Twelve Shades of Midnight:

by Liliana Hart

  The Adonis before me grinned lazily. “Speak of the Devil,” he said, his voice as heart wrenchingly beautiful as his features. “And he shall appear.”

  Chapter Seven

  With that, the Devil shot out his right hand toward the closest SANCTUS guard. “Besides,” he continued, “they stole me first.”

  The guard screamed as his gun turned to flames, the fire jumping from his weapon to one held by a soldier across the alley so quickly I could only stare. Then it leapt again.

  “Aleksander Kreios,” the Devil said by way of introduction. He didn’t let go of me as he stooped to pick up the golden box at his feet, examining it with marked distaste. “And now I think we should be leaving. Where is the plane?”

  “Ciampino Airport,” I said, still trying to process the carnage in front of me. Not very easy, given the smell of burning flesh on either side of us. “Thirty miles away. Were you the one watching me in the catacombs, then?” I frowned more deeply. “And how did you get in that box?”

  “It appears Armaeus did not expect us to meet. He always was a man of no manners, despite his protestations.” He nodded. “But we must away. As enjoyable as it would be to see these men suffer longer, we have other places to be.” He turned, guiding me over a man whose cries of torment only increased on seeing Aleksander Kreios standing over him. Kreios paused long enough to stop the guard’s screams—by kicking him savagely in the head. Then he turned back with a satisfied smile. “After you,” he said, gesturing me on.

  I glanced back as we strode away. The fires dissolved into dirty smoke as we moved farther down the alley, but half the men still seemed in abject pain, and the other half were held in some kind of thrall, none of them making a move. Breaking out onto a main street, Kreios walked into the still-scattered traffic, moving ahead of me to flag down a sleek Alfa Romeo. The driver stopped, pole axed with alarm, gaping at us as we approached his vehicle. Kreios put his hand on the hood appreciatively. “It is a fine car.”

  The man—a prosperous-looking businessman, judging by his suit and tie—promptly exited the vehicle with his briefcase in hand, standing by the driver’s side while the few cars that were on the street pounded their horns and angled around us. Kreios nodded to him and spoke in musically fluent Italian, something about a Banco Credito. The man just smiled magnanimously and gestured to his car. “È tutto tuo.”

  Then he walked off. Whistling.

  “You see?” Kreios said, dropping my hand to open the passenger door for me. “There are still men of refinement in this world.”

  I thought momentarily of exiting, stage left, but Kreios’s gaze held me. “Think carefully, Sara Wilde. You still have much to gain by remaining with me. Money, travel, and—” His brows lifted. “Now this is interesting. I have not been to Kavala in many years. Your desire to return those young women to their homes, it is a worthy goal.”

  I stared at him, not even remotely surprised at his intrusion into my thoughts. He was part of Armaeus’s stupid council. Reading minds was what they did. “So they are in Vegas?” I demanded. “They’re still alive?”

  “There is only one way to find out, it would seem.” He gestured at the Alfa Romeo. “And don’t you want to see where this leads next?” A chorus of police sirens suddenly screamed from a few streets over, and Kreios winked at me.

  “Rome is always so invigorating.” He leapt for the driver’s side, and I clambered into the passenger seat, barely getting the door shut before he slammed the car into gear. We raced through the streets, conversation impossible what with half the city roiling with lights and sirens, all of them seeming immediately behind us for the first few harrowing minutes. The usual thirty-minute drive took all of thirteen, and Kreios skidded onto the private airstrip and was out of the car before he’d even fully parked it, loping for the plane as his laugh soared through the air, beckoning me. I followed, braking uncertainly as he passed the stairway that hung from the side of the sleek craft, but he waved me up. “I will be right behind you,” he promised, lifting up the reliquary. “I just have to stow this someplace nice and warm.”

  “Wait!” I protested, even as he turned away. “Armaeus wanted to examine that—”

  But Kreios wasn’t listening to me anymore. He disappeared around the edge of the plane. Whistling.

