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Chapter One Hundred Fifteen

LUNA

Bennett Tropp built his house with his own hands, on a desert slab the US military had laid for a temporary barracks and abandoned.

Bennett spent fourteen years building that house, and when bad electrical wiring burned it down, he wept on Richie’s shoulder.

He cut the power, but it was too late. We didn’t have enough water to put it out.

When his tears dried up, everyone around came to shoot into the fire in an act of pointless communal retribution against bad luck.

That night stank of gunpowder, burning wood, melted paint, and the concentrated pinch of off-gassing.

The octagonal room I’m dragged into has the same smell.

The guards put me in a high-backed chair and stay on each side.

Carmine growls. “Let her go!”

The ceiling is two stories high, with a miasma of smoke rising in a column.

Oil portraits of men crowd the walls. The floor is marble, with a compass rose in the center.

There are doors at each point, and three are guarded by a human man with the 5C logo embroidered onto their left breast. The west door has been blackened by fire and the face on the portrait above the doorframe is still melting.

A very tall man hangs by the neck from the top of the jamb, burned to carbon from feet to thigh. Above the place where his legs meet, he is supple, vampire porcelain.

“Welcome, Raven.” Charles has the same golden glow as my husband. He looks Carmine up and down and seems surprised by what he sees. “You look… well .”

When Charles yanks on his collar, he displays the last three of his fingers—from pinkie to fuck you—each with a black ring on it.

Three rings.

“You heard me, Bourbon. She has nothing to do with what’s between us.”

“Of course she does.” Languidly, Charles waves his arm toward the hanging man.

“You’ve met the most recent ex-King of Koltrast?

He wisely, eventually, chose stasis instead of death.

His little entourage wasn’t so smart. They were all too trusting.

Being sired in a time of peace makes you unable to recognize war. ”

“You know when I was sired. I won’t go down easy for you.”

“You cannot be offered a bitch drunk on grog to replace what you paid for. Gluttony isn’t your weakness, but you’re still intoxicated.” He turns to me, then back to Carmine, smiling.

I can’t see Carmine’s face from behind him, but I have a view of his right hand balling into a protective fist.

“Do not mistake me for a man who’s drunk,” Carmine says.

“Not on grog, no. You were drunk on righteousness when we met as men. You carried it when you were made—for nothing better than a whore, and still, now, for an unseasoned American Strega.”

Carmine’s had a long life, and if I live to the end of mine, there will still be pieces of his history there’s no time to tell.

I’m taken aback not by the content of Charles’s stories, but by the way they’re both stalling.

This is all just foreplay. Too many words to negotiate who’s going to fuck who.

“You will let my wife go.”

Charles sighs. “You have a choice.”

In my lap, I hold my fingertips together, concentrating on the tingling lines everywhere in the room, finding energy I can use, then open them. Carmine’s jacket flutters at the hem. I can do this. There’s nothing stopping me.

I’ve made so many mistakes today. There’s no one left to save me from the next one, which I have to make before these two finish their dick-measuring contest.

“I’ll tell you what,” Charles says. “Because you’re my nephew’s father, you can live.

Once I wear the raven, your Strega will feed me and you can search the labyrinth for your knife.

” He pauses. All I have to do is get in Carmine’s jacket now, the way I got into Orlando’s belt that first day.

“You’re surprised I knew that’s what you want? ”

My concentration is a tunnel the diameter of a drinking straw. Their voices are miles away. I am an elongated whip of intention, reaching out for him.

“I’m surprised you think I’d give her to you so I could live.”

I snap back. As if he’s on the exact same clock, Carmine opens his hands. They are full of fire.

The Glock smacks into my palms at painful velocity.

Fuck. I did it.

Carmine throws the fire at Charles while I turn the gun on the guy next to me, pulling the trigger without thinking. He falls.

“Shit!” I almost drop the gun. I didn’t want to kill anyone. Not a made guy who’s just in thrall, like Nunzio or…

I don’t have time to finish the thought. There are hands on me again. I shoot down and away, sending the next guy back with nothing but meat between his calf and thigh.

“Back!” a voice commands.

Suddenly, no one’s touching me. The two men left have fallen back. Carmine is rolling flame from one hand to the other and Charles is squinting, but he’s not burned. I point the gun at Charles. The screams of the man with the shot-up knee echo in the chamber.

“Quiet, Freddie.”

Freddie’s screams go abruptly silent. I can hear my short breaths and pounding heart.

“Sit down on the floor,” I say to Charles, because that’s what cops say and I have no idea what else to do.

“She means it,” Carmine says.

Charles smiles. “Her bullets are slow and your fire does not consume. But… I wonder what can a king with three rings do?” He spreads his arms, and with a flicker before surrender, all the light in the room is sucked away. “Oh, I like this.”

The darkness is thick, like a psychic gel. It’s as if the lights are still on, but the shadows are opaque enough to subsume it.

“Carmine?” I whisper, pointing the gun left, right, waiting to figure out where I am or if I’ve gone blind.

“It’s okay,” he says from the other side of something I cannot define. “Just shadows.”

Just shadows. He says it as if it doesn’t have a pervasive sentience.

As if it doesn’t run against my skin and in the crevices of my body like water…

except it has an intention to know me, understand my weakness, find what I’m hiding.

This darkness—these just shadows —are so dense they are sentient.

If I breathe, they will enter my lungs and consume me from the inside.

“What is that?” Charles says from behind me.

I spin into the darkness, pointing the gun at nothing.

Main character change, broski.

The voice is everywhere. Nowhere. Flat as a robot. Male and female. Cozy and dangerous.

“Where have you been?” Carmine says from my left.

These tiny little legs didn’t understand the assignment.

“You summoned a demon?” Charles’s last word is sucked into an otherworldly squeak then a whoosh-snap. For a moment, the darkness is paired with a silence that seems too big to break.

Then there’s light, and heat, and the hiss of dying oxygen.

Carmine holds a ball of fire, but this is different. It’s not cold vampire flame or warm Strega hearth. This fire burns shit, and Charles, who’s only a few feet from Carmine, steps backward and makes a quick sign with his hand.

“Down, Luna!” Carmine shouts.

My body obeys as if it’s in thrall, hand on the gun while the pop-pop of bullets rings out above. They won’t hurt Carmine, but they’ll kill me, so I roll under a table, crouching with my feet to the wall.

Charles is burning. His screams drown out rational thought. One of his men is blasting him with a fire extinguisher.

Carmine runs through the smoke to me, right arm hanging uselessly—as if he’s been hit. He reaches down to me and says, “This way.”

I take his hand. It’s fever-hot. He pulls me up and toward the doorway the half-burned vampire hangs from.

“Are you?—?”

“Look out!” Carmine has his fist in front of my chest.

A split second after, I hear a pop . The man with meat for a knee shot at me.

Carmine opens his hand. A bullet falls out and clicks to the floor.

Carmine reaches out again and again. I hear the shots after.

I am off my feet.

This is all happening so fast it’s out of order.

The second bullet clicks on the marble.

I drop the gun.

The world blurs. Carmine is carrying me, running at thought-defying speed.

How is he like this?

It’s my blood, but more. Something about him is different.

My scarf whips behind me, and boom, I am on my feet in a cold hallway, catching my breath while the walls turn sideways.