Jude pulled me away from the sink and twisted me around to meet his gaze. He swept away a lock of hair sticking to my cheek from the wet cloth. He curled his fingers around my nape, keeping my focus on him. His aura of flame and iron wrapped me in a cocoon of protection, the way it used to.
“Don’t go there, love. Hear me now, and hear me well.” He brushed his thumb along my jawline. “I’ve lived with the bitter fruit of regret. It will eat you alive till there is nothing but the black pit of hatred left behind. Every time you look back at a mistake you’ve made, wishing for a different end, wishing you’d been a better person, you give a piece of your soul away. If you want to live in the now, for me, for our child, then you must forgive yourself and let it go.”
I wrapped my fingers around his wrist. “It’s hard.” I didn’t want to cry. I was so sick of crying. I’d wept enough tears to fill a fucking river. Yet, even now, after all I’d seen of the Flamma of Dark and their evil, I longed to curl up and weep for what they’d done, for what they could still do. “My heart isn’t hard enough, Jude.”
His intense expression fell, softening with a half smile and a look of complete adoration shining in his dark eyes. “Oh, my love. Thank God for that. Your good heart is what I cherish most.” He cupped my face with both hands, angling so that I couldn’t look away. “Your heart is warm sunshine in the cold winter. And I would want nothing else.”
A tear slipped down one cheek. “Goddamn it.” I couldn’t help it.
Jude swiped my cheek with his thumb. “What is it?”
“I didn’t want to cry.”
His smile widened. “You’re a sensitive woman. It’s natural.”
“Are you calling me moody?”
“I’m saying you’re human, and wonderfully feminine, and therefore fragile. In some ways.”
“Great. I’m weak. That should help us out a ton to kill that fucker Damas.”
“Genevieve Elizabeth Drake.”
Well, that silenced me. How did he know my middle name? Wait. What was I thinking? This was Jude Delacroix, master of secrets and detection.
“Listen to me, woman. You marched into the deepest pit of hell, killed a demon prince and dragged me back to life.”
“I got you out, but Uriel brought you back to life.” Yes, I was being a petulant child. Feeling sorry for myself felt better than facing reality.
He brought his face closer to mine. His fingertips combed farther into my hair. “When I was lost in the darkness of my mind, I dreamed of the stars and the moon. Over and over again. A sparkling canvas shone in the night wherever I wandered. The torture inflicted upon my body drove me far, far away. But I was never alone. It was the moon…the moon, Genevieve, that kept calling to me in these dreams. Her beauty and brightness shone like no other. I didn’t even know my fucking name after I passed through the veil of Lethe. Under Danté’s whip, I wished I’d never been born. So I let my mind wander. And always, always the night sky would appear. That luminescent beauty called to me, soothed me, kept me from losing my sanity. Mea luna tenebris. You have always been my moon in the darkness.”
No point in fighting the tears now. How could a girl not cry when the man who owned her heart said such things? I wrapped my arms around his waist and let my head fall to his shoulder. He held me close while I let it all out.
“And you’re my guiding star,” I muffled into his shirt.
He tightened his hold and pressed a tender kiss to my temple. “Then we’re a perfect pair, you and I. We belong together. And nothing, not even the demons of hell, will ever tear us apart.”
And that was a truth I felt bone-deep. No matter what Damas and his demon brothers planned, my bond with Jude was strong enough to withstand anything. My heart might be human and fragile, but my will was iron and steel. And I had a fiery bad-ass Master of Demons who would always catch me when I fell.
Like now.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dad still hadn’t woken up, but his pulse was steady. I’d been at his bedside for hours. Jude had gone out to meet with George and Uriel. I’d dozed in the chair by my father’s bed. When I opened my eyes, I found my katana leaning against the wall. I’d forgotten it. Of course, Jude had fetched it for me.
