by Black, Paula
Cradling the chalice in both hands, he passed the grisly thing from mouth to mouth, and each in turn, the horned devils drank greedily from it. Then Dante drank deep, the blood staining his lips.
A sort of peace settled over me, that lightness of knowing you’ve done everything you can, and your burden is in fate’s hands.
Nothing to do but wait for the end.
Konstantyn had said the capsule was ancient. Would it even work?
I’d know soon enough.
Incantations bounded around the stone room, so loud the candles flickered.
He’d promised death within minutes.
But he’d promised other things too, things that never came to pass.
What if he was wrong?
I felt nothing.
Someone coughed.
Choked.
As Dante lifted the cup to Konstantyn’s lips, the first of the seven fell to the floor, and in turn, the rest followed, clawing at their throats as they struggled to breathe.
A mask rolled to a stop against the foot of the altar, and my eyes found the face it uncovered. It was the doctor from the morgue, his white moustache speckled with red. He foamed at the mouth, and before my eyes, his red face swelled and distorted. Around me, five bodies danced to the Beastrider beat in a macabre death-throe twitching that left me shuddering.
“Whore!” Dante’s voice was thunder cracking over my pain-wracked body, and I jolted at the shout, wide eyes finding the furious storm of crazy striding towards me.
How was he still alive? How was I? I’d spat the poison into the cup as soon as I felt the capsule crack, but I fully expected to die. I’d only hoped to take as many of them with me as I could, but there wasn’t time to think about that now.
He flung the chalice across the room, splattering the walls. “What have you done, you whore? You’ve ruined everything! Do you know how long it will take me to assemble another seven? To find another body?”
“That was kind of the point, you sick bastard,” I said.
He spat in my face and I gave him a bloody smile, the pain that was riding me almost a high. Or maybe that was the cyanide, taking what life I had left.
Perhaps it wasn’t good to further enrage the psychopath. Dante snatched up the Friar’s favourite candle, its top quivering with a terrifying well of molten wax.
“You won’t need your eyes to perform.” He lifted the flame right over my face and I screamed as I slammed up, head-butting the candle and spraying the liquid wax into Dante’s face.
My skin burned with spots that caught me in the collision, but he was the one screaming now, and I got a certain satisfaction from watching the skin blister and peel as he raked his own flesh in mindless agony.
In the midst of the chaos, beams of light illuminated the candle-lit darkness, sweeping out to flash over my skin. I squinted at a head-on beam, trying to clear the spots from my vision and identify the people coming in.
In the end, I didn’t have to. They announced themselves.
“This is the London Metropolitan Police. Come out with your hands up.” There was authority and shock in that voice, and I knew the sight we must have made, blood and death and nudity all in one sordid place.
“Mother of God,” someone cried.
“It’s the Halloween party from Hell,” another said, kicking the mask that rolled under his feet.
“I think I know this one. Holy shit, that’s Oliver Dalton, from the homicide division.”
Tied to my sacrificial podium, I could do nothing but slump in relief. My eyes sought out Konstantyn through the darkness, and the flash of green in his eyes as he smiled weakly at me was all I needed to keep breathing. He hadn’t drunk from the cup.
Gracie had called for help, and they’d come. They’d finally come.
Dante was still screaming, fighting the officers who had him pinned to a wall while they cuffed him. “I have diplomatic immunity. You can’t touch me. Do you understand?”
A police officer whirled him about and shone a torch right in his face. He recoiled from the light. His horns were gone, I noticed. When he’d found the time to remove them, I couldn’t say. As for his reptilian eyes? Well, they were swollen almost shut by the molten candle wax.
A kind-faced female officer draped me in a shock blanket and as she worked to free my wrists and ankles, I glimpsed Mariya being marched away in handcuffs. I heard none of the officer’s soothing nonsense or soft questions. All my attention was on Konstantyn, who’d been released from his chains.
He looked so strong as he strode towards the officers wrestling with Dante’s claims of diplomatic immunity.
