“Drop your blade.”

  Gino swallows hard, but his hand tightens around the hilt. He glances around, and Leona understands. She grips Alice’s hand.

  “Gino must have been working with the Regent. He’s certain help will come.”

  “Yes, especially now that the Dark Lord has taken over his descendant completely. The Regent should make his entrance to deal with his supposedly now evil brother. But the Regent won’t come.”

  “How do you know? Alice, I’m scared.”

  “I told you, Samael is an archangel. He always worked for the forces of good, and now that he has his Lilith back nothing can make him switch sides.”

  “But why did the Regent hope differently?”

  Nathaniel turns to them, answering in Alice’s stead. “Because he thought that you, with your fickle, lustful nature, would cheat on me and make me bitter, bitter enough to finally give in to evil forever. He used many pawns for that, including Varlam. There’s a reason why he sent him into the picture at the moment he did.” His eyes soften with love. “But he didn’t expect that you and I would both learn true love.”

  Leona sees the movement in front of Nathaniel, but it all happens so fast she doesn’t have the time to warn him. Gino is smaller than Nathaniel and much more fragile, but he still decides to use this moment in the giant’s faltering attention to swing his blade above his head and attack him.

  The blade slices into Nathaniel’s shoulder, causing him to cry out, his voice bouncing off the stone walls of the courtyard. He grabs his attacker and lifts him off the ground with one hand, but doesn’t do anything else to hurt him. Gino swings his blade, even pushing it into Nathaniel’s body, but beyond causing him some grunting the wounds don’t stay. His flesh regenerates every time the blade moves away from it. The fighting has stopped everywhere, everybody is watching this exchange, trying to make sense of it.

  “He’s proving a point,” Alice whispers in Leona’s ear. “He’s not attacking Gino, so his Upgrades don’t have a reason to intervene. He’s proving to his people that he’s still on their side, that he doesn’t mean any harm.”

  “Fight me!” Gino yells, exasperated, attacking angrily. Nathaniel simply moves away from him, walking backwards, spreading his muscular arms like a benevolent priest.

  “I’m not here to fight you or anyone, Gino. I just came here for my wife. She wanted to sacrifice herself thinking that she and I would bring pain, death and destruction to this world if we stayed in it, but that’s not how it’s going to be.” He turns to Leona. “I renounce my position as head of the Order. I just want to walk out of here with you, no deaths, no irreparable damage. We’ll live a quiet life, isolated from the world.”

  There’s movement and whispering everywhere as if, for some reason, the Upgrades don’t agree. One of them steps forward to speak, but Nathaniel holds up a big hand, stopping him.

  “I know I disappointed you, all of you,” he says.

  “Not me,” Damian cuts in, approaching Alice and Leona. He only carries one bloody dagger in one hand, placing the other one on his wife’s shoulder and raising his chin defiantly. “Love isn’t something anyone should feel ashamed for or guilty about. I know it changed my life for the much better, and kept me loyal to the Order when nothing else could. As a member of the Order, I reject your resignation.”

  Nathaniel’s sparkling silver eyes meet the Executioner’s devilish green gaze.

  “Who would have thought, friendship’s in the air,” Alice whispers to Leona.

  “Disappointment,” Gino spits, drawing attention. “You think all you did was disappoint us? You took advantage of us, wearing a fucking priest’s clothes! We thought you an incorruptible cleric unstained by sin. We trusted you even though we’d never seen your face, because we believed in what you represented. Then we discovered your identity and, only a few months later, we find you screwing a gypsy on an altar! It doesn’t get any more wicked, any dirtier than that!”

  “Dude, you’re just full of hatred,” Armando calls from far behind. “Maybe you’re the one with a problem.”

  “Even your admirer is on your lover’s side,” Alice whispers hopefully to Alice.

  “Sadly, Gino is right, Mr. Gabor,” Nathaniel says. One of the Upgrades silently offers him a priest’s garment, and Leona realizes her lover has been fully naked until now. He thanks the young man and throws the cape around his shoulders, but the young man’s gesture tells Leona the Upgrades are taking a more benevolent attitude towards him.

