Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Baking heat and the sizzle of street meats wrapped their arms around me, embracing me in my long-awaited return to mortal streets.
Save for my brief and bloody missions for vengeance, my last full cycle spent with my human was overseeing a healthy, happy life in a small Syrian village when news of “the miracle” trickled through the grape vine.
I wished I’d savored those days.
I longed to go back, to commit every breath to memory, to hear her happy, unbothered heartbeat before the world changed.
I wished I’d slept beside her, if only to experience joy each time her eyes began to move beneath closed lids.
I wanted to see the moment she left this world for astral dreams. I craved the small joy of a loved one’s restful sleep.
It was a lesson in taking things for granted, and one I didn’t intend to repeat.
Years of denial, followed by a history-altering treaty, were the final shackles of our distance.
I paused beneath the wilt of a tent between two barking merchants.
I flicked a hand, instantly conjuring a member of my legion.
The dark, wiggly lines, the vaguely human-shaped extensions of my will, had grown uniquely useful.
Before our relationship had gone untameably public, I’d closed off the parts of me that had maintained one foot in Hell, leaving my legion woefully underutilized.
“Yes, my Prince?”
I frowned at the spiderweb of narrow roads, then back to the wisp as human bodies brushed through him, completely unaware that they were touching eternity.
“Byzantium is much larger than I remember it being. Take a dozen or so and report back with her location. Last reports had her working at her family’s stall for the day market.
If she’s gone home already…” I checked the sun, contemplating what I knew of Byzantine and its work culture. It seemed too early to retire.
“Certainly.” It fizzled, presumably relaying my message, then reanimated. “It should be noted, my Prince, that you last visited this city before it fell.”
There was a reluctance to his delivery that held a mirror to my increasingly human emotions. Whatever he had to share was something I didn’t want to hear.
“It’s now called Constantinople.”
“The etymology…no. Constantine? But if he’s a Roman Emperor!
I had nearly left Hell’s conclave when that man was in power.
” I shook my head like a dog trying to rid its ear of a fly.
My words poured out faster. I’d stayed apprised of the earthly powers as they moved every moment I was away.
This couldn’t be happening. It was too soon.
“Nearly every Roman deity was in attendance in protest to Rome’s conversion to Christianity.
That was only, what, sixty-five mortal years ago?
He can’t have gotten this far! And then after passing the Edict of Milan he declared the local people newly-minted followers of Heaven, and didn’t let the ink dry on his decree before capturing Byzantium? ”
I could hear my frown as I argued—a fruitless endeavor. They were incapable of lying to me. That was, of course, unless the lie was one I was telling myself.
“There’s more, Your Highness.”
The tendons in my hands flexed as I channeled my impending horror into my fists. I knew what he was going to say before it left him.
“They call her Damiane in this life.”
A nail in the coffin. My fists went slack. In Byzantium—the now-Christian Constantinople—her parents had cursed her in Latin. The name had been brought to former Byzantium on the backs of Roman. In this life, her name meant, “to subdue, to tame.”
All at once, the meats, the spices, the city sounds and colors and smells were too much.
I pushed through my legion, vaporizing his shape as I picked an alley on blind faith and marched toward what I hoped would be her home.
The four-limbed legion appeared in front of me again as I marched over the large limestone slabs paving the road, nearly tripping on the packed dirt from one gray, flat rock to the next.
“Your Highness—”
I continued to walk, feeling nothing as his shape burst and reformed.
“My Prince, please, I must tell you—"
Just then, I caught the sharp, clean scent of the sky above the clouds.
Her. I had to be close. I’d followed my heart, and the unseen cord that tethered us drew me to her, even without the help of those who were created to serve me.
A burst of red—terracotta roofing tile—fell from overhead, shattering into a million pieces at my feet.
I squinted into the sunlight to see the undefined shadow of arms and legs as one of my legion grabbed a second tile and chucked it into the space before me.
The first appeared on the far side of the faux-danger, curved ochre pieces of someone’s home tossed for no gods-damned reason as they stood between me and my human.
“Wait! Wait.” He held up a pleading hand.