Father Clementine used oil lamps. I turned one up so I could check on Dad. After a few hours in this place, I realized he lived without electricity or modern technology of any kind. “I like the simple life. It’s easier to stay close to God this way,” was his reply when I’d asked. The local newspaper and visits with the townspeople were the only ways he knew what was going on in the world. But what was there to know other than the world was quickly going to hell? Literally. Terrorist strikes increased across Europe, the Middle East and even Russia. Riots had erupted in all corners of the US for no reason at all. Of course, I knew who was at the heart of every strike and every riot. Demons.
Dommiel stirred in the bed next to me. “I have something for you.”
I stood with the quilt that had been draped over me while I slept by either Father or Jude and wrapped it around my shoulders. Angling my chair nearer to Dommiel, I sat again and finally observed him closely. He had no piercings of any kind in his lips, nose, cheeks, brows or even his ears. It was odd. At the same time, the absence of all the metal revealed the face of the handsome angel he had been before the fall. Dark stubble was growing back on his shaved head.
“What is it?”
He opened a small drawer in the nightstand and pulled out my St. George medal, dangling it in the air for me to take. I took it and traced the figure of St. George and the dragon with my finger. I’d never realized I’d meet the man in the flesh.
“Why are you giving it back to me? Our blood bond remains.”
“That belongs with you. I saw you wearing it the very first time I met you. Even while I had it in my possession, beneath the blood bond I sensed an emotion lingering within the small silver medallion. It belongs with you.”
His hook lay in his lap on top of the quilt. He crooked the other arm behind his head, propping himself against the wall. There was no headboard on these bare beds. He looked so vulnerable, different, somber and yet…content.
“How much longer before Father Clementine says you’re good to go?”
“The wounds are closed. That priest knows some healing tricks. Whoever made him gave him some good mojo. But the bones were fractured in my ankles.”
I winced, remembering how we’d found him crucified to his own office wall. Damas was indeed a demon prince of hell, capable of all manner of tortures. My pulse tripped faster, knowing Mindy was in his hands. But Jude and George had convinced me not to lose hope, that he would use her as some sort of bargaining chip with me. I’d already figured out what Damas planned to do, so I was keeping my shit together till the time came.
“So then you’ll head back to New Orleans?”
He stared down at his hook. “No. I won’t go back there.”
“Wait. Why not? That was the whole deal. You helped me, and Jude would help you keep NOLA as your domain. A bargain is a bargain.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, meeting my gaze. “Damas killed every minion who was loyal to me. Every one of them.”
He paused, and if I wasn’t talking to a high demon who’d worn a sinister grin every time I’d met him, I’d have thought I detected a note of remorse in his voice.
“Damas has branded me,” he continued. “I am a traitor to my kind.”
“Because of me.”
“Because of my greed. I knew Bamal wanted the New Orleans territory. I knew he’d eventually come back and stake his claim. So I took your offer, in my own greed for power. None of this is your fault. You offered an opportunity, and I took it.”
And there it was. True, heartfelt remorse lining every word that poured from his mouth. This demon was not the one I’d first met with his raven perched on the dragon’s head above his throne in The Dungeon. This was a broken soul, humbled before fate and circumstances, accepting th
e consequences.
Uriel had spoken of an Age of Gray dawning when the Great War officially began. And Dommiel was a prime example. A creature of darkness with the foulest of sins on his soul, and yet, that prickly signature that had always accompanied him was gone, changed, morphed into something smoother, like a jagged stone washed smooth by time and the constant lapping of steady waves.
“You’ve changed, Dommiel.”
He laughed. “Not so much.”
Very much, from where I was sitting.
He glanced toward the small window set between the beds. Snow had fallen last night. A gray pall hovered, leaving the quiet landscape to keep us company.
“Maybe it’s this place,” he said. “It reminds me somehow of the time before the Fall.”
My mother’s adaptation of Gustav Dore’s angels plummeting from heaven was rendered in vivid and vibrant colors, revealing the beauty of the angels as they fell from grace. I tried to imagine Dommiel as one of the many who’d taken the wrong path.
