20. Valefar
Valefar
Iknow what it is before it finishes detaching from the wall.
The markings—five binding sigils etched into its flanks, barely visible beneath centuries of limestone dust—I have seen them before, in the Pit, on the walls of the second enforcement chamber.
A hellhound.
They are older than the church above us by at least four hundred years. They are, in the precise terminology of infernal practice, a ‘custodem perpetuum’. An eternal guardian. Bound to this place. Given no choice in the matter.
I feel something closely adjacent to sympathy. Then it opens its jaw and lunges for my face. The feeling vanishes.
I catch its throat with both hands, and my heels drag backward across the stone floor as it drives me toward the far wall.
It is almost my height. Its body is skeletal and ancient—joints of black, calcified bone, ribcage like a collapsed vault, eye sockets burning with a dull infernal red.
Not the elegant predator of hellhound mythology.
This is something older, cursed to a single purpose for so long, it has become its only purpose.
My only purpose is protecting Vesper. This is a fiery, hellbent determination, forged in my blood, radiating from my very damned soul.
I shove it sideways with everything I have, and it crashes against the wall.
The impact cracks the stone from floor to ceiling.
A gargoyle mounted in the left alcove loses its head in a clean diagonal break.
Stone dust rains in a wide curtain. The hound scrabbles, catches itself, and rounds on me with a long-awaited fury and is deeply offended at any delays.
“Val.” Vesper’s voice comes from beyond the iron fence. “What does ‘qui sub lapide requiem petit’ mean?”
I duck the first swipe. The hound’s claws catch my shoulder, and the cold-fire bloom of it spreads across my back, but I set it aside.
“Who seeks what rests below this stone,” I translate.
A pause. The scratch of her thumbnail on her palm. “Next line. Non mendacio—”
The hound hits me in the chest with its full weight.
We go over backward together. The iron fence around the coffin catches my spine with a shriek of bending metal.
My bones jar. I feel the rail fold under the impact and make an internal note, as iron does not make that sound when it’s having a pleasant experience.
I get one hand under the hound’s jaw and the other around its throat and push. “—sed veritate,” I finish, through my teeth, because I am a goddamn professional. “Must not come here with lies alone.”
I bring my tail around in a full arc and crack it across the hound’s flank, hard enough to raise stone dust from its ribs. It recoils with a grinding yelp, and I shove off the ruined section of fence and roll upright. The bite on my shoulder is already healing. The back is taking longer.
“You are significantly uglier up close,” I tell the hound pleasantly.
It snarls. Foam drips from its lower jaw.
“Oh. That hurt your feelings?” I roll my shoulders back. “Good.”
The humor helps mask the bone-deep fear I feel for Vesper. It centers me, enabling my focus.
When the hound lunges again from the left, I sidestep, catching its rear leg with my tail and whipping it directly into the opposite wall.
It hits the stone like a catapult striking a fortress.
Both remaining sconces along the far alcove shatter.
Rock shards scatter across the floor in a wide radius and rattle against the iron fence.
The hound gets up immediately. “That,” I say, “is genuinely unfair.”
“Non clavis,” Vesper calls from the coffin, slightly breathless. “No key, right?”
“No key,” I confirm and step wide to my right, drawing the hound’s attention away from the window. My tail moves in a slow warning arc.
“Non vis hanc sedem movet—” she shouts.
The hound feints left. I do not take it. “—no force shall move this place,” I answer. “What’s the next part?”
The hound coils back on its haunches, and I judge the angle of its weight distribution with seventeen centuries of experience. I unleash my claws, prowling, mirroring its movements.
“Sola veritas faciem tenet.”
“Only the truth worn on your face,” I translate again.
A brief, expressive pause from the other side of the wall. “Is this man serious—”
“Vesper,” I redirect.
“Right. Sorry. Next line.”
The hound launches off its back legs and catches me by the forearm. I do not go down. I will give the creature credit for the strength of its bite; the cold-fire of it grinds through the muscle like a vice made of old ice. My knees bend from the sheer force.
Digging my claws into the back of its neck, I drag it sideways, and we spin together until I find the edge of an alcove and slam it into the stone frame hard enough to crack the arch.
The bite releases.
I step back. Blood runs down my arm. The pain is dim compared to the adrenaline roaring through my blood. Nothing will deter me from my mission. Protect Vesper.
“I knew a three-headed dog once,” I inform the hound. “Every head had much better manners.”
