CHAPTER THIRTY
M asked strangers swirled around them in a frenzy. Beside him, Selene stood impossibly still, as though carved from marble. Her demeanour more akin to when she was on duty than attending a glitzy masquerade. Rather than joining the festivities, they lingered on the outer edge, which suited Jules.
Their angry words still echoed in his ears. And when he wasn’t being consumed by thoughts about the argument, his mind drifted back to the Cor Cordium . Even now, he couldn’t shake the sensation of vast power trapped inside that chamber at the heart of the Vatican. Even now, he could still feel the blood that had covered his hands and streaked his arms.
He had felt with the sleeping god the same affinity he felt with Sparrow. Echoed, too, in his memory of the battlefield, and the ozone scent of storms as the weather demon drew closer. Demon . The truth had resonated through Jules’s bones in the same way the Deathless God’s voice resonated through his veins.
Let me die .
Jules hadn’t guessed how magnificent the restored Colosseum would be, with arches lit by shifting lights. On every tier, people mingled, champagne flutes clutched in their hands. Crumbling statues to Roman greats littered the space and wisteria coiled around stone columns and balustrades, dripping with amethyst flowers even though it was Rome in the middle of winter.
The Imperium Politikos circulated amid select guests. Jules had seen him from a distance, and once, when Selene had drawn him to a standstill and forced him to bow low, Jules had seen a hint of the shadowy throne where the empress sat.
It was undeniable that the Colosseum was bursting at its glamorous seams with Rome’s elite—her noble families—and all of them watched Selene.
Even in her mask, she was recognizable. Selene Alleva, Macellaia di Roma.
Perhaps for the first time Jules understood the allure she held for the people of Rome. Was she a monster? A guardian? Fear and respect and caution warred for primacy when they glanced her way and hurried to make room for her wherever she went.
But wherever Jules looked, fear won.
No matter what Selene had done for them, it would never be enough. They’d never appreciate her as they should. Instead, they treated her like a tamed wolf, knowing the wild in her could not be suppressed forever.
Jules shifted closer, touching her wrist with his little finger.
She pulled away from him. ‘Don’t touch me.’
Her mask carved around the edges of her face, accentuating her honey-coloured eyes and her knife-edge cheekbones. The rich blue and brilliant gold stars adorning the mask only managed to fade when compared to her. She looked ethereal.
‘You know—’ he started, but the skin around her eyes tightened and Jules cut himself off.
‘Selene!’ Adriano de Sanctis strode toward them.
Selene plastered on a smile. ‘Imperium.’
Before she could bow, he captured her hands. ‘No need for that.’ He pressed a kiss to each hand. ‘Matteo would be so proud of you.’ Clearing his throat, he nodded at Jules. ‘Eliot.’
‘Imperium.’
‘You should be dancing.’
‘Oh, you know … I got a little rusty in Nice.’ Jules snatched a champagne flute, chuckling until he drowned the laugh with alcohol.
‘My god-daughter is far too young and lovely to be relegated to the edge of the dance floor, Eliot. If you don’t dance with her, I will.’ Adriano laughed, but there was an edge of warning to the words. Jules knew an order when he heard one.
Squaring his shoulders, he barely stopped himself saluting with the champagne flute. ‘Sir.’ Setting down his glass on the next passing tray, Jules swept into a low bow of his own for Selene, holding out his hand as he lowered his eyes. ‘Dance with me.’
She laughed a brittle laugh.
Adriano wore a beatific smile. ‘Go,’ he urged her. ‘You’ll make me so happy.’
Jules almost thought she’d refuse, but finally he felt her hand land in his as light as a breath. He smoothed his thumb over her knuckles and she stiffened.
He’d ruined everything.
Her fingers felt brittle in his hands, bone, muscle and tendon all denying his touch. So different to when she’d smoothed careful fingertips over his jaw to check the closeness of his shave. They were different people now. Maybe they’d had a future then. It had certainly felt as though there was a spark of possibility. Now they had ashes and angry words. His stomach churned with regret.