“What do you mean?”
He gestured with his hook toward the door. “The priest.” He captured my gaze with a smirk. “He’s actually a good man, you know.”
“There are lots of good men.”
“No, there aren’t. People are too caught up in their own selfish desires. Trust me, I know.”
“You spent the majority of your time in the club off Bourbon Street, Dommiel. I think you might have seen more of the bad than the good.”
“No.” He turned his somber gaze on me. “I’ve been alive too long and seen too much. My time in the city of New Orleans is only a blink of time in my life. Countless years, I’ve seen men take what they want—for politics, power, lust, for blood revenge. I’ve seen women abandon their children only to meet their own needs. I’ve seen children beat dogs because their father had done the same to them. It is a wicked world, Vessel. If you plan to attempt to defend and redeem those humans caught up in this war, you’d best prepare for the worst.”
Dommiel’s truth hit me so hard, I tried to keep my composure. Yes, he was a demon lord. He’d spent countless years luring humanity toward sin and his dark ways. But here he was, professing the world as he saw it, and it sickened him. Did he even know that it did? Did he realize he was more like me in this moment than one of his own demon horde?
“You may be right, Dommiel. But for every selfish man, woman or child, I can offer a selfless one in their stead. The firefighters and policemen of 9/11. They walked into a burning inferno to save strangers, knowing they would probably not come out alive. Many of them didn’t. The single mother who works three jobs just to keep a roof over her children’s heads and food on the table. The homeless child who offers his scrap of bread to his younger sibling instead of keeping it for himself. These people exist. They do. I’ve seen them.”
His expression was unreadable. “You are the one true Vessel, aren’t you?”
There was no denying a truth I knew as I knew how to breathe air into my lungs. “Yes.”
“Do you know what you look like to the Flamma of Darkness?”
Jude had told me I was a beacon to all Flamma. I assumed that meant I had some sort of white light around me to the eyes of Flamma.
“No,” I finally answered, curious how he saw me.
“Your signature is so pure and clear, it radiates with a glistening aura. It feels like cool water to the dying man, like a balm to the blistered soul, like silence to the maddened mind which has no reprieve from discordant voices. But Flamma of Dark do not want to be saved. They want the sin, the frenzy, the chaos. They know they are welcome there. You beam with something they cannot touch, and it reminds them of what they could have had, could have been once.”
I’d never thought of the world from their point of view. So strange. And so sad.
“That isn’t how you feel anymore, is it? What will you do now?”
He looked out the window, where downy flakes had begun to fall again. “The priest offered to let me stay with him.”
Dommiel and Father Clementine?
“And are you going to stay?” I asked, surprised.
“No. I like the priest. And I am grateful to the old man. I may be a creature of sin, but without him…I would not be whole again.” He pulled up his sleeve to trace the mark on his wrist where the blade had pinned him to the wall. “Damas had injected his essence into the blades. He’d intended for me to rot from the wounds. A slow, painful death. He hadn’t figured on you coming to the rescue.”
“Why not? He knew you’d helped me. You were being punished for it. Why wouldn’t I repay the favor?”
“Because demons don’t think that way. They think only of their own gain.”
The thought of Damas, as Thomas, smiling at me, kissing me, winning my favor by slow degrees, slapped me with regret. But Jude was right. I couldn’t live that way. I had to move forward and do the best I could.
“So if you’re not going back to New Orleans and you’re not staying here, then where will you go?”
“I’m not sure,” he said with a funny smile. “It’s kind of freeing, actually. What does that frown mean, Genevieve? Are you worried about me?”
“Maybe. A little.”
“Don’t be. I’ll be fine. And the blood bond remains. If you need me, you can call. You still have my feather?”
“Yes. Of course. But how will you reach me if I keep the medal?” I didn’t want to give it back, yet I thought it unfair he couldn’t call me if he needed.
