“So?”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Lilith, and I will.”
“Oh, because I’ve never been hurt before? Think I’ve never been dicked around by guys who only wanted me for sex?”
“No.”
“Then what are you trying to protect me from? I’m not some delicate little porcelain doll that’ll break if she’s handled too roughly. I’m a grown fucking woman who can make her own decisions.”
Dante offered a playful little smirk. “You’ve never been rejected before.”
“What if I haven’t?”
“Maybe you should learn the humility of it.”
“You’re seriously trying to teach me humility right now? I just threw myself at you, and you’re too busy trying to protect me and teach me humility, rather than just take what it is I know you want.”
“You don’t know what I want,” he said, his jaw tightening.
“Then why don’t you tell me? Help me understand what I’m doing wrong with you.”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” he said, “but I’m doing you a favor. I’m a mistake you won’t be able to erase. Goodnight, Lilith.”
He stood, then walked away from the table and kept walking before I could think of something to say to him, some rebuttal, some… anything. Anything at all. But the words weren’t coming. All I could do was look at him as he walked around the tables in the bar and then out of the bar itself, leaving me alone in the dim room with the quiet, rainy streets of the little German town to my right.
The bartender came over and said something in German, which I assumed was something like last call. Whatever it was, I waved a polite no thanks at him and turned my head against the cool glass, allowing my heart a chance to calm down. Dante had said a lot of things, and he had been right about a lot of things, but he wasn’t right about this. He had, however, rejected me; so that was that, because I was done chasing him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Rectory
I waited until the bar looked like it was closing down for the evening before heading upstairs, trying to keep Dante out of my head. Thoughts of him had the power to weigh me down, and right now I needed to be as light as a cat, ready to react to just about anything that might come my way.
I made myself feel a little better by reassuring myself that Raphael had looked okay after we had slept together. The change in Aiden had been instant and dramatic. He had gone from strong and full of life, to weak and lethargic almost immediately after we had finished. Raphael, though, had kept some of his stamina, at least, and that was good. Having to carry him through the rest of this, or worse, leave him in the hotel to recover, wasn’t something I wanted to do. I just hoped he wouldn’t get worse during the night.
When I opened the bedroom door, that worry drifted away like fog in the morning.
Raphael wasn’t asleep and in a worse condition than I had left him. He was awake, sitting in the lotus position in the middle of the bedroom, shirtless and glistening with sweat. At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on; his eyes were shut, his hands were still and resting on each of his knees, and besides the steady, deep heaving of his chest, he wasn’t moving at all.
Then he moved his right hand, turning his palm upward and opening it to reveal, nestled within it, the silvery-white crystal he had shown me earlier—the Raphael crystal. He rubbed it with his other hand, and then he released the crystal. When he did, the crystal began to pulse with inner light. I shut the door behind me and took a step into the room, but didn’t say anything for fear of breaking whatever was going on.
The crystal continued to pulse softly, growing brighter as the seconds passed until finally reaching an apex of inner brilliance and remaining there. Raphael then simultaneously closed his palm around the crystal, sucked in a breath of air, and opened his eyes. Around him, an array of colors swirled like smoke. Blue, green, and purple patterns shifted around him, as if he were a prismatic campfire, blazing in the dead of night.
“Raph?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
Though he had been looking in my direction, he seemed to see me now. “We were looking in the wrong places,” he said.
“What?” I walked a little closer.
“We were looking for churches, but we were not going to find him in a church because they were not talking about a church.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My phone… I need my phone.”
I saw it sitting on the dresser, so I picked it up and handed it to him. Raphael unlocked the screen and started a Google search for a short string of German words. When the results popped up, he keyed what looked like directions into his phone’s map app, then showed me a route. Walking, it would take us seventeen minutes to get from the hotel we were staying at to what looked like a bar with a name I couldn’t pronounce.
“What is this?” I asked.
“The church,” he said.
“But that’s a bar?”
“In German, the bar is called Saint Christopher’s Rectory, known to locals as the church.”
“The… church? You’re sure this is right? Not just another dead end?”
He nodded, and I could see the confidence in the gesture. “I know this is right. He is there, the man with the spiderweb tattoo.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, right now. If we go, we will catch him.”
A wave of nerves pushed through me, unsteadying my sense of balance. I almost started to feel a little faint. “Why didn’t… you do this before? If you’re so certain now, I mean, what’s changed?”
He shook his head lightly. “I don’t know… I think you did something to me.”
“Did… something?” Hot blood flushed to my chest. “What did I do?”
“When you left, my senses opened. I started seeing things… clearly. I saw him, and I followed him with my mind, using my crystals to help focus my energy. I’ve never felt as powerful as I do now.”
“Wait, so you’re saying I helped you? You don’t feel tired or sick?”
“I do, but I also feel charged, and I’ve found him. I’m sure we will find him there.”
“Then I shouldn’t waste any more time asking questions. We have to go.”
Raph nodded and went to stand, but managed only with some effort to do so. I tossed his shirt over to him, then turned, walked into the corridor, and knocked on the door to Dante’s room. For a panicked minute I thought he and Vik may have been sleeping, turned in for the night, but Dante opened the door, Vik peering from behind.