  Despite my misgivings about what the Devil was doing with the shiny gold box, I climbed the stairs, the sounds of sirens still haunting me. I had little doubt that Kreios would be joining me for this flight to Vegas, at least. He’d gone through this much trouble to get out of Rome. Why would he screw things up now?

  Then again—until twenty minutes ago, I hadn’t even known Aleksander Kreios existed. The actual Devil. For the love of Kansas. Clearly, I hadn’t asked Armaeus for enough money.

  I clambered on board with a nod toward the woman who stood at the top of the stairway, perhaps the most attractive flight attendant in the history of aviation. The jet Armaeus had commissioned for this jaunt was sleek and well equipped, and apparently came with enough money to expedite minor inconveniences such as identity checks and customs management. The attendant followed me into the cabin and began to describe the plane to me in a silken, heavily accented voice. Then Aleksander Kreios was there, and the woman’s head seemed to separate completely from her body. Clearly, she was now his number one fan.

  While the attendant tried to recover her capacity for speech, I went to the bar, pulling out a bottle of water and listening to the captain crackling instructions over the intercom. Turning around, I watched the-man-who-would-be-the-Devil discuss the upcoming flight with his newest convert.

  Who is this guy, really?

  Aleksander Kreios was foreign born, just as the Magician was, but their similarities ended there. Well, some of them, anyway. As golden as the Magician was dark, Kreios sported a shock of sandy blond hair drifting over his lightly tanned skin. His large, sensuous eyes were jade green, his body sleekly built beneath his designer suit. The combination of high cheekbones and sculpted lips looked almost too perfect on a man, but the sexual aggression that lay barely restrained in the guy’s every move kept him from looking even remotely feminine.

  Could he seriously be the Devil devil? Or was his role constrained to serving as part of the Arcanan Council, one of the other apparently immortal sorcerers I had yet to meet? And either way, why hadn’t Armaeus warned me that I’d be carrying around some kind of canned master-of-darkness?

  Speaking of which…

  I pulled out my phone and punched in Armaeus’s digits. Though the Magician could haunt my thoughts when we shared a city, open bodies of water were his downfall. Something I’d finally had the pleasure to figure out on my own, because Lord knew Armaeus wasn’t big on giving me any shortcuts. Where magic failed, however, technology filled the gap. And by this time, the Magician had to be somewhere over the Atlantic, if not already in the US.

  The call rang through, and, as usual, Armaeus didn’t keep me waiting. Still, just as the call was picked up, my phone slipped out of my hand, leaving nothing behind but a shiver of promise, like a mild electrical charge against my fingertips.

  “Armaeus,” Kreios said in his luxuriously sensual voice, his eyes steady on mine as I shook out my hand. “Look what you have brought me.”

  He whirled before I could grab for my phone, and strolled across the floor of the cabin, oblivious to the attendant’s attempts to get him to sit, even as the captain’s voice sounded over the intercom again, instructing us to prepare for takeoff.

  “Yes, yes,” he was saying, and then, just as easily, he slipped into a language I had no knowledge of—something that didn’t sound even remotely European.

  I shook my head, irritated more at the loss of my phone than the man’s high-handedness. I was getting soft around the few members of the council I’d met, I realized, ready to put up with their bullshit way too easily. The Fool was reasonable enough, sort of like Loki’s nerdy younger cousin, with an affinity for fast cars and faster tech, but
the High Priestess was completely on the other end of the spectrum, haughty and lovely with long dark hair, flashing dark eyes, and an ability to whine that was almost a superpower unto itself. She had joined the council fairly recently, I got the feeling. But with these guys, that could mean any time after 1950.

  Still, Armaeus owed me a lot more than a tidy paycheck for this job, sending me into the freaking Vatican necropolis to steal the Devil without so much as a heads-up. Who did that!

  Just then, Kreios appeared in my line of vision, dangling my phone from his graceful fingers.

