“Come here.” Finn pulled me closer to him, one arm around me.
I shouted over my shoulder, “Stop pushing! There’s bayonets!”
The mob was screaming “Clovian scum!” and “Get out of Albia!”
The Clovian soldiers were barking orders I didn’t understand, and Finn and I were inching closer to them. Any minute now, I’d be stabbed.
“We’ve got to get out of here, Finn.” I started throwing elbows again, trying to clear a way out.
“Clovian scum! Clovian scum!” The mob chanted.
My attempts to flee the crowd achieved only two things: losing track of Finn, and my shoes.
The crowd was like a living thing that had consumed Finn, that would eat us both up and spit us out.
The first gunshot rang out, and my stomach sank. I was nearly certain it had come from one of the Clovian soldiers, although in all the chaos it was impossible to tell.
The crowd started screaming louder, incoherent. But they weren’t dispersing. It was like a sea of rage rising around me, unstoppable. And still, as much as I fought, I couldn’t fight my way back out of it. Someone’s elbow slammed into my cheek.
I had a dagger on me, but what was I going to do? Murder everyone?
More gunshots cracked, sending my heart racing. My ears rang, and the scent of gunpowder filled the air.
At last, the crowd started to flee, screaming, away from the gunfire. I looked around wildly for Finn. I caught a glimpse of my suitcase, trampled in the street, all the delicate clothes crushed into dirt and mud. The perfume bottle smashed.
Between the fleeing people, I saw the bodies of three dead Dovreners, too. Shot by the soldiers, blood pooling between the cobbles.
“Finn!” I shouted.
I took a few shaky steps, then I felt it—the count’s dark magic thrumming over my skin. The hair rose on my nape.
When I turned, I found him looming over me, his cowl raised. All I could see were those pale, penetrating eyes. “You’re late.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I blurted.
I watched him sheathe his gory sword. Every other part of him was completely still. “Enter through the Lion’s Gate. Give your name. They’ll be waiting for you.”
I glanced at the castle, at the crowd of Dovreners swarming around the moat, some of them falling into the water, shrieking. Many Dovreners couldn’t swim. And I was supposed to walk through this chaos to my first day at my new job, working for the man we all hated.
He turned, walking toward the crowd, and I stared. They’d tear him to pieces. Didn’t he know that?
Already they were surrounding him, hurling death threats, every obscenity in the book. A large man in a leather apron tried to swing a plank of wood at the count.
The angel hardly turned his head. He just lifted his forearm, and the wood shattered against him. The man looked stunned, then terrified as the count pivoted. Saklas grabbed the man’s forearm, then wrenched it behind his back with an audible snap, clearly breaking it. The attacker fell to the ground.
The crowd pressed in closer around the count, too tight for him to draw his sword. I thought I saw the flash of a dagger as another man lunged for him, then the count’s gloved hands gripped the man’s head. He twisted sharply, snapping the man’s neck. The sound of breaking bone horrified me.
I followed after him at a safe distance, wanting to see what I could learn about how he moved, how he fought. He managed to draw his sword, and the frantic mob began hurling rocks, bricks, anything they had. They wanted to bring him down, to bash his head into the stones.
What followed was like nothing I’d ever seen. His sword carved into them with a ferocity that seemed straight from Hell. He moved like a storm wind, a maelstrom of whirling steel, blood arcing around him. Each movement was precise, slashing through two people’s heads at once, the speed of his sword unparalleled.
He was a masterpiece of death. A swift strike of the blade across someone’s throat, then a pivot to slash another person’s jugular. He turned destruction into a work of art, terrible and mesmerizing at the same time.
I clutched my stomach, wanting to throw up.
I was learning something, and so was everyone around me: the count was nearly impossible to kill, and you’d be an idiot to try.
When eight dead bodies lay at his feet, the crowd parted before him like the sea. His sword dripping with gore, he stalked forward.