Unlike Selene, Jules had never learned to waltz, but he followed the couple dancing beside them, matching their movements a fraction of a second delayed. But Selene was a natural lead.
Every time she twirled away, he felt a spike of panic. As though he’d lost her forever. Only once did he pull her back too soon, unable to quell his rising pulse. Her expression was stormy, but she didn’t comment on his mistake.
With his hand on her waist, Jules could feel the slightest dip of her ribs beneath his thumb as he ghosted it beneath the sheer silk of her dress. Her expression was taut, but she dipped with the grace of a dancer. He spread his hand against her spine, holding her as her unbound hair trailed across the floor.
‘Selene—’
‘Hold your breath.’
‘What?’
‘I stink of corruption, so hold your breath.’ He pulled her up, stepping between her knees as his hand smoothed down her spine to hold her close. She smiled with teeth as she hissed against his ear, ‘And don’t stop.’
His jaw worked. He couldn’t fake a smile like hers, it hurt too much.
Tugging her closer, he made her miss a step. She slid a furious look his way.
‘You can’t deny there’s something wrong there.’
‘Wrong?’
‘Corrupt.’
She scoffed, holding his shoulder as she leaned back in a half-dip.
In retaliation, Jules released her waist, letting her fall for a fraction of a second before he caught her. ‘Oops.’
‘You bastard.’ She pressed up against him, forcing him back a few steps with her body, and he felt something sharp against his groin. He didn’t dare look but she pretended to brush a kiss to his neck, her soft lips trailing the fast-beating pulse at his throat. ‘Drop me and it’ll be the last thing you do as a man.’
He swallowed, hands loosening a little on her waist, and he drew his fingertips feather-light up her sides. Her breath came faster and after a beat she yanked the knife away from his crotch. ‘Don’t touch me.’
‘You don’t touch me.’
‘I’m not touching you.’ But she was; one hand was bunched in his hair as she pressed their foreheads together. ‘I hate you.’
‘I—’ Love you . He almost said it. But the words wouldn’t come.
‘Captain Alleva?’
Selene pulled away from him, breaking all contact as she turned, brow arched in question.
An imperial valet had his hands linked behind his back, trying studiously to look unobtrusive. ‘I see you’re carrying your familial blade. You’ll have to disarm. Please come with me.’
Selene’s lip curled. ‘Took you long enough. The empress is right there .’
The valet’s expression didn’t change.
A tall woman appeared from behind the valet, her dark eyes crinkled with a smile. ‘An indication of the crown’s trust in you, Captain Alleva. Exorcist First Class now. Congratulations.’
Her flawless complexion belied her age; the woman had to be in her late forties, though she could have passed for younger. A companion of the empress, Jules assumed. And even here in the heart of Rome she wore a stunning royal-blue-and-gold qipao.
Selene nodded. ‘Thank you, Lady Yajin.’
‘Please, come.’ The woman indicated with an elegant hand.
Selene shot Jules a look that could wither fruit on the vine. Stay , it said, or maybe, Die . Possibly both.
A faster waltz struck up and Jules watched the feathered, silken Carnival masks and their people circulate on the floor. Then he saw a maskless face. A young man cutting through the crowds.
Jules elbowed through the dancers, hopping on one foot to dodge behind a swirling skirt. He saw the pale flash of the man’s face before he placed his mask on with spread fingers. Then he passed behind one of the pencil pines edging the Colosseum’s main floor, disappearing from sight. But Jules still felt him, the same resonance of familiarity as he felt with Sparrow.
He pushed past a man, his gold hair glinting. ‘D’Alessandro!’
Jules barely even registered Gabriel as he turned in place, looking this way and that until the faces around him blurred. He plunged into the dancers again, leaning back to avoid the tickle of ostrich feathers as ladies were dipped by their partners, before he was ejected out the other side.
His quarry had completely disappeared.
‘I see you’re wearing the mask of the Duke of Briars. How very curious.’ The young man leaned against a crumbling column nearby, hands loosely tucked into his trouser pockets in a relaxed posture. Jules couldn’t say exactly what it was—nothing outright triggered his honed instinct for danger—but something stirred his unease.
