“Flamma intus!” The demon—both beast and human host—collapsed inward, then exploded in a cloud of ash.
I was in no mood to save the human hosts buried within. My dad lay as still as death, wearing his white gi, which was bloodied from cuts around his face and half ripped off his body. His black belt had been torn and tossed away. Demon after demon got in my way, no matter how many I killed with one stroke of my blade.
“Fuck this.” I sifted across the maddening crowd in front of my father. Just as I knelt down, a thin rope circled my wrist, then the other, yanking me back. “What the—” My katana fell in the dirt.
A white-misted dome suddenly covered me, blurring the sound of fighting. I glanced down at my wrist to see a crystalline web wrapping my wrists and my ankles, keeping me pinned in place. The tendrils snaked up my arms till I couldn’t budge an inch. The chilly vapor thickened and swirled, blocking out everything but the distinct aura of silent winter. My breath puffed out in white clouds. He was here, in this frosted dome.
“Come out, Damas.”
Like a Greek god come to life, he appeared before me, tendrils of vapor curling away from him. His smile, the one I’d found genteel and kind and alluring, now only repulsed me.
“What’s the point of all this?” I yanked on my web of confinements. “You know the prophecy. I must be at the gathering in three days, or you all die. Or don’t you remember?”
“I don’t plan to harm you, dear Vessel. I told you I never would.” A glint of malice flared in his eyes and his too-wide smile.
My VS thumped in the distance, this vapor holding my power at bay somehow. I closed my eyes and willed it forward. Damas grabbed my jaw and shook me. I opened my eyes on a gasp, his grip a painful vise.
“It didn’t have to be this way, Genevieve. I would’ve cared for you. I would’ve loved you.”
“You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“You could’ve taught me.” His expression softened to such sincerity, an imploring plea glistening in his supernatural eyes. “You could’ve shown me how to love. You could’ve been my queen.”
Someone pounded on the exterior of the dome, but I could see nothing through the white fog cocooning us from the mayhem. The screech of talons crossed the top of the dome. Mira was trying to get in. Whatever this was he’d created, there was no sifting in or out. I’d already tried.
“You’re mad.”
His intent gaze raked over my face, landing on my lips. If he thought to kiss me, he was sadly mistaken. “Let me go, Damas.”
“I liked it better when you called me Thomas.”
“But that was a lie. Just like everything else about you.”
“Unlike your hunter? He’s so honest. He never told you of his heavy sins, did he? I had to bring you that truth.”
“He told me everything, how you led him to slaughter those people in that village. Yes, he did the killing, but you had as much blood on your hands as he did. And you only showed me that ghastly vision in order to lure me back to you. Well, it won’t work. None of it. I will never be yours.”
The pounding continued.
His smile slipped. “Yes. I know. You made your choice. Such a pity. All the pleasure that could’ve been yours will now only be pain. And remember, I gave you a choice.”
“You said you’d never harm me.”
“Physically…no.”
Fear streaked through my veins like ice. “What do you mean? What have you done?”
“It could’ve been so different.” His grip on my jaw slackened, and he dropped his hand. “You think the hunters could’ve kept them safe?”
He shook his head with a condescending arch of the brow. My knees buckled with the weight of his insinuation.
“Damas, what have you…?”
The web and the white dome vanished. I stumbled forward directly into Jude’s arms. It had been him pounding. The vapor dissipated. Only silence weighed heavy where there had been clanging of swords and grappling bodies before Damas sealed me in his dome.
“Are you okay?” Jude asked, fear and rage marking his face.
A hazy cloud of ash and sulfur lingered in the air. Storm clouds still billowed, pressing down like a heavy cloak.
I couldn’t answer as I scanned the misty scene. The bodies of demon hosts littered the ground. All was quiet, but not all was well.
Damas was still here. I could feel him.
Uriel tended to Xander. George knelt by my father, completely unaware of the demon prince inches away. Behind him stood Damas, a sword raised in a double-fisted grip. Lightning beat three flashes across the night sky, silhouetting the man, the demon, who’d once professed to love me, as he stared down at his target. My father.
