Innocent Blood(56)

He imagined her in this role, wearing the simple robes of a Delphic priestess, sharing words of prophecy. “Yet you do this no more?”

She stared out across the dark waters. “I still see occasional glimpses of what is to come, of time rolling ahead of me as surely as it trails behind me. I cannot stand against these visions.” A line of sorrow appeared between her brows. “But I no longer share them. To know my prophecies has brought more suffering to mankind than pleasure, and so I keep such futures a secret.”

The inn appeared through the mists. He steered his gondola toward the stone dock. Once he drew abreast of it, two men in livery hurried to secure the boat. One held out a gloved hand to the beautiful lady. Judas steadied her with a palm held against the small of her back.

Then shadows fell out of the darkness above and landed on the dock, forming the shapes of men—but they were not men. He saw the sharp teeth, the pale, feral faces.

Many times he had fought such creatures, and many times he had lost. Still, with his immortality, he always healed, and his tainted blood always destroyed them.

He pulled Arella behind him in the boat, letting the beasts take the men from the hotel. He could not save them, but perhaps he might save her.

He swung his pole like a club, while her beautiful hands fumbled with the ropes that secured them to the dock. Once free, he pushed the gondola away. It heeled to one side, then righted itself.

But they were not fast enough.

The creatures sprang across the water. It was an impossible leap for a man, but a simple one for such beasts.

He yanked a dagger from the sheath in his boot and thrust it deep into the chest of the larger of the two. Cold blood washed across his hand, down his arm, and soaked into his fine white shirt.

No man would have survived the blow, but this creature barely slowed, knocking his arm aside and pulling out the dagger from its own belly.

Behind him, the second beast had Arella on her back and crawled across her soft body.

“No,” she whispered. “Leave us be.”

She pulled the silver shard from her throat and slashed its sharp edge across the creature’s neck.

A scream ripped from its severed throat, followed by flames that quickly swept its cursed form. Entirely on fire, it leaped for the cool darkness of the canal, but only ash fell to the water, the body already completely consumed.

Seeing this, the larger beast vaulted high, hit the neighboring bank, and bounded into the darkness of the city.

Arella dipped the shard into the canal and dried it on her skirt.

He scrutinized the sliver in her hands. “How?”

“This is a piece of a sacred blade,” she explained and hung it around her neck again. “It kills any creature it pierces.”

Judas’s heart quickened.

Could it kill the unkillable—like him?

Or her?

Sorrow crossed her face as if she knew his thoughts, confirming what he had just imagined. She wore the instrument of her own destruction around her slender neck, a way to escape this prison of endless years. And from her expression, she must have been sorely tempted occasionally to use it.

He understood that desire. For years uncounted, he had sought to end his life, enduring unspeakable pain in the attempts. And still he lived. The simple right of death was granted to all other creatures. Even the beasts they had fought here could simply walk into the sunlight and end their unholy existence.

His gaze fell again on the silver shining between her breasts, knowing that the death he had sought for so long was close. He only had to take it.

He reached out—and took her hand instead, drawing her up to him, to his lips.

He kissed her, so very glad to be alive.

Upon the Tiber, in the brightness of the midday sun, Judas thought back to that moment, to that kiss in the dark. Regret swelled inside him, knowing what would follow, that their relationship would end so badly.

Perhaps I should have grabbed that shard and not her hand.

He had never learned where she had obtained it, nor anything else about that sacred blade. But in the end, they each had their secrets to keep.

He touched his breast pocket and removed an ice-cold stone roughly the size and shape of a deck of cards. It was made of a clear green crystal, like an emerald, but deep in its heart was a flaw, a vein of ebony black. He lifted the stone toward the sun, turning it this way and that. The black flaw shivered in the brightness, waning to a pinpoint, but still there. Once he returned the crystal to the shadows of his pocket, the flaw would grow again.

Like a living thing.

Only this mystery thrived in darkness, not light.

He had found the stone during the years that followed after Arella, after he had discovered why he walked this long path on Earth. During that dark time of his life, he had lost himself to the study of alchemy, taught by the likes of Isaac Newton and Roger Bacon. He had learned much, including how to animate his clockwork creatures, how to manipulate the power found inside his blood.