The Graves of Saints (14 page)

Octavian ignored her, looking at Barbieri. ‘I need the room.’

The FBI woman scowled. ‘Who the hell are you?’

Barbieri had the good sense to look uncomfortable. ‘Agent Kline, this is Peter Octavian.’

The woman’s face went blank and she drew back slightly. ‘I see.’

‘I need—’ Octavian began again.

‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mr Octavian,’ Agent Kline said, ‘but I’m sure you understand that the crime scene is still being processed.’

Octavian felt a flare of anger that caused him to clench his fist and make his hand crackle with the dark purple light of deadly spellcraft. It was happening more and more, his emotions stirring
the magic within him, and he knew he had to be cautious. There was danger here.

‘Bullshit,’ he said evenly. ‘Philadelphia PD was in here. Barbieri and his UN vampire hunters have been over the room, top to bottom. Your own people have been in here for
hours. You’re done. It’s my turn, now.’

Agent Kline glanced beyond him at Allison and Kuromaku, then focused on Octavian again.

‘For what?’ she asked.

Octavian stared at her, then shifted his gaze purposefully back to Barbieri.

‘To do it my way. Get them out of here, Barbieri. I won’t ask again.’

He didn’t need to. Agent Kline continued to protest, but mostly in muttered asides. Octavian was certain that Barbieri – like Song – would report back to Metzger, but none of
that mattered. Metzger needed him far more than he needed Task Force Victor.

‘This is the place, then?’ Kuromaku asked, when the others were all gone.

Octavian glanced around the bedroom, his eyes lingering on the bed where he had found Nikki displayed in a macabre tableau. Kuromaku knew the answer. He had asked only to give Octavian a chance
to speak, to explain.

‘This . . . yes,’ Octavian replied. He gestured to the bed and then around at the markings and little numbered plastic tents that the forensics people had left behind. ‘Most of
it you can imagine for yourself. I’ve tried not to imagine it, but I’ve failed. It’s in me, now . . . this thing. Every breath I take, it haunts me.’

‘We’re going to kill him and his whole coven,’ Allison said.

‘We will,’ Kuromaku agreed, but he reached out and put a strong hand on the back of Octavian’s neck. ‘But it won’t help the pain.’

‘Maybe not,’ Octavian said, ‘but we’ll kill them just the same.’

He took a deep breath, steadying his heartbeat and narrowing his eyes. Reaching down within himself, he summoned up the magic there and extended his hands. During the millennium he had spent in
Hell, he had learned thousands upon thousands of spells and hexes and enchantments and glamours, but at a certain point his understanding of magic had outstripped what could be studied and entered
the world of intuition. Sorcery was a combination of elements that included the extant supernatural energies woven into the fabric of reality, as well as a facility to wield and weave those
energies. Nikki had once compared his abilities to a nuclear scientist being able to manipulate atoms merely by thinking of them. She hadn’t been far off, though magic was more involved than
that.

It took focus and discipline, knowledge and purpose . . . And it took passion. Love worked, as did anger. Or grief.

‘I could have done this before you arrived, but I wanted you both to see it,’ he said.

‘What are we seeing?’ Allison asked warily, her usual bravado gone.

Octavian contorted his hands and dragged them through the air, which had become warm and malleable around him. It flowed sluggishly around his fingers like paint and slow ripples spread outward,
reality shuddering and changing.

The room grew darker, and the curtains that had been open a moment before were now closed. The time here in Philadelphia, on the twelfth floor of the Loews Hotel, was late afternoon, but a
sliver of early morning sunlight shone in through the gap in the curtains.

‘Just in case,’ Octavian said softly. ‘I’m worried that I’ll miss something important . . . some detail that we’ll need.’

‘Peter?’ Kuromaku said warily.

‘Hush,’ Octavian said. ‘Just watch.’

He kept his back to them. He didn’t want to see their expressions, or his own reflected in their eyes.

Out in the foyer of the mini-suite, there came two clicks, one soft and one slightly louder. The door swung inward and Nikki entered the room. Octavian felt a surge of love and longing that
quickly turned to ice inside him. He could smell a citrus odor that he realized came from the maid’s cleaning products, a scent that had been lacking when the crime scene people had finished
their work.

