CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
E ach step became a lesson in patience as Selene backed away, mindful not to disturb the water. Her every movement created a domino effect of ripples that disappeared into the dark, but she hoped there was enough disturbance from the steady dripping to disguise it. When her toe scraped against something that moved beneath the water, she froze.
A gleam of gold pierced the dark. She plunged her hand into the water, already knowing what she’d find. A ward coin. And ahead, the pale glimmer of an alabaster lion. What had once been a Vatican lion was ghostly in the dark. It was split down the middle and the coin that had been at its heart sat snug in her hand—already warming to her touch. A wave of terrible grief rolled over her. This was a reminder she needed about as much as a knife through the ribs that the one doing this was an enemy. And an enemy to all Rome.
Resting her hand on the lion’s mane, she listened. She heard no movement. Only the perpetual dripping that filled the necropolis.
Her footsteps were careful in the depthless black water. She had to find Jules. Baliel had hunted him in Nice, and Cesare was pulling Baliel’s strings. What did it mean? A dull ache throbbed through her temples as she tried to force the pieces together, but they didn’t want to fit.
Once past the ironwork gate, she took the steps two at a time, favouring speed over stealth. The hall ahead was empty. She glanced over her shoulder, toward the necropolis’ yawning dark.
Hands caught her waist and adrenaline shot through her. But she knew those hands. They were familiar. Large and warm.
‘Jules!’ she gasped, burying her face against his neck. He smelled of warm skin, of chilled Roman rain.
Stepping back, she let her eyes roam over him. He was soaked through.
He pulled her tighter to him, his lips roaming over her cheek to press to her temple. Then he moved to her mouth and caught her lips in a hard kiss. A kiss that took more than it gave. It was divine.
‘I shouldn’t have left—’ he began.
‘No, and you certainly shouldn’t have come back.’
Gripping his shirt in her hands, she pushed him, stumbling, back the other way.
Taking refuge in the language library, Selene moved Jules’s hair back from his face. Then she slid her hands down his neck and shoulders, feeling him. His shirt was translucent from the rain and plastered to his skin. Where they were pressed together under a stone arch, beneath a stained-glass window that lit his face in hues of blue, the briars and thorns of his scar were clearly visible. How had she not realized he was a demon earlier?
In the necropolis it had seemed so obvious, and not just because of what had happened in the Cor Cordium , but also because Jules was remarkable. She tugged at his shirt, tearing it a bit as she pulled it down his bicep, her fingertips sliding over the scar’s pale ridges. ‘This … this is why.’
It was like a brand. Sealing the demon in him off from her magic and senses, as though it wasn’t there at all.
His eyes were liquid as he watched her. ‘I think so. Sparrow told me he didn’t know at first either.’
She felt the blood drain from her cheeks.
Jules searched her face, brows drawing together with confusion. ‘I thought you knew.’
And she thought he hadn’t .
Walking away, she pointed. ‘Don’t come closer.’ She ran her hands through her tangled hair and tipped her head back. Sparrow, of course . If he had told Jules he was a demon, it meant Jules had been lying to her since that night.
With obvious effort Jules obeyed, muscles shifting beneath his skin as he held himself in check.
‘God, you must think I’m so stupid,’ she breathed.
‘Selene—’ He moved toward her and she snatched her favourite boot knife from inside the boning of her dress, angling it so it touched his solar plexus.
‘Do not touch me, Jules Lacroix.’
Anger flickered in his eyes, then he shuttered it behind faux curiosity. ‘What now, exorcist?’
Selene felt like crying but the tears wouldn’t come, and she burned with humiliation. ‘Enough games. Sparrow isn’t the only one with answers.’
The scar on his bicep was a cipher, and suddenly she could decode the mystery of him.
‘This mark belongs to one of the noble houses. The Duke of Briars. The demon you spoke to tonight. The demon I’ve been hunting.’
His expression didn’t waver. So he knew that too. It felt as though he’d wrenched her ribs wide—so much easier to crush her heart that way. But she was hell-bent on telling him something Sparrow hadn’t. Even if it hurt.
Pacing, she continued, her words spilling out moments after she realized the truth for herself. ‘You were taken to the orphanage in Nice as a newborn, already scarred. Which tells me you were grown inside a demon’s womb. Your mother wasn’t some innocent girl seduced by a demon.’ She watched his eyes, but there was no surprise there. He knew that too. She nodded to his bicep. ‘Your mother did that.’ Her words were venom, but she couldn’t stop them. ‘She carved her newborn’s flesh.’