I suspected he’d wanted them to see that display of carnage. He wanted them to know they were powerless against him.
My make-the-best-of-a-bad-situation spirit was starting to falter a bit at this point. There were bad situations like “sharing a bed with your drunk mum,” and then there were bad situations like “locked in a castle with a literal death monster.” This was, unfortunately, the latter.
I mentally ran through the consequences of simply turning and running. Presumably, the count would demand his money back, and quite possibly hunt me down and kill me. Mum and I would be out of money to pay the Rough Boys, so if the count didn’t kill me, they would hunt us forever.
Best get on with it, then. Get in there and be lovely as fuck, just as Ernald said.
I started shoving my way through the crowd, getting jostled on all sides. When a new barrage of gunfire rang out, the crowd started running again—this time, away from the fortress, slamming into me, nearly knocking me on my arse.
Someone caught my arm, and when I looked up, I saw Finn’s blue eyes on me. I read pure panic in them. “Lila. Come with me. You should leave.”
I’d already made up my mind. I jerked my hand out of his grasp. “I can’t, Finn. There’s no way out of this. Write to me. In pictures.”
I was about to be trampled into the stones like Zahra’s lacy underwear. The sky had opened up now, rain still slamming down harder than ever, the earth slick.
When a firm hand grabbed me by the shoulder, I turned to stare up at the shadowed face of Count Saklas. With his enormous body, he was blocking the fleeing crowd from crushing me.
Then he turned, marching into the crowd once more, while they parted around him like he was a dark god on earth.
I followed behind him, primal fear stealing my breath.
11
Lila
Drenched, I hugged myself. Rain slid down my skin, and I kept my eyes on Saklas’s cloak.
The path curved around the castle moat, to the right. Chaos reigned around us, and the count slipped farther away from me as we got closer to the gatehouse. But as I neared the portcullis, the crowd started to thin at last. I turned to look at the wreckage behind me. A few people lay injured, trampled by the crowd. And past them, eight bodies bled onto the stones.
Disturbed, I turned back to the gatehouse. A line of Clovian soldiers stood before a locked iron door, bayonets pointed at me. Nervousness fluttered in my belly. Seemed the count had already disappeared inside.
I looked up at the gatehouse. Two stone towers flanked the door, piercing the clouds. Marble lion heads jutted from the stone on either side of the arches. And between the lion’s teeth—a man’s actual head, dripping blood. Grimacing, I took a step back.
The count had been busy, hadn’t he?
I looked down at the guards again, steadying my voice. “I’m Zahra Dace. Count Saklas is expecting me.”
One of them nodded, and the soldiers slowly parted. The portcullis groaned up behind them. On the other side of it, a bridge that spanned the moat. My heart was a wild beast as I crossed through the arches of the gatehouse, taking care to avoid the dripping blood.
One of the soldiers pivoted sharply to walk by my side, escorting me across the bridge. On the other side, more towers soared into the sky. Five guards stood before another iron portcullis.
I’d actually imagined myself walking across this bridge before. But in my imagination, there’d been a distinct lack of severed heads, and I’d been wearing shoes.
As we approached, the second portcullis heaved and groaned upward. When
the gate was high enough for me to walk under, the guard led me through. Here, a cobblestone path carved between impossibly high walls.
No ravens swooped overhead. In fact, everything in here seemed dead. No birdsong, no butterflies or moths. Just the cloudy sky above us and the stone walls rising up around us like a prison, until we reached an open archway. We turned into it, and the soldier led me through into a grassy courtyard.
As I walked, I tried to get an idea of the layout of the place, to take in every tower, every room. If Alice lived here once, where would she be?
The central castle rose up on a hill before us, gleaming like a polished pearl—a paler color than the surrounding walls. Four stony spires reached for the heavens like sharpened bones. The stark beauty was forbidding and breathtaking at the same time.
A sense of wonder washed over me as I walked barefoot in the grass.
