CHAPTER SIX
T he train to Nice left at midnight.
Setting her case on the green-velvet seat, Selene remained standing as the train readied to depart. It was not her first time catching this particular train, but it had been years since she had left the heart of the Holy Vatican Empire.
Once, the regions had been independent of Rome, ruled by their own disparate forms of government. Dysfunctional as they were, warring between themselves, it had seemed to work for them. For the most part. Until God had been crucified.
Then the power of the Vatican had washed the land, cleansing the demons from the earth in the name of God, even as they kept Him insensible within their walls. Protected, from everyone but them . Obviously it was the right choice. The only choice, really. Selene didn’t question that. But she could still note the irony.
Selene held her sword, the charm on the hilt turning as the pale jade tassel fluttered in a phantom breeze. On one side, the Alleva coat of arms, and that of the Deathless God on the other. Exposing an inch of the black blade, she sliced her thumb and locked it with a bloody thumbprint so nobody but her might ever draw it. Then she tucked it into the leather straps of her case.
On the platform outside, a man with one crutch doubled his pace to make the train. Bandages wrapped his hands and his head. He was missing a leg from the thigh. A veteran of the war sweeping across their north-eastern border with the Caspian Federation, just trying to make his way home and unaware of the altered schedule. Steam hissed as the train began to ease along the platform. He wouldn’t make it.
Sympathy knifed through her. The Vatican rarely concerned itself with the inconvenience to civilians when they requisitioned trains. It was a vital strategic advantage in their war on two fronts: the battles fought mainly in shadow against demons who got too close to Rome, and the open bloodshed against the Caspian Federation, led by their part-demon Tsarina Anastasia Alexandrova Romanov. A classified secret that had quickly become common knowledge. Now the worst of the gossip rags claimed Anastasia had her horns shaved down each week, her pointed teeth filed smooth and pretty. Nonsense, of course. But disinformation was not their enemy. The Vatican kept their secrets close. The truth even closer.
The shiny steam trains were for the Vatican first and everyone else a distant second.
A whistle pierced the night.
As the engine drew slowly out of the station, steam billowed to engulf the hobbling man. His determined expression didn’t waver, even as the train picked up speed. Selene didn’t stop to think. She flew from her cabin and ran down the length of the carriage, flinging the last door open. ‘Hurry! I’ve got you.’ She stretched out her gloved fingers.
He could make it. She’d pull him in.
He stowed his crutch under one arm and lunged for her, his bandaged fingers brushing her own. She leaned out, grasping the brass handle with her other hand. Then his expression changed. ‘ Macellaia di Roma. ’ She saw his mouth form the words before they were torn away by the wind.
He flinched from her grasp and the train parted them.
Dark hair whipped against her cheeks as she clung to the door, staring back into the billowing steam.
‘ Signorina ?’
She swung herself inside and closed the door. Hurt lanced through her. Stretching the soft leather taut on her fingers, Selene adjusted her glove and met the conductor’s look. He wore an expression she couldn’t quite read. Not sympathy, surely. She arched a single brow and he dropped his gaze.
When she returned to her cabin, she didn’t need to see her reflection to know her expression was unbroken. Her cheeks whipped ruddy by the cold air and dampened by falling rain, not tears. The Butcher of Rome wasn’t wounded so easily.
The sway of the train brought with it a swell of nostalgia not easy to ignore.
The train’s tasselled curtains shivered with their quick passage through the smoke-shrouded city. Rome’s domes and columns were lit by gold lantern light. The sky broke and rain slashed against the train windows, driving rivulets across the glass.
The last time she left Rome she had been a child wearing white kid gloves detailed with tiny river pearls, a smaller version of her mother’s. Selene curled her fingers inside the black calfskin glove that held her shattered hand together. Some things changed, others did not.
She and her twin, Niccolò, had been seven. Only a year later, she began training at the Vatican’s Military Academy. Three years after that her father had been executed for high treason and apostasy.
Leaning her forehead against the glass, she met her reflection. She twisted the knob, dimming the gas lamps in the cabin, but it did little to lessen the bittersweet impression that someone with eyes very like her own stared back. Niccolò . When their father died, she’d lost him too.
Selene closed her eyes, but memories played behind her eyelids in an unstoppable reel. It was the sensations she remembered most vividly. The sound of rain falling on St Peter’s Square where the proud obelisk had long ago been moved to make room for the Academy Arena. But that day it had been set up for an execution.