Pain—but not surprise—flared in his eyes at her words. That a mother Jules had never known would hurt him? Or that she had?
He drew an unsteady breath. ‘I should have told you.’
Selene shook her head, laughing bitterly. ‘No.’ The anger drained out of her as suddenly as it had come. ‘The irony is, I know you made the right choice.’ She turned away, disappearing the knife into her dress once more. Her hands trembled. ‘The only choice really. I could not have been trusted.’
The warmth of his chest radiated into her back as Jules stepped up behind her. She wanted to lean into him but held herself rigid. A gentle touch—tentative—then he turned her with a hand on her waist. ‘I’m still sorry I didn’t. But I’m not sorry for anything else. Not a single moment.’ He brushed her cheek with his thumb, frowning as he rubbed salt between his fingers.
Selene ignored the evidence.
Grasping her jaw in a hand, he tipped her head back so he could kiss her, softer than a flake of snow landing. She arched onto her toes, chasing the kiss when he leaned away. Laughing against her mouth, he wrapped his arms around her to hold her close.
Footsteps passed by and she pulled away, listening intently.
‘I need to get you out of here. It’s no longer safe.’
She led him swiftly to the nearest garden courtyard, heart pounding double time as they kept to the shadows beneath a line of bending palms. Silhouetted against the night sky, the thick fronds were populated with large round nests. During the day, they were occupied by noisy green parakeets, but now the birds made only a few sleepy chirps as Selene and Jules disrupted the stillness.
Her bare shoulders prickled in the cold. The rain had stopped, leaving the night slightly overcast. She paused in the deep dark beneath an ancient cypress. ‘The Vatican ward was broken tonight.’ She reached into her dress, drawing out the hexagonal disc from the broken ward in the necropolis. ‘I don’t know what the hell’s going on or how it’s all connected.’
He reached for it, but she snatched her hand away.
‘Are you stupid?’ she asked, and she was pleased her voice came out steady if a little cold. ‘This was one of the most powerful wards in the city, Jules. It operated like a battery, charging the Vatican ward. They work against demons like you—’ She broke off. How long had she suspected his true nature without acknowledging it to herself? A day at least. ‘It isn’t because I don’t trust you. I’m afraid for you.’
His expression opened with realization.
She rolled her eyes and slipped it back into her clothes. ‘These discs were created specifically to guard against powerful demons and …’ The enormity of the fact that he was somehow a full-blooded demon hung between them, overripe like the fat moon peeking through a tattered veil of low cloud.
‘It broke tonight?’
‘During the Carnival Masquerade. When I wasn’t here.’
When Cesare had specifically ordered her not to be here. But she didn’t say it aloud. The pain was too raw.
At the far side of the garden she saw movement. A group of exorcists were knifing through the dark with an urgency that didn’t fit the hour. She pulled Jules back and they ran low through the shadows until they could cut through to St Peter’s Basilica.
‘Are there other wards?’ he asked softly.
The early hour painted the Vatican in silver and grey. Shadows teemed in the corners, sinister in the way they had always been—but now she knew enough to admit it. She had never trusted her instincts when it came to the way this place made her feel.
Around the corner from the guardhouse, they stopped and she counted the moving silhouettes inside. Two. And one more outside. That was normal. If something was afoot, as she suspected, that could change. They had to move.
‘Some. Wards like this take massive amounts of power to uphold. It’s why we can’t protect Rome as easily as the Vatican. Or Italy as well as Rome. Or Europe. Even protecting the entirety of Rome would be impossible. Some always get through.’
‘But never into the Vatican.’
‘Never. But now that the main Vatican ward has fallen, I don’t know how long it will hold. There should be three, but, who knows, the other two could already be compromised. Meaning, theoretically, the demon dukes could descend on Rome.’
Jules only frowned.
Selene slipped over the wall, keeping it between her and the checkpoint, and slunk low toward the guardhouse. The ember of a lit cigarette glowed in the dark as the checkpoint guard took a drag, illuminating his face. Tommaso, the exorcist who’d challenged Jules at the funeral. Just perfect.
Only a hundred feet separated them from the relative safety of St Peter’s Square where they could disappear among the citizens of Rome. She pressed her back against the wall of the Academy building, keeping the jutting corner between them and the guardhouse. They’d be fine, so long as Tommaso didn’t choose to stroll this way.
Jules took his place beside her and threaded their fingers. He glanced around the corner, then flattened her back with his arm. He shook his head in disgust. ‘Why does it have to be him?’