‘Who are you?’
Overhead, snow had started to fall. Whether it was real or manufactured Jules couldn’t say, because it never reached the dancers, dissipating as it passed between strings of lights. The man stepped closer. His gold half-mask had laurel leaves at the brow, lending him a regal bearing. Then Jules saw the truth beyond the obvious.
He staggered back. ‘ You— ’
The young man touched Jules’s mask right between the eyes. ‘ Me .’
An enigmatic smile on his face, his touch heralded a subtle twist of magic as blue flames ghosted across his skin.
Only feet away, entertainers dressed in jewel-toned silks for Carnival performed in their harlequin masks. But he might as well have been alone, because Baliel stood only inches away. The demon’s blue eyes burned in the depths of the mask that hid his face. His glossy dark hair fell over the laurels carelessly. He was tall and long-limbed, though perhaps not quite so tall as he had been when they’d met at the orphanage in Nice.
Jules’s fingers itched for a blade. He wanted to pay Baliel back for Kian. But he was unarmed and the demon just about stank of raw power barely contained. Jules clenched his hand into a fist. Nausea was like a moth fluttering in his stomach as he looked around at the helpless guests, dressed in their insubstantial finery. Baliel was a wolf among sheep.
Jules raised a hand to rip off his own mask.
‘ Stop. ’ A command, Baliel his general.
Jules almost laughed but his muscles seized.
On the upper balconies of the Colosseum, contortionists twisted themselves into shapes upon request, and magicians delighted and dismayed, disappearing champagne flutes and priceless jewellery in exchange for laughs. Even more and varied acts threaded among the throng on the main floor: a feathered youth; a snake-eyed waif of indeterminate gender and unspeakable beauty; dancers who spun in a complex ballet that had them leaping and twirling overhead.
All that faded into the background, leached of all colour, until it was only him and Baliel.
The demon’s glittering blue eyes watched him through the mask—staring through Jules and into his soul. Jules fought to twitch even a finger but could not. Fear prickled his skin.
‘Why are there only twelve masks?’ Baliel continued rhetorically, his voice thrumming rich as overturned soil. ‘One for each of the twelve demon dukes, yes, but they are not the greatest of us. There should be thirteen.’ He said it with finality, as though that explained everything.
Jules watched his mouth and jaw, observing the parts of him he could see. Even though it was clearly a new body—not the same wrecked and twisted thing he’d worn last time—he recognized Baliel. Both from then, and from the drawing in Matteo Alleva’s notebook. It was as though Baliel had sculpted this body to be a shadow of his real one.
‘Why do you look different to before?’ Jules asked.
‘This new body is more suited to me. Though it is rather young. My essence isn’t ripping it apart to get out.’
‘Why not?’
‘Demon blood.’ Baliel touched his chest lightly with long fingers. ‘This one has a demon in his family line somewhere. Long ago. If I am careful, I can leave his body whole when I’m done with it. He will be—well, if not none the wiser, at least alive.’
Jules grimaced. ‘Generous.’
‘If I do not borrow this body, I cannot walk in this world. I wasn’t born here. I do not have my own body.’ He waved a hand. ‘I have very little say in the matter, Jules.’
The sound of his name on the demon’s lips made a shudder crawl down Jules’s spine and he shuffled back an inch, putting some distance between them.
Baliel looked around, his lips twisting with distaste. ‘Look at them, dancing on the Deathless God’s living grave.’ Contempt dripped from Baliel’s every word. ‘Do they question nothing?’
‘You know him,’ Jules guessed. ‘And you know he’s not God.’
‘Of course he’s not God.’ Baliel laughed, though the sound was humourless. ‘They once had another god, you know. They unthinkingly stitched a demon into their religion, warping the stories to fit.’
‘Who is he? The man they call God.’
‘He is our king. Yours and mine. The Elysian king.’