  I ignored it. “How long is the flight?” I asked instead, watching as he dropped the phone on the table beside me, then turned to sprawl in his own seat. I’d sat across from the Magician just hours before in almost identical positions, of course. But while Armaeus had breathed refinement and control, the quintessential European aristocrat, the Devil was like a half-drunk frat boy, lounging with one leg over the arm of the plush leather seat, his body canted back, his gaze several shades too contented.

  “Twelve hours, give or take,” he said. “Armaeus has a several-hour head start on us, but I’m sure he’ll be eager to see you again.”

  I looked at him. “There’s no way you’re the actual Devil.”

  “A matter of semantics, I suspect.” He smiled.

  “Uh-huh. And how again does the Prince of Darkness end up in the Vatican basement, exactly?”

  “So quickly does the rose turn to thorn.” Kreios betrayed no actual concern, his smile still laden with intent, his green eyes still hot. He showed no tell either, from what I could pick up—not a twitch, not a shiver, not an edge to his voice. “I was heading to Hungary quite some time ago, if it is truly now late spring…?”

  I nodded, and he continued. “On very good information from a man who, while not a friend, precisely, had certainly never been my enemy before now.”

  I frowned at him. Hungary had become a hotbed for the underground antiquities market over the past few years, but I’d managed to avoid the place so far. And the country was too far east for its lost children to find their way onto Father Jerome’s list. There were other watchers to care for them. Still…“What’s in Hungary?”

  “A family of mystics, as it happens. Very old, very well respected. They had gone to ground around the turn of the last century, and there was some indication that perhaps they had resurfaced with the recent…global rekindling of interest in the magical arts.”

  “I take it you didn’t find this family?”

  He shook his head. “Regrettably, no. I no sooner landed in Budapest than I was met by a group of very earnest young soldiers, some of whom I recognized this evening.”

  “The ones you set on fire.” Kreios merely shrugged. “They trapped you in the box?”

  “A charming thing, no?” He leaned back as if imagining it in his mind’s eye. “Diaboli Reliquiarum Thecam. The Devil’s Reliquary. The last time I saw it was in Consta—No!” He snapped his fingers. “It was Istanbul by then. Ah, how things change with the passage of time.” He regarded me with his heavy-lidded gaze. “A dear friend of mine, my mentor, if you will, had drawn the attention of some very unfortunate men, rigid adherents to a code of religious practice that we found tedious at best, despicable at worst. My friend, he had grown to become a person of prominence by this time, and to see him brought down by such unfortunate parasites was, as you might imagine, quite affecting.”

  I watched him, tracking the danger in his tone. Though his manner was still easy, the edge in his words was now unmistakable. “And how long was he in there?”

  The Devil shrugged. “As far as I know, they cleaned his ashes out of that accursed box in order to put mine in. And to that we should drink!” These last words were shouted, and the beautiful attendant materialized in the doorway to the cabin, hastening to his side.

  “Do you have a preference, Monsieur Kreios?”

  “Scotch,” he said, glancing at me. “It’s what the lady likes.”

  I stiffened. I was a fan of scotch, yes, but there was no way that I had said as much to Kreios in the few words we had shared—and I certainly hadn’t been thinking it. And I could not imagine that my beverage preferences had come up in the conversation between Armaeus and Kreios on the phone. Still, as the attendant looked over to me for confirmation, I nodded. “Glenmorangie.”

  Kreios raised his brows. “You seem quite confident that it’s in stock,” he said drolly, his grin widening even as my eyes narrowed.

  “And you seemed quite confident of my drink of choice. Why is that?”

  “One of my many charms.” He spread his hands, anticipating the return of the attendant with the glass at his side. She smoothly handed him the drink, then presented me with a cut-crystal tumbler as well. When she’d withdrawn to whatever antechamber served as her holding cell, Kreios lifted his glass high. “To Marcus, long of life,” he said robustly, the lilt in his voice breaking through, betraying his Greek heritage. “That he did not die in vain.”

  “To Marcus.” I nodded. The scotch was as smooth as I had come to expect, but it still burned a fiery trail down my throat. “That he had not died at all.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I would go that far,” Kreios said, angling his glass to me. “After all, without his death, there would have been no becoming for me. And then, my dear Sara Wilde, we would not have met. That would have been a pity.”