‘One of the few who knows your face,’ Selene agreed in a whisper.
‘Is it bad if the demon dukes get into the Vatican?’
‘It’s worse than bad. If they get through, they’ll come for the Deathless God.’
‘Baliel won’t. He doesn’t want to hurt him.’
‘And he told you this?’ she scoffed.
He nodded, watching her with trusting green eyes.
‘Oh, well then, we don’t have to worry about anything.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’ His eyes were distant. ‘Baliel may not be a threat, but there are others.’
‘Be quiet for a minute.’ She pressed the flat of her palm to her forehead. ‘I have to figure this out.’
Jules drew her hand down, rubbing his thumb against her palm. ‘Which part?’
A silver scar across her knuckles was all that remained of her wound.
‘All of it.’ The distant sound of a door slamming made them both still. ‘We need to get out of here. It’s not safe for you.’ Selene dared another look around the corner in time to see Tommaso kick away from the wall and toss his spent cigarette.
‘Checking the perimeter,’ Tommaso grunted. ‘Watch the gate.’ There was no movement from inside the guardhouse.
Jules raised a brow in question. Now?
She held him back, hand pressed flat to his chest where she could feel the powerful thump of his heart, waiting for Tommaso to turn the corner around the base of the ten-foot Janiculum wall.
Then, together, they slipped through the shadows, crossing inches from the rectangle of light that splashed onto the cobbles from the open checkpoint door. Inside, two men played cards and nursed steaming cups. No wonder they didn’t want to step outside.
Complacency. Her lip curled.
Jules paused, looking curiously in, and she grabbed him, propelling him ahead of herself.
He whispered a protest. ‘The skinny guy’s cheating.’
‘Do you want to go back?’ she snapped.
He smothered a chuckle.
Outside the Vatican fortress signs of life were everywhere. A drunken group staggered down the middle of the quiet street, their laughter ringing loudly. A pair of old men played chess by the light of a lamp, breath misting in the chill.
‘What I can’t figure out is how Baliel knew my father. I learned Baliel hadn’t been here for years.’
‘He came in secret,’ Jules said softly. ‘And he told me your father took the records.’
She stopped. ‘But that means …’ Her brows drew together. ‘My father destroyed records relating to you before he died. Years ago.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Who are you, Jules Lacroix?’
He smiled slightly. ‘The eternal question.’
She sensed he wasn’t saying something, but brushed it off, knowing where they needed to go. ‘Let’s find out what else my father was hiding.’
Even before she stepped inside her family palazzo, Selene knew it was a horrible idea. Musty air rolled out when she forced open the door, its hinges stiff with disuse. The dust motes glinting in the faint light of street lamps could have spelled it out: Wrong way. Go back .
But Jules’s warmth soaked through her like sunshine on stone, and his broad-shouldered frame filled the doorway behind her, locking her in. She couldn’t back out now. No matter how dearly she wanted to.
Selene touched the wallpaper, gliding her finger along its ridges, and paused in front of a gilded mirror that had a film of dust over the glass. She looked like a ghost. Well, if that wasn’t poetic irony. The girl in the mirror hadn’t stepped through this door since before her father died. When her family was still whole. Now the ghost haunting these halls was the one who’d destroyed it all.
Jules gaped at the cobwebbed double-tiered chandelier. Selene noticed other things: a spilled travel chest of clothing at the foot of the stairs, papers and passports abandoned on the sideboard. Her family had been exiled—a dignified exit had never been on the cards for them.
As if in a dream, Selene walked further into the foyer, tipping her head back to look at the coffered ceiling. Above it, her old bedroom, right next door to Niccolò’s. Numbly she led Jules toward the library and her father’s adjoining study at the back of the house.
Beautiful once, now draped sheets protected the books from fading and the library ladder had an air of being stationary for too long. The presence of her father was so palpably missing and she felt like a visitor in someone else’s memory.
‘What makes you think your father was hiding more than the records?’ Jules blew on the dust-covered mantle, revealing forgotten trinkets. A rare fossil. An old sextant. A polished jade egg.
Selene averted her eyes. ‘Because he died for pulling the spear from the Deathless God’s body. The more I learn, the surer I am that pieces are missing from this horrible puzzle.’
‘Apt description,’ he murmured.
An expression crossed his face like clouds over the sun. She knew enough to guess he was holding something back again. Maybe if they laid out what they knew … but that meant her being honest too, and the thought of cracking open her ribs and revealing her fragile insides made her flinch from the thought as though burned.
