Page 205 of Nightshade

“And is that why you’re here? To avenge in the afterlife?”

“No.” Rubbing my finger up and down the flat surface of the blade, I recalled the moments before I’d left the cathedral, when I’d held that very blade to my own throat. Feeling the crushing weight of desolation. Pain. Madness. My reflection in the steel was that of a man walking a very fine thread. One that could snap with the slightest of pressure. “I am here because I want to know what Pentacrux intends. It was you who told me that Lustina would one day be reborn.”

“Yes. And she has. Did you not feel her presence on the day she arrived?”

The shift of my gaze back to his had him diverting his eyes away. “Why did you?”

“Because I was the one who took her life. Therefore, I am connected in some strange way. Perhaps the mysterious punishment of the Holy Father for tainting my soul.”

I sneered at that and resumed toying with the blade. “The Chosen do not end up in Nightshade, though, right? They certainly do not begin their journey in the Infernal Lands.”

“I still have much to atone for.”

“What is their intent with her?” The very question roused a deadly violence inside me.

“It is the night of the blood moon. But rather than kill her this time, they’ve chosen a more effective means of hurting you.”

“What?”

“Drystan intends to have her impregnated.”

Rage clawed my insides at the sound of his name. “I was under the impression Drystan was living it up in Ex Nihilo.”

“He was. He’s come back.”

“How?”

“In the days before my earthly life ended, I had a dream. A very vivid dream of the boy. I’d made love to him on a bed of soft feathers. And as we lay in the sin of what we’d done, he whispered something to me. He told me that he’d been swindled out of his mortality by the fallen angel, Virgil, who I believe you sent to Ex Nihilo. The very place where Drystan was trapped. In the dream, he possessed my body and compelled me to transcribe a series of of symbols, a language I did not understand. His sigil, I’ve since come to learn. A way back from the vacuous hell where he’d been sent. The Nothing.” His eyes turned spacey as he stared off at something beyond me. “When I awoke, the sigil I’d written in dreams had been carved into the rock at the foot of Mount Helios where I lay. Though, I could not recall how I’d gotten there.”

“Drystan.” I spoke the name like a bitter acid on my tongue. “He’s come back, then.”

“Someone would’ve had to interpret the symbols for that to be true.”

Farryn’s father. That was why they’d wanted him. Perhaps they didn’t originally know his daughter happened to be Lustina reincarnated.

Until recently, anyway.

“And Drystan? What does he hope to achieve by impregnating Lustina?”

“What he’s always hoped for. Vengeance. Once her curse is broken, you will lose her forever.”

“How? Only an angel can break her curse.”

“Yes, that is correct. It is his own curse which led him to the girl. As I understand, he’s lost his wings, and his power is weak. Therefore, he intends to hand her over to a Sentinel in exchange for protection.”

My spine snapped to attention on hearing that. “Who?” I growled.

“I’m afraid I’m not privy to that information. Either way, you lose her. Whether they break her curse, or not, they do not intend to return her to you.”

Hand curled tight around the hilt of the blade, I willed myself to remain calm. To tamp down the urge to see the old man bleed out of a deep cut to his throat. My teeth clenched so hard, a spike of pain speared my jaw.

She’d returned to me, after centuries of waiting. Wanting. How easily she’d slipped through my fingers like the very sands of time that had kept her away for so long. And yet, if I attempted to return to her, the very powers that kept me imprisoned in Nightshade would easily end her life.

I slumped into a chair in front of the fireplace, across from Barchiel’s bed. “She is lost to me, then.”

“Now do you see why I can’t possibly kill you in vengeance? There is no pain I could inflict worse than this.” Sighing, Barchiel rose from the bed and crossed the room, where he poured himself a drink from a decanter set out on a silver tray on the table next to me. He tipped it back, then poured another in a separate glass. “Let us drink to vengeance.”

“I will not share a drink with you.”