He held up his hand in protest when I started to hand the medal back, still cupped in my hand. “No. As I said, the necklace has some special meaning to you. I can sense it when I hold it. You’ve done enough already, more than any of my own kind would have. Now, if you don’t mind, those wonderful meds the priest gave me thirty minutes ago are starting to kick in.”
“Oh. Sure.” I stood and glanced at my father, who hadn’t moved, then left, clasping the medal back around my neck. As soon as I tucked it into my shirt where I’d worn it since my mother had given it to me, I sensed what Dommiel spoke of, zinging along the silver chain straight to my heart. My mother’s love for me and mine for her still resonated here.
Her voice, soft and pure, whispered over the years gone by. “It will keep the dragons away.” I went in search of Jude. The Blood Moon was fast approaching. I hoped my mother was right.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I stood in front of the window of our little room on the afternoon of the Blood Moon. Snow whispered down in soft flakes, falling to earth in peaceful quiet. The old adage, the calm before the storm, couldn’t be truer at this moment. I was harnessed and strapped with a weapon wherever I could hold one.
Jude stepped up behind me and swept my hair to one side before placing a kiss to my neck. I shivered in response. His arms came around me. One hand cupped my belly. I still hadn’t begun to show at all, but that was to be expected. I hadn’t even crossed the five-week mark.
“Father Clementine wants you to eat before you go.”
I chuckled. “It wouldn’t be prudent to meet every demon and spawn of hell on an empty stomach, would it?”
“Not prudent at all.” Another soft kiss to my neck.
I twisted in his arms and pressed a feverish kiss to his lips, demanding that he open for me. He did, his hands sliding to the small of my back. He groaned and pulled me closer. His tongue swept in and met mine, my desire mounting in a millisecond.
He pulled back and touched his forehead to mine. “What was that?”
“I wanted to. Would it be prudent to shut that door and pull you onto that cot right there?”
“No. Not prudent at all. Not in Father’s cottage, anyway. Let’s save that for tomorrow. After our job is done.”
I scoffed. “You act like it’ll be so easy, like we’re just expelling a demon or two, and then we’ll be back home in time for tea.”
“It won’t be easy. We have no idea what they have in store. Whatever it is, it will be very diffic
ult, I imagine.”
I had an idea what they planned to do. We’d see soon enough if I was right about Damas and if I could stop him.
“But we have something else, my heart.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“You. The only Vessel of Light to ever escape the clutches of evil. And we’ve arrived at our destination…the night of the Blood Moon.”
“It all ends tonight.”
Jude loosened his hold on my waist. “No, love. Tonight it all begins.”
Yes. The Great War and battle for dominion over the earth. The very idea was unfathomable, the thought too huge for me to comprehend. Better to take it one step at a time.
“All right, then. What has Father cooked for dinner?”
He took my hand and led me out of the room. “A hearty beef stew.”
My stomach growled instantly. He glanced back with a crooked smile. “My girls are hungry.”
“Oh, so now you agree with me it’s a girl.”
“I’m just appeasing you. Don’t want to upset the mother unnecessarily.” He winked.
I laughed as we entered the den, where a small round dining table was set up in the corner.
“Here you are,” said Father Clementine, setting down a white bowl with a spoon and a basket of crusty bread.
I took the first bite and thought I was in heaven. “Mmm. It’s delicious.”
The twinkle was back in his blue eyes. “Well, now. That’s music to my ears. You two eat up before you head out.”
Jude and I practically inhaled the meal, ready to be off, ready to get things moving, a nervous energy filling the room. I sopped the last of mine up with a crust of bread, then wiped my mouth with a napkin, hoping this wasn’t the last supper or something.
“Thank you, Father. Jude, I’m going to step in and see Dad one more time before we go.”
He nodded. Father Clementine drew his attention back to a front-page article in the paper. Another terrorist attack in London.
When I stepped into the bedroom, I felt something was different. Dad lay on his side, his eyes open, staring at the lantern on the bedside table.
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