“All this is beyond the point now,” Leona says evenly, drawing attention to herself again. She’s sick of the blond prick’s theatre. “Nathaniel will replenish his power and come to get me. You must build the stake, now.”

  “Wait a minute, just wait,” Armando calls, wriggling himself free from the Upgrades’ clasp—his skills and natural abilities are upgrading fast. “Just how did this happen? I mean, admittedly, I’m not a fan of that giant, and you,” he points at Leona, “know this better than anyone. But I’m pretty fucking sure he isn’t your stalker or Tudose’s killer, it just doesn’t add up.”

  “He didn’t know that he was doing it,” Hector intervenes as if everyone’s an idiot for not seeing the obvious. “Due to his feelings for Leona, the Dark Lord has started taking over him bit by bit. In the first stages he had basically a split personality.”

  Everybody holds their breath as Hector continues, advancing slowly towards Leona, looking straight into her face.

  “The first curse that you cast, the one that hit the first victim, Pavel Tudose. That curse had so much perfectly aligned energy that it bolted directly to the underworld, into the Dark Lord’s very heart. That was the moment he awakened. The Dark Lord, fuelled by this, sent his energy directly to the place where he sensed you. The energy seeped into the Dark Lord’s direct descendant, Viscount Nathaniel Sinclair. Jealousy, possessiveness and sick worshipping made him kill Pavel Tudose the exact same way you demanded, through your curse.”

  “But,” Alice breathes, “Nathaniel was certain....”

  “Like I said, he didn’t know he was doing it,” Hector interrupts again. “The flood of dark energy practically made him black out.” He comes face to face with Leona in the middle of the gathering. “He literally killed for you without knowing he did it.”

  “And Serena Gheorghe? Did he kill her, too?” Alice demands to know.

  Hector shakes his head. “That was us. The Regent sent his men to kill Serena Gheorghe.” He pushes his chin up. “She knew too much, and she’d started to become dangerous. Her allegiance couldn’t be trusted.”

  “Nathaniel had a theory in the beginning,” Leona says. “He did think the killer might be someone who didn’t know what they were doing.” She looks down. “He suggested I might have done it myself in a state of trance.” She replays the theory Nathaniel exposed to her that night at the Gossip Parlor, the night she got so scared by her own possible darkness that she ran out into the rain.

  “When it was actually him who’d killed the man, in a state of trance indeed,” Hector finishes.

  Leona looks at Armando’s concerned face and then at Hector’s determined expression. The germ of murder lies in both of them too, susceptible to her calls, to her uncontrolled curses. What if her powers grow so strong that she won’t be able to control them anymore?

  She scoffs. No matter which way her life goes, it will lead to the same thing—pain, destruction, death. Plus that the idea of a life without Nathaniel, after having known his love the way she did, squeezes her heart like a fist with thorns.

  “Build the stake,” she says, her voice cracking over the words.

  “No,” Armando calls.

  Hector grabs her hand, a wild look in his russet eyes. “You don’t have to do this. Come with me.”

  “Even if I wanted to, in some absurd universe,” she retorts, “Look at where we are. How do you think we can get away together from all these guys? You think they’ll just let us run, hand in hand?”

  “I have powers of my own,” he whispers, squeezing her hand. A strange current goes through her and, as she looks down, she sees his skin going transparent, revealing the small wires of veins, finger bones and reddish flesh.

  “Teleporting powers,” she breathes, understanding. She’s seen this before, someone at the monastery has similar abilities. She glances into his eyes to make him think she’ll come along and make him activate his teleportation energy. A zinging sound fills her ears, like activating shields in Sci Fi movies as he loads full power into his teleporting. In the last instant, she pulls her hand away, and a desperate “No” echoes as Hector vanishes, alone and agonizing.

  “What are you doing?” Gino cries angrily. “We could have had him.”

  “One last favor I did him,” Leona says quietly. “Wicked or not, the man loved me.”

  “Take her away,” Gino commands, pointing at her. A metallic sound flashes through the air as Damian’s daggers shoot from the holsters under his sleeves, ready to fight to protect Leona, but she stops him.