Jules felt a muted spike of surprise. It made a kind of twisted sense that Dieu Immortel was important to the demons. Jules pressed a hand to his chest, heart beating in panicked little skips. Baliel knew what he was, too. The wrongness he’d felt earlier returned to him. The scent of death. His realization that their god was a demon and that he was suffering . The realization that exorcists had trapped him inside their walls for power.
Did they know? Did Selene ? No, he thought not. Even if she feared the Deathless God more than loved him, her faith was real. The realization soothed his frayed thoughts.
Jules leaned heavily against the marble column at his back. The Deathless God had been nailed and chained to the great burned crossbeam where he’d fallen all those centuries ago. And the Vatican as it stood now rose up around his body. The cult of the Deathless God seamlessly making a home for itself in the carcass of the old religion. And the carrion crows of this world still lived with that, even at the cost of their god.
Jules withdrew Matteo’s notebook from his pocket, finding the page he’d looked at more than once: Baliel’s face, sculpted from graphite and shaded so he looked pensive. He held it up. ‘Good likeness.’
Baliel tipped his head. ‘Indeed. But can you read the words?’
Jules shook his head. ‘I know a little Latin, as much as anybody, I suppose. Well, not as much as them.’ He nodded toward the shadowy throne, using the Roman empress to encapsulate the spectre of the Vatican and all the exorcists within it. ‘Can you?’
‘Of course.’
Baliel took the book and flipped through the pages, then handed it back, looking slightly bored. Jules blinked, the residual imprint of blue flames momentarily trapped in his retinas after Baliel used his magic. When Jules glanced at the page, he froze. The script was legible for him to read, and so he did, hungrily .
Baliel, Duke of Briars
Even Baliel looked faintly amused as Jules scanned the short-form observations around the sketch. Many were things he knew from having met Baliel before—things he could know now by glancing up at the man opposite him, as those distinctive blue eyes beyond the mask watched him back.
Still, he read.
Baliel’s power was vast, manifesting as blue flame. He had the ability to possess living human bodies and adapt them to his needs. He was very old, though he did not look it.
Then he read a passage that gave him pause.
Baliel is the one who gave us the wards, and he’ll be the one to break them.
‘You made the wards?’ Jules asked, looking at Baliel with surprise.
‘Not all of them. I made the first, then they made more, imitating me as best they could with their lesser magic.’
‘Why?’
Baliel responded with the resonance of an answer to a question, though it was not the one Jules had asked. ‘Do you ever wonder why they left him like that? Neither dead nor alive—’ Baliel choked off, as though someone had grabbed his throat in their fist.
Jules shook his head. ‘Of course I wonder. But why tell me about their god? Why tell me he’s a demon?’
Baliel watched him, interest sparking in his eyes. ‘You sound unsurprised.’ A small smile tipped the corner of his lips. ‘Have you been into the very bloody heart of the Vatican, Jules? Have you seen him?’
Unable to put the experience into words, Jules just nodded.
The demon did not seem to mind his silence. ‘Remarkable.’
Jules shrugged that off so he wouldn’t have to think about the way Baliel’s admiration made him feel. ‘Why did you destroy the records? All of them. Because of you, I don’t even know who I am.’
Baliel smiled. ‘I have tried to destroy them all, but not to thwart you. It’s always been about protecting you.’
‘ Protecting me?’ he asked, voice caustic with doubt. ‘And what do you mean, you tried?’
‘The Vatican records were already gone when I looked. Destroyed, I hope.’
‘Who by?’
Baliel was thoughtful for a moment. ‘A man I knew a few short years ago, I believe. Matteo .’
The word was like an electric current through Jules, though he had already suspected they’d come into contact. ‘Matteo Alleva ?’
Baliel’s gaze sharpened and that was answer enough.
Jules slouched against a pillar, watching the demon. ‘What do the wards have to do with the Deathless God?’
‘Everything.’ After a beat of silence, Baliel began speaking in earnest, his voice filled with the timbre of a storyteller. ‘It was hastily worked magic, the wards I created. I had little time and much to protect. In the same working, I bound a truth into this city, into the wards that protected it from my kind—that would eventually protect it, even from me. It expended a great deal of power. I was weakened. I am weakened still.’
