Chapter 5

Chapter Five

Petra had not been the first choice to take the position as High Priestess of St. Emaine’s cathedral. She hadn’t been in the top five, or ten, or even one hundred. In fact, she hadn’t made the list at all.

But her boss had.

A ponderous old man with a weakness for card games, High Priest Gurney and his assistant had been summoned from St. Raoul’s cathedral in Seattle to negotiate a crisis in the Elvish Protectorate. Theodore Solbourne, barely a year into his sovereignty at the time, had created a political firestorm by demanding changes to how Healing Houses — under the purview of and partially funded by the Temple — were run.

Gurney, a well-liked man known for his ability to negotiate with prickly leaders, had been dispatched to reason with the young sovereign. Too bad his assistant had come down with a terrible case of food poisoning the night before their departure. It was a bad omen, surely.

Luckily Petra, a priestess who had previously never shown much interest in politics but fell just below his assistant in the hierarchy, was there to fill the gap.

It was even luckier that she happened to be there, ready to step into the old man’s shoes, when he came down with the same bout of illness and couldn’t meet the sovereign when he’d come by unexpectedly, demanding a wedding to Margot Goode.

She’d been all too happy to accommodate him — on the condition that he recommend to the High Gloriae, the secretive ruling body of the Temple, that she replace Maximilian Dooraker as San Francisco’s highest ranking acolyte.

It was a shock, to be sure, when the name of a completely unknown priestess was announced. Gurney had been the popular choice, but the position was a powerful one, so the debate over who would take the seat had been raging for months. The news that she would take it hadn’t been well-received.

At first.

For reasons she couldn’t quite understand, the people of San Francisco warmed up to her almost immediately, and that political pull quieted most of her detractors. Some of it was certainly due to her appearance, but she hoped they also saw a bit of Max in her. A pale shadow of the warmth he’d brought to his services, the genuine compassion he’d felt for the suffering, perhaps, but something of him.

She couldn’t say the same for the Temple, let alone the Gloriae. They, like most in Glory’s service, were a tangled mass of vipers.

They weren’t all bad. Few groups of people were, in her experience, but she’d been in institutions almost all her life and that meant she’d seen exactly what power structures did to even the best of people. There’d been a moment of hope, when Max had finally tracked her down and pulled her from the children’s home, that life among Glory’s acolytes would be different, but that hope was extinguished within a week.

The truth of the matter was that, for all the violence, deprivation, and abuse she’d suffered on the streets and then in the children’s home, Glory’s Temple was far more dangerous.

The prospect of real power made snakes out of even the sweetest souls eventually. And if it didn’t, then they hadn’t lasted long enough for the transformation to take place.

That was why she had trouble understanding how Robert had survived as long as he had.

Her assistant found her, as he usually did at this hour, standing at the balcony railing of the columbarium to eat her lunch. She could hear him huffing and puffing his way up the spiral staircase long before she caught a glimpse of his balding head or flapping robes.

Petra let out a quiet sigh. The columbarium, a two-story, octagonal tower where ashes were interred, was not often visited by staff or worshippers. Situated at the front of the main building, the balcony overlooked the full stretch of the cathedral below. It was also the only part of the entire cathedral complex where she could find a little peace.

Fitting, she thought, swallowing a bite of her turkey sandwich without tasting it, that the only comfort I can find these days is amongst the dead.

“Your grace,” Robert huffed behind her, as was his habit.

“Call me Petra, Rob,” she replied, as was hers.

“The contractors are done with the guest suite’s bathroom and the chef has finished with the menu. It just needs your approval.” He lumbered up to the balcony, where he turned to face her, sweaty hands tucking away into the depths of his red sleeves. His long gold necklace, similar to her own, hung so far from his neck, Glory’s symbol bounced against his belly whenever he moved.

Petra stared out across the yawning expanse of the cathedral, eyeing the exposed ribs of the arched ceiling and the play of light through the massive stained glass windows. Curls of sweet smoke rose from the statue of Glory’s eye sockets, drifting over the head of a praying worshipper in the first pew.

Even from so far away, she swore she could feel those empty eyes fixed on her.

“None of us walk alone,” Max once told her. “Even when it might feel like we’re in the dark, Glory’s eyes are watching. Remember that, Pet. She expects great things from you.”

Petra bit back a snort. Great things? So far great things appeared to be paranoia, poking at predators, making deals with demons, and seeing that the nicest suite in the complex was even nicer for their esteemed guest and his entourage.

Antonin had complained, in his benevolent way, about the guest suite during his last stay. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t given the staff any notice before he showed up at their door, nor that he hadn’t stayed a full twenty-four hours. She’d gotten the message.

He would be coming back for her, and he expected her to be ready.

“Your grace?”

Petra turned her attention back to her flushed assistant. A tightness settled in around her ribs. She liked Robert, but that was a dangerous thing in their world. Even if she could afford to bestow favor on people, she couldn’t protect everyone. Petra didn’t have the reach, the resources, or the ruthlessness required of a real High Priestess.

She was an angry little girl playing dress-up and trying to catch a murderer.

“I’ll look over the menu tonight,” she assured him. “And thank you for handling the suite. Did the new furniture come in?”

“It did.” Robert pursed his lips, as he liked to do whenever he had something to say but wasn’t sure he should.

Petra gave him a look. “Out with it, Rob.”