There’d be time enough later.
Wordlessly Selene entered the study, searching the desk and drawers before moving to the ornate boxes on the shelves. All locked. Her knife didn’t care.
She tipped her head. Something didn’t seem right.
Jules had ripped the sheets off the furniture in the other room, sending eddies of dust into the air, and without the lumpy sheets her suspicions were confirmed.
Against all logic, the shelves were set further back in the library. Even though they both backed on to the same hallway, her father’s study was six inches narrower. Selene slid her hands along the bookshelves, searching for a switch or a divot. Anything really.
Jules poked his head in. ‘What’re you doing?’
She ignored him.
He waved his hand in front of her face. ‘Have you found something?’
‘Not sure.’
Jules caught her waist in one hand and kissed her bare shoulder, playing with the beaded strap of her evening gown. ‘I’m not moving until you tell me.’
She set a hand on his chest, smiled sweetly, and shoved him out of the way.
He steadied himself on the shelf and it rocked forward, threatening to tip books all over them. Then, with a mechanical click, it swung open, revealing a second glass-fronted bookshelf beyond.
‘ Dio … ’ she breathed.
Jules brushed himself off. ‘You’re welcome.’
Again, she ignored him, her eyes roving over the hundreds of beautiful books.
‘Death by twelve-foot bookshelves? Check.’
‘You can’t check it off,’ she murmured. ‘You’re not dead.’
‘I was checking it off my “ways not to die” list.’
She glanced at him, one brow arched. ‘You have a “ways to die” list?’
A slow smirk swept across his face. ‘In the throes of—’
She pressed a hand to his face to smother his talking. ‘I’ve heard enough.’
Surrounded by piles of books from the secret bookshelf, Selene sat on the floor of her father’s study. She shook them out and tossed them aside, ignoring the clouds of dust that billowed around them.
Jules had a very different approach. He sat with a small pile of interesting books—books with gold foil and sprayed edges and decorative metal corners, and the ones overflowing with bright illustrations and diagrams of Rome’s famous architecture—and he slowly worked his way through them without missing a page.
She sighed loudly. He ignored her now, too invested in his painstaking investigation. Selene threw another book over her shoulder and stood to sweep the contents of another shelf into a box, not caring that some spilled messily to the floor.
Jules clicked his tongue and scooped up one of the books that had fallen open, crumpling its delicate pages. But when he picked it up, he froze. ‘I think I’ve found something.’
Jules held up the notebook, a twin to the one they already had. Scrawled across the pages were copious notes in her father’s hand. Most of it Latin, again. Selene flipped through the pages and almost dropped the notebook when she came to a sketch of the Deathless God that covered two pages. The spear embedded in his torso had been meticulously recreated on paper—down to the swirls and carvings in the flared spear point and every stud along the line of the shaft.
Selene no longer felt her nails biting into her palms. Instead, she felt the smooth wood and the metal studs beneath her hands, the hot rush of blood that covered her and burned her until she thought she was nothing but bones, with sheer will holding her up.
‘Oh,’ she said faintly, overwhelmed by the memory. ‘You might be right.’
Jules caught her before she hit the floor. ‘Whoa.’ He cradled her to his chest.
Unsure what had happened—what continued to happen—she struggled to breathe. Her hands bunched in his shirt and she shuddered. Why couldn’t she breathe? Jules was a pillar of warmth, but it was the ghost of a sensation compared to the encompassing memory of pain.
Her father lay crumpled just out of sight, and she was so small, with only a spear to quell the divine giant.
‘Selene.’ Jules’s voice was soft but firm. ‘Breathe.’
He smoothed her hair back from her face, repeating her name. Then he captured a gleaming teardrop on his thumb and looked at it with an expression of deliberate wonder. ‘I didn’t know you could cry .’
The words finally broke through the fog in her brain. She laughed and Jules’s eyes flooded with relief.
Darting in, she stole a kiss. Dio , she was stupid around Jules. Why did he make her feel like half a girl and only a quarter of the exorcist she was supposed to be? She could picture her gravestone all too clearly now: Here lies Selene Alleva, Exorcist First Class, and one whole entire idiot.
‘I’m all right,’ she assured him, pressing their foreheads together. ‘Only—’
Her father’s notebooks sat on the edge of his desk.