  “I did succumb to sin and, worse yet, I don’t regret it.” He looks at Leona again. “I never thought I’d feel human love in my existence. I’ve been around for many centuries, and thought myself above lowly desires. Now I realize that, despite my long life, I was smug as a schoolboy. There’s nothing lowly about human love, or about lust, for that matter. I swear to you, I fought against my feelings for Leona Ignat with all I had. In the solitude of my sanctum I kneeled on broken glass, whipped myself, scratched the walls until my fingernails came off. But I’m a superhuman. I regenerated within seconds, and pain didn’t manage to distract me from my lustful thoughts. Now I realize that lust is just as worthy a feeling as love, as long as it accompanies it.”

  “His intentions with Leona Ignat were as pure as with all of us,” Damian adds. “When he brought her to the monastery three years ago, it was because she was my wife’s best friend, and knew too much about the Order, superhumans, and she’d started to develop her own hidden superpower. He had only two choices—extract her from the world, or kill her.”

  Gino can hear no more, his hatred breaks out. He throws himself at Nathaniel, failing to move him, and screams with foam around his mouth. “Both you and your whore deserve to be stoned to death.”

  Nathaniel’s features harden at the threat against Leona, but he lets Gino beat his chest.

  “You’re a disappointed child,” he manages softly. “Let me make it up to you. I relinquish my position, I’ll go into exile with my wife.”

  “I want you to go back to the hell you came from!”

  An Upgrade steps in. “I don’t mind that you found love, or that you embody Samael, the dark archangel,” he says. “I want you to lead us.”

  “You made each and every one of us what we are,” a second one echoes.

  “We’re orphans without you.”

  “Oh, come on, stop that piss,” Gino bursts. “He never even showed his face to the majority of us until the temptress caused him to. You owe nothing to him.”

  “You forget, Gino,” Damian puts in. “He’s the brain running this machine. We can’t possibly replace everything he knows, all of his connections.”

  “No one is irreplaceable, not even divinity,” Gino says.

  “And who do you suggest takes over if Nathaniel leaves us,” Damian says. “You? Or maybe the Regent, since you clearly have an understanding with him.”

  “That’s preposterous,” Gino squeaks.

  “You think we’re all idiots, don’t you? You were prepared to fight the Viscount and, hadn’t his wife summoned all of his energy from the underworld, you stood a good chance of killing him. The tips of your swords were heated in the special fire of the Blacksmith, the deformed incarnation of Hephaestus that crafts weapons from dead Upgrade flesh in the Regent’s dungeons.” He points at the weapons now lying on the ground around Gino. “I know the Blacksmith well. I’d recognize his craft anywhere.”

  “Sounds like you admire that monster.”

  “Sounds like you know who I’m talking about.”

  Gino points a finger at Damian. “You’re a monster, too, Executioner! You’re a killer, just like this giant fuck who calls himself our leader.”

  “You’re desperate to make us both look bad, aren’t you?” Damian counters.

  “He killed a poor human prick to defend the honor of a hooker!”

  “Don’t call her that,” Nathaniel says through his teeth.

  Leona lifts her chin, rage burning behind her eyes. “Just what do you want, Gino?”

  “You know what he wants,” Alice whispers. “Power.”

  Leona feels darkness pool inside her, thick and pasty. “Then let him have it,” she says, her eyes burning brighter. “Let his cravings become things, and his body their vessel.”

  Gino stares at Leona, dumbfounded for a moment. From his shining eyes Leona can tell he hopes the curse she just cast upon him becomes true. She lifts her hands as if making an offering, sending him the energy.

  Gino begins to shake as if the earth is quaking under him, only that his body is the only one moving. He loses balance as energy creeps up his legs, torso and arms like snakes under his clothes.

  “My God,” Alice, says. “Not even I expected this to be so... visual.”