  “No, Damian,” she says. “Don’t kill, not for me.”

  The Tarot spread that Pythia threw for her months ago comes back to her. Her destiny was Death, and it scared her witless. Not anymore. Leona is even beyond accepting her fate—she’s choosing it.

  LEONA CAN SEE THE STAKE from her sanctum window. It’s high, piercing into the night sky in the middle of the monastery’s fortified courtyard. There are guards on the ramparts, holding torches, scrutinizing the dark forests surrounding them.

  “It seems a ritual,” Leona whispers, contemplating her upcoming fate. She’s bracing herself, cold from the fear and hesitation, realizing with every passing moment that this is her own life she’s letting go of.

  “It is a ritual,” Gino says behind her in his annoying singsong voice. “Fire strengthens the forces of good at night. Electricity is not as powerful, so we wouldn’t use it even if we had it.”

  Gino Bogza, her very henchman, is the only person Leona has accepted in her sanctum while she prepared for her own execution. Armando, Alice, and even Damian were forbidden from returning to the monastery, and Leona wouldn’t have wanted them around anyway. They would have tried to stop this, they would have tried to make her change her mind, and hell, they probably would have succeeded. Anticipating death is a paralyzing thing.

  Gino is the only ally she has, or so she thought. Right now though, she’s not so sure anymore. Seems he’s tacitly appointed himself the Order’s new leader, and she suspects that might have been his plan for a long time.

  She turns slowly to him, keeping her chin down and therefore her face hidden under the hood. It was one of Gino’s conditions—she’s to keep her oozing temptress powers in check, and cover her sex appeal. He didn’t even want to see her eyes and her lips, and forbade everyone at the monastery to look into her face. They all keep their eyes away from her like from Medusa.

  “One thing I’d like to know before I die, Gino. Why do you hate me so much?”

  He glares at her as he sits on the divan, a vindictive grin on his face, the wooden cross above his head. “To be honest, I always hated the Queen of Hearts, too. I hate your whole lot. Your powers are arrogance embodied. Women like you piss on the hard earned results of the rest of us. You come with your luring charms and take away the best people, corrupt the best hearts, cloud and rend useless the sharpest minds.”

  Leona squints under her hood. “What powers do you have, Gino?”

  He doesn’t say anything, but hatred twinkles in his blue eyes.

  “None,” Leona breathes as she understands. “You’re envious, that’s your problem.” She glances at the cross above his head, remembering from her first time at the monastery that Gino Bogza projects himself as someone very religious. “Isn’t envy a mortal sin?”

  “Enough blabbering.” He pushes himself with his fists off the divan, strides over and grabs her elbow roughly, yanking the door open and tossing her outside.

  “It’s power that you lust for, Gino,” she says as he leads her roughly among rows of Upgrades towards the stake. “You always thought yourself better fit than Nathaniel to rule the Order, didn’t you?”

  “The way you refer to him by his first name, you brash whore. To the greatest men in this world he’s Viscount Sinclair, and you think you can just casually say his name because you suck his cock?” He makes her stop as they reach the stake, this time looking her closely in her face, his fine features distorting into something ugly that seems more genuine than all his other faces.

  “Before you die, I might as well tell you this—The day I realized the Executioner had fallen head over heels for that child-face bitch Alice Preda, I realized this whole Order business was bullshit. I was disappointed, yes, painfully so. The people I looked up to weren’t the incorruptible, perfect creatures I and other idiots like myself thought them to be. They were big horny dicks that were just waiting for the right whore to yield to. But I’m for real. I am everything I’m showing you right now, temptress.”

  “A misogynistic brute?”

  He hauls her onto the mound of hay from which the stake sticks up with one hand. The hay must be soaked with gasoline and something else, something even more intoxicating, since it acts like a drug on Leona. Even the fear subsides. Maybe Gino had a drug added to the mix in order to make sure she doesn’t back down from her decision of having herself executed.

  “Tie her up,” he orders an Upgrade with a mask covering his face. His big hands grip Leona’s wrists in a second.

