CHAPTER FOUR
A sigil burned out on Jules’s blade as he sliced down a demon. ‘This isn’t a natural storm,’ he shouted to Farah as a streak of red lightning split the dark.
Even though it was nearing noon, all but the faintest hint of daylight was swallowed by the tumultuous clouds. Savage rain churned up the battlefield mud, making every step a challenge.
Farah wiped cold rain from her eyes.
He joined her, cleaning his sword on his trousers. ‘Must be a powerful demon.’
‘Very good, grunt.’ An exorcist loomed out of the downpour, taut muscles visible beneath his saturated uniform. Surprise flickered over Farah’s face at his sudden appearance. His eyes roved over them, finally settling on Farah after reading her lapels. ‘Abandon the trenches. The fight’s shifting to the city. Hold them off while Ostrava is evacuated.’
Jules didn’t bother asking if the Vatican would be fighting alongside them. They were not fodder. Not like Jules and the rest.
‘Tommaso!’ Turning at his name, the exorcist left them forgotten.
‘Why didn’t he go after the weather demon?’ Jules shouted over the roar of rain against the bare branches overhead. Few trees had survived the trenches and the bullets. They stood sentinel, reminders of what this place could’ve been.
Farah tapped her lapel. ‘He was low-ranked. Not strong enough.’
Jules hissed through his teeth. Of course. Why would the Vatican send their best to die alongside them?
‘Fall back to Ostrava!’
Their company had retreated to the city limits, where crumbling buildings with blown out windows like jagged teeth provided scant relief from the slanting rain, and even less from bullets. A war falcon cut through the late afternoon, its angular wings gilded by lightning flashes.
Intent on tying off the bandage around Jules’s torso, Farah did not notice the bird.
Wind whipping his unbuttoned shirt, Jules straddled the ridge of the roof and raised his forearm. Talons bit into his skin as the falcon landed, ruffling its feathers against the spattering rain. He slid down the tiles to rejoin Farah, sheltering the falcon from the worst of the elements. With clumsy fingers, she untied the note, reading it with her lip caught between her teeth. ‘They’re sending reinforcements.’ She shot him a smile.
Reluctantly he smiled back. ‘Who?’
‘Exorcists. Someone who can actually kill that goddamn demon.’
His bones went liquid with relief. The relative quiet of the last hour had only made him more worried—indicative of an enemy regrouping for another, stronger assault. One Jules wasn’t sure they’d survive. Relieved of its duty, the war falcon chirruped, letting him scratch its feathered throat with a fingertip before it took flight.
As Jules watched it go, he caught movement beyond the last stand of abandoned buildings. Wiping water from his eyelashes, he squinted against the dark. A forked tongue of lightning lashed from the sky, illuminating the enemy soldiers passing through a copse of towering cypresses. Somehow they were sheltered from wind and rain, and mostly hidden in deep shadow as they approached the city limits. And at their centre, a figure in sky blue.
‘How close are the reinforcements?’ Jules asked, voice carefully neutral.
‘Ten minutes out,’ Farah said, confirming his worst suspicions.
They wouldn’t last ten minutes.
He dragged on his coat over his unbuttoned shirt. ‘I’ll lead a team to intercept the enemy, hold them off—’ Lightning struck one of the watchtowers, setting it ablaze. The weather demon was closing in.
Farah’s jaw flexed beneath her skin, the hope of moments ago fading. She nodded. ‘I’ll wait for the exorcists here, then we’ll join you. Don’t die.’
Making his way down a crumbling stairwell, Jules poked his head into grim concrete rooms. Nowhere was dry, and soldiers huddled in the corners to avoid the worst of the wind whistling through blown-out windows. With infinite sadness, Jules tapped a few shoulders, singling out soldiers he knew. ‘With me.’
None of them were veterans of this war—other than him and Farah, few remained—but neither did he choose the pups who’d arrived only the month before. He wasn’t a monster. They’d just be fodder.
He recognized the soldiers who’d been here a while not by name but by the haunted hollows of their eyes. They knew death when they saw it. They saw it in Jules.
