No, he had other plans for the blood, ones Kara could never know about.
22
The moonlight revealed the bleached white bones buried in the blood-soaked cob in stark relief.
I should have burned this place to the ground. Ash would have, too, if he hadn’t been concerned he might lose the ability to break the curse. He’d scoured the tower from top to bottom, but there was still a chance the secret was hidden somewhere inside.
A light step alerted him to Kara’s approach.
“I have to give you credit,” he said without turning around. “That was nearly soundless.”
“Apparently, it wasn’t close enough since you heard me,” Kara growled, coming to stand beside him.
They stared at the abomination in front of them in silence. It said a lot about their daily reality that neither of them flinched or looked away.
“How many bodies in this one?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.
“You don’t want to know.”
Her glance betrayed mixed emotions—annoyance he wouldn’t answer along with a tinge of gratitude.
“Well, let’s not waste any more time.” She headed for the entrance, but without Ash, there was no way she was going to cross the threshold.
“Here, let me,” he said, stepping in front of her.
The door was barred with the thickest steel Bastille could make. He’d carved the sigils on it himself. The angelic wards couldn’t be broken by any demon-born, nor the vast majority of humans.
He opened the lock with the key and threw the bar back. The creaking grind of steel on steel reverberated through the night air. He pushed open the door to reveal a yawning darkness.
Assuming it was over, Kara started to walk around him. “Not yet,” he said, reaching down to fish his blade out of his boot.
Kara’s eyes widened as he held up his arm and cut himself across the forearm. He touched his fingers to the blood, and drew across the air in the threshold. The traces of blood floated in the space before flaring bright and burning out in a shower of golden embers.
She whistled. “Nice.”
“Wait. There’s four more.” More blood, more sigils—one for each of the different species he’d run into onto his time on earth. When he was finished, he turned back to her.
Kara’s expression was wry. “You weren’t taking any chances, were you?”
“Too much at stake.”
“Well, I’m honored to be the first human to cross this threshold.”
He frowned. Had she forgotten the human sacrifices killed to fuel spells, or somehow missed the bones poking out of the walls?
Kara wrinkled her nose. “Wait, that came out wrong. Never mind.” She waved her gaffe away with an expression of self-disgust and crossed the threshold, slipping into the black darkness beyond.
“I brought a torch,” he said, taking out the hand-crank flashlight he’d meticulously repaired. He wound it. The weak light glowed anemically, barely lighting the area around their feet.
“Forget it. Save it for reading—if we find anything.” She continued up the stairs, leaving him and the light behind.
Ash hurried after her, concerned she might misstep in the dark. But Kara was way ahead of him, as surefooted up the pitch-black stairs as he was.
The first level was empty. The demon king had used it for meetings and the occasional orgy. The chambers here had been untouched, mainly because there hadn’t been much in them to begin with.
Together, they cleared the first and second level within the hour. The third was a far greater challenge.
“This is where most of the books were,” he said, gesturing at the empty shelves. He pointed to the left, where he’d inflicted the most damage during the battle with the king. “The altar room was through there.”
The broken arch had been haphazardly reconstructed to let him access the room for his various searches. It would hold for now, but he was prepared to fly Kara out if an earthquake started.
The hole he’d made slamming Amducious’ body through the wall would make a convenient exit if that was the case.
Kara raised her brows at the breach in the ceiling, but chose not to comment.
A solid grey granite block dominated the center of the room. Its pitted surface was permanently stained black with blood. Human and lower demon both. Here in the altar room, the demon king hadn’t much cared which was sacrificed. If any of his followers failed to meet his expectations, they were no safer from his wrath than the humans he spit on.
Kara averted her eyes from the altar. She focused on the walls. Most of the space on them was inscribed with demonic sigils and runes.
“What is this?” she asked, frowning at the long scrawl dominating most of the wall next to the arched entrance.
“It’s their language. Surely you’ve seen the graffiti all over town?”
“Yes, but…it’s not like this,” she said, gesturing to the string of profanity. Her head drew back. “It’s a whole bloody paragraph…I guess I never thought of it as a language of its own, one with rules and syntax.”
Ash sighed. “The demon dialect is a foul tongue. It used to make my skin crawl just to look at it written like this,” he admitted.
She rubbed her arms, flicking him a troubled glance. For a human being, witnessing this would be a hundred times worse. “Does it still?”
“Not anymore,” he said truthfully. “After a dozen or so visits, I suppose I became inured to it.”
He wanted to tell her it would be the same for her, but didn’t. With luck, she would only be exposed to this filth this once. If she didn’t see anything this time around, there was little point in making her come here again and again.
Kara tore her eyes away from a particularly profane imprecation written behind the broken door. She pointed up at the twisted metal girder worked into the peak of the tower. “Is that part of the Eiffel tower?”
“Yes, it is.”
She stared avidly at the still-recognizable lattice metal frame. Her brow furrowed as a thought occurred to her. “Were you here when it went up?”