Icy rain dripped off the ends of her hair and trickled down her face in a mockery of tears as she cut through the square dressed in her Academy gear. She hadn’t intended to watch her father die. There was no point. No good could come of it. Niccolò would hate her. Their mother would look at her with accusing eyes.
She wore her boots buckled tightly up her calves, as though to distract from the fact that her father would be chained up twice as tight. Or maybe … maybe she wanted to remind herself. Who was she to forget?
‘There she is.’ She turned at the familiar voice.
Eliot had an arm around Niccolò, a hand tightly holding his shoulder as though to keep him on his feet. Niccolò’s eyes shot up. Amber like the golden light of dawn. Those eyes, identical to her own, struck her motionless.
No , she thought bitterly . Identical in theory alone. She was too guarded for her eyes to ever be that wide. Too cynical for them to be that beautiful. Barely eleven and she had already killed. She would never be innocent again.
Niccolò took half a step toward her. ‘Selene!’
His soul shone from his eyes, hers was naught but a broken thing. Too dull to ignite even a candle wick.
Their family motto was animas nostras pro populo . Our souls for the people. But didn’t Rome deserve better than her twisted soul? So it was lucky, really, that the Latin so easily translated the same word a different way. Our lives for the people.
That she could give.
When he said her name again, she raised her chin. ‘Niccolò, Eliot,’ she greeted them, her words sounding clipped even to her own ears. ‘I’m sorry.’
Niccolò was barely dressed, with one leg of his fawn trousers only half tucked into his brown boots, and a forest-green jacket pulled over a poorly buttoned white shirt. He didn’t seem to care.
Straightening, she pressed the heels of her shiny black boots together. Looking her over, his eyes widened even further, finally seeing her neat Academy uniform, her polished boots, the fact that she had tamed her dark hair into a sleek Dutch braid down her spine.
‘Selene—’
‘I swear I’ll restore our family’s honour—’
‘I don’t care about our honour,’ Niccolò spat.
A vast dark cloud of realization painted itself across his face, and she had the unique, glorious torture of witnessing his eyes dim as the last innocence of childhood was snatched away. Selene would remember for many years the last moments he looked at her as anything other than a killer.
‘What did you do? Selene, what did you do ?’
He always saw her so clearly. Whether it was just him, always uniquely perceptive, or whether it was because he was her twin, Niccolò could always read her like a book.
‘ Selene. ’ His voice broke on her name. ‘Is this because of you?’ She had turned away from him when the sunshine in his eyes broke.
Eliot held Niccolò back, fighting him to the flagstones where he cradled him in his arms. She had walked away with a spine made iron by long training and a vicious determination not to let anyone see her crumble. The watching eyes tracked her progress with obscene interest. The last thing she would ever allow was for them to see her cry. She refused to let the vultures pick her bones.
And she had not cried since.
Stepping off the train five hours later, case in hand, Selene inhaled a deep lungful of coal and leather. The scent of journeys. Overhead, the high beams of the Gare de Nice-Ville were illuminated by muted gas lamps and, at the highest point, the graceful glass arches were lit from behind by the flickering pinpricks of stars.
Her eyes roved hungrily over familiar constellations until the steam engine’s billowing clouds filled the upper reaches of the station, blocking them from sight. She shook herself. She was a Roman exorcist, homesickness was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
Rather than change trains to get to the small village of Saint-Jeannet, Selene had opted for a town car to collect her. Angling her wrist, she checked her watch. It would already be waiting at the north exit. She was quite anticipating the drive to the Alps, despite her antipathy toward the regions.
Or … perhaps, rather than the regions themselves, it was the potential of who might be waiting for her outside Rome.
Her fragile smile cracked.
At least there was no chance of meeting her exiled family in a town car.
Selene didn’t know where they had fled to when they’d been banished from Rome. They could be anywhere on the continent, but she couldn’t help but feel as though they might be around every corner.
It made her feel watched.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as she threaded between women in sleek plaid slacks and men wearing slouchy caps and stylish suspenders. Nice was glamorous. Almost as glamorous as Paris and Rome—if you ignored the risk of death by demon. To most, the risk was worth the reward. Rome was the jewel of the Holy Vatican Empire, and exile the only suitable punishment for Roman elites who stepped out of line.
