last part out loud. Sparrow stepped closer, his hand rising to catch Jules’s jaw and tip his face. ‘Never say that. You are not half human . You are not half anything. You are a demon. Every drop of your—’

He broke off. The bloodless expression on Jules’s face had silenced him faster than a knife to the throat.

Jules sat heavily on the edge of Sparrow’s desk. He had assumed he was like the people on the roof. Human, with tainted blood in his veins. But Sparrow had dashed that hope.

You are a demon .

Perhaps deep down he’d suspected it since Nice. Why else had he forsworn his sword? On the battlefield outside Ostrava, the Tsarina had handed him a nightmare with a smile. He hadn’t accepted it then. Now he had no choice. Born and raised a human, with demon blood in his veins.

‘You could tell?’ Jules heard his own voice as if from far away.

Sparrow shook his head. ‘Not right away. Your scar binds you. I thought you had a brand, because I could only feel the faintest flicker of your demonic essence when …’ He cleared his throat. ‘When I was very close.’

‘I remember that,’ Jules murmured, a smile tugging at his mouth. ‘Tell me more.’ It hurt, but it was not in his nature to rail against reality.

Sparrow spoke with the cadence of a storyteller, guessing at Jules’s torrent of emotions and gentling his voice to match. ‘If this was done when you were a babe, then it was your mother. Most likely in the minutes after you were born. At first I didn’t recognize it, because this is something I’ve only ever seen once before.’

A feeling unfurled in Jules’s chest. Relief, warm and golden. ‘You’ve seen this before?’ Perhaps he was not entirely alone.

Sparrow smiled faintly as he pulled back the eyelid of his ruined white eye to reveal a small black mark pressed into his sclera. It looked like a teardrop. Or a fang.

‘A tear?’

He touched Sparrow’s arm lightly to let him know he could release his eyelid. Sparrow blinked dark lashes and rubbed his eye with a sheepish grimace. ‘It is the symbol representing the Duke of Teeth. It bound me before I destroyed it.’

A sacrifice to reclaim his birthright.

‘So that’s how you knew. You have one too.’ Jules frowned, rubbing his thumb over his own bicep. ‘I thought you said it was Rome that ruined your eye?’

‘In a way it was. Without the Vatican we would be safe.’

The French doors blew open and a flurry of snow came in, falling wet and heavy before Sparrow caught the windows and latched them shut. The papers on his desk rustled, then went still—as still as Jules felt, heart leaden in his chest.

He shook his head. ‘Without demons we— they —would be safe.’

Sparrow brushed that off, unacknowledged. ‘Your scar tells me much. I think your mother must be related to the Prince of Thorns somehow. One of your parents certainly.’

His parents. His demon parents.

‘The Prince of Thorns?’

‘Perhaps you know him by another name, the Duke of Briars?’

His knees weakened. If he hadn’t been leaning on the edge of Sparrow’s desk already, Jules would’ve sat heavily on the floor. The Duke of Briars— Baliel —he knew.

His knuckles whitened where he gripped the desk.

Kian’s killer was his blood. His lungs constricted, burning as though he breathed hot embers, and Jules crushed the thought cruelly down—unable to deal with it right then. It threatened to split him open, baring his insides to the world.

Even though he trusted Sparrow—trusted him more than he’d trusted anyone since arriving in Rome—he didn’t want him to see so deep. Nor so clearly. His guilt. His crimes . Those he was happy to share, but his weaknesses were his alone.

‘The night Selene and I met, she fought him. He arrived at the orphanage where I was raised and—’ He faltered, cleared his throat. ‘Baliel killed Kian, my childhood friend. My closest friend.’

‘What else?’

‘What do you mean, what else ?’ Jules’s hand was a fist against his knee, then he recalled the words Baliel had spoken as his body burned. ‘And he told me the Vatican was my enemy.’

‘He told you that? Then you must believe him—’ Sparrow broke off and Jules heard it too. The crisp tap of Selene’s boots. Jules slid his arms into his shirtsleeves and buttoned up. He wanted to dig his fingernails into the scar on his arm and shred his flesh to get it off. If she found out he was a demon, Selene would kill him. He could run, but she knew this city. These were her streets and she’d hunt him down.

If he asked, Sparrow would let him stay in spite of the marks on his arms—no matter how much trouble Jules brought to his door—because Jules knew how to use his smile.

But he didn’t want to stay.

When Selene stepped into the room, her hair glinted in the lamplight as she turned to find him, and he knew he would be leaving with her. His eyes trailed over her, the curve of her hip, those long legs clad in tight leather, and he crushed down his rioting emotions so she wouldn’t immediately know something was wrong. No matter how cold she pretended to be, she saw more than she let on.

Farah would have told him to run from this, but he had always barrelled head first into danger.

‘Ready to go?’ he asked, running fingers through his hair, mussing it so it stood on end.

Sparrow closed his eyes.

Selene nodded, pressing a cloth to her knuckles. ‘Quite.’

There was a crisp click as Sparrow flicked open the silver lighter. The flame played over his eyes so he was a different creature entirely to the man he’d been with Jules. Reaching for another cigarette, Sparrow lit it between his lips.

Selene wrinkled her nose. ‘Sparrow, that’s a vile habit, I’ll have you know.’

He breathed out a coil of blue smoke. ‘Noted. I’ll take your personal preference into account from here on out.’ Somewhat inevitably, Sparrow seemed to take it as encouragement. ‘So?’ he asked, voice almost back to its usual timbre. ‘What did Kalindra tell you?’

Selene raised one shoulder in an easy shrug. ‘Did I say I’d share the information I was given with you, L’occhio della Malavita ? Ask her yourself.’

‘An open book, as ever. Can’t you try to be a little fucking mysterious for once?’

Selene smirked. ‘Don’t pretend you can read .’