  As dizzy as she is, Leona begins to realize what’s happening here. The masked Upgrade starts chanting a death song, probably as extra shield against the dark powers Gino made everyone believe Leona would conjure, while Gino himself takes a big torch from another man and lowers it to the mound of hay. Fire sores from the hay that’s soaked with gasoline and whatever else has made Leona feel high as a kite.

  The heat quickly turns unbearable, sweat breaking out all over her, her flesh heating up so much she struggles like a fish being boiled alive. Her whole body tightens in expectation of excruciating pain when the fire would start eating at her flesh, eyes up at the sky that now dances through the smoke. All she can think is, “What have I done?”

  The moment Leona forces herself to say a prayer, a flock of birds unite into one huge shadow right above her, waving dragon-like wings over the fire, then springing forward and wrapping itself around Gino Bogza, throwing him to the ground. Through the dancing flames and the distorting heat, Leona sees Gino twist and convulse under a black cloak of shadow with a will of its own.

  Upgrades jump to his aid, grabbing the cloak and managing to rip it from his body. The cloak, or whatever it is, lets itself be torn into a thousand threads, which then transform into predator black ravens that stab with their beaks at the Upgrades, so fast and swift that they seem bullets. Now Leona understands who they’re dealing with, and joy flares in her heart. Upgrades fall to their knees with hands at their bloody eyes, screaming, then groping for their weapons, trying to get back on their feet.

  Now unattended, the fire spreads to neighboring objects. The screams and running Upgrades remind Leona of movies about barbarian raids in medieval villages. She calls out Nathaniel’s name, struggling to free herself. But that only makes his attention falter. Ravens fly behind her, their beaks picking strongly at the ropes tying her to the stake, she can feel their tug. But while these birds work on freeing her, the Upgrades and a wild looking Gino Bogza with a straining baring of his teeth seem to gain the upper hand over the remaining fighting birds. They strike some of them dead, and the birds working on Leona cry out in pain, too.

  “Go, leave me,” she calls out at the ravens. “They’re going to kill you if you don’t focus on them!”

  With Leona now free from the ropes, crawling on all fours away from the flames, the birds shift focus to the next vital move. They fly over to the gates, lifting the heavy wooden block and letting help in—the Executioner Damian Novac, with his devilish green eyes exuding bloodlust, daggers glinting in both his hands. Alice storms in after him, looking desperately for Leona. Armando is right behind her, his rebel hair with dyed blond tips glowing in the flames, his expression even more aggressive than usual, his strong upper body naked, two short swords in both his hands, looking like some modern Spartacus. He gives out a war cry, and launches himself into battle.

  “Alice, here,” Leona calls, lifting her hand and waving to Alice. Her friend spots her, rushes over as fast as only a fully developed Upgrade could, and pulls her by the church wall, away from the flames. Leona slumps in her arms, crouching away from the wild fighting all around.

  “This whole place is burning down,” Alice yells, looking around. “We need to put out the fire.”

  “We must help Nathaniel,” Leona says, searching for him with desperate eyes. “They’ve hurt him, parts of him are bleeding.” She points at isolated birds heaving in pools of blood.

  “Jesus, they’re killing him,” Alice says.

  Leona’s eyes dart back and forth as her brain searches fervently for a solution to help her lover. Nothing else matters, not even if the whole world burns.

  More birds fall, Damian is fighting three Upgrades at a time, Armando is waving his swords at the guy with teleporting abilities that keeps appearing and disappearing in front and behind him. The young gypsy doesn’t stand a chance, he’s too new, too inexperienced, he’s not even done with his training. He will die tonight. Damian Novac is one of the biggest guns ever engineered, he might survive and manage to escape with Alice and Leona, but Armando and Nathaniel would be dead.

  The women hating bastard seems well prepared for this. He’s fighting the birds that group and re-group around him and his fighting squad as they point blades with hot tips at them. Gino takes a new fighting stance every few seconds, fast like in movies with special effects, grimacing with killing purpose. Leona’s skin creases.

  “It seems the bastard knows what he’s doing,” she yells over the screams, rustle and clamor at Alice.