A held breath exploded past his lips. He went downright ruddy when he whispered, at speed, “It just doesn’t seem fair that he gets everything he wants when this isn’t even his cathedral. Your suite hasn’t been updated since the sixties! You should be the one getting new furniture, not the Protector.”

Petra took another bite of her sandwich and prayed for patience. They’d had this fight before. Twice, actually. “First, it’s not just for him. The guest suite is for any visiting member of the Gloriae. Second, I don’t want new furniture or my suite to be taken over by construction. It’s fine.”

If she wasn’t certain that there were listening ears even in the columbarium, she might have told him that making sure the Protector had nicer sheets than her was the least of her problems. Antonin was the source of most of them, but Shade was rapidly hurtling to the top of the list.

But even if everything was perfect, she wouldn’t have wanted to renovate her suite anyway. It didn’t matter that the bathroom was outdated, the water pressure abysmal, and the furniture not to her taste.

The suite had been Max’s. Sometimes, when she stared at the ceiling, struggling to sleep, she thought she could feel him in the air. A foolish, sentimental part of her worried that if she modernized the suite, his essence would disappear.

And then she’d really be alone.

Of course, besides her sentimentality, there was always the secret passage to worry about. It was just about the only reason she could sleep at night at all, knowing that she could escape if she truly wanted to. An illusion, perhaps, but one she needed to stay even a little bit sane.

But she couldn’t tell Robert that even if there weren’t listening devices in every nook and cranny of the cathedral, so Petra gave her assistant a quelling look.

Robert pursed his lips again. Grumbling, he conceded, “Fine.” He looked out over the balcony. “We found a new runner, by the way, to replace the burnt one. And I’ve ordered a couple sandbags to place on the bases of the votive holders.”

Petra hid her grimace in her sandwich. Fucking Shade.

He hadn’t admitted to being the reason not one but two worshippers needed to be hit with a fire extinguisher, nor why the very expensive, antique altar runner needed to be replaced, but she’d seen it in his smug grin.

It was the same smile he’d given her just before he climbed out her office window, saying, “By the way, I only jammed the surveillance devices. They’ll come back online as soon as I’m gone. Just thought I’d warn you, in case you wanted to say something really filthy while you have the chance.”

She recalled how she’d returned from the bar after their first meeting and shuddered. It turned out he hadn’t actually removed her glamour. He’d somehow managed to modify it so only her hair was revealed.

Fear crawled from the atavistic part of her brain at the display of raw magical skill. It was one thing to break a glamour, but never, in all her life and magical instruction, had she heard of someone so powerful they could change a spell with a simple swipe of a finger.

What have I gotten myself into?

After Antonin’s first visit, it hadn’t seemed like she could get into deeper shit than she already stood in, but Petra could practically feel it oozing up her legs.

Her only solace was in the fact that she could count on one man, at least, to do what he said he would.

“Good work, Rob.” Finishing off the last of her sandwich, she dusted the crumbs off her fingers over the railing and turned to head back down the stairs. Since she didn’t have a future to speak of, she let herself ask about Robert’s. “How’s the search for a surrogate going?”

“We’ve got it down to two interviews,” he answered, sounding both scared out of his mind and breathtakingly happy. He followed her as she headed for the stairs. “We think we’ve settled on the right one already, but you have to have back-ups in case— Well, you just have to.”

Petra paused to look over her shoulder at him. Her heart was a clenched fist in her chest, drawing tighter every time she recalled that she would probably never get to meet the baby her assistant and his husband were trying so hard to bring into the world.

Her voice came out a little throatier than normal, a little more raw, when she said, “If I can do anything to help you, name it. Time off, recommendations, a good healer. Whatever you need.”

Robert’s throat bobbed with a hard swallow. “Thank you, your grace. You’ll be the first to know, I promise. Hopefully we’ll know something before you go on sabbatical.”

There was a strange, uncanny weight to the word sabbatical. She hadn’t discussed why she planned to take time off after Antonin’s visit, but it didn’t matter. Everyone had come to their own conclusion.

She could tell he wanted to say something about it, maybe offer a warning, but she cut him off. “Even if I’m away from the cathedral, I want to know everything. Promise you’ll send me a message.”

It was unlikely that she’d ever see it, but she needed to know he would. That someone would think about her in a moment of joy even when she was… wherever she’d end up.

The skin around Robert’s eyes tightened. Quietly, he replied, “I promise, your grace.”

Petra liked babies. She liked them a lot. It hurt like a motherfucker to know she wouldn’t get the chance to know Robert’s.

Forcing herself to smile, to keep walking, to keep moving lest she stall, crack, and shatter there in the columbarium, she playfully admonished, “It’s Petra, Rob.”

“Sorry, your grace. I’ll remember next time.”

She shook her head and kept walking. All around her, names and dates engraved on tiny bronze plaques glinted in the lights of a hundred tiny candles, each one set into its own special tray to mark the souls connected to those names.

There’d been questions about why Max wasn’t interred there. Rumor was that he’d left a request to have his remains sent to his only living relative, but no one could say for certain where they’d gone.

No one knew that his ashes were in her suite, carefully stored in a warded box in the cabinet next to her bed. She’d already drafted her will, instructing Robert to place her and her adopted father together in the columbarium, but a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach told her that she wouldn’t get even that simple courtesy.

Death was a scary thing to imagine, but it was far better than the alternative: a life tied to the Protector himself.