“Are you immune to this, asshole?” Konstantyn growled. None of us saw the fist coming, but suddenly Dante was an unresponsive heap on the floor, and Konstantyn was shaking out his hand as the police moved to restrain him. I shivered in my blankets and laughed when he just grinned at them.
“It’s okay. I’m done,” he said, weaving on his feet.
They shook their heads, the looks on their faces the universal expression for ‘so done with this shit’, but then Konstantyn’s knees buckled, and like watching it in slow motion, he hit the ground with a muscled thud. Officers and medics rushed to his side while I watched on in a daze, seeing his blood creep across the floor as they gathered around him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The city hospital was both the last and the only place I wanted to be. Though the police and medical staff treated me like fine china from the moment they’d unchained me and draped the blanket around my naked shoulders, there was no getting around the unpleasantness of the intimate examinations and probing questions their investigations required. Those first days I’d spent in a dreamlike bubble, robotically following commands, and scarcely believing the events of the past week were anything but a terrible nightmare.
My awakening finally came with the news that my request to see Konstantyn had been granted. Now that I was actually walking the sterile corridors in my slippers and hospital gown towards him though, I was in danger of losing my nerve.
You need this, Neva, if only to get closure.
All the same, the thin cotton of my hospital gown shimmied with a tremble that was nothing to do with the cold gusts blowing up through the lobby from outside. I turned a corner, shuffling past the discrete mortuary sign that never failed to get my spine tingling. It was there in that same morgue I’d said goodbye to my brother Daniel.
Had the cogs of fate turned in another direction, it would be my lifeless body laid out on one of its cold slabs, I thought.
But fate had taken a different direction, and so did I. Hurrying to the open elevator, I stepped inside and punched the button for the male wards on the second floor. I used my reflection in the stainless steel walls to fix my hair and pat some colour into my shadowy cheeks.
He’s already seen you at your worst, I reminded myself, but it did nothing to ease my nervous fidgeting.
I didn’t need to ask for Konstantyn’s room. The two police officers standing sentinel outside were a dead giveaway. I’d had a matching pair outside my own room until that morning, when the powers that be decided any threat to my life had passed. I even recognised the bald man with the goatee as one of my former guards.
“Hey Jamie,” I quipped and he returned my smile. It was good to see a familiar face. The guy had been approachable from the get-go, good for passing the time with talk about movies and books, all that normal stuff. I got the impression if he weren’t on duty, he’d have been hitting on me.
“Neva, what brings you up here?” he asked.
“I’m here to see Konstantyn,” I said, with a shy smile. “He’s expecting me.”
I caught Jamie’s look before he had a chance to shut it down. Disapproval, or disappointment, I couldn’t be sure.
“Go on in,” he said.
I swallowed, took a deep breath and pushed through the double doors into the private room. The lights were down, and only the colourful array of monitors illumi
nated the room.
“Hi,” I said.
His beautiful mouth spread into a smile that lit up the darkness. “Hi.”
God he looked exactly as I remembered him. My mind had tried to process so much over the preceding days, I’d begun to wonder if I’d conjured him from my imagination.
“It’s dark in here,” I said, barely raising my voice above the whisper the subdued surroundings demanded.
“This is my enforced rest time,” he said sourly. “And I thought Ukrainian nurses were strict.”
“I’m sorry. I came at a bad time.” I turned, already reaching for the door.
“No. Stay, please stay. I hate hospitals.”
“Me too.” I smiled and ventured a step closer.
Konstantyn grabbed onto the handgrip dangling above the bed and pulled himself up the bank of pillows at his back. The white sheet slid down his bare chest, revealing bandaged ribs and a plastic tube that fed from his chest cavity into a fluid-filled drain on the floor.
He coughed and air bubbled up through the liquid. “The blade punctured my lung, and my liver,” he explained, arranging the sheet across his hips.
Concern widened my eyes. “You shouldn’t be moving.”