The thought of her own family as traitors made pain throb behind her eyes. Selene winced, massaging her temple with two fingers. A moment delayed, she realized it wasn’t tarnished nostalgia making her eyes ache in her skull. An intense wave of demon magic washed over her, dropping her to one knee.
Gasping raggedly, her heart rate spiked.
‘ Mademoiselle , are you well?’
A handful of Nicoises surrounded her. Selene fought a dry heave as an older woman extended a soft, crinkled hand to smooth back her hair. Her gentle shushing became a shriek. She stumbled back, clutching her wrist as her fingers withered to brittle blackened sticks. With dazed horror Selene realized the woman had brushed the rune on her brow. She’d touched the blood of God.
‘I’m sorry.’ Selene braced a hand on the wall to gather herself before pushing through the group.
‘ Exorciste .’ Whispers followed her, drowned by the woman’s screams.
A broad-shouldered young man with tousled hair rounded the corner, tossing his cigarette to the tracks below. Her shoulder slammed into his and she pivoted on her heel. It felt like hitting a brick wall. But Dio , he had to be the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen.
He caught her elbow as her newspaper fell to the ground.
‘Watch it,’ she snapped.
Hot air caught her hair like a pennant as a train screamed past the platform. Express to the busy port station Nice-Riquier, she supposed. His lips moved, but she couldn’t hear him over the train. A flame-haired man grabbed his lapel as the last carriage disappeared.
‘C’mon, don’t be a bloody idiot. If we do this, we do it tonight.’
The young man bent to retrieve her fallen newspaper and Selene’s gaze snagged on the insignia of the Nice gendarmerie on his pocket. She turned on her heel, striding away before he could offer her the newspaper. If the police found an old woman with magical damage, they might have questions. She wanted to be long gone before they did.
She had no time to waste and a demon to hunt.
Exiting the south entrance, she hunted the demon power along Nice’s wide boulevards. Down narrow alleys. In and out of the city’s arteries until she came upon the white facade of the Notre-Dame de Nice. The woman’s screams still rang in her ears. Clenching her teeth, she dashed across the road and up the steps to hammer the door with her fist.
A doe-eyed nun in starched white eased the enormous door open. Selene nodded in greeting. ‘Captain Selene Alleva, Exorcist Second Class. A woman has suffered a divine touch in the Gare de Nice-Ville.’ Ordinary people could be killed by even accidental contact with God’s blood. Exorcists were immune to this divine touch. Whether because they were intermediaries between God and man, and their proximity to divinity safeguarded them, or because of the stolen magic in their veins. ‘Deal with it.’
Her skin prickled at each new wave of demonic power.
‘Captain Alleva,’ the nun whispered, dampening her lips as she eased the door an inch wider. ‘Do you feel that?’
She had no time for this.
‘I do.’ Drawing her gun, Selene turned. She’d done all she could for the woman with the withered fingers. She had other, more urgent concerns.
The power peaked as Selene raced along a tree-lined street and a building burst into flame. She smothered a gasp, ribs constricting under the overwhelming power. Then it stopped, as suddenly as it began. An echoing hollowness followed in its wake.
A loose group of bystanders, dressed warmly against the pre-dawn chill, stared in horror at the licking flames.
Selene grabbed a newspaper boy by the scruff, dragging him closer to the doomed structure and the roaring flames. ‘What is this building?’
‘How do you say—?’ The boy stumbled over the Italian. Impatience was an ugly trait, but her jaw creaked as she ground her teeth. ‘ Archives communales de Nice. The civil registry building? Many records are kept here.’
‘Is that all?’
The crowd flinched back as the building caved in—all but Selene and her captive.
She ignored the heat on her cheeks. ‘Is that all?’ she repeated, raising her voice to be heard above the shriek of collapsing structural beams. She gave the boy a rough shake. No, not a boy . He was just shy of military age.
‘ Et la Bibliothèque Généalogique. ’
Selene loosened her fingers and let him pull away. ‘ Merci ,’ she muttered, a frown crumpling her brows.
The demon— her demon—had been here, at the Genealogical Library.
Silent witnesses lined the street, their glassy eyes reflecting the flames.
If demons gained a foothold here, they would destroy this city. She’d always considered herself a necessary evil in this world. A small cruel cog in the machine that kept demons at bay. And she could live with that if it meant protecting them. Selene thought again of the woman in the station.
Even cleansing fire burned everything it touched.