Jude gave me an agreeing nod. “Where is this leading? Somehow, I fear the worst is still to come.”
Oh yes. It most definitely was.
“You remember Thomas?”
His forefinger stopped tapping. “How could I not? Though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him face-to-face as I’d hoped.” His sardonic tone could’ve cut through marble.
“Actually…you have met him.”
As always with Jude, whenever his emotions heightened, so did the aura of flame around him, swelling out to lap into my personal space. I’d missed the sheer intensity of this man. And though I preferred to feel his fiery aura when wrapped in the passionate storm of his embrace, I didn’t dismiss the idea that it was fortunate I could feel this at all.
“Go on.”
“After I brought you back from…you know, you were unresponsive. A few nights ago, I felt the urgent tug of Dommiel through the blood bond. He was in danger.”
“You did not go alone.” A sharp command not a question. “Tell me you didn’t.” Now more of a plea.
“No. Kat came with me while Mira stayed here with you. What we found was Dommiel’s club piled with dead demons and a strong residue of sulfur.”
Jude hadn’t yet moved, still as a statue, awaiting the grenade I was about to toss him. Nothing left but to pull the pin.
“We found Dommiel staked to his office wall by none other than Thomas. Or so I’d thought he was Thomas. He wasn’t my guardian angel at all.”
Kat’s fear-drenched expression popped to mind, paralyzing me all over again.
“Who is he, Genevieve?” His words rumbled out slowly, precisely. As if he knew the answer already. Perhaps he did.
Pulse pounding ninety miles an hour, I finally spit it out. “He’s Damas.”
Jude made no move at all, though his irises bled into black. A minute ticked by. Then another. I squirmed in my seat. “Jude?”
I was afraid he was going to slip back into oblivion. He knew that my “guardian angel” had saved me several times. He also knew I’d shared a kiss of power in order to sift. And he knew I’d let that kiss go too far.
I licked my dry lips as he still said nothing, his expression a stone mask. “When I brought you back from the underworld, George and I found the opal pendant I’d lost clutched in your hand. You’d found it somewhere in the Void. We’re not sure how. But George sensed the essence of evil within it. He…he brought it to Uriel, who told us it was the spawn of Damas. That’s why I…why he was able to twist me so easily.”
I stopped babbling, afraid of what else might spill from my mouth, like the fact that Damas had used his essence to lure me into his trust. So much so that I’d fallen into his seductive arms too easily. I wondered if our sharing the kiss of power was how I’d had a recent dream of us as lovers. Or was that my subconscious telling me he wasn’t Thomas at all? But the demon lord Damas who’d captured Kat and taken her into his realm. The truth had been staring me in the face all along. I wanted to slap myself. Too late. I couldn’t live with regret. I could only move forward and hope my strength was enough.
“Jude? Say something…please.”
His fingers curled around the tumbler of whisky. He knocked it back with one gulp, then stood beside the table, pulled out his wallet, and tossed a large bill on the table. I knew he’d kept a box with all kinds of currency in his top dresser drawer. I’d rummaged through it in the days I was so bored I thought I’d go mad. He must’ve remembered it was there. Apparently, George was wrong. He remembered everything as if he’d never left.
He held out his hand to me. “Let’s go.”
No anger rumbled in his tone. No. In fact, he sounded more like the Jude I’d first met—confident, strong, powerful, the epitome of masculinity.
I stood and shouldered into my coat, then took his hand. He pulled me swiftly through the tables and the bar, then out into the blistering cold. “Put your gloves on.”
I didn’t argue. Apparently, we weren’t going home yet. I pulled my leather gloves from my pocket and slipped them on as we walked around the corner to the out-of-eyesight place we sifted in. He pulled me into his arms, wrapping my waist, hands splayed across my back and pressing me close. Such an odd reaction. I’d expected fuming anger, a bunch of filthy words, maybe even his aura of flame to light up the night, the main reason I’d chosen to tell him in public. Perhaps cowardly, I avoided the wrath I’d thought would come of my confession.
