Chapter 14 Kate
KATE
“I’ve found something.”
I blinked at Marcus, trying to make sense of those words as I warmed my hands on my coffee mug.
Unless a demon forces the issue—or Timmy—I don’t wake up well.
Which was why I was hiding in the kitchen pretending to review training schedules while nursing my third cup of coffee and staring blankly at a spreadsheet that might as well have been written in Aramaic.
Now, however, my brain cells started to fire. “Something about Antonio?”
Mindy had managed to hack the USB drive’s password a few days ago, and Marcus had been printing out documents and poring over paper ever since.
I’d checked in on him twice, found him surrounded by stacks of printouts covered in his cramped handwriting, and quietly backed away.
Marcus doesn’t usually do research, but since this is about Antonio, he was going all in, and I knew that doing the research was his way of working through his grief.
“Come with me,” he said, which wasn’t an answer at all.
I wasn’t about to argue, though, so me and my coffee followed Marcus through the mansion’s quiet hallways.
Morning light filtered through the tall windows, casting long rectangles of gold across the hardwood floors.
From the dorm area wing, I could hear the muffled sounds of students moving around—footsteps, a door closing, someone laughing.
Normal sounds of a school going about its morning business.
We passed the sitting room where Laura was huddled with Stuart, both of them bent over laptops, probably reviewing the budget or some other essential administrative thing I was grateful not to have to think about.
Stuart looked up as we passed, and something in his expression made me pause—that distant look he got far too frequently now, like he was seeing something the rest of us couldn’t.
But then he blinked, and it was gone, and he went back to his computer.
I made a mental note to check on him later, then followed Marcus into the library.
Thanks to Eric’s love of rare books and his training as both a Hunter and an alimentatore—essentially a research guru—the school’s library is a bibliophile’s dream.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with ancient texts, leather spines cracked and faded with age.
Research tables scattered with papers and artifacts.
The smell of old books and older secrets.
Usually, I loved this room. But it wasn’t a place that Marcus frequently visited as a combat trainer, and when he made a point of closing the door behind us, I shivered as an invisible cloak of dread seemed to settle over me.
When we reached the biggest table in the center of the room, I saw why we were here—Marcus had spread Antonio’s materials across its surface like evidence at a crime scene. Which, I supposed, it was. Printouts. Photographs. Photocopies of documents so old the text was barely legible.
“Thank God for Mindy,” Marcus said, closing the heavy doors behind him. “That kid’s a whiz at research.”
“So what do we have?” I asked, glancing at the closed doors. This was bad. This was something he didn’t want anyone else to hear about. Not yet.
“A lot. Maybe some answers.” He paused, his expression strained as he added, “A few things you won’t want to see.”
I drew in a breath. “Whatever it is, just tell me. I’m sure I’ve dealt with worse.” I expected a snarky comment in response.
I didn’t get one.
Instead, Marcus selected a printout from the pile and slid it toward me.
The text was in Latin—because of course it was—but certain words jumped out at me even with my rusty translation skills.
Sanguinis. Blood. Porta. Door. Terra sacra, consecrated earth.
There was also a word I didn’t recognize, repeated throughout the document like a heartbeat—Samarek.
A name, I assumed. And considering who I was and what I did, I assumed it was the name of a demon.
“What am I looking at?”
He pulled out a chair and sat, then gestured for me to do the same. “Antonio was researching a ritual. Something called Samarek’s Rite. It’s old—medieval, maybe older. References to it appear in texts the Vatican has kept locked away for centuries. Forbidden knowledge, even by Forza standards.”
“Samarek,” I said. “I haven’t heard of him.”
“Old. Doesn’t slide into our world often.
And when he does, it’s usually bad.” He pulled another document from the pile—this one a photo of a page from an illuminated manuscript, the margins decorated with images that made my skin crawl.
Twisted figures. Writhing shapes. And in the center, something that might have been human once, if you squinted and ignored the horrific wrongness of its proportions.
“According to Antonio’s research, Samarek started out human. But ages ago, he began trading pieces of his humanity for demonic power.”
I shuddered as I studied the illustration of the thing that had once been a man. “Trading how?” I asked, keeping my voice level when I really wanted to cringe and
say, “Eww.”
“Literally how? No idea. But the bottom line is that he gave up a piece of himself—soul and body—and his sire demon replaced that offering with something from the other side. Over and over until there was nothing human left. Just...this,” he said, tapping the illustration.
“A patchwork demon, the old Hunters called him. Part human memory, part demonic corruption, all of it stitched together into something that shouldn’t exist.”
The coffee churned in my stomach. I’d fought a lot of demons over the years. Killed more than I could count. But this? This may well have been the creepiest thing I’d heard of.
“That’s...” I couldn’t find the right word. Horrifying really didn’t sum up the freak factor. “Why would anyone do that?”
“Power. Immortality. The usual temptations.” Marcus shrugged, but his eyes were grim. “The texts say Samarek was ambitious even as a human. A sorcerer, a scholar of dark things. He didn’t want to just summon demons—he wanted to become one. To transcend human limitations entirely.”
“Just when you think you’ve seen everything in this job...”
“Ah, but wait. It gets worse.” Marcus pulled out a printout of a photograph—grainy, dark, clearly taken with a flash in poor lighting conditions. But I recognized the image immediately.
The Signum Fidelis. The symbol we’d found burned into Antonio’s palm.
“This is Samarek’s Signum Fidelis,” Marcus said quietly. “His personal mark. Antonio had been tracking references to it for months before he died. That’s why he was coming here early, breaking protocol. He found something that scared him enough to risk everything.”
“Wait—he was coming here to get our help or because he thought we needed help?” Fear cut through me as I thought of Eric and Allie. Surely this freakish demon didn’t consider them brethren because they had demon essence woven through their humanity.
Did he?
“Marcus?” I pressed as silence lingered. “Tell me.”
He sighed, then nodded. “Okay. Okay, here’s the thing.
The ritual I mentioned earlier—Samarek’s Rite—it’s blood magic.
Very dark. Very dangerous. It can channel Samarek’s power for specific purposes.
Healing wounds that should be fatal. Curing poisons that have no antidote. Saving lives that should be lost.”
“But there’s a price,” I said, because there was always a price.
He nodded, then pulled one more document from the pile—I recognized it right away. One of Forza’s log sheets, part of an internal file that had kept track of hunter activities for millennia.
“Antonio found this in the archives. It’s a report from over twenty years ago. A hunter named Gregory Mathes performed Samarek’s Rite in Rome.”
Gregory Mathes. The name tugged at something in my memory. “Oh,” I finally said. “We worked with him a few times, back when Eric and I were still in Rome. Older guy. He’d been like a mentor to Eric for a while. You’re telling me he performed the Rite?”
Marcus nodded. “He performed the ritual to save someone who was dying. Someone who’d been poisoned by demonic venom and had only minutes to live.”
I went completely cold, my heart pounding in my ears.
I didn’t want to look at that document. Didn’t want to see what I already knew was written there.
“The ritual required blood,” Marcus continued, his voice soft. “Specific blood. From someone whose soul was connected to the dying person. Someone who loved them.”
“Marcus, no.”
He met my eyes, and I saw the sympathy there. The sorrow. “Eric’s name is on that report. He was the blood donor. And the person Gregory saved...”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
I looked down at the document. Read the words I’d been dreading. Eric’s blood. A demon’s bargain.
And my life saved.
But at what price?