Chapter 15 Kate
KATE
Ifound him in the training room.
The space was large and open, designed for combat practice—padded floors, mirrored walls, racks of weapons along one side.
Eric stood in the center, working through forms with his blade.
The movements were precise, economical, the kind of muscle memory that only came from decades of practice. Thrust. Parry. Spin. Strike.
He was beautiful when he fought. I’d always thought so. Even now, with my heart hammering and my hands shaking and twenty years of secrets—again—sitting like poison in my gut, he still called to me, this man I could watch for eternity.
He turned when I came closer. And I watched the light in his eyes dim as he understood.
“Marcus put it together.”
I nodded. “Did you expect less of him?”
“Never.”
“Funny,” I said. “I expected more of you.”
“Kate.”
“You and demons and the damn secrets you share,” I snapped.
“When is it going to stop? First, the whole demon-bound-inside-you thing that, oh, impacted our daughter’s entire existence.
And now I learn that you used a demonic blood ritual to cure me?
That I have some of that essence, too? And you never once thought I might like to be clued in? ”
He dragged his fingers through his hair. “I know. Believe me, I know. I should have told you. I did tell Father Donnelly. He said it wouldn’t—well, that it wouldn’t mark you permanently. That its power would be drained away by the healing.”
I crossed my arms. “Great. You got off easy. What if that hadn’t been the case?”
“Dammit, Kate, you were dying. I’d do the same thing again today. And you know what? I think you would, too. For Allie. For Timmy. For Stuart.” He drew in a breath. “Maybe even for me.”
I blinked back tears. “Fine,” I snapped. “I get it. But it scares me.”
He took my hands in his. “I know,” he said softly.
“It scared me, too. But losing you scared me more. And it wasn’t like I could ask your permission.
You weren’t conscious. You were dying. And I would have sold my soul to save you.
” He drew in a breath. “I didn’t have to, though. The price was only blood.”
“You and I both know it’s never only blood.”
He shrugged. “You were dying. Even my life wouldn’t have been too great a price.”
I pulled my hands back, firm but still gentle. Because, yeah, I got that.
“You should have told me when we found Antonio,” I said, but there was no bite left in my voice. “You should have told me you recognized the mark when we were in the cemetery.”
“I didn’t. I swear. I knew it was a Signum Fidelis. But I didn’t know whose. Not until today when Marcus told me he’d identified the mark.”
“But you suspected.”
He shook his head. “No. I didn’t. Honestly, Kate, why would I? That was two decades ago. With everything that’s happened since then, why would seeing Antonio with a mark make me think of that horrible night and my goddamn deal with the devil to keep you alive? Katie, please. Believe me.”
“I do,” I said truthfully. “But Eric—Allie. You say it didn’t impact you, but what if it did her? What if now she’s connected to Samarek in some horrible way? Not just the essence of a demon, but some actual bit of that one inside her because you put its blood in me?”
A flicker of my own horror crashed over his face. “No. No. I just told you. The blood burned away with the healing. No traces left in you at all.
I studied his face, saw the certainty there. “You’re sure?”
“Father Corletti would have told me if that was a risk. And he would have said something when you were pregnant. We both know that. He’s not like Father Donnelly.”
I hugged myself. Father Donnelly was the priest behind the whole demon-in-Eric plan to make an uber-Hunter. But he hadn’t bothered to inform anyone in, oh, the Vatican until very late in the game. He’s also on a branch of my family tree, a little factoid I am always trying hard to forget.
Eric reached out and tentatively took my hands. “She’s fine,” he said gently.
I looked down at our twined fingers. “You have to stop hiding things from me.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t.”
“Dammit, Eric,” I began, but he stopped me with a finger to my lips.
“I have to tell you what affects you and Allie, but you’re not my wife. Not anymore. I know because you keep reminding me.”
He stroked my cheek, and despite everything, I melted a little. “I didn’t perform the ritual,” he said. “I was freaked out of my mind. You had maybe minutes to live. Gregory performed the rites. I was just...the ingredient.”
“The ingredient?”
“The blood source. The connection.” He crossed to the bench against the wall and sank down onto it as if exhaustion had overcome him. “Mathes knew things most hunters never learn—rituals and texts the Vatican kept locked away. You remember, right?”
At my nod, he continued. “I thought I could trust him with anything, and I was beyond glad that he’d come hunting with us that night.”
