56. Lazarus
My boots skid on the tile. The air is full of smoke so thick it is like a wall I have to push through. For a moment, my mind refuses to see all the carnage in front of me.
Bodies lie strewn across the great entrance hall, my men, Konstantine’s men too. Some are still moving, but most of them are dead.
I walk past them, step over them, continue on until I spot him.
Devin is in the doorway to the library, half propped against the frame as if he simply sat down to have a rest, but the posture is all wrong. A pool of his blood has spread out from under him, a dark, impossible mirror reflecting the chandelier far above him.
Fuck. Fucccck.
I don’t stop to check if he’s alive, it’s clear he’s dead or as good as.
“LEANDRA!” It rips from my throat, not a word but a raw, torn sound, a wolf’s howl stripped of all music.
The sound echoes. It bounds down the hallway, a frantic, mocking spectre leaping from wall to wall, rushing up the staircase to die in the upper galleries. It is answered by the profound, swallowing quiet of a tomb. That silence is worse than any scream. It is a negation. It suggests an ending.
My rage turns to ice water in my veins.
I have known fear, I have known terror but this, this right here? It is a new kind, a cold, absolute zero at the core of me. I am moving again, picking up pace, no longer running but sprinting so fast I think my legs might snap. The stairs groan under my weight.
On the landing is more evidence of the violence that has taken place here. Broken furniture, bullet holes gouging out half the plaster and bodies, so many more bodies.
I continue on, not checking any of them because what would be the point?
I start searching the rooms, growing more frantic as each one proves to be empty. She is here somewhere I know it.
“LEANDRA!”
Again, there is no reply. Nothing but that same awful silence.
I push through another door. It swings inward with a sigh of its well-oiled hinges, a sound obscenely civilized in this abattoir.
And then, I see her.
The world ends. It doesn’t shatter, burn, or fall into the sea. It simply ceases to exist. It becomes a vacuum, a silent, screaming void, and at its centre is a single, terrible image.
She is lying in the middle of the floor. She is on her back. Her arms are flung wide, not in a sprawl of violence, but in a gesture of terrible, forced surrender. Like an angel. A broken, fallen angel pinned to the earth in a grotesque parody of a crucifixion. She is naked.
That beautiful dark skin that I have traced with my lips, that curve of her hip that fits the cup of my hand with such divine precision, the secret hollows and shadowed vales of her body… all of it is laid bare as a map of suffering.
Livid bruises in the shape of possessive, brutal fingers bloom across her throat and upper arms. A starburst of burst capillaries mars the delicate skin of her chest. And her forehead, Christ, upon her brow, drawn with a thick, far too fucking steady finger, is a cross.
It is blood.
Her blood.
It is still wet, catching the last light with a glistening, obscene sheen.
Her eyes are shut. The long, dark fans of her lashes rest on her cheeks. Her lips are slightly parted. In the soft, forgiving twilight, she looks as if she could be sleeping. The most perfect, sculptural, peaceful sleep.
The scream that has been building in the marrow of my bones never comes. It is too vast for my throat.
Instead, it implodes.
It collapses my chest.
My legs buckle. I go down, with my knees hitting floor with such a thud that I feel it in my very teeth.
All of this was for her.
The thought is a white-hot spike driven through me.
All these years of patient, venomous scheming.
The alliances, the careful architecture of vengeance I have plotted with the meticulousness of a master builder…
. she was the heart that began to beat within it.
She took the monstrous engine of my hate and gave it a purpose beyond mere destruction.
She looked at my scars, my blood-soaked history, the tainted parts of my soul, and she did not flinch.
She saw me, and she made me believe that a life after all this horror was possible.
She made the revenge worth having, because it would pave a golden path to a future where her smile was my sun, and her joy was my whole world.
But there is no future now.
That golden path leads here, to this silent room. To this final, defiled masterpiece of flesh and stillness.
Right now, my brother is being anointed with sacred oils, draped in robes of gold and white, preparing him for the grand ceremony at the cathedral. He is on his way to meet his fate in a trap I have spent a lifetime laying out.