This place was two thousand years old. Two thousand years of Albian history around me. What had these walls seen? The invasions from the barbarian hordes from the north, the executions of kings and queens, the murders of princes, the coronations, the spells of the great sorcerer Johannes Black. The intrigues, the parties, the scandals, the menagerie of lions and bears and monkeys from faraway places. And all of it in a castle on an ancient hill, constructed over the buried head of the first Albian king. The Raven King’s severed head lay somewhere beneath this grass.
Never before had I felt such awe.
And among the flowers, I spotted something very interesting indeed. Here and there, the grasses grew with nightshade—the leafy plants and deep purple flowers, yellow stamens in the center.
Once, Alice had taught me to use them to subdue the police officers guarding a ship. We’d poisoned their beer—just enough to make them delirious and knock them out, so we could rob the ship. Odd that it grew here.
As we approached the castle on a gravel path, I caught a grim sight to my left: a gallows, with four bodies swinging in the breeze, the wood creaking forlornly.
A thin tendril of fear curled through my chest as we climbed a set of stairs to the central castle.
At the top, I cast one last glance out onto the courtyard, and pieced together a mental picture of the entire place. An outer wall with eight dark gleaming towers, an inner wall with thirteen towers, and both of those structures surrounding this ancient castle. A second building stood between the castle and the river—the soldiers’ barracks, I thought. Where the rank and file would sleep.
“You must enter.” For the first time, I heard the soldier speak, in his faint accent from the southern land across the sea.
He bowed his head. “The count awaits you.”
Inside, we crossed into a hall of gray stone, with great columns reaching to the ceiling. The soldier’s heels clacked over the floor, echoing off the walls. It was gloomy in here, only the light of torches dancing over the walls. But when we went into the next hall, awe stirred in my chest again.
A vaulted ceiling soared a hundred feet above me, the stonework like intricate, skeletal blooms. Columns rose from the flagstones as if they’d grown from it thousands of years ago. A ray of light broke through the storm clouds outside, and shone through stained glass windows on the left, flecking the floor with gold and blue and red. The windows depicted angels, rising and falling from the heavens.
A golden throne stood at the far end—empty.
The soldier backed away from me, then stood by one of the columns.
My bare feet felt freezing on the cold stones. A few moments later, an enormous man prowled into the hall. He was barefoot for some reason—also bare-chested. He wore low-slung trousers, and a blue cape draped over his shoulders, flecked with tiny diamonds that shone like a starry sky. Candlelight shone over his warm bronze skin, and his chiseled chest and abs—tattooed with the phases of the moon. By his height alone, I could tell he was an angel, too.
He drank from a wineglass, and flashed me a smile. “You’re the amanuensis.”
“Zahra’s the name. Zahra Dace.”
“I’m Lord Sourial. Did you not see fit to wear shoes? Or something … I don’t know, more respectable?” His brown, wavy curls hung to a square, dimpled chin.
“You’re not wearing shoes. Or a shirt.”
He shrugged. “Ah, but a lord doesn’t need to be respectable. When a rich man is barefoot, it’s eccentric. It only adds to my appeal. In your case, you look like a bedraggled slum-dweller.”
“I must have lost my shoes when the count started murdering everyone just outside. My humblest apologies.”
It wasn’t entirely true, but I felt I needed some sort of retort to meet his obnoxious disdain.
His hazel eyes narrowed. “Murder? I’d call it a well-deserved execution. You’re not telling me you support the rebels, do you?”
Perhaps my retort hadn’t been the best idea. “I don’t know anything about them.”
“Well, I’ll bring you to the count. He’s expecting you.”
As we walked, I felt it pulsing off him—the power that crackled like electricity around my body, making my pulse speed up. It was a dizzying sense of the divine that made it hard for me to remember where I was, what was up and what was down.