Glad for the distraction, he smiled in reminiscence. “I was. I thought it was magnificent, although I was in the minority.
Kara blinked. “Really?”
He nodded. “It was grossly unpopular in the beginning. The native Parisians thought it was an eyesore. There were petitions to have it torn down. It was supposed to have been temporary in any case. The city built it for the Great Exposition of eighteen-eighty-nine. The tower was supposed to come down afterward, but it was a genuine engineering marvel. Plus, it made the city money, so it stayed.”
“Hmm.” She reached toward the wall where a bit of metal poked through the bloody cob, touching the once much-maligned structure. “I used to wonder why I had the misfortune to be born in this time. But now, I wonder if it would be worse to be you—to have memories of a better world that’s long dead.”
Ash came up behind her, wrapping his arms and wings around Kara like a protective cocoon. “I can’t do anything to restore or change the past, but together we can give Bastille a chance to build a better future.”
At least, he hoped they could.
Seeming to understand that his words were about so much more than ending the curse, she nodded before breaking away to resume searching the room.
They piled everything they found in the center. He sat on the floor, sifting through the detritus. There were ritual bowls and mortars along with a few shreds of paper, the remains of scrolls and books he’d left behind.
Kara kept her distance from the altar, doing a complete circuit of the tower room a half dozen times. She dug through the debris for a few hours without rest, handing over everything she found.
Eventually, she gave up and joined him on the floor. “Are there other rooms we can check?”
“There’s a basement, but it only has bodies.”
Kara shuddered. Ash patted her back absently before plucking a strange object from the pile. It appeared
to be a weapon of some kind. It had a Celtic cross-shaped handle paired with a horn made of ivory. Every bit of the surface was intricately carved, but it wasn’t in demon tongue. It was in his own.
“This is angelic,” he said. “But I don’t recognize its construction.”
His kind didn’t have weapons like this.
“Should you?” She took it from him for a closer look. “It could be from after your time up there. You did fall a long time ago.”
“Perhaps,” he murmured, wondering why that felt wrong. The strange blade seemed too primitive.
“Maybe it’s ceremonial. It doesn’t really look functional,” she said, slipping her own knife out from its sheath and comparing the two side by side. “What does the writing say?”
“That’s the strange part. It just has words, no phrases. There’s nothing coherent on it.”
She pointed to the altar. “You mean like those?”
There it is, he thought, his heart sinking. “Like what?”
There was nothing written on the altar—nothing his eyes could perceive.
“Can’t you see it?” Kara was frowning. “The symbols are like the graffiti on the streets. Just bits and pieces.”
He shook his head. “To me, it’s completely blank.”
She brightened, getting to her feet in a rush. “There’s nothing on top, but there’s writing on all four sides.” Kara bit her lip. “I wish you could see it and tell me what it says.”
“You can write it for me,” he said, holding out one of the little notebooks Marcus always made sure Ash had tucked into his armor.
He was about to hand it to her when he reconsidered. Sketching rapidly, he drew the symbol for concealment in the filthy demon dialect. “Is there one that looks like this?”
Kara studied the picture, holding it up for comparison as she crouched, crab-walking all around the altar.
“It’s here,” she called from the other side. “It’s small and almost totally covered by others carved on top of it.”
He knelt next to her, studying the blank space she’d indicated. “You need to do something… It’s not going to be pleasant.”
Kara stood. “What is it?”
“Your knife. You need to take it and cut yourself. Put the wound over the symbol of concealment. I would do it myself, but my blood won’t work.”
Her nostrils flared. “Is this another thing only humans can see and do?”
Ash looked away. “Yes. Coat it well. Made sure every bit of it is covered.”
“O-kay.” She took out her knife and drew a thin line across the center of her palm, then touched it to the symbol and moved her hand about.
The hiss was unexpected. Startled, Kara reared back, snatching her hand away as if it had been scalded. However, she hadn’t been burned. The symbol flared briefly as the concealment spell was broken, rendering it visible to his eyes.
The center portion of the block blinked out of existence, revealing a small cavity. It was crammed with books and scrolls.
Ash reached in and pulled out a thick volume. It was a rare volume on the creation and control of aquatic monsters, the Bathra Haeresim.
Not much use in landlocked Bastille. There were other classics in there as well, Pazuzu’s Codex and the Necronomicon—the real one—to name a few.
He pulled out the scrolls, books, and the other assorted artifacts out, minimizing the amount of skin-to-skin contact as much as possible. Touching the things made him feel unclean.
His hand fell over a small handwritten scroll wrapped around a black enamel rod. It gave him a shock. Ash was about to dismiss it as static electricity when he noticed the decorative flourish on the ends. It was a circle partially bisected with a line.
With a sweep of his arm, he shoved the lot in the knapsack he brought for that purpose. “It’s getting late. Let’s take this back to my place and get some sleep.”
Kara’s head drew back. “That’s a little presumptuous, isn’t it?” She laughed.
“That you’ll be coming home with me or that you’ll get any sleep?”