“Pft. I’ve survived worse,” he said, and patted the bed for me to come sit by his side.“Besides, my ass was numb from lying down.”
“You don’t get to complain about a pain in your ass,” I said, giving him my best glare. It was hard to disguise my smile though. It was so damn good to see him alive.
He winced. “How is the tattoo?”
“Itchy as hell, if you must know.”
At least he had the decency to look sheepish.
Mindful of all the tubes and wires, I perched on the edge of the mattress and the conversation took a serious turn. “I thought you were dead, after you punched Dante, and you passed out. I thought I’d lost you.” My eyes stung with the threat of tears and I bit down on my lip to stop them coming.
“Hey.” His fingertips grazed my arm. “They call me Lazarus for a reason, remember?”
“Yeah,” I laughed and dropped my gaze into my lap.
I felt his knuckles stroke my jaw as he murmured, “You bit the bullet.”
I flipped my eyes up to his and saw an emotion in his green-flecked eyes that looked a lot like awe.
“That took real guts,” he said.
I shook my head. “I had nothing left to lose.”
“You had your life.”
A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. “You were dying, and if I had to die too, I was taking those bastards down with me.”
He grinned his approval.
“The doctors said it was a miracle I wasn’t poisoned.”
“Is it possible you have an immunity?”
I shook my head vigorously. Immunity was unheard of. I’d picked the doctors’ brains about it until I was blue in the face. There were some crackpot theories that the Russian monk Rasputin had been immune, but other than that, the only way to avoid the effects was to take tiny doses over a long period of time, and build up a tolerance. Clearly that didn’t apply to me.
“Dante wasn’t affected either,” Konstantyn murmured.
I looked away, not liking his implication one bit. Dante had hinted about my paternity, but if that were true, what in hell did that make me? Part demon? No. The guy was a deranged sicko with a wildly overdeveloped fantasy life. To accept any other reality would be to admit my own insanity. “They’re working on the theory I somehow managed to crack the rubber and glass just enough to spit it in the cup without getting the cyanide in my mouth.”
Konstantyn sucked on his teeth and nodded, accepting the whitewash for what it was.
“They pumped me full of antidote and had me hooked up to all kinds of monitors for days. But I knew, once Alexei fell. I knew then I wasn’t going to die. My biggest fear was that they’d make you drink first. That I’d have to watch you die by my hand.”
“It would have been a mercy. I was good as dead already.”
“Have you seen the newspapers?”
“Da.” He leaned over to rummage in the bedside locker. The movement triggered another fit of coughing and the liquid in the drain rumbled ominously. I opened my mouth to protest but he waved me off, dumping a stack of broadsheets and tabloids onto the bed as he settled back against the stacked pillows.
I’d read most of the salacious headlines. Having a senior politician, a surgeon and a high-ranking police detective embroiled in an occult sex ring was enough to whip the media sharks into a feeding frenzy. That they’d died of cyanide poisoning in the midst of a masked orgy was more chum in the water. There were interviews with some of the survivors, and photographs, including some of Daniel, but I’d had to skim over those.
“Have you been approached?” Konstantyn asked.
“Hounded more like.” I’d turned down some seriously large sums from newspapers wanting to buy my exclusive story.
He frowned at that.
“I just want to put this whole horrible experience behind me,” I said, heaving a sigh.
The disappointment I caught in his eyes was unexpected, but it was gone before I could place the reason for it.
“It’ll blow over soon enough,” I said, forcing a smile. “I just can’t believe Dante didn’t make the front pages.” I leafed through the newspapers at the top of the pile. One had a mention, on the third page, about a member of the cult receiving severe burns to his face during the struggle, but that was the extent of the coverage about Dante Barron. He wasn’t even named.
“The authorities must tread carefully to avoid a diplomatic crisis. Dante has immunity. He will never stand trial in this country. All they can do is deport him back to the Ukraine.”
I felt my jaw tighten. “It’s not right. He can’t just walk away from this.”
“He can. I told you, nobody in my county will touch the man.”