‘Peter, you don’t have to do this,’ Allison said. ‘We know what happened.’

‘Just in case,’ he said again, steeling himself.

Octavian, Allison, and Kuromaku stood like ghosts in the room as Nikki put the key card for her room on the small coffee table by the loveseat out in the mini-suite’s foyer. She walked
into the bedroom and stripped off her black shirt, glancing around until she spotted the discarded pajamas laid across a chair by the heavily draped windows. Looking tired and grateful to be able
to exhale, she unhooked her bra and removed it.

Shadows swirled like liquid blackness in the corner of the room, coalescing into a lean, sculpted figure.

‘You
are
lovely,’ the figure rasped.

Cortez had arrived to murder her, to tear out her throat and nail her to the wall, and Octavian could only watch, for these events had already unfolded.

Revenge seemed such a small thing to him, now.

But it was all he had.

Siena, Italy

Gabriel Baleeiro felt more relaxed than he had in years. Arm in arm with his wife, Jessica, he strolled through the square in front of the Basilica San Domenico and breathed in
the cool, clean night air of Tuscany. He had never thought of churches as romantic, but with the lights strung throughout the square and the late-night lovers wandering together, the façade
of the fortress-like basilica made him feel like he had stepped back in time.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Jessica said, bumping against him playfully.

Gabe smiled and swung her in front of him, playing at the image of a dashing leading man from some 1940s film.

‘After twenty-five years, you need me to tell you what I’m thinking?’

She grinned, shyly dropping her gaze. ‘You’re thinking you can’t wait to get back to the hotel.’

‘I can wait,’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful night. But I am looking forward to what happens when we return to our room.’

‘Me falling asleep?’

He laughed. ‘Not tonight.’

She gazed up at him, searching his eyes with the kind of adoration and yearning he hadn’t seen in her in ages. Music drifted from the open door of a trattoria across the square.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Not tonight.’

The Baleeiros were doctors, Gabe the senior surgeon at St George’s in London, and Jessica the head of the pediatric oncology unit there. She was British born and bred, while Gabe hailed
from Brazil. They’d met in medical school and fallen in love during all-night study sessions, but twenty-five years had passed in a blur of patients and surgeries and they’d had to
steal romance in the tiniest sips. Aside from the occasional weeklong sunny holiday with their two sons, who were now twelve and fourteen and staying with their grandmother in Milton Keynes, they
had rarely been away from their work. This sabbatical – two weeks together in Tuscany, no kids – was something of a second honeymoon, and Gabe had spent the past week falling in love
with his wife all over again.

‘You know what this reminds me of?’ Jessica asked as they walked along the cobblestones in the shadow of the church. ‘With all the lights?’

‘Sao Paolo,’ Gabe said. ‘The festival, that night you first met my parents.’

Jessica slid her arm through his again and leaned against him as they walked. ‘You know me well.’

‘I know
us
well. Sometimes I forget, but this trip has reminded me.’

‘Aren’t you a bloody romantic?’

He smiled. ‘Well, I
am
Brazilian.’

Jessica tugged him toward her and gave him a quick kiss. It felt to Gabe like he’d won a prize of some kind, but he knew that his life with Jessica was the prize. For the second time they
stopped where they were, right in the middle of the square, and gazed at each other. He knew he had aged well – the white streak in his hair the one thing that put the lie to his boyish face
– but Jessica had aged even better. Not that she had been untouched by the years; instead, the lines at the corners of her eyes and the edges of her lips had given her an austere, dignified
beauty that youth could never achieve.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ he said.

‘How long, do you think, before the boys noticed our absence?’

‘With your mum spoiling them, at least a couple of months.’

She laughed, and then grew serious again, reaching up to touch his face. ‘We need to do this more often, love. Take some time for ourselves.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s unbecoming in doctors, you know. All this soppy affection. And very un-British of you, too. You’re meant to
be wry and jaded and hold love at arm’s length.’

Jessica gave him a playful shove. ‘Bugger that.’