Volume i . She could feel its twin in Jules’s breast pocket. She felt sick at the thought of more secrets uncovered. What had her father learned that took him to the Cor Cordium that day, intent on dragging the spear free from God? He’d started unravelling the Vatican’s secrets ten years ago and it led to his death.
And Cesare … Her heart spasmed at the thought of her uncle. The pain of his betrayal was too intense. Her mind darted away from it. Later , she told herself. It had been such a long day already.
She nudged the book to Jules. ‘Can you look?’
He carefully leafed through her father’s notebook. She saw diagrams of the Vatican, the buildings mapped out and labelled. The capillaries of the necropolis, the five-pointed corridor, and the solid lines of the walls. He turned the page, fingers flinching off the paper.
It was the drawing of the Deathless God. Her father had captured the light in the room perfectly, how it slanted across God’s cheekbones at a certain time of day, illuminating a glint of pale skin and little more.
Jules cleared his throat. ‘ Devastatingly, what Baliel told me is true. The demon king was wounded to the brink of death during the Battle for Rome. Moving him would be a death sentence, and so a deal was struck— ’
‘Stop,’ Selene said. ‘No, this isn’t right. Who is he writing about?’
Jules paused. When he spoke, the words were terribly soft. ‘ Dieu Immortel .’
Selene strode forward to snatch the book from his hands. Unlike much of the rest, this page was written in slanted Italian as if her father was committing his thoughts to paper in a mad dash.
She continued reading aloud: ‘ The Vatican would shelter him until the spear could be safely pulled free. Baliel told me this, as all but the most tangential records of it have long been destroyed. I’m not sure even the current Exorcist Primus is aware of the truth. At some point the Vatican decided to let the truth die. I know the Imperiums are as blinded as the rest of us. I spoke to Cesare. He was horrified. And furious at my sacrilegious words.
‘ He will come to understand. ’
Selene shook her head. But it was undeniable. Her father’s writing crowded in around the sketch of the Deathless God. It was quite clear that the notes and the drawing were connected.
She looked at Jules in confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’
Jules looked trapped, worry creasing his brow.
‘Please, just say it.’ She wasn’t ready, but she was sick of dancing around the fact that Jules knew something. ‘What did Baliel tell you?’
He groaned, pressing his face against her collarbone.
She carded her fingers through his hair and then tugged his head back. ‘Tell me.’
He sighed, looking anywhere but at her. ‘The Deathless God is not what you think he is.’
What , not who.
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Continue.’
He turned his hand over and bared his wrist, as if to say, Remember? She touched his skin lightly, her fingertips trailing the blue of his veins.
‘The Deathless God is a demon. Baliel confirmed it.’
She coughed a laugh. ‘And we believe Baliel? A demon duke? Why?’
‘He’s telling the truth. Even before he told me, I knew it without a shadow of a doubt.’
Selene felt as though the world had been yanked from beneath her feet. Jules must have sensed it too, because he gripped her elbow with one strong hand and held her steady. She feared she might fall off the edge of the world if he let go. ‘No, it’s impossible,’ she breathed. ‘How could nobody know?’
Jules’s face was too calm when he said, ‘How could they? Demons aren’t allowed in the Vatican.’ He looked at his wrists, expression twisting into something complex. ‘And maybe that wouldn’t prove anything anyway. Maybe it was just my blood.’ He swallowed. ‘Baliel told me …’ He faltered.
Her lips parted. ‘What?’
His haunted expression played out the thoughts behind his eyes. He knew it wouldn’t take much more to kill her faith. Finally, brutally.
‘What is it? Tell me.’
‘He told me,’ Jules began, closing his eyes for strength. ‘The Deathless God is my father.’
Selene took an unwilling step back. Then she remembered the way his veins had burned with gold fire. Gold like God’s blood. Jules was a demon and Dio Immortale ’s presence should have destroyed him. But Jules hadn’t burned, he’d shone.
Her faith said it couldn’t be, but the Deathless God’s blood had triggered her magic the same way demon blood affected other exorcists. Even though it felt impossible, it made a bizarre sort of sense. Selene circled the desk, away from his warm, distracting hands.
She needed to think.
‘Please, Selene,’ he said, sounding wounded, ‘I swear—’
‘ Enough .’
He stopped, eyes sharpening. She could see the killer he’d been. The one mentioned in Bachelet’s reports, the one the Caspians called Stigmajka . She glanced at his arms. He’d rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, and coiling line after line of scars told of his brutality. His willingness to kill. Worse, his utter proficiency at it.
‘I trust you,’ she murmured.