“What did happen that night?” I asked. “I don’t remember any of it.”
He hesitated, as if he didn’t want to go back.
I was beginning to think I’d have to push when he began, his voice low and flat.
“The three of us were hunting in Trastevere,” he began, referring to a historic neighborhood in Rome with a lively nightlife.
“You took a hit meant for me. The demon’s claws were poisoned—something ancient, something we’d never seen, and it was spreading fast. There was nothing I could do, so I picked you up and was going to try to race back to Forza. ”
I remembered. Fragments of it, anyway. The pain that had felt like fire spreading through my veins. The cold that had come after, numbing and final. Eric’s face above me, terrified, his voice breaking as he begged me to hold on.
“Gregory said he knew a way,” Eric continued. “A ritual that could channel enough power to purge the poison and heal the wounds. He said he’d read about it years ago.” His voice cracked slightly as he continued. “I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t care about the cost. I just wanted you to live.”
“What did he do?”
“He punched out the window of a closed shop, and we went inside, then down to the basement. He cut my palm, then drew symbols on the floor in my blood. Spoke words I didn’t understand—old words, in a language I’d never heard.”
I shuddered. Eric’s a genius with languages, ancient and modern. Even back then, if he hadn’t been familiar with the language, it must have been truly rare.
Eric’s hands had curled into fists on his knees. “There was a moment—just a moment—when I felt something reach through. Something vast and dark and hungry twisting inside.”
A chill ran down my spine. “Samarek.”
“I didn’t know his name then. I just knew it was wrong.
Powerful and wrong, and for a moment I was certain I’d screwed up.
” Pain colored his face, but then he took a breath, and his shoulders sagged as if he was reliving his relief all over again.
“Then you gasped, and your eyes flew open, and the poison was gone. Just like that. Like it had never existed.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and I knew he was battling tears.
I couldn’t blame him. My eyes were welling, too.
“And Mathes?”
The silence stretched. Then Eric whispered, “He collapsed. Right there on the floor, next to the symbols he’d drawn. Dead before I could even try to help him.”
He looked up at me, and his eyes were haunted. “That was the price, Kate. A life for a life. Gregory Mathes knew it going in. Knew someone had to pay. He chose to pay it himself so I wouldn’t have to.”
I stood there, trying to process. Twenty years. Twenty years of marriage and divorce and death and resurrection, and I’d never known. Never suspected that the life I was living—every breath, every moment—had been bought with another man’s sacrifice.
“So the ritual closed when Gregory died. That was the exchange.”
“Yes. Whatever door he’d opened, whatever connection he’d made to Samarek’s power—it sealed when his heart stopped.” Eric’s jaw tightened.
“If you’d asked—if Gregory had told you the ceremony would kill him—would you have done it anyway?”
He didn’t hesitate. “If he were truly offering? Yes. To save you, I would have said yes in a heartbeat.”
I blinked, fighting tears. “And what about now? I mean, why is he back? Why come here? Why kill Antonio?”
“I’ve been thinking about that since Marcus told me it was Samarek’s mark. I don’t know.” He drew in a stuttering breath. “But I have a guess.”
I felt suddenly cold. Eric’s guesses were as good as gold. And I could already tell that this one scared him.
“What? Dammit, Eric, what?”
“The Gate.”
It took me a second to figure out where he was going with that. When I did, I gasped.
“Allie,” I whispered. “You think he’s here for Allie?”
“She closed the gate,” he said. And that she had.
Our daughter had prevented the freaking apocalypse by closing and locking a gate to hell that was about to burst open and would have released a massive number of theretofore trapped demons.
A side benefit was that the gate she’d shut was connected to other gates all through our realm of existence, each connected to the other by a spiderweb of demony mystical threads.
To be honest, I don’t fully understand how it works—that’s Eric’s thing.
But I do understand the end result. Smaller gates all over the planet closed and locked that day, too.
And if one of those gates was Samarek’s back door, then my daughter trapped him.
And he’s probably pretty pissed.
“That’s my guess,” Eric said when I managed to put my thoughts to words.
“Samarek had been biding his time for centuries. Patient. Careful. Waiting and planning for the right moment to burst free and rampage through the human world. And then some teenage girl slammed the door in his face and ruined centuries of preparation in a single moment.”
“So he’s angry,” I said.
Eric almost smiled. “I think we can call that an understatement.”