“You think clay will hurt me?” Heat flowed through me. I pointed at their sham attempt to wound me—a father who’d lost the last vestiges of patience with his children. “Unless I’ve been relieved of my crown and formally dispossessed from the royal family, you will stand down, now.”
The legion atop on the roof ceased his feeble attempts to delay me. The first member trailed me, his ever-shifting plumes of smoke taking up space in my periphery as he refused to obey a direct order.
“But, Prince. The conclave. Our meeting. The treaty. Those that left, sire. The ones who departed… They didn’t keep our… Told… Knows… Guard… There… Sire… Heaven…”
I hadn’t listened to a word he’d said from the moment I’d caught her scent on the wind.
The painfully clean lungful of air grew stronger. I rounded a corner, dragging my fingers along the pale bricks, counting the windows of the long, single-level building as I angled for the modest two-story home at the end of the street.
I skidded to a halt.
There, in the midday heat and light, seeped the shimmering glow of something ethereal from an upstairs window.
I began to run.
One stride for home.
A second for love and Love alike; the emotion, the compulsion, the person.
A third for our reunion.
A fourth—
I rammed into an unmovable wall long before I’d reached her front door.
I collided with the object with such force, it sent me sprawling onto my back, head bouncing against rock.
I blinked up at the white-hot sun, head spinning.
There was no time to process the impact before a weighty pillar crashed into my chest, pinning me to the limestone.
Reality flooded in from all directions. Every devastating revelation crushed me, some more literally than others.
It was no pillar on my chest; it was a foot.
The obstruction hadn’t been a wall; it had been an unseen man. No, not a man. This was no human. It was the heated glow of metal yanked from the forge, pressed against my throat. A mountain of beige leather and tanned meat glared down at me with blazing, golden eyes.
A wave of brown hair blocked the sun as he leaned toward me.
“The mighty Prince of Hell,” chuckled my assailant. “I was wondering when we’d meet.”
He’d had one singular advantage: the element of surprise.
I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t care what he was. He was in my way, and he’d lost his upper hand. Literally. No one stupid enough to launch into a villainous monologue deserved a fair fight.
I twisted to my left with explosive force, my right hand grabbing the ankle on my chest, rolling toward the blade as my left, open palm shoved the broad side of the blade.
The stranger lost his footing, the tip of his sword driving into the gravel as I turned my roll into a forceful sweep of my legs.
Already stumbling from my shove, my legs against the back of his calves landed him on his ass.
The second it took him to gather his bearings was all I needed. He threw his weight into his sword in a two-handed arc, but rather than eat into my flesh, the metal hit stone, for there a new shape planted four enormous paws where only seconds earlier, a man had stood.
Frothing lips pulled back from fangs.
Ears flattened against scalp.
Claws extended.
I caught the reflection of piercing white fur, jagged black stripes, and a half ton of an apex predator.
I unhinged my tiger’s jaw, snapping down before he’d regained control of the sword.
He scrambled beneath me as I bit into his face with every drop of strength, satisfied with the pop as my incisors pierced his skull.
The sword clattered to the ground as he continued to twitch beneath me, hands grasping for nothing as he tried, and failed, to latch onto my fur.
The hot, bitter rush of myrrh. I yanked my mighty head to the side, tearing the assailant’s face free.
He strained to stay upright, swaying as exposed brain tissue, the ripped dangle of a tongue, and gold, shimmering blood oozed from the stump of his neck.
I stuck out my tongue, dropping the angular jaw, straight nose, and popped eye sockets of someone who had either been very brave, or very stupid, to take on the Prince of Hell.
Glitter oozed between stones for all who had eyes to see what stood just behind the mortal veil.
A young boy ran by, dirty feet passing straight through the attacker’s legs, our realms meshed, yet wholly separate.
I wrinkled my nose at a familiar scent. It was sweet, and minty, and though I hated it, I couldn’t quite place why.
The oils…the perfumes…the baked in smell of—
The staccato slap of flesh on flesh tore my eyes to an imposing figure leaning against the clay wall.
He took three loud, slow, resonating claps.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I was nearly impressed that three notes of percussion conveyed such clear mockery without saying anything at all.
The man pushed away from the wall and strode toward the fallen assailant.
He kicked the leg, carefully avoiding the pool of metallic sparkles.