“No!”
The blade fell hard and true, right into my father’s chest. George flinched as the sword seemed to drop out of nowhere, not seeing or even sensing the perpetrator hovering over his shoulder.
A flash of lightning. The demon prince met my gaze once more, steel-hard with a promise of more pain to come, before disappearing into the night. George was already pulling the sword from my father’s body by the time I ran to them and fell at my dad’s side.
“No. God, please. No.”
My dad wasn’t even conscious before, but now he coughed up blood, spattering his white gi.
“Dad…Daddy.” I cradled his head in my lap. “Please! Uriel!”
He was already there at our side.
“Please help him. Tell me you can.”
“This healing of the body is beyond me. I can only mend the soul.”
Jude was already lifting my father in his arms. “I know someone who can. Hold on to me, Genevieve.”
I wrapped both arms around the two men I loved most in the world, and we were gone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A longer sift. The sun had already fallen, leaving a sliver of pink light on the horizon of a quaint town. This wasn’t Arran. We stood in a familiar place on a wide green lawn. I turned and saw St. Mary’s Church, where Jude and I had been married.
“Father Clementine?”
“Yes.” Jude strode toward an unassuming stone building off to the right. “Come. Hurry.”
He didn’t need to tell me. I was pushing open the wrought-iron gate in front of him. We arrived on the back steps of the cottage.
“Go in. He’ll know we’re here.”
I opened the door to find a short priest, nearly bald, with bushy eyebrows, walking toward us as if he’d expected us. Father Clementine.
“Come in, come in.” He ushered us into his humble home, through a cozy den and into a room where Dommiel was propped up in a twin bed playing cards by himself, staring at us in wide-eyed surprise. Jude gave him a single glance, then set my father on the other bed. I hadn’t realized this was the healer George had spoken of when he took the injured Dommiel away that night in London.
My dad hadn’t come around once. Blood seeped from the gaping wound.
“The blade went through his heart,” I whispered, choking on the words.
The man I knew as the merry-eyed priest who had led Jude and me through our wedding vows was now calm and grave as he held both palms over the wound in my father’s chest.
“No, dear,” he replied. “Whoever did this missed the heart.”
“How can—”
“Let him work.” Jude pulled me gently out of the way with an arm around my shoulder.
“Get my kit, Jude. You know where it is.”
He let me go to fetch the kit in another room. I moved to the foot of the bed and knelt, placing a hand on my father’s ankle, needing to touch him. Still warm. He wasn’t gone yet.
Jude reentered the room and set a brown leather satchel on the nightstand. Father Clementine went to work, all the time whispering a Latin prayer. I’d seen wounds cleaned and stitched before. As a matter of fact, the first time I’d gone to Jude’s place in the French Quarter was when that asshole Fabio had stabbed me. Jude had used his own hom
e-nursing kit to take care of my injury. Fabio got what he deserved in the end. And I damn sure planned to make Damas pay.
“Damas paralyzed me in that dome,” I whispered to Jude, who now stood at my back with his hand on my shoulder.
He didn’t reply. I thought he hadn’t heard me, but he finally replied, “We knew there would be a consequence of you accepting the power to sift. He’s a demon prince, no guardian angel. He left some of himself behind. Perhaps it now prevents you from doing him mortal harm.”
The thought that I’d relinquished my power to destroy the one man I wanted to blast into oblivion made my blood run cold. I would have my vengeance. One way or another.
Father Clementine had wiped and cleaned the excess blood, still praying. I’d noticed that the wound no longer bled as it should have. My father should be dead from blood loss alone, but his healer seemed to pray the wound closed. His fingers moved with deft swiftness as he stitched with thick threading material. The wound was on the left side of his chest. Damas had meant to stab through the heart. But he’d missed. On purpose? Doubtful. Perhaps the heavens were on my side.