He stared down at me, still not speaking of the bomb I’d dropped on him. This time, he initiated the sift. A few swift seconds in the Void, and we were back on solid ground under a canopy of stars. He released me. We stood within the circle of standing stones where he’d taken me during that one glorious week of our honeymoon. He stepped away and leaned back against one, tucked his hands in his pockets and gazed up at the gibbous moon. The full moon drew closer.
I eased to the stone nearest him and mirrored his stance. My VS tingled under my skin when I leaned against the ancient stone, some part of them recognizing one another. This place spoke to me, resonating with my Flamma power, telling of times past, battles won and lives lost within this primitive space.
Jude’s gaze remained fixed on the night sky. The clouds had parted, revealing a dotted canvas of stars. This place was hallowed ground, majestic, beautiful. And yet all I could think about was the fear rotting in my gut that Jude’s disappointment in me had pulled him further away.
“I’m sorry,” I said shakily, having nothing but a paltry apology to offer him.
“Don’t.” One word—gentle, loving, kind. No fuming anger roiled off him at the thought of Damas’s lips on mine.
I shivered from the cold and the heartbreak digging deeper. When I couldn’t stand it a second longer, he finally spoke.
“Haven’t you ever wondered how I’ve been able to cross into the underworld?”
Strange. But I hadn’t. “You rode Cocytus into Danté’s realm.”
“No.” He shifted his attention away from the stars to me. “I used Cocytus to get into his castle. But I’ve always been able to go into the underworld. The first time he soul-sifted you there, remember?”
Yes. He’d been waiting on the threshold on his knees, bloody fists pounding the door to get in. I could never forget that moment. “I remember. I’d assumed you had some sneaky demon hunter way to get in.”
He didn’t laugh. “No Flamma of Light can cross into the underworld without the aid of the Flamma of Dark. No one except me.”
“But you had help that last time to find the prophecy. You told me that you’d fed Styx to travel there, right before…”
He shifted and leaned one shoulder against the stone so he could face me. “I used Styx to get within the sacred circle. Flamma of Dark use wards to keep us out just as we do to them. But I’d been hunting in the Black Forest for a while. When I couldn’t find the prophecy anywhere on earth, I knew it must be somewhere down below.”
“But Jude…you are Flamma of Light. Aren’t you?” My heart hammered faster. He was about to confess something heavy, I could feel it.
“I am the first of the Dominus Daemonum. But before my making by Uriel, I was a creature of Damas. I’d fallen to the dark, long before I ever hoped to live in the light.”
The humped moon above glazed the stones, Jude’s hair and sharp profile in silver. I didn’t understand what he was telling me, so I waited. And listened.
“When I came to this land as a slave, I was raised into a warrior. This I’ve told you before. I lived a simple life, growing stronger and fighting for my clan. One day, after I’d grown, a man came to our village. A foreigner.” A derisive laugh escaped him as he remembered. “I had no idea how foreign he was. He was a fine, noble man, a Roman he looked to us—black hair, pale skin, fine clothes.”
“Damas,” I whispered.
Jude untucked his hands from his pockets and crossed his arms. “Damas. At the time, I knew nothing of this world of Light and Dark, only my very earthly existence. This man, who claimed his name was Titus, brought news from my home in France. He said that he’d been sent to find me by my grandfather, who’d been on his deathbed when he’d left. I doubted his words, of course, for my grandfather was an old peasant just as I was. What would this nobleman have to do with an old beggar? For that’s surely what he’d become without the aid of my father or me to support him. He was my father’s father and had lived with us before Octavius had come into our lives and ruined us all. Octavius, a grand name for the grand man he thought himself to be.”
“I’m sorry. Who is Octavius?”
Jude dropped his chin and hunched his shoulder. “You know him by another name. Danté. I remember him as Octavius, the great Roman prefect who came and took over our village after the Romans had conquered our land. After my parents’ death, my grandfather could do nothing to save me, an old man with little power and few friends once Oct—I mean, Danté had sunk his claws into the villagers. They’d all stood by and watched when Danté sold me to the Campbell clan.”