“Raph found him,” I said. “We have to go.”
Dante nodded, then gestured c’mon to Vik.
“I’ll get my things,” Vik said.
My anxiety levels began to rise as soon as we got into Dante’s Audi and started down the rainy city streets. One of the men involved in almost getting me killed was, if Raph was correct, currently inside the bar we were quickly closing in on. As much as I was running on adrenaline and the euphoria of having recently fed, I still wasn’t at all sure what would happen when we got there.
He was bound to be hostile, so I expected a confrontation. But what if he was armed? What if he had friends? What if he had magic?
“Is there anything else you can tell us about what we’re going to get into?” Dante asked. “Vik? Raph?”
“I cannot get into a meditative state like this, there’s too much going on, so I can’t see him anymore,” Raph said, “but I feel like he’s still there.”
“I didn’t have a lot of time to work,” Vik said, “but I did manage to find some information on the person I think we’re closing in on.”
“Really?” I asked, shifting in my seat. “What did you find?”
“Well, first of all, the spiderweb is a prison tattoo; it means the guy has served a good length of time in jail.”
“This isn’t news, I know all about prison tattoos; I’ve hooked up with a guy who had prison tattoos.”
Vik nodded. “I was only clarifying.”
“Okay, what else did you find?”
“Like I said, not a lot, but I did find his name, and we did find this.” Vik handed me his phone, open on a page translated from German to English using an online translator. On it was a news article dated five years ago quoting “Konrad Roth, a Munich man, stabs local woman to death in street, suspect at large” with a blurry CCTV picture of a man with a blotchy mark on his face that couldn’t have been anything other than a spiderweb tattoo.
Raph, who was looking over my shoulder, pointed at the screen. “That’s him,” he said. “I have no doubt.”
“Holy shit, look at his hands.” They were dark, as if covered in blood. “What the hell are we dealing with?”
“I’m not sure,” Vik said, “but it gets weirder. I followed the story, and the day after the fatal stabbing occurred, the woman’s body was stolen from the morgue.”
“What?” I asked, whipping my head around and giving Vik his phone back. “Stolen?”
“No one knows how. The police found nothing they could use, no leads, so they shut the case and considered it unsolved.”
“They never caught him?”
“The suspicion is that Konrad fled the country or went into deep hiding.”
“This reeks of the supernatural,” Dante said. “We need to be incredibly careful. We have no idea what these people are capable of.”
“I agree,” Vik said. “I also don’t think we should separate. Not this time.”
“There goes my plan of infiltrating the bar and doing a little recon,” I said.
“I don’t think we have time to do any recon,” Dante said. “If we let you go in on your own, you won’t have any cover or backup, and like I said, we have no idea what they’re capable of.”
“I just don’t know about all four of us going to the bar together. Won’t we get noticed as soon as we walk through the door?”
“Maybe, but at least we’ll be together, and there will be four of us.”
“Okay, fine, but if we all get killed, I’m blaming you.”
“If we stay together and do as I say, we should make it out of this alive.”
Dante parked the car on the opposite side of the street once we arrived, and I stepped out into the cool, wintery night. The rain hadn’t stopped, but it had become fluffy, and it still had the capacity to bite every bit of exposed skin. I turned my eyes across the street where, tucked between two alleys, a red glow spilling out onto a stone wall indicated the doors to Saint Christopher’s Rectory were open. The street itself, however, was quiet. No one seemed to be going into or out of the bar itself.
The guys stepped out of the car, and when we were all ready, I crossed the street and approached the mouth of the alley, noticing immediately that there was no bouncer at the door. There weren’t any tables outside, no one smoking or hanging around. This was normal—Dante had mentioned how German cities had a no noise policy, even if you could drink your pint of beer out in public without any problems—but it didn’t make the scene any less eerie.
“Remember the plan,” Dante said as the four of us reached the entrance.
“Plan? We don’t have a plan.”
“Yes, we do. Stick together and do as I say, and we’ll make it out of this.”
“What if you make a bad call?”
“Do what I say anyway.”
Putting what had happened earlier between Dante and I aside made it easier to remember that, of the two of us, he had the most experience and probably knew what he was talking about. I wasn’t a leader here, I was a subordinate, a member of the team. For all of our sakes, I had to do as I was told. I didn’t want to go down as the reason why four stupid supernaturals lost their lives on this wintry night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Barfight
My heart began to thump as I approached the entrance to Saint Christopher’s Rectory. The open, outer door looked like the vault door to a military bunker. It was black, made of metal, bulky, and on the front of it was a giant crucifix with German words written on it. Beyond that door was a small nook, and inside the nook was another, larger door flanked on both sides by large, red bulbs, like eyes in the dark.
Dante pulled the door open, and immediately the thumping drone of industrial heavy metal rock came wafting out to greet us, or turn away the people who were intimidated by such music. Walking into the dim, smoky bar, the first thing I noticed was how low the ceiling in the entryway was. With the door, and now the low ceiling, I very much got the impression of walking into a bunker, having to lower my head to make sure I wouldn’t hit the crossbeam.