Lives trickled through his fingers like sand. As they fought in the streets, holding the attackers back and pushing forward when they could, his soldiers died deaths of insignificance. No battle would be won on their heads alone. Their war against the Caspian Federation was only the most recent iteration of humanity’s long fight against demons. Centuries of bloodshed. Long enough that their sacrifice was worth nothing at all.
Night was near, made imminent by the dark thunderclouds.
Jules knelt to clean his blade on a fallen comrade’s jacket and prised the dead man’s sword from his fingers, angling it absently to check the sigils. Only one remained. Better than nothing. He slid the sword through his belt and straightened. ‘Push on.’ Few enough remained that he did not need to raise his voice; they stood close enough to hear him breathe. ‘Stay sharp.’ Ankle-deep water drowned the cobblestone street.
The shout and clang of battle faded, and despite himself Jules slowed, listening through his ragged breaths. As he rounded the next corner, he faltered. Hundreds of Vatican Empire soldiers had been cut down, their bodies roughly piled into makeshift barricades. Someone started to retch.
‘Group up.’ Jules fingered his blade, angling it so he could see its sigils in the dark. A nervous twitch. Mere inches to his left, a soldier was shot down. His body flung back with the force of the bullet, sliding across the cobbles.
Demons broke through the ranks of Caspian soldiers, grins splitting their cheeks. Beyond the lower-ranked demons, the weather demon, cloaked in pale blue, paid them no mind. It bent its head, conferring with a smaller figure in pristine white that remained unsoiled by the mud coating everyone else.
‘Jules!’
He turned.
On the other side of the square, Farah crouched beside a broken wall to avoid being shot. Beside her, figures in black.
The Vatican exorcists with Farah did not hesitate, cutting their way through the approaching soldiers in a lethal flurry, eviscerating demon and Caspian alike. He had never wondered if killing could be beautiful, but as he watched the deadly dance, he knew it could.
Tracer bullets silently sliced the air, ending lives as a female exorcist levelled a handgun, her waist-length plait whipping around her as she twisted in place. Even from a distance, Jules could tell these weapons were far more potent than the generic demon-killing blades the Vatican armed them with.
A huge exorcist wielding a pike plunged into the fray, as beside Farah a third readied herself for the fight, drawing the sleeves of her shirt up her forearms so they were bare.
They were saved.
Despite the tumult of battle, Jules heard the soft breath of awe from the soldier beside him. He turned to her, smiling broadly. Her eyes were shadowed by her peaked cap. Uneasy, he reached to grasp her shoulder. Her chin dropped forward and water poured from her eyes and mouth.
A wordless cry was torn out of him as he leapt back, and the drowned soldier collapsed. With ice in his veins, Jules turned to find the weather demon watching him from within its deep hood. All he could see was the glint of pale eyes. Its head cocked, and a light, almost musical voice reached his ears: ‘Protect the Tsarina.’
The ranks of Caspian soldiers and demons closed around the figure in white as the weather demon broke away.
Anastasia Alexandrova Romanov, the Caspian Tsarina, here .
Jules’s fingers flexed on his sword.
She was the heart of this war. The throbbing blood-gorged heart. With her dead it could end.
Nobody else seemed to have heard the demon’s words in the chaos. Jules spun in place, searching for an exorcist. He needed to tell them. This changed everything.
The blue-garbed demon used a length of weathered wood to spin and whirl in the midst of the imperial soldiers, striking them down. In one swift turn, the demon’s hood fell back to reveal the face of a beautiful young woman—were it not for the white marbles of her eyes and the way her cheeks split, baring far too many teeth. She flung out a hand, manipulating the elements like an extension of herself.
The Vatican had their own system of classifying demons, a system Jules didn’t give a shit to know. What he did know was this: the more human a demon looked, the deadlier. And far more difficult to kill.
Those uncanny eyes settled on Jules with unwavering intensity. The demon cut her way toward him, and wherever she went the tide of battle turned. Tracer bullets cut through the air between them. The demon faltered, head whipping around. Then the handgun-wielding exorcist who had decimated the demons’ ranks was cleaved in two by an unnatural bolt of ragged lightning.