It snarls and drives forward. It bites down again on the same arm, directly over the existing wound.
“Bad dog,” I scold. It bites harder. “Right. Fair criticism.”
“Val—‘quod in pectore latet inauditum’.” Vesper shouts, her voice focused, aware that she’s up against a ticking clock.
I block a swipe with my forearm—wrong choice; its claws rake directly across the bite wound. Even as the extreme torment sears through me, I process the phrase simultaneously.
I bellow through the pain, “What lives unspoken in your chest!”
“What?”
When the hound charges again, I dodge out of the way, striking its muzzle with my tail. “Something you haven’t said aloud, Ves—something you’ve been keeping—”
The hound hits me low, and I go down on one knee. Both hands catch the floor. I breathe through it, recalibrate, and push back upright. Nothing about the next phase of battle will be comfortable.
“Last line,” I say. The words come out more strained than intended. “What is the last line?”
A scrambling sound. The scrape of stone on stone. “Dic in altum et—transibis? I think? Ugh!” she groans. “My seminary Latin is apparently decorative—”
“Speak it aloud and pass! The truth in your heart.” Gods, it sounds ridiculous coming from my mouth.
A silence. Then, quiet and incredulous and directed at no one in particular, I hear her mutter, “Why couldn’t this man just write ‘use the stone wisely’ and call it a day—”
“VESPER!”
“I know, I kno—”
The hound drives into me with its full weight and takes me to the floor.
I fall hard, on my back. Its jaws open over my chest—the killing position.
I lock both hands around its lower jaw, my claws driven into the calcified bone, every muscle in my arms shaking with the effort of preventing those teeth from closing around my throat.
My tail is pinned beneath me. I cannot get leverage.
The hound’s eye sockets blaze down at me. Ancient. Bound. Patient, as if it has waited six centuries for this.
“The descendant of the goddess Bastet,” I tell it, the veins bulging in my neck, “loves to chase my tail. She is better behaved than you, Scooby Doo.”
It presses down another inch.
“Valefar!”
“I’m fine,” I insist. “Keep reading.”
And then her voice rings through the crypt. Not a question. Not a mutter. Full, open, unstoppable—the specific quality of truth that comes out when a person runs entirely out of room to keep it in:
“I’M IN LOVE WITH A DEMON!”
I go completely still. The hound’s jaw presses down, and I do not notice.
The grinding crack of the stone coffin’s lid is enormous.
Pale gold light flares through the bars of the window—warm, resonant, the luminosity of a ward stone recognizing the truth that activated it.
A sound like a long exhale moves through the walls, through the stone itself, as though the entire crypt has been waiting to breathe.
I am still not moving. The hound snaps its jaws two inches from my face. I take the full weight of its next lunge on both arms, and I do not look away from Vesper.
Something with a depth both mighty and wordless thunders in my chest.
The truth. She spoke the truth.
The scrape of stone from the coffin lid. Her hand closes around the ward stone, whole and awake and singing at a frequency I recognize from the deepest parts of what I am. A muttered ‘sorry, I’m so sorry’ directed at Elias Doran, the practical corpse, resting beneath it.
The hound swings its head toward the sound of her vaulting the iron fence. I wrench both its jaws sideways with the last of my available leverage. “Eyes on me,” I command, all my hellbent determination flaring with need to hold it here. I’ll take a fatal blow—as long as she is safe.
Vesper hits the ground beside us at a dead run.
She slides to her knees and presses the stone against the hound’s flank.
The sound it makes is not a yelp. Not a snarl.
It is something merciless, a single high grinding note which moves through every frequency at once.
And then it’s a tide going out. The moment it explodes, I dive for Vesper.
Bone to stone. Stone to dust. I cover her, blanketing her from the smithereens.
Finally…a fine scatter of grey settles slowly across the floor of the crypt and does not move again. Our heavy breaths tangle. My arms loosen, and I heave a sigh and lie on the cold stone and breathe.
Vesper’s arms close around me before I have fully registered that the fight is over. She presses her face into my neck with a fierceness entirely inconsistent with her usual reserved feelings. I feel her shoulders shaking once, unstoppable tremors releasing a long-held pressure.
I groan. Several places along my body currently hold significant grievances, and I cannot disguise them. But my arms go around her immediately, and I pull her in and press my face into her curls. I breathe her in. Cedar. Sage. Cold coastal air. Something warm and entirely hers.