“Where’s the justice in that?”
“You want me to kill him for you?” he asked, and his hand curled around my thigh. “I can do it.”
“No,” I lied. Yes, I wanted him dead, but more than that, I wanted Konstantyn alive. Pressing my lips into a hard line, I shook my head. “Enough killing.”
“He can’t walk away from cancer,” he replied, stroking my thigh through the thin hospital gown. His touch was equal parts reassurance and distraction. “By all accounts, you’ve left him blind too. He will really hate that. Cyanide would have been too fast. His will be a slow, humiliating death. Perhaps that’s punishment enough, for a man who could never accept his own mortality?”
The desire for revenge pounding behind my breastbone said it wasn’t nearly enough, but I held my tongue. Something told me if I voiced the truth, Konstantyn would be dragging himself, chest drain and all, on a do or die vengeance mission across Eastern Europe. I thought I’d lost him once, my fragile heart couldn’t take that again.
“How’s your mother?” he asked.
“Still refusing to see me. Maybe it’s for the best.” The last thing I needed was another person reinforcing my crazy. “Have you heard from your sister?” I whispered.
Konstantyn’s lids fell and he shook his head. “Last I heard, she was taken into custody,” he said tightly. He dragged his fingertips down his temples and muttered what I took to be curses in his mother tongue. “I never knew she was helping Dante.” I watched his hands curl into fists. He couldn’t even look at me when he spoke. “He played me. They both did. I am sorry, Neva. So sorry.”
“Hey.” I smiled and cupped his jaw, loving the scratch of his beard growth against my palm. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”
“I told you I’d do whatever it took. I had to play a part, to get a foothold in their inner circle. I thought Dante would kill me on sight if he knew the truth.”
“I know that now,” I said, dropping my hands into my lap. “I should have known all along. Time and again, you stopped them from hurting me. But being tied up, alone, and knowin
g what was to come, my mind became my enemy. I couldn’t make sense of it all: Why you’d singled me out at the audition, why you chased me down the road and brought me to your apartment. The only logical explanation was that you targeted me, from the very beginning.”
“I did target you,” he replied, and there was a roughness in his voice.
My eyes flipped up to his, startled.
“Just not for the reasons you think.” His smile made my insides clench.
I raised a shy brow in question.
“Neva. The moment I set eyes on you in that audition, the rest of the room disappeared. You must have known. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t help myself. Against my better judgement, and out of pure selfishness, I chose you for the demonstration. I wanted to touch you, to feel this beautiful, soft skin against mine.” His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth, grazing my lower lip, and I struggled to calm the urgency that crept into my breathing. “Your defiance stirred something in me. And then we danced, and it was physics, chemistry and biology all rolled into one mind-blowing addiction.
“I felt it too,” I said, breathless. My head was light, like I was floating.
“But I was an asshole,” he said, frowning. “I shot you down in front of all those people, because I thought they’d seen my weakness for you. The more I tried to deny the attraction, the more you became a dangerous obsession. I could think of nothing but the next time I’d get to dance with you. But then, when I recognised you in the club, I resented you seeing me like that.” His jaw tightened. “Prostituting myself.”
“You weren’t. Not really.”
“Da, but you didn’t know that, and it could be no coincidence you were following me. The best agents employ seduction as a weapon. That explained it. You were sent to bewitch me, and I had to cut you loose. Except after I kicked you out of the auditions, I found I couldn’t let you go.”
“I’m glad you chased me.”
“Yeah?”
I bit back a smile. “Yeah.”
His hand found the nape of my neck, burrowing into my hair, drawing my mouth down onto his, and we kissed with the raw passion of survivors. His tongue demanded access and I opened myself up to him, relishing the burn of his stubble on my chin. He claimed me with rough dominance, hauling me up his body until I was straddling his hips, only the thin cotton of our hospital gowns separating the hard press of his erection from where I so desperately needed him to be. No apologies. No holding back. We’d danced with death and come out with our hearts synchronised to the same desperate beat.