  With understanding that goes deeper with every one of Gino’s screams and his flailing, Leona smiles. “When you learn to master energy, you master matter, too.” She scrunches her eyebrows as if trying to remember some old saying. “Who put it so well? Oh, yes, our good professor from college, Dr. Anton Barbu, the shrink, and my aunt Pythia. They said matter is just condensed energy.” She motions with her hand flowingly towards Nathaniel, who’s now watching Gino, unsure whether to intervene in some way or not. “That’s why Nathaniel is so big and his flesh so solid, for example. When his body started to upgrade into a superhuman body, it shaped according to the energy it needed to contain.”

  “For fuck’s sakes, stop this,” Gino yells as he fights imaginary attackers, snakes of energy coiling all over him like transparent moving loops. They glide so tightly onto him that they dig ditches into his flesh as they pass. Nathaniel makes a move to help, but Leona stops him.

  “Don’t. He’s only getting what he always wanted—power. Only that...” She smiles at her lover’s awe-struck face. “He can’t contain it.”

  Leona approaches Gino as he struggles. Nathaniel gets out of her way, looking at her from head to toe in delighted shock that Leona enjoys like honey down her throat.

  “You see, Gino,” she begins explaining as she circles him, drawing the hood over her head as not to offend his eyes with her witch lures. “Simply put, the power that you crave is too much for you. The energy that represents you has a different fabric and consistency than the kind of energy you want. You must either become a match to your desire—pretty much become someone else—or drop it.”

  “Just make it stop!”

  “There’s only one way.” She stops in front of him, allowing his frantic eyes to find hers. “Go, and come again. Clean slate.”

  Allowing her instinctual powers to work, Leona allows a slight pressure inside her skull, as if the atmospheric charge just shifted. The sound of a muffled implosion fills the air, and time seems to slow down.

  “You’re telling me to die,” Gino whispers, gazing lost into her eyes, now seeing the witch in all her splendor as if in another dimension.

  “And be born again. I’m helping you go without pain right now. There’s a window open for you to cross into death taking your body along, but I’m new at this, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep it open.”

  Gino looks around, assessing the environment, probably contemplating Leona’s powers. She doesn’t like it, and shakes her head.

  “Now, Gino, I must urge you,” she says. “The pressure in my head is starting to lift, I don’t have full grasp of this yet. If you take any longer I might not be able to help you.”

  “If I take my body with me, how do I—?”

  “You’re an Upgrade. You can take death at a higher level. You don’t want to be born as a human and start all over again, do you?”

  Leona thinks of comparing this to a video game, in which when the main character dies and is resurrected it doesn’t have to start over from level one, but Gino has been a busy Upgrade for a while now, so he probably doesn’t have much experience with video games. By the time she thinks this last thought Gino has spread his arms, let his head fall back, and given in to the snakes of energy still coiling around him. His body disappears under ever growing loops of energy that grow big and fat as they consume him, and then crawl their way out of the monastery.

  For moments on end everybody, Leona and Nathaniel included, can only stare after the leaving energy. The pressure lifts from Leona’s head, the air thins again, and everyone breathes out in relief. Nathaniel’s big hands wrap around Leona’s shoulders, feeling hot and powerful through her cape. She closes her eyes, enjoying the sensation, literally high on the joy that he’s here with her again.

  “Leo, my lioness,” he whispers, full of admiration. “What you did was extraordinary to say the least. You’re...” He grips her tighter, making her open her eyes and look at his beautiful face framed by Samael’s curls, her eyes falling to his silvery eyes, his sinfully kissable lips. “You’re a jewel. Exquisite. My God, the elegant dark power on you.”

  “And the noble character on you, Viscount,” Alice says in her crystalline girlish voice. “Through everything you did you proved—yet again—that you’re the best man fit to lead this Order.” She seems a girl prophet as she speaks, her husband standing like a huge bodyguard behind her. “No one could ever replace you, Viscount. I’m new to this Order, but I have a feeling everyone here agrees with me.” She eyes two Upgrades by the gates. “Or almost everyone.”

  “Whoever doesn’t agree is free to go,” someone calls from the crowd.

  Upgrades begin moving towards the Viscount, at first slowly, then faster, until they all group around him like defense units. They start beating their chests in rhythm, chanting his name, lifting everyone’s hearts, and making Leona’s eyes fill with tears.