  I tried to hide my curiosity, but Kreios peered at me, his eyes missing nothing. “You have not worked with the council long, but it is still no excuse for Armaeus not to have introduced us.”

  “I’m not in the city much.”

  “Of course you aren’t.” Kreios’s smile was far too knowing. “Still, something could have been arranged, even before my unfortunate excursion, don’t you think? It is a curiosity that we have not met. And curiosities interest me.”

  I shifted uneasily in my seat. “I can’t see how it matters.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” Kreios conceded. “One evening of carnal pleasure with Armaeus, no matter how intriguing, does not a relationship make.”

  I scowled at him, knowing he was baiting me but unable to resist the challenge. “As you say.”

  His smile broadened, and he leaned forward, his entire being focused on me. The effect was heady, dangerous. “Well then. Since the Magician does not now share your bed, perhaps you can tell me how I might be of service.”

  “And perhaps,” I said, leaning forward as well, my gaze lingering on his eyes, the curve of his jaw, his sensual lips, “you could tell me why SANCTUS stuck you in that box.”

  Kreios’s laugh was a thing of raw, primal beauty and did nothing to ease the tension in the room. He took another sip of scotch, regarding me more closely over the rim of the glass. “Old prejudices die hard, Sara Wilde,” he said as he gestured with his glass. “The men who captured me are not the exact caste as the priests who incarcerated Marcus, but their desires are the same, as are their needs.” He rolled the glass in his hand. “Needs and desires are my stock-in-trade.”

  “What, the damning of souls lost its shine for you?”

  His smile was wicked. “Do you have a soul you’d like to be damned?” His gaze rested on my mouth again, stoking an alarming response until he settled back in his chair again. “I assure you, my role on this earth is nothing so tedious. How much do you—ah!” His beautifully arched brows lifted high, as if he’d had a flash of inspiration. “Has Armaeus told you so little, then?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Do you do that all the time, answering your own questions?”

  “Forgive me.” He inclined his head. “You will find that as cloaked as our dear Armaeus can be, I am his opposite. In this as in so many things. He uses only deception and illusion to gain his ends. I find that the truth can be far quicker—and, when skillfully applied, far more devastating.” He set his glass beside him, then clasped his hands together. “But I was telling you of my unfortunate altercation with SANCTUS.” He said the name wi
th a delicate twist of his lips, making it sound like an epithet. “What do you know of them?”

  He had the grace to allow me to actually answer this time. “Evil minions of some cardinal, dedicated to destroying all magical icons in the world.”

  Kreios nodded. “The role of the Arcanan Council since time was born has been to maintain the balance of all magic. ‘All magic,’ of course, presupposes that there will be dark to counter the light. Dark, as it happens, is my specialty.” He patted his own lapel, the soul of modesty. “The rest of it—the worship of an anti-God, fire and brimstone, eternal torment—that is not a construct of mine, nor of any of my predecessors, but the Catholic church does not see things in quite the same light, nor have they for centuries.” He shrugged. “I cannot blame them. Their zealotry has served them well. But—I, and Marcus before me, and all who came before him—we mean to enjoy this world, not bathe it in screams of terror.” He lifted his brows. “Which is not to say the occasional scream isn’t quite—satisfying, in the right context.” He grinned as I rolled my eyes. “But the ruination of the teeming masses is not nor has it ever been our purpose. It would be quite tedious, in fact, when there are so many pleasures to be had.”

  “Uh-huh. So if you’re not the real Devil, enemy of the Church, then why—”

  “Well.” Kreios spread his hands once more. “I never quite said I wasn’t an enemy of the Church. That would be a lie, and as I have told you—”

  “Right. Champion of truth, defender of honesty, got that.”

  He nodded. “Whatever you would know, I can tell you. Especially, as I have mentioned, your deepest needs, Sara Wilde. Your darkest desires.”

  “My worst fears too, I suppose?”