At the end of the hall, Lord Sourial pushed through a wooden door. There, Count Saklas sat behind a mahogany desk, his cowl pulled up. Light beamed through a diamond-paned window behind him. Bookshelves lined every wall. Forget the wings, the power, the wealth—the real difference between them and me was knowledge. And I wanted some of that.
The door slammed behind me.
It was just me and the death angel.
He had no fire burning in the hearth, only dead ashes. The chilly air raised goosebumps on my skin. He seemed a beautiful, divine being sculpted from darkness.
But a sense of wrongness seemed to stain the air around him, his eyes too bright under that hood, the air around him too dark.
He rose from his chair and walked around his desk, his gaze sliding over me. “Zahra. You’re hiding something from me, aren’t you?” His deep voice skimmed up the back of my neck. “Turn around.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, and turned to face his desk. He crossed behind me. I felt it then, the rush of his magic over me that was so like the rush of tingling heat from the feather. I could hardly remember what he’d just said to me.
“Put your hands on the desk.” Pure, shadowy power emanated from him, sliding across the bare skin on my back.
I’d come here knowing what I was in for, knowing what I was doing. I’d chosen this because I had to know what happened to Alice.
I felt like my pulse was racing out of control, my skin hot all over.
I did as he said. I put my hands on the desk, leaning over it.
He leaned over me, one hand next to mine. Warmth from his chest beamed over me like the rays of the sun, and I felt the steel of his body against mine. His masculine scent slipped around my body like smoke.
The cold castle air hit my legs as he lifted up my dress from behind.
My face flushed hot as the force of his erotic angel magic snaked over me.
12
Count Saklas
She smelled of roses and oak. A mortal scent, exotic to me.
Disturbingly, there was some part of me that liked having her here in my control. The conquering side, dominating her. Not surprising, I supposed. I was made to dominate. She was my prisoner, whether she knew it or not.
Conquest was my divine mission. Total submission of mortals who opposed me.
Did she oppose me? My dreams suggested I needed her on my side. Not that it would be easy to control her. I could sense resistance in her.
Conquest … For most of the other Fallen, the conquest would be another kind. Mortal women were sexually addicted to the touch of angels. So her heart would race, and her back would arch at my caress. I’d strip her completely bare, make her beg for release. Pure, ecstatic and shameless satiation at my fingertips. Maybe I wished that sort of conquest were for m
e, but it was not. Love and pleasure were not part of my destiny. And what was more, the desire for mortal women was very dangerous to me.
God created me to deliver death.
So with the hem of her skirt pulled up, I reached down for what I was looking for—the weapon strapped to her thigh. My fingertips brushed her skin as I pulled the dagger from its sheath. I heard her breath hitch at the contact.
Strange that was all it took. And strange that the sound squeezed my heart.
I let the hem of her dress drop, and turned the dagger over in my hand. It looked expensive, a short, double blade of fine steel that gleamed in the light. Slightly curved. Ideal for slitting someone’s throat—the blade of choice for someone who wanted to work silently, in the shadows.
Bizarrely, half my mind was still on her body, bent over the desk. Though I should have been focused on the fact that she’d come armed.
“Did you think to use this on me?” I asked.
Did she honestly have no idea how that fight would go? She’d be dead in a heartbeat. A sense of wrath slid through my bones, darkening the room around us. Crushing my enemies to dust was the one thing that fulfilled me.
Was she my enemy?
She turned to face me, and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “It was just for self-defense.”
So she did oppose me. Fool. Nothing could kill me. I handed it back to her. “Is this all you brought with you? The knife?”
“My suitcase was trampled outside in the chaos.”
“Your boss Ernald told me you can write well in Clovian and in Albian.”
She looked up at me, her dark eyes wide. Silence stretched out.
“You can’t write in Clovian or Albian.” Had I made a mistake?
She shook her head. “There must have been a miscommunication.”
Liar. “Is that what it was?”
“I can learn.”
“I take it you do know what an amanuensis is.”
The Fallen (Hades Castle Trilogy Book 1) Page 6