  “Yes, you used to lead this Order as a celibate,” Alice’s crystalline voice rises above them, almost like a prayer. “Then you’ve known love. Along with carnal love. But your most basic instincts drove you to wed the woman of your desire, not just use her. Your built-in high morals and instinctual noblesse specific to archangel core Upgrades only let you love a certain way—totally, possessively, yes, dangerously, but divinely.”

  “Nathaniel,” Damian says. “I didn’t like you in the beginning, this is no secret to you. But now, after three years, I can say that, if I ever cared about anyone as about a best friend, it’s you.”

  “Viscount,” an Upgrade addresses him from the chanting gathering. “We unanimously reject your resignation. We hold you to your oath of remaining leader of the Order until your physical death.” He looks to Leona, and bows courteously. “And we agree to accept and honor your wife.”

  Leona’s heart swells as her lover’s bliss-filled eyes find hers. Nathaniel’s enormous arms coil around her, crushing her to his boulder-like body and lifting her up. By God, the way he looks into her face, it’s ravenous.

  “My lioness witch,” he says, his powerful voice vibrating against her body, making her think of a purring panther. “There’s no way out for you now. If you accept this, you accept to be my queen, and remain on Earth with me, probably forever. If anyone tries to separate us again—”

  Leona puts a finger on his silky lips.

  “They would have to deal with me first.” She gives him a cunning smile, which he returns. He cups her head and presses his lips on hers, filling her with that fantastic feeling—she’s high the Dark Lord’s love.

  Two days later

  After a bad fit accompanied by seizures, Sinbad is bracing himself in a strait jacket, rocking back and forth, humming to himself. His mother, the fortuneteller who calls herself Pythia, holds him between her arms from behind, crying quietly. The doctor called her over because Sinbad had been close to his end.

  The padded door opens, and Pythia lifts her teary eyes, expecting so see the doctor bringing the secret medicine that has been keeping Sinbad alive all these years. But, to her surprise, it’s not the doctor that she expects. It’s the man she spoke to years ago, the one who offered her the experimental—and illegal—treatment. Her heart rate spikes, a monitor would probably go up in frantic lines.

  “Shit,” she manages.

  “Nice to see you again, too, madam Pythia.” He bows curtly.

  Her old fingers drill protectively into her son’s arms from behind. “Nice? For fuck’s sakes, you said that if we ever met again....” Her throat zips up at the memory, and she swallows hard.

  The man begins pacing the room, hands behind his back. The two bodyguards that followed him in remain put, and for a second Pythia wonders why they’re here. It’s not like she or Sinbad could attack their tall, imposing, gentlemanly boss.

  “I remember what I said. That if we ever met again, it would be because your son’s days have come to an end.” He turns brusquely to her, his shiny black shoes swishing on the floor, startling Pythia, which seems to be the reaction the man was aiming for. He gives a large grin that reminds Pythia of a serpent, shaking his head.

  “Madam Pythia, the universe has always been kind to you, I hope you appreciate that. You had a child with disabilities, but you happened to be the great Dr. Tiberius Preda’s neighbor, who took care of Sinbad, and kept him alive with his top-secret potions. Later, your niece became best friends with Dr. Preda’s daughter, Alice, which drew my attention to you. When Dr. Preda went out of the picture, and you were desperate for a way to keep your son alive, I stepped in. You surely remember all that. But you seem to forget you had your own part in the deal.”

  “I assure you, I did everything I could,” Pythia manages in a shaking voice.

  “It was your job to make sure that Leona Ignat disappoints the big guy.” The anger lurking behind his controlled tone isn’t lost on Pythia. “It was your job to make sure that Armando Gabor is balls deep inside of her when the big guy walks in on them on the campfire night, hurting and angering him so much that the Dark Lord would strike with a vengeance, taking over completely. That was the ace in our sleeve, and you blew it.”

  “It wasn’t my fault—”

  “No, but you’re still to blame.” Now she can hear the gritting of his teeth despite his still controlled voice.

 

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