CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
S elene looked at Jules with ravenous, disbelieving eyes. He was ashen. Bruises marred the skin beneath his fever-bright eyes, as though pressed in by cruel thumbs. Beneath his skin, blood flowed like liquid gold. But he was alive .
He cocked his head, as though unsure how he came to be there, and pushed the column away. It crashed through the wall, sending up a plume of dust and debris.
Emotion flooded up her throat, so suffocating she thought she might be choking on blood from some ruptured organ—perhaps a stray rib piercing through her lung. Instead, when he touched her cheek a sob spilled from her.
He caressed her lower lip with his thumb. ‘I’m here.’
Her joy at seeing Jules shattered as cold terror filled her. He was alive but the power raging through his veins would destroy him. And it only worsened with his proximity to the Deathless God.
‘You have to go!’ She grasped his hands, propelling him into motion as Cesare rounded the spill of fallen columns.
Cesare was too close to being fully unleashed and deep shadows spilled from his eye sockets. Upon seeing Jules, those dark eyes flickered with confusion.
Boots slipping on damaged marble, Selene tried to move him.
He didn’t budge.
‘Jules, you really have to go!’ she begged, barely recognizing her own voice.
He shook his head. ‘I can’t leave my father or the suffering will just begin again.’ His clouded eyes flicked up to the Deathless God. ‘Nothing’s completely new, Selene. Sometimes it’s just a shadow of the past.’
She reached for his bloodless cheek. He felt cold to the touch. ‘I don’t understand.’
Cesare snarled, ‘You’re harder to kill than you look, boy.’ His resonant voice echoed unnaturally. Raising both arms over his head, Cesare drew a pair of curved blades from a coil of dark smoke over his shoulder. Pleased, he turned them over in his hands. Selene had never seen him exhibit such a skill before. In truth, she wasn’t sure any exorcist could do what he’d just done. It was a demon’s skill.
Levelling a blade at Selene, he gazed along its length. ‘Ready? I’ll give you one last chance to tap your magic.’ Cesare was skating on the edge of humanity, and Selene wasn’t sure this was a state from which he’d ever return.
Worse, if Cesare let his power consume him, he would be nigh unstoppable. She had no intention of following him to hell.
Jules stared at Cesare, his eyes beautiful, gold, and blank. Threading her fingers with his, Selene tried again to make Jules move. Using her own thumbnail, Selene sliced a gash across her knuckles, carving into strength . Still he was immovable. Then he seemed to shudder, shaking his head as his hand tightened around hers.
Cesare chuckled, and that was all the warning they had.
He came at them in a flurry, landing blow after blow against Selene’s sword as she threw herself between Jules and Cesare, barely managing to block both his blades.
One sliced her bicep, severing a tendon that dropped her sword hand uselessly to her side. She caught her blade before it hit the ground and deflected Cesare’s second blade before it could gut her.
With his third arm he casually reached for the floor and tossed a handful of dust and marble shards at her eyes. She cried out, falling back as he swung again, drawing a line across her belly that was blessedly shallow but screamed through her nerves. Cesare roared at the near miss, less lucid and more animalistic by the moment.
In her blurry peripheral vision, Jules’s boot planted itself in the middle of Cesare’s chest, kicking him back. Cesare slammed through a colonnade and right through the travertine wall, exposing a flight of ancient stairs.
Jules’s gaze was filled with more concern than flame. His expression cleared, and she recognized some of the Jules she knew returning. ‘You can’t go on like this,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ll die.’ He pressed his palm to her stomach, the other touching her spine.
Solemn and concerned. Afraid. But himself again.
She was frightened too, but not of dying. She was afraid of unleashing her power and unravelling her soul until it was a frayed, unrecognizable thing. She didn’t want to become worse than the worst demon, hungering only for blood and chaos.
Cesare groaned and untangled himself from the debris. Jules’s head snapped his way and a second pair of gold eyes opened beneath his first.
Incontrovertible proof he was a demon.
Selene didn’t care. Here, where her father had written his own death warrant, the two most important men in her life squared up. She couldn’t live in stasis. She had to adapt to survive. Falling to her knees, she laid out her limp arm as though on an altar. Knife in hand, she whittled into bone, trigging her runes. Speed , strength , resilience , foresight , precognition , fire . More than she had ever dared trigger in one go.
When the flames trickled over her skin, she felt the full power of God—her Dio Immortale— fill her up, running hot and liquid through her veins, scalding her centre like wildfire. She felt herself hollowed out, and there was more raw power than there was Selene.
She smiled. Her fight with Cesare had lasted a second and a day. A lifetime . But soon it would be over. Jules seemed to sense the enormity of what she’d done. He eased back. Cesare’s movements were erratic and strange, chilling her blood. She didn’t think she imagined the flicker of fear that burned in his skull.
‘I love you still, uncle,’ she breathed.
Cesare stretched his arms, preparing to fight her at her most deadly.
Her senses were assaulted by a wave of sensation—the blood rushing in Jules’s veins, the heavy thud of his heart as it hammered itself against his ribs, the soft scrape of Cesare’s breath through bared teeth. She could even hear her own threads snapping and breaking, untethering her from who she was and who she knew she could be until she was nothing but raw power. Dio , it felt good. Why had she ever resisted?
Tipping her head back, she laughed, the sound pealing out like Ave Maria. Overloud and wrong in this usually quiet place.
She pressed a palm to her stomach where Jules’s hand had been and felt the skin knit as though the wound was nothing. Not even Lucia, specialized as she was, could have hoped for more. Without looking at Jules, with what little she could summon of her own self in this moment, she whispered, ‘If I am undone by this, promise you’ll finish it. I want you to do it, Jules. I don’t want anyone else to kill me.’
And though his expression twisted, his eyes were as hard as flint as he lowered his chin in a nod. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
Satisfied, she redirected her attention to her uncle. ‘Do you want to see how much of a pathetic shade you really are, Cesare? Because for that you need to see the light.’
She thrust out a hand and a pillar of flame coiled from her palm, hissing and snapping with the head of a snake. The arm Cesare had destroyed hung limp and bleeding from her shoulder. With a thought she healed it.
First, tendons formed with the taut resilience of a strung bow. Then muscles wrapped around the bone. Finally the flesh she’d mutilated for power knitted and healed. Snatching her fallen sword, she held it.
‘ I am the light. ’
The Deathless God spoke through her.