‘What truth ?’
‘Only a demon can kill him. Only a human can free him.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Why? Because I cannot change the laws of nature. I can only bend them. So I restricted who could strike the killing blow, and that is all. And then I ensured no demon could get close enough to do it.’
‘Except me.’
‘You, I did not anticipate.’ Baliel watched Jules a long moment, his eyes deep with some emotion Jules couldn’t name. ‘I had hoped that a human would free him, but in two hundred years I have only been disappointed.’ His eyes darkened. ‘I miscalculated. I forgot how fleeting a human life could be. The humans who had been alive to witness their god were in his thrall. But that faded with time. And then they learned the power in his blood and he was too valuable to them sleeping.’
Sleeping . A tender way to put the torment Jules had felt in echo.
Jules looked away, wondering what Selene would do if she knew the truth. He couldn’t say for sure that she’d yank the spear free. ‘He doesn’t look like a demon. I don’t think they know what he really is. I only knew because I … felt it.’ He bit off his words. He could still feel the smothering desperation, the pain, and couldn’t continue without his voice breaking. ‘He’s … beautiful. Nothing like the demons I’ve seen.’
Baliel was silent a moment. ‘The demons you’ve seen are not their true selves. With their essence compressed into a shell so unsuitable it is akin to torture. It stretches, trying to fit around you, twisting and breaking and cracking, pop - pop - pop along the bones and up the spine—’
Jules repressed a shudder. The description was far too visceral, as though he could feel it.
‘Eventually it becomes some approximation of what you’ve left behind, something that can, for a time, hold your spirit captive in the flesh—’ Baliel broke off, barking out a laugh and pushing his hands through his hair to smooth it back again from where it had fallen over his forehead. ‘Forgive me … He—the one they call their god—is what we really look like, Jules. He is a true demon. The only true demon in this realm. His body uncorrupted, though his spirit is still trapped.’
‘Why is it like that?’
Baliel frowned. ‘He forced the door shut in a last bid to protect humanity. It takes a vast amount of power to cross, and it trapped many of our kind here to wither and die. All to protect the ones who ultimately held him captive for centuries.’
Jules thought back to the voice that had begged for death inside his mind. ‘He wants to die,’ he murmured.
Baliel looked up sharply.
‘He asked me to kill him. He was speaking to me. It was—it was awful.’
Jules wanted nothing more than to forget it.
Baliel reached up, catching his chin in strong fingers. ‘Quiet.’
Obediently Jules fell silent.
‘He will not die. I won’t let him.’ The words sounded raw with conviction and Jules realized that Baliel cared. Really cared. The demon had a personal stake in this. Baliel glanced around the gathered people, but no one paid them any mind. They were too distracted by the tumult of entertainment thrown at their feet.
‘What is he to you?’ Jules asked.
His voice was steady even though he had not stopped processing the wretchedness he felt at standing eye to eye with Kian’s killer and having a cordial conversation. It felt almost as strange as speaking to the Tsarina among the bodies of slain friends. Although Baliel felt a thousand times more dangerous—and more unknowable.
A ghost of a smile touched Baliel’s lips.
His voice was low. ‘The better question would be, what is he to you ?’
Jules frowned in confusion. He was God.
Baliel waited, silent, and once more Jules felt as though he was being read. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but not because he was afraid of Baliel. Despite all he’d been told, he found himself unable to fear him.
At last Baliel sighed. ‘He is my son. And he has been trapped here long enough.’
Impossible …
Jules wanted to denounce the words, but the truth of them sang through his bones. Baliel meant every word. His unceasing air of rage and grief suddenly made sense. Unable to hold his eyes, Jules looked away.
This demon was the father of God.
Jules had been raised believing in the Deathless God. This was sacrilegious. He felt almost ashamed to believe him—but believe him he did.
He is my son. The echo of Baliel’s words taunted him. The better question would be, what is he to you ?
Fighting a sense of dread, Jules dampened his lips. ‘And who am I?’
Baliel huffed a laugh. ‘You are his son.’