“I may be bleeding like a stuck swine,” I express into her hair. “But for some reason, I feel no pain.”
She makes a strangled sound, not quite a laugh, almost a whimper. “I was so afraid. I was afraid I was going to lose you.”
I lie with her weight against my chest and stay here for a moment.
Then I cup her face in both hands and tilt it up.
Those emeralds are so bright, so fathomless; I do not yet have adequate language to describe it.
The edges are wet. She does not cry. She is simply close to it.
I am grateful she may cry in my presence.
I wish to be a safe place for all her emotions.
And the most recent…it is the strongest.
“I’m here, Vesper.” I hold her gaze. “And I am not going anywhere.” A beat. She does not blink. “You truly meant it. The truth vow.” I take a deep breath. “You are in love with me?”
She nods. A small nod, but no hesitation.
Her lashes catch the dim light. “It makes no sense,” she says.
“And it makes perfect sense. You make sense…to me, Valefar. You fit with Bethie, with my shop, with the life I fought so hard to build. Everything in my life wants you in it.” Her voice softens.
“Me, most of all.” She stops, searching my face.
I lower my lips to her brow and hold them there.
“If I may be equally honest, Mistress.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend.
“I cannot fall in love with you.” A beat.
Her lips part, but I go on, “For I already have. Unconditionally. Unequivocally. And eternally. I love you, Vesper Elizabeth Larson.”
Her arms tighten around me, straining my three existing wounds, but I do not mention any of them. “I heard you last night,” she admits, chewing on her inner cheek. “Right back at you, Big Guy. I love you, too.”
My tail instinctively slides along her spine, slow, a language it reserves for her specifically. When it slips below her shirt, she goes still. And then she squirms—and then she giggles, a sound of such pure involuntary delight, I will carry it for the rest of my existence.
“Apologies, Ves,” I say, with complete dignity. “It has a mind of its own, as you well know.”
“It’s fine.” She tilts her face up. Her color is high and lovely, and she is biting her lower lip, a gesture catastrophic to my self-regulation.
“My body consents to be your tail’s playground whenever its mind wishes.
And, um.” Her lashes lower. Warmth and mischief frolic there. “We have the stone.”
“Mmm. Indeed, we do.”
“And…it’s mostly private here.”
I glance around, taking stock of the environs. Whatever magic exists in this place has resealed the coffin with admirable discretion. No temperature changes. No dark presences.
There is something else in her voice, though. Something I have become intimately acquainted with over the past few months.
Before I can pursue it, her expression changes. Her gaze drops to my sweater. The fabric is torn through at my shoulder and along my side, blood drying around the shredded holes.
“Oh my God, Vale. I’m sorry. We need to—I have a first-aid kit in the car.”
She starts to pull away, but I catch her gently around the waist. “No, Vesper. I am healing.”
“You’re still bleeding.”
“Temporarily.” I draw her forward again, until she is stationed just above my waist. “And there is absolutely no chance I will permit you to leave such a flawless location without telling me what was responsible for that particular expression before you noticed the blood.”
Her mouth twitches. “What look?” She tries to play innocent, but the blush in her cheeks testifies to my suspicions.
I take her hips solidly in my grip before fondling the luscious curves of her ass. “Tell your demon now, Vesper,” I growl. When her lips part in a silent moan, but her thighs clench, I grin, showing my full teeth.
She lasts approximately two seconds. “Okay, okay!” she says, flustered before leaning over to skate her fingertips along my chest. “I’ve always wanted to have sex in a cemetery. And the underground crypt is just a bonus.”
I study her face. Vesper is lying against my chest in a subterranean chamber beneath a Catholic cemetery on the Oregon coast with the remnants of an ancient guardian all around us—and the sound of her “I love you” lingering like a sacred prayer.
“Well, then,” I declare, combing my hand through her hair. “I will be honored to help you check such a venture off your bucket list, so to speak.”
“If you feel up to the task.” The tone is specifically, calculatedly cheeky. She smirks at me.
“Oh, you naughty beastie.” I sit up, and she sits with me.
I narrow my eyes, piercing her with the full weight of my intention.
“For that, you are going to stand before me, remove every item of clothing you are wearing, bend over that coffin, ” I gesture to it, “and take your spanking like a good girl.”
Her grin is, without qualification, the most radiant thing I have encountered in seventeen centuries.
“Yes, Sir,” she says.