“So your grandfather was still alive when you were taken away. Was Damas telling the truth?”
“Damas only ever tells the truth as it suits him. Why he’d targeted me, I’ll never know. But he told me of how Danté had risen high, remaking our town into a Roman settlement, had had a son from the girl I—”
He cut himself off, glancing across the moor into the dark of his memory.
“What girl?” My stomach twisted with a new truth. That Jude had loved someone before me. “You loved her?”
“No. It wasn’t love. I was still only twelve when I left. Melisende was fifteen. Beautiful brown hair, fair skin, lovely eyes. All the village boys wanted her. But she had chosen me to become her favorite friend, or so I’d thought. I would tell her of my troubles, of my family. How my father had become angry with my mother. How my mother wept at night, especially after Danté had made a round through the village. For every time he did so, he paid particular attention to her, offering her a position as a servant in his house. We all knew what that meant. For a peasant girl to serve in the prefect’s house was as good as enslavement. I never knew my mother was a Vessel, not until Uriel made me into a hunter years later. Danté had wanted her from the first, knowing who and what she was. There would be no end to his torment of my family as he attempted to seduce her to his will.”
I knew firsthand the agonizing torture of Danté’s amorous attentions. I couldn’t imagine having a husband who must stand by and watch a nobleman lust after his wife.
“Melisende comforted me with whispers that I could tell her anything, that she was my friend. And so I told her…” He paused, shaking his head at the memory. “I told her that we planned to leave, that the prefect was forcing us to run away and start a new life somewhere else. I actually wept in her lap, because I thought I loved the girl, and up to that point, leaving her was the greatest pain my young heart had known.”
I ached for the young, brokenhearted Jude. I could see him, lying in the pretty girl’s lap, weeping for what would never be as Melisende brushed his dark hair through her fair fingers.
Jude continued on. “I didn’t know that she’d already become his lover with the promise of being his wife. She was a peasant girl, you see. To become the wife of a Roman prefect would elevate her beyond any good marriage she could make among the villagers.
“But her worst betrayal was yet to come. One of the servants in the house of Danté told us that afternoon that he’d overheard Melisende telling their master this news and that Danté had ordered men to our home to retrieve my mother. My parents knew what would happen next. He’d kill my father and take my mother as a slave, which he’d been promising to do since the moment he stepped into our village. So…” Jude’s gaze settled back on me. “You know how that story ends.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Your father bound your mother and drowned her in a pool, then killed himself. And you were sold into slavery.”
A slow nod and heavy sigh. “And so Damas brings news that my grandfather died, and his dying wish was that I might avenge him for the wrongs done to our family.” Jude laughed and shook his head. “Damas couldn’t have said anything more tempting to a young warrior with bloody revenge on his heart. I didn’t ask how he knew my grandfather. I didn’t care. I wanted to kill. I wanted to slaughter everyone I ever knew from my past. No one had tried to save us. No one had tried to protect me from being sold like a dog. The entire village had trembled in fear and bowed down to the almighty Octavius.” He combed a hand through his hair. “My clan brother Lauchlan and I set off with a band of warriors. My adoptive father understood and let us go.”
“And Damas traveled with you?” I shivered from the cold, my teeth chattering when I spoke.
“Oh yes. Of course. He wanted to see me stir up trouble for his estranged demon brother, Danté.”
Jude shoved away from the stone and stood in front of me, pulling me into the warmth of his embrace. I burrowed my head under his chin.
“I wanted to come here, to remember in this place that reminded me of my clan. But you’re too cold. Best get you home.”
I didn’t argue as he held me tight and sifted us home.
Chapter Twenty-Three
From her nest on top of the cabinet, Mira turned her orange-eyed gaze on us when we entered the cottage. She ruffled her tail feathers, then resettled and closed her eyes.