She laughed louder, blushing wildly. Kara ducked her head in embarrassment, allowing him to surreptitiously slip the small black scroll into the breastplate of his armor.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked, shouldering the bag and holding out his hand.
Guilt warred with shame as she gave him a beatific smile full of trust. Kara took his hand, and they left the abominable room together. Under his armor, the scroll heated ominously against his chest.
23
Ash traced the pattern the dappled sunlight made on Kara’s skin. Making love to her last night had been sublime…and it had kept him from thinking too much about the way he’d deceived her.
Not deceived. Withheld. The scroll he’d taken had been written by the demon king himself. Ash had pored over it for hours after Kara had fallen asleep. But the closely spaced words had been close to gibberish. They would require more study before he could determine whether it had anything to do with the Firehorse curse.
As for the blood Kara had given him, there were things he needed to do, tests he needed to conduct. But those could wait. This morning, he was going to pretend he and Kara were the only two people on earth.
An eternity with her wouldn’t be long enough. And without her, it would be Hell.
Don’t think about it. Live in the now. It had been his strategy for a millennium, a coping mechanism that enabled to get him through the endless series of days.
Taking his own advice, he looked down at Kara. He memorized the lines of her face first with his eyes and then with his fingers. He traced her chin and fragile collarbone, torn between letting her sleep and willing her to wake.
She stirred in his embrace, but didn’t open her eyes. Ash pressed a kiss to the soft spot on her cheek next to her ear. He was about to start working his way down her body when a masculine throat clearing stopped him dead in his tracks.
Ash raised his head, sucking in his breath through his teeth. “Do I have to start hanging a tie on the doorknob?”
Except he hadn’t actually seen a tie in years. If he wanted one, he’d have to sew it himself.
Marcus’ blank expression told him he was unfamiliar with that particular sartorial accessory. He looked from Ash to Kara, a flicker of distaste crossing his features.
Annoyed, Ash rose from the bed. “What is it, Marcus?”
His aide held a piece of paper in his hand. “I…uh.” He looked past Ash to Kara. She was blinking at them both from the bed with a sheet wrapped around her.
“Whatever you need to say, you can say in front of Kara,” he told Marcus “You can trust her.”
I’m the one who can’t be trusted, he thought, thinking of the scroll hidden in his armor.
Marcus continued to hesitate, looking down at his report to avoid their eyes. Ash glowered at him.
“It’s okay,” Kara interrupted before he could reprimand his aide. “I need to get back to check on my people anyway.” She glanced at the spot on her arm where he’d drawn her blood. “It may be time to replenish certain supplies,” she added.
“All right,” he said, wishing she would stay.
Stop being selfish. Making certain the surviving Firehorses had blood to stave of the curse was a hell of a reason for her to go.
“Let me at least get you something to eat or some coffee,” Marcus said in a strangled voice. He resembled a turtle trying to crawl back into its shell.
“No, thanks. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just get dressed now.”
Ash gestured for Marcus to precede him out of the room. He closed the door behind them.
He crossed his arms, staring down at the smaller man.
“I’m sorry, my lord, but this information is very sensitive and your…friend…is still a stranger.” He shifted his weight back and forth. “I’m not certain if this information is sound or not. The source was not exactly reliable—”
He held up a hand. “Slow down. Just tell me what
it is.”
Marcus stepped farther away from his bedroom door to the other side of the room to ensure Kara couldn’t overhear them. “I was sent a report late last night from a man in the eighth arrondissement.”
He broke off and held up a hand. “Serge is a bit of a drunk, and he can’t hold down a job. He can usually be found sucking down rotgut out in one of the empty lots down by the ruins of the Arc de Triomphe. He claims two men passed by late in the evening. They were herding a group of people. He thought the men were bound, that they were holding their hands out in front of them like…”
“Like they were prisoners,” Ash finished, a rolling disquiet spreading through him. Could it be? Had someone set up another prison in town despite his warning?
The bedroom door opened. Kara was dressed and ready to leave with her bag in hand.
“Get me an address. I’ll take care of it,” he said in a low-pitched murmur. Kara didn’t need to hear this.
“Right away,” Marcus said before excusing himself.
Kara watched him leave out of the corner of her eye. “He does not like me.”
“Marcus is simply surprised,” he said absently. “I don’t think he ever expected me to, you know, be with someone.”
It was such a weak description for what was between them, but his mind was racing, trying to figure out who would dare cross him again.
If there was another prison, he’d have no choice but to make examples of the people responsible…
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Can I help with whatever’s gone wrong?”
“How do you know anything is wrong?”
Kara scowled, making a move to snatch the report. He held it above his head, conceding defeat to her powers of perception. “It’s nothing I can’t take care of on my own. If your people need you to refresh their good-luck charms, then that should be your priority.”
Kara frowned. “If you’re sure.”
“I am.”
She pointed to the chest he’d used to store the books and scrolls they found in the demon tower. “What about those? Are they going to explode or cause a tsunami to sweep away the city?”
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