As he lay there, I felt a keen sense of déjà vu, remembering when I’d stood at Jude’s bedside, studying every mark that had been made by demon fiends set on hurting him. Though not suffering the same ghastly whiplike wounds, my father was bruised badly. His gi had opened, the black belt he usually wore stripped away. Massive contusions darkened his chest and abdomen. Both of his eyes were swollen. A cut opened his bottom lip. He’d fought and lost. He’d been used as a punching bag for the demons’ entertainment.
“Did you kill Bellock?” I asked, rage rippling through me.
“No.” Regret hung in that one-word reply. “But I will.”
We remained quiet a moment while Father Clementine’s prayer grew louder. I wondered if he’d prayed over Dommiel, a high demon, as he’d healed him. The image would’ve made me laugh any other day, but not when my own father lay on death’s door. Dommiel said nothing from the bed behind us.
Jude didn’t need to tell me that Father Clementine had a few gifts of his own. He wasn’t simply a doctor or a man who was good at stitching wounds. His power as a sentinel, a Flamma of Light, surpassed the ordinary. He knew with all confidence that my father’s would-be killer had missed his mark. He spoke to the body, and the blood had stopped flowing from the wound. A supernatural gift of healing. Something I hadn’t seen any other Flamma possess before now.
He snapped his satchel shut and turned to me. “That is all I can do now, dear,” he said in his thick, clipped English accent. “Why don’t we have a spot of tea to calm your nerves?”
I moved to the head of the bed and swept Dad’s bangs away from his brow, then kissed him there, relishing the warmth under my lips. A tear rolled off my cheek into his hair. “Get well, Dad. Please,” I whispered. “I love you.”
No response. I followed Jude, who glanced back at Dommiel with a scowl. Dommiel held up one hand and one hook as if to say I didn’t do anything. I hadn’t the energy to chat with the high demon at the moment, especially knowing it was his own kind that had done this to my father. Of course, it was Damas who’d put those nasty holes through Dommiel’s wrists. The injuries were visible when he’d raised his arms in mock protest of whatever he thought Jude might do to him. The black stitching was the same that Father Clementine had used on my father.
I pushed Jude on when he stalled at the doorway, probably considering whether to interrogate Dommiel. But I knew the ousted demon had nothing to do with this.
“What about Xander?” I asked when we stepped into the den. No television or computer anywhere. A wall of books and old furniture filled the room. A brown wingback chair faced the warm fire crackling in the grate.
“George must’ve had Xander watching over your father. They obviously ambushed him at the dojo.”
“Yes. I’d asked him to put two guards on my dad and—”
Jude turned sharply. “And Mindy.”
I nodded, a wave of fear swamping me again. Without a word, he grabbed my hand. We rushed from the house out the back door, through the gate and beyond the wards that protected the house from any Flamma sifting directly inside.
“Jude,” I practically cried, knowing what we’d find.
He pulled me hard into his embrace, and we were gone, sifting through the black once more, gray shapes blurring past. We landed outside my apartment in New Orleans. The street was quiet but for a dog yipping in the distance.
“No.” Our apartment door hung on the hinges. I sprinted.
“Wait!” yelled Jude, following fast.
The door had been splintered, a massive footprint indented in the wood. Someone had muscled their way inside. I ran straight to her bedroom, seeing no one and nothing amiss in the living room. Her bedroom was empty. So was her bathroom and her closet. I looked every tiny place Mindy might’ve hidden from an intruder. Jude hadn’t followed me.
I found him standing in the kitchen entrance, staring down at something. I rushed up beside him.
“No, Gen.”
Too late.
“Is it Mindy?”
Blood smeared the kitchen floor, painting our white tile red. Crimson splattered our fridge and countertops. A young man’s body lay on one side, having bled out from a stomach wound. Dave. Mindy’s boyfriend.
Two large, male hands—chopped mid-forearm—lay on the floor a few feet away. Tarquin’s head had been propped on one of our white dinner plates and set on the counter next to the toaster, facing the doorway, where sightless, glassy eyes would greet anyone who entered. Blood had pooled on the plate and dripped off the counter. Streaming rivulets dribbled down the cabinets, dripping steadily into a pool on the floor.