With a howl the exorcist with the pike attacked the demon, raining down a flurry of blows. None seemed to land. The air thrummed with power that billowed off the weather demon, tasting of ozone and rain. Then the demon captured the man’s face between two delicate hands and crushed his head.
Jules tightened his grip on his sword as he fought his way through water up to his knees. He sliced a Caspian soldier from hip to shoulder and kicked him aside, finding the last living exorcist with his eyes. The ring she wore on her thumb glinted in the dim light, revealing the hidden blade that she dashed against her knuckles. And as she did, Jules felt an incredible swell of power.
In a flash of movement, the exorcist drew an arrow of pure light and released it from her longbow.
The weather demon laughed and plucked the flying shaft from the air. She pivoted, flinging it back at the exorcist upon her captive wind. The arrow pierced the exorcist through, pinning her against the wall. Rain battered the exorcist’s upturned face. When the arrow’s magic died, she collapsed and did not rise.
Jules staggered, horrified by the swift reversal. In moments, all the Vatican agents had been cut down.
The weather demon spun around, unerringly finding Jules again. From the corner of his eye he saw a glimmer of gold. Farah snatched a fallen sword from the slick cobbles, angling it to check the sigils as she finally stopped beside him. Her expression was grim as she flicked a glance his way. ‘Get out of here, Lacroix. Tell them we’ve lost.’ He barely heard her words as they were whipped away on the wind. At his feet, the weather demon’s long shadow darkened the stones.
He tightened his grip on his sword. He wanted to tell Farah to run or hide or drop her sword and fall to her knees—anything to save herself and not him—but it would be futile. That was not Farah.
She roared and charged.
‘No!’ He moved too, but the wind pressed him back.
The weather demon bent at the knees, sweeping up a broken spear which she used to impale Farah. Only a being of immense strength could have forced the splintered wood through a human ribcage. Then Farah was tossed to the muddy cobbles in a boneless heap, like nothing more than a child’s discarded doll, broken and glassy-eyed. And utterly, inescapably dead.
Jules howled, his knuckles whitening around his sword hilt.
The demon came for him next. Survival superseded grief and he folded beneath the deadly arc of her war staff to get inside her guard. Like a lantern flickering in the dark, his killing instinct awakened. With the promise of a death blow guiding his hand, Jules thrust his sword through her mouth.
The blade fractured as the final sigil burned out, and the sword shattered in his hand, sending shards of useless metal into the rushing water.
Fuck .
A few sharp teeth fell from the demon’s mouth, but she was alive. And angry.
Her nails lengthened.
Tossing aside his spent weapon, Jules tumbled back as fingernails like beetle-black shellac raked his skin. He threw himself away in time to save his life—that clear, distant note of agony muffled by adrenaline. Plunging his hand into icy water, he searched for the exorcist’s fallen pike. The swirling water clouded with his blood. Cold fingers closing on the metal shaft, Jules pulled it free of the torrent. He turned the pike in a tight arc and the demon’s own momentum drove her onto its length, right to his white-knuckled grip.
Keening in pain, the demon disintegrated like ash. But in the moments before she died, he thought he felt the demon leave , the unfathomable weight of her presence suddenly no more. Power pulsed from the exorcist weapon, its magical recoil a thousandfold stronger than his army-issue blade.
‘ You .’
He almost thought it was the wind across the now silent battlefield—the last raging of the unnatural storm—then the Caspian Tsarina stepped through the falling ash, her blue eyes alight with curiosity.
Face framed by the pale ermine lining her cloak, Anastasia Romanov appeared soft and pretty, but Jules wasn’t fooled. His heart slammed against his ribcage as he pushed himself up from the mud, his eyes not leaving her. Part demon, the rumours said, with fangs behind those soft lips. His gaze narrowed in on the pulse at her throat, and he gave the pike an experimental twirl.
‘You’re the killer, the boy with the scars on his arms, the one they call Stigmajka .’