The walls inside were all made of stone, as were the columns supporting the ceiling. There were tables scattered around, all of them black with a red candle burning in the center. The bar occupied the entire left wall, which ran almost along its entire length. Toward the end of the bar, I noticed there was no dance floor, but rather four rows of church pews leading up to a pulpit standing in front of a gothic crucifix surrounded by hundreds of lit candles.
This was exactly the kind of place I would have wanted to go to back in Seattle, the birthplace of grunge music. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t here on a tourist excursion, that I was actually looking for someone, in order to stop myself from admiring the aesthetic. When I shook myself back into the moment, I saw Dante had already started toward the bar with Vik and Raph in tow.
I walked to catch up with them and noticed two things as I went. The first was a small staircase at the far-left corner of the room. At the top of the staircase there was a door, slightly ajar and letting off a soft, yellow glow. The second thing I noticed was the bar’s only standing patron. There weren’t many people sitting at a table and having a drink, one couple all clad in black and covered in piercings, but this man stuck out to me not because he was standing up, but because he was staring at me almost as if he’d seen a ghost.
I followed him with my eyes and watched him pull his phone from his jean pocket and start punching the screen with his thumbs. I wasn’t sure if I simply wasn’t close enough to get a sense of his aura—I could see the couple’s emotional auras radiating from their shoulders; each of them wanted to, and was probably going to, get laid.
“Raph,” I said, calling out to the closest person to me, but my voice didn’t carry loudly enough to reach his ears over the thumping bass of the music being pumped through the speakers.
I watched Dante make conversation with the bartender and caught German words being flung around by both parties. Vik stood next to them, nodding occasionally as if he understood what was being said. I didn’t want to interrupt, but at the same time I also wasn’t entirely keen on the guy stealing glances in my direction as, with nervous fingers, he handled his phone. Who was he texting so nervously?
I scouted the couple sitting down at one of the tables, but they weren’t being shifty. They were just drinking talking, and holding hands. It didn’t look like they were in on whatever was going on, assuming something was going on and this wasn’t just my paranoia kicking in. So, I grabbed Raph’s arm and made him look at me, then I reached up to his ear.
“See the guy at the back?” I asked. “I think he’s up to something.”
“Are you sure?” Raph asked.
“I’m not sure about anything in here, but Dante is busy and I don’t want to make moves that are too suspicious.”
Realizing then that simply talking to him conspiratorially as I was probably seemed suspicious to anyone watching, I grabbed Raph’s collar and pulled him in for a kiss, letting it last just long enough to look legitimate and hot, and not at all forced. Lucky for us, we were both good kissers. So good, in fact, I almost forgot—as his tongue rolled around inside my mouth—that I was kissing him purely to throw that other man off.
When the kiss broke, I turned my head to glance at the guy who I assumed was a sentry… and he wasn’t there. My heart began to rapidly pulse, my hand tightened around Raph’s collar, and my breath hitched up. Where the fuck has he gone? Oh s
hit, oh shit… where is—there. I saw him walking briskly along the pews, heading in the direction of the set of stairs I’d seen on my way in, but he didn’t get that far before the door opened and a big man came barging out.
It was Konrad.
I let Raph’s collar go, then threw myself at Dante. I turned his head, forcing him to look at the stairs. Both men were now looking at us, the bigger man stopped halfway down the stairs, the sentry still some feet away. Neither looked like they knew what to do in that moment, and while this would have been a great opportunity to seize, none of us knew what to do either. I hadn’t expected to run into that guy so easily. I’d expected I’d have to beat up a couple of goons first. Wasn’t that how this went? You beat up the goons to get to the boss level?
“Vikram!” Dante yelled, and Vikram seemed to immediately activate and swing into action, coming around Dante’s shoulder and making sweeping gesture with his right hand. The four lines of pews standing between me and the sentry suddenly swept aside, screeching across the stone floor as if pushed by an invisible hand. The couple sitting having a drink, and the bartender too, suddenly started screaming and flailing, as if hordes of bugs had fallen on them and they were desperately trying to fight them off. All three of them took off and made a break for the front door, shrieking, leaving Vik, Raph, Dante, and I, squaring off against those two men.
The smaller man, the sentry, darted toward the front door, too, while the bigger man grabbed hold of the staircase railings and used them to pull himself back up the stairs, toward the door at the top.
“Lilith, stop him from getting away,” Dante said. “Vik, with me!”
Konrad seemed like a much sounder target; he was large, and looked more than capable of defending himself against the likes of Vikram and Dante. He was also about to head into a room where he could put a door between him and us, effectively ridding us of our chance at catching him. The sentry was starting to make a run toward the bar’s front door, but in order to get there, he would have to go through me and Raph first, and I wasn’t letting this guy get away. By the time he cleared the first set of pews, Raph was on him, having deftly navigated the mess of tables and chairs between them, but the sentry ducked to the right just as Raph went to grab him and managed just barely to maintain his momentum.
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