The stage is set.
The players are in motion.
The finale is fucking primed.
But what does it matter? What does anything fucking matter now?
The vengeance, the power, the empire of ash I have to build? They are the playthings of a fool. A fool who believed he could have a heart after he had cut out so many. The only real thing, the only true thing, was this. Was her, and now it is gone.
It is all fucking gone, and my life is meaningless without her.
A desperate, defeated clarity seems to settle over me as I realise that I am worthless now, that everything is worthless.
I lie down, I curl my body around hers. I mould my chest to the line of her arm, my knees to the curve of her hip.
The warmth of her body seeps into me, against my skin, in a terrible, last intimacy.
I bury my face in the tangled, perfumed mass of her hair, that field of silk that still smells of her, just her, under the taint of all this abject horror.
The sobs that tear from me are not human. They are the breaking of not just a person, but their very soul. Hot, silent, wracking torrents shake my entire frame. My hand finds hers. It is cool, but not yet cold. I interlace my fingers with hers in a final, desperate lock.
I will stay here.
I will hold this anchor as the world burns down around us.
It is the only logical choice.
A life without her is not a life. It is an echo. A haunting, and I will not be a ghost in my own story. I will let the flames write the ending right here, our ash entangling and rising on the same thermal column of destruction.
It is not a tragedy. It is a consummation.
I close my eyes, waiting for the heat, for the crackle, for the smoke to filter in and then the flames to consume us both.
I press my lips to her temple, just below the obscene cross of blood. My tears cut channels through the gore on her forehead. A silent, final benediction.
Goodbye, my heart. Goodbye, the only thing that was good in this entire fucking world.
And then, I feel it. So faint, so impossibly slight, I convince myself I imagine it. But it comes again. A rise, a fall. A fractional, rhythmic expansion against my ribs.
My breath dies in my throat.
My heart stutters.
It is an hallucination; it has to be. The wishful thinking of a broken mind. I am suffering the same ridiculous delusion as my bastard of a brother.
But I still command my own heart to be still, to not beat, so I can listen. The silence stretches, an eternity in a second. And there. It is not her breath, but the whisper of her life. A flutter so shallow it is barely a suggestion, a moth’s wing beating against a glass pane.
Her chest, under the ruin of her beauty, is rising. It is.
I scramble up, I scramble to grab her wrist, to try to find her pulse there but it is so fragile, so delicate. I drop it quickly and instead press my fingers into the hollow beneath her jaw.
For one heart-stopping, soul-searing second, there is nothing. And then, a beat. A single, soft, irregular tap against my fingertips. It is the most beautiful sound in the history of sound. It is the music of the spheres, the voice of creation. Th-thump.
There. Again. A weak, arrhythmic miracle.
A choked, wet sound escapes me. A laugh? A sob? It could be both. It is a sound of a world being willed back into existence.
And then, I see it, a few inches from her body.
It is not blood. It is cloudy, tinged with bile.
Vomit. Whatever poison he forced down her throat, she vomited it up.
She was unconscious, defenceless, a lamb at the altar and her body, that same stubborn, fierce vessel that housed her impossible soul, spat death back in its face.
This is not chance, this is not luck. This is a sign that God has made his choice. He has looked upon my bloody path, and he has not turned away. He has given me her life back. He has sanctioned this, all of this. I am an instrument of a divine, terrible will.
A roar, guttural and raw, a sound of pure, uncontainable joy tears from my throat.
“Yes!” I shout, my voice hoarse, splintered, echoing off the walls that were, barely a moment ago, a tomb. “YES!”
I gather her into my arms and I hold her tight to my chest, her head lolling against my shoulder, her breath a soft, warm ghost on my neck. The cross of blood on her forehead smears against my own skin, but I welcome it. It is an anointing. A marking.
I am Lazarus, risen not from the dead, but from a death of the spirit far more final.
“Stay with me,” I whisper against her hair, the words a prayer, a command, a plea. “Stay with me, Leandra. My miracle. The day has just begun, and we have a god to kill.”