Zherneboh would have nothing left to chase.
There would be no war.
Ruadhan could go on without me to burden him; Jonah would lose his connection and his pain would evaporate with me; Brooke would have Jonah back; and Gabriel … well, Gabriel could go home, back to the light, back to the Angel that awaited his return.
I wouldn’t keep him here any longer.
I willed my feet to race faster, ignoring the sharp branches that scratched my face as I whipped past them. I skidded to a stop at a ledge, narrowly avoiding a fall. The mountain dipped down into a large slope, finally breaking into level ground.
At the center of the clearing was a lake, frozen, perhaps fearful of my arrival. But it was beautiful, a deep gray merging into thick white ice at its core. It separated me from the other side and, as I explored the backdrop, I came into full view of St. Barthelemy and Galinat’s peaks, which looked over at me.
It must be night now, but at this height the clouds swirling and growing caused the sky to wear a thick white cloak. And I realized that here, right in this very spot, it was neither light nor dark. It was somewhere in between.
This place was me.
Bitterly cold, I trenched through the thick white carpet of snow to the edge of the lake. A large cluster of rocks provided a perch on which to sit and wait. I teetered precariously on the tip of a boulder and scanned my surroundings. No sign of movement.
The lake was hibernating and I glanced down and took in my reflection. The same face I had always known stared back. I wished her well in her journey; I had no idea where she would go. If things went the way I had planned, she would be left caught in this moment, nothing more than an echo trapped in the water.
It was the most fragmented twitch in the air that told me he was standing behind the rocks.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, that your face is one of the first that I can remember.…” I said. “And at the end, it’s the last I will ever see.”
Brushing myself off and with one final glance at my reflection, I rose to face him.
He stood, only marginally taller than me, his hair still tied back in a loose knot at the nape of his neck, his expression blank. I looked to his clenched fist wrapped around the hilt of a sword, which was sheathed in a holster at his hip. The sword looked older than he was, displaying his family crest at the base of the brass hilt.
“I’ve come to seek retribution. You owe me your life.” Ethan addressed me as though he was reading me a death sentence.
I nodded. “May I ask why I owe you my life when you already took it once?” My tone falsely oozed confidence; in reality, my insides were somersaulting.
I needed to buy some time.
“But I didn’t,” Ethan said. “Here you stand, and here I am, one of the Devil’s brood. Because of you.”
My eyes flickered down to where his white knuckles clenched around the top of the sword, ready to release it from its cage.
“What happened to you?” I asked. “I don’t understand. When I knew you, when you knew me, you were human.…”
I edged backward. I wanted answers and I needed him to be patient.
He didn’t reply but stepped closer to me.
I put my hands up defensively and said, “Listen, you can have your revenge, I won’t stop you. But first, please let me understand.” My voice was cracking, giving me away.
He considered my request before finally answering. “You were going to leave. I watched you meet with him, but you were promised to me. I found you in the barn; you were about to run away with him, I knew it. But, Lailah, I had not meant to harm you.”
His eyes grew larger as he struggled to recall the emotion that he had once felt, before he was like this—before he had become dark. “I only wanted to stop you from leaving with that stranger. I wanted to be the one to give you everything—”
I interrupted, “Stranger? You mean Gabriel?”
“I did not know his name. We never met.” His expression lost its fleeting softness and twitched instead to irritation.
“What do you mean you never met him? You must have spoken to him the day you found me ready to leave?”
Azrael had said Gabriel had influenced Ethan, but how could he have if they had never even met?
“Lailah, I did not make his acquaintance. When you fell, I thought you were dead. I ran, like a coward no less, into the land. I wasn’t expecting to find one of the Devil’s own there.”
“You mean Eligio?” I asked.
“Yes, my Gualtiero.”
Ethan’s brow tightened as he struggled on. “By my own hand, I lost the one—the only one—I had ever…” He stopped, dwindling. “Loved.”
He seemed to struggle to even recall the emotion. “I wanted death to find me and he did. I did not falter when he changed me. A fitting punishment for taking your life, it seemed, was that Eligio should steal mine.”
I bowed my head, entirely sorrowful. It was my fault that he had been turned. “I’m so sorry.”
The snow began to fall lightly at first, but within moments I found it hard to keep the cold flakes from blinding me.
“You have no comprehension of what it is like, serving a Gualtiero,” Ethan continued. “Locked away until he deems it fit to release you to carry out his violent acts, and then … the terrible darkness. It takes control. It eats away at you, until there’s nothing left.… It becomes you.” He paused, treading ever nearer. “I live now for death, for their blood—the only satisfying thing left on this godforsaken Earth. Well, at least that was the case until I saw you again.”
His lips trembled as he salivated.
I sighed deeply before replying. “You can take my life, but not right this very moment. I must ask you to wait,” I interjected swiftly. Now I had to bargain, though I had next to nothing to play with.
“Why would I do that?”
Without hesitation, he glided the sword from its sheath and pointed the tip under my chin, scraping my flesh.
“Because if you kill me now, I will just wake up. You must wait for Zherneboh, the Devil, to come and when he does, then you must strike me here.…”
I moved the blade down toward my heart, blood seeping from my neck as I did. I had killed a Vampire by plunging a jagged piece of metal through his heart. I hoped that it would work for me too.
He paused, the cruel steel resting at my chest, and I watched him take in the scent of my blood. “I told Eligio about you the night I first saw you again. He didn’t believe me. But something had thrown him back into Hell as he began to come through the rift. Something immensely powerful. And so he had to consult … with the Devil.”