The word meant nothing to him. Stigma sounded Latin. The rest? Probably Caspian, but that was all he knew.
The Tsarina continued, ‘The empire’s toy soldier who always knows where to strike. How many Kairos have you slain, boy?’ She spoke with a faint accent.
‘Kairos?’ Jules repeated.
‘Demons,’ she said with a curl of her lip. ‘ You would call them demons. The Holy Vatican Empire, and all those beneath their aegis, have forgotten much.’
Not really understanding, Jules shook his head. Besides, he didn’t care what they called themselves. ‘Why do you ask? Does the number even matter?’ He reined in his emotions, not wanting her to see how much her recognition troubled him. The boy with the scars on his arms. There were a thousand soldiers, ten thousand, more . And many of those had scars. But he knew what she meant. Of course he did.
As though reading his mind, Anastasia found the healed marks on his hands. Her eyes darkened. ‘I knew it was you.’
The Tsarina’s lilting tone played on his nerves.
On this field of death she was vulnerable. All her protectors gone. He’d end this whole war if he could kill her. It was worth a shot. And certainly better than having a conversation.
Jules twirled the pike toward her throat. ‘I’m not here to talk.’
For a moment the sun slipped from behind a cloud and the world was magnified. Colours brighter. Lines crisper. He could see the end of the war and victory for the Vatican at his hands, as though the world moved in slow motion. He saw the killing stroke—the path his pike would take as it sliced the air—and knew he had her, that he’d split her throat.
His body moved, trusting that promise. But Anastasia effortlessly folded away from his strike, impossibly fast and graceful.
Unbalanced, Jules slipped in a patch of icy mud and he fell to one knee.
‘Listen.’ The Tsarina’s voice was melodic, striking notes that felt somehow familiar. ‘How do you always know where to strike to kill?’ Her smile was sharp where moments ago she had appeared completely human. Anastasia gestured broadly, encompassing the battlefield. The death. The uncountable small tragedies. ‘Because you’re like me, Stigmajka ,’ she whispered.
Jules shook his head, gritting his teeth against the agony of his ribs, ignoring the hot blood he could feel darkening the waistband of his trousers as he gained his footing. A glint of blonde fluttered in his peripheral vision. Then the sun disappeared behind another bank of clouds and Farah’s hair was the last thing that glinted bright in the dull grey world.
He angled the pike at Anastasia’s chin. ‘I may be a killer but I’m nothing like you. You could stop all this, Tsarina . The war, the bloodshed, the needless death .’
When she didn’t move, he ghosted the serrated blade against her throat. But, curious what she had to say, he held the blow.
She wore the hint of a smile. ‘ Oh? You can’t do it, can you?’
And she was right. He couldn’t move, his own hand foreign to him as he clutched the pike.
Because you’re like me , she’d said.
A killer of unprecedented scale …?
Reaching up, she smoothed a fingertip along the blade like she was stroking a kitten. ‘ Stigmajka , so adept with the blade. So very deadly. How many scars mark your arms?’ She glanced toward Farah, eyes finding the marked hand on her hilt. Her body seemed to flicker, and then she was kneeling over her, ripping aside Farah’s sleeve. Where Jules’s arms were more silvery scar tissue than unmarked flesh, Farah’s arm showed only the occasional pale line.
Stigmajka , he realized then. Scarred killer.
He swung the pike, resting it against the back of the Tsarina’s bowed neck. But his hand trembled against the staff as she gently smoothed Farah’s eyelids closed.
‘You think you’re like this one here, little killer? Because she scarred herself too? You are not. You’re a creature all your own, Stigmajka . Now let’s be done with this. Kill me. If you can .’
Jules’s temples throbbed and a headache like none he’d ever known crowded into his skull. He backed away and Anastasia chuckled. Her peal of laughter was obscene on this battlefield among the dead and dismembered. His hands were dark with blood, tacky against the pike shaft and, horrified, he flung it aside. That killing instinct that guided him to the perfect death stroke glimmered out of existence as he backed away.
Anastasia did not pursue him, only turned her head to watch his retreat.
With her words echoing in his ears, he ran.