Then she pulled him to her and Gabe went along willingly. He didn’t wait for her to kiss him, wrapping his arms around her and bending to meet her lips. The late-night revelers and
strolling couples around them were forgotten. The moment belonged only to them.

And then the night exploded.

The air ruptured as the front of the church blew out, glass and rubble erupting and crumbling down onto the cobblestones. The blast threw the Baleeiros off their feet, still locked in an
embrace, and they hit the street in a tangle of limbs, rolling and sliding to a stop. Gabe struck his head and blacked out, coming to moments later with his ears ringing and the echo of the
explosion still resounding off of the façades of the buildings in the square.

Jessica was kneeling by him, blood dripping down her cheek from a laceration at her left temple. Her eyes were glassy but she seemed otherwise unharmed. It took him a moment to realize that she
was talking to him, calling his name, shaking him.

‘I think I’m okay,’ he said, and realized he’d spoken in Portuguese.

Not that it mattered. She’d barely have heard him over the screams of the other people in the square. Some were cries of fear and others of pain or grief – as a doctor and a surgeon
he had come to be familiar with so many different types of human anguish.

The cobblestones shook beneath him and he heard the rumble of more of the church collapsing. His chest rose and fell with shallow, ragged breaths and he glanced around, blinking at the
realization that he might be slightly in shock.

‘I’m all right,’ he said, this time in English. ‘Just shaken up. Come on.’

He sat up, wavered a bit, and then stood and stared at the church. Most of its face had collapsed and its interior yawed vast and dark, the glow of the festive lights in the square barely
reaching within.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘We’ve got to help.’

She hesitated, her concern for him etched on her face, but then it vanished and was replaced by the determined mask of the doctor.

‘Where do we start?’ she asked.

‘Follow the loudest screams.’

They scanned the square, ignoring the people only now streaming out of the trattoria and a wine bar, as well as the busker who was on his knees weeping over his broken guitar.

‘This way,’ Jessica said, grabbing his hand.

They ran toward the church. A sixtyish woman stood over a man who’d been struck by stone debris. He looked shattered, his chest misshapen and his jaw askew as blood bubbled from his mouth.
Gabe and Jessica exchanged a dark look, and he knew they were thinking the same thing.
Triage.

This guy wasn’t going to make it.

Not far away, a pair of college girls was crying, trying to move a chunk of wall off a third. It took all of Gabe’s will to turn his back on the dying old man and run to them.

‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Let me look at her first.’

They looked confused and he realized they didn’t understand English. He started to gesture to himself, saying ‘doctor,’ but then Jessica was there, rattling off something in
simple, passable Italian and they took a step back. The two girls stared in shock at their fallen friend, whose legs and pelvis were trapped beneath an enormous slab of wall. The trapped girl was
blessedly unconscious.

Gabe dropped to his knees beside her, checking her pulse as he lowered his head and listened for breath sounds. Her pulse was weak but steady and she was still breathing. If paramedics arrived
with their gear in time, and the rubble could be shifted off of her, she might live, but it was going to be a near thing.

‘Honey,’ Jessica said. ‘Have a look at this.’

He turned and saw the two college girls staring at him hopefully. One of them, a tall, olive-skinned girl, had blood soaking through the fabric of her long, stylish sweater in a dozen places or
more. Small pieces of jagged glass jutted from the left side of her face and from slices in the thin sweater. She cradled her left arm against her chest, and he knew something other than glass had
struck her, but it was the glass that concerned him most. The girl blinked, studying him, and then she spoke to him in Italian, gesturing at her fallen friend.

She staggered a little, weak from loss of blood already. In minutes, or less, she would be unconscious. She would die unless he could staunch the flow of blood, but there were so many
wounds.

‘Jess, help me with her. Get her to lie down. Christ, we’ve got to figure out how to get these—’

‘Gabe,’ his wife said, and her tone brought him up short.

He glanced at her and saw that she had never moved. She stood staring at the ruin of the church with wide eyes, her mouth slightly open, a kind of sickly fear etched upon her features. Only then
did he realize that she had never meant for him to look at the bleeding girl, never been worried about the college girls at all. Not once she had seen this.