Our popcorn popper sat on the counter, untouched. A flash of Mindy came to mind, tossing a popcorn kernel into the air and catching it in her mouth. I could hear her tinkling laughter, then I could hear her screams as this horrific nightmare unfolded.
My stomach roiled. I clamped my hand over my mouth and ran to the bathroom and vomited in the toilet. Gripping the toilet seat, I emptied my stomach, sweat breaking out over my entire body. Jude was there. He pulled a dishcloth from the cabinet, wet it under the faucet, then pressed the cool rag to the back of my neck.
I stood upright and took the cloth to wipe my face, now fevered from the horror in my kitchen.
“He’s killed Mindy, Jude.”
“No,” he said with confidence. “If he’d killed her, he’d have made sure to leave her body. He wanted us to see those he left behind.”
“Poor Dave,” I said, wiping my eyes. As much as he wasn’t my favorite of Mindy’s boyfriends, I’d never wish this on him. Or anyone, for that matter. “And Tarquin.”
Jude’s stony expression hid the anger simmering under the surface. But he could never hide his emotions from me. His fiery aura lit once more, the way it used to before he’d ever been to Lethe’s lair. A dangerous flame burned around him.
“How could they have gotten in?” I asked. “The wards. They couldn’t sift inside. After you were gone, I made George double your efforts so no one could. So how did this even happen?”
I’d known if the wards were strong enough, no Flamma of any kind could sift inside. Even then, I hadn’t trusted that my so-called guardian angel, Thomas, wouldn’t do something underhanded. Of course, he wasn’t an angel at all.
Jude’s expression was distant, pensive. “Mindy’s boyfriend was killed first with no resistance. Tarquin must’ve been watching and saw something or someone come into the apartment.”
“But who? Mindy would never have opened the door for a stranger. Never. She’s not stupid. We’ve discussed this time and again.”
“She let them inside, there’s no doubt. You’re right. With the wards, no Flamma of Dark could sift inside, but a sentinel working for a demon prince could walk in.”
“But I know no sentinels.”
“Apparently, you do. Someone Mindy would’ve truste
d. What about that guy you dated, the study partner?”
“Malcolm? No way. Not him.” Someone we both knew?
As if my world was sliding sideways, the truth knocked me off balance. I gripped the edge of the countertop.
“Oh God.” There was only one person I knew who Mindy might let inside without hesitation. One person who fit the bill as a sentinel, a guard, but not for the Flamma of Light. For him. For Damas. “Erik.”
“Who?”
“Erik. He works for my father. He’s like family. He’s like…my brother.” I thought I was going to be sick again.
Damas had told me he’d watched over me my entire life. Erik had come into our lives right after my mother died. He’d been planted by Damas. The truth dug its claws so deep, I thought I’d vomit again.
“If Mindy knew him,” said Jude, “then he could’ve led Damas inside.”
“But, Jude, this isn’t like vampire mythology. Damas couldn’t walk in just because he was invited.” My sarcasm was uncalled for, but Jude endured it with grace and nonchalance as usual.
“No.”
The timbre of that one word snapped my attention to him. I set the wet cloth on the counter. “What is it you’re not saying?”
“Genevieve, when you accepted his gift of power, you opened yourself to him in ways I think we’re only now beginning to comprehend. He paralyzed you back on that bayou and prevented you from using your power, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Then he left some of his essence behind. Who’s to say he didn’t take some of your own? Some part of you that was able to mask his identity, even to the wards created by the Flamma of Light. When I told you he was the master of deception, of lies, I wasn’t exaggerating. He can hide himself in ways no one else can. He’s had thousands of years to perfect his art.”
I folded the dishrag over the edge of the sink, my hands trembling. “When Damas was standing over my father, George didn’t even sense him, as if his signature wasn’t even on his radar. Yet I could feel him the whole time. I knew he was there.” I leaned forward on the sink, bracing my weight with both hands. “It’s my fault my father is dying. It’s my fault Dave is dead. And Tarquin. And possibly even Mindy.”
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