  “He must have had ties with the Regent all along, and made some kind of plan.”

  More and more birds are falling, and Nathaniel repeatedly fails to regroup into one huge shadow. Every attempt falls apart with a gut-wrenching cry that hurts Leona so bad it makes her crouch.

  “They’re killing him,” she cries.

  Alice moves in front of her and grabs the sides of her face. “Leona, listen to me carefully.” She squeezes her eyes shut, takes a deep breath, and opens her eyes again, serious and unyielding on Leona’s. They sparkle an intelligent blue that goes beautifully with the dark ash on her face and her disheveled hair. “There’s only one way out of this. You must conjure all of Nathaniel’s evil power. You must curse the Dark Lord into taking over his human form completely.”

  “You want me to unleash hell onto earth?” Leona stresses. “I don’t know if you realize, but no matter how well you can explain magic with science, this is what’s going to happen.”

  “There’s one thing everyone forgets, Leona. Samael is NOT a devil. He is an angel, an archangel even. I have a very strong feeling that what the Regent expected of his brother was overly enthusiastic. An archangel may be dark and even wicked, but he’s still God’s warrior.”

  Leona bursts into tears, overwhelmed. “Alice, you haven’t seen Pavel Tudose’s acid-eaten flesh. No angel could have done that, trust me.”

  “Pavel Tudose wasn’t a good man, Leo. He was a scumbag. But okay, it’s not for us to judge him, and we can’t change what happened. This, on the other hand, is in your power, this is where you get to make a decision, a decision that might save or doom the love of your life.”

  There’s a thump to their side, making both women jump. Another bird has hit the floor, convulsing, blood-caked beak open, eyes up at the sky as its chest squirts blood. The sight stabs Leona in the heart, and it’s all it takes for her to make a decision. She looks one more time in the direction of Nathaniel’s fight, and the love they shared fills her, flooding her from head to toe.

  Leona feels everything about her reduce to one condensed, solid spot in her chest, at the felt middle of her being. At her very core. In the end, for all humans there’s only one thing of essence in the world, only one thing they truly care about. It’s something unique for each and every one.

  This moment, Leona has a revelation—everything she is about is her love for Nathaniel Sinclair. And if she is to remain in this world, then her lover will have to live here, with her. If she is to exist at all, she’ll exist with him.

  Her lips start to quiver, breath leaving her mouth in barely audible words that yet fill with energy. “May your feet hit the ground. May they drill in and grow like roots, anchoring into the crust of earth. May your name, entwined with mine, become flesh, bound to mine. When one bleeds, so will the other. When one breathes, so will the other. When one lives, so will the other.”

  Unlike in movies, there’s no rolling eyes with arms spread out wide, no convulsing in the conjuring, no losing consciousness. There’s only calm and undulating energy, as if Leona’s very body is turning to water. The fighting slows down, as if the fighters are moving through water, too. Cold air descends, applying pressure to everything around, like a restraining force that reins even the flames in. With a muffled boom Nathaniel’s shadow expands, slowing down at the edges, as if it’s all happening in outer space. Then the shadow implodes and slowly turns into big, muscular, solid matter.

  There’s a swirl of residual, dust-like shadow around the big masculine shape that now looks at his own hands and body as if he sees flesh for the first time. He’s completely naked—impossible to keep clothes on when you turn from man, to an army of deadly ravens, to a cloak of shadow, and then into a man again, Leona thinks. But his perfectly sculpted body with those bulging arms, shoulders and thighs seems made of dark marble. He’s darker than Leona knows him, and shinier, his hair a bit longer, looking so much like that picture of Samael from the book called The Devil’s Elixir.

  His Elixir, Samael’s power, has poured down over him, imbuing him. His silvery eyes now twinkle like sparkling water, and his features seem even harder, edgier. He’s magnificent, making everyone step away from him in both awe and fear.

  He exudes power, and everybody in the monastery courtyard feels it. Some of them kneel, realizing what’s happening, while Gino glares. He doesn’t lower his weapon, but jumps when he hears the Dark Lord’s deep, rumbling voice.

 

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