Chapter 50

Chapter Fifty

Silas woke to his mate sprawled on top of him, his head throbbing like someone had taken an ax between his horns, and blanketed in a contentment he hadn’t felt in his entire existence.

They were also laying the wrong way on the bed.

He breathed deep, taking in the lingering scent of sex in the air and the perfume of his mate’s skin. Magic was a tinny note at the tail-end of each breath. It tasted like blood and sunshine on his tongue. Like her.

Bonding with Petra was a bit like being struck by lightning, he discovered. Her power had blinded him as it coursed through his veins, leaving tracks of pure fire in its wake. When it was over, he was left remade, transformed like ordinary sand to crystalline glass.

He’d always possessed magic, but this was different. What was once a spark was now a roaring furnace inside him.

Staring at the ceiling and listening to her even breathing, it occurred to him that he could do anything with it. With his expert control, he could bend any sigils to suit his will. His options were limitless and his hunger for discovery immense. Nothing could stand in his way now.

But as he sifted his claws through his mate’s long blonde hair and stared at the dark ceiling, there was a curious lack of desire to do more than that.

He felt no urge to run to his lab. He considered his many, many schematics and the ideas he’d been forced to set aside due to lack of power but felt no enthusiasm to revisit them. He didn’t feel the victorious rush he often did when he got what he wanted from someone who’d initially refused him.

Silas felt… good. Satisfied. Like he’d been hungry for something his whole life and finally, finally had his fill.

It was an odd thing to feel no itch, no need to find the next rush. Silas’s lips twisted into a wry smile. There’s no rush that compares to my witch. If I’d known what a thrill it’d be to have her… Well, Petra’s lucky I found her when I did.

He figured he’d always be drawn to creation, to puzzle-solving and tinkering, but he couldn’t imagine running off to take outright illegal jobs now. Not because he’d discovered a sense of morality between Petra’s perfect thighs, but because it just didn’t interest him anymore. The risk of getting caught or putting his mate in danger wasn’t worth it.

She didn’t know it yet, but his services had become exclusive to her and her alone.

He was her one-demon army and he wouldn’t rest until every one of her enemies was dead.

“What are you thinking about?” Petra’s groggy voice drew his attention back where it belonged — her.

“Destroying the Temple for you,” he answered, rubbing a strand of her hair between his fingers. He loved her hair. It was captured sunlight — like her magic, like how she made him feel, like her.

“Okay, I think the bond hangover is scrambling my brain. What’d you say?”

Silas frowned and switched to gently massaging her forehead. “I’m going to destroy the Temple for you.”

Petra sounded adorably confused when she grunted, “Huh?”

“Because they’re a threat to you,” he explained, amused by her sleepy befuddlement. He loved this new version of her: well-fucked, safe, and drowsy.

When Petra continued to stare at him, he went on, “We’ve been in here for almost…” He finally thought to check his watch. “…two weeks. My programs should have cracked the encryption on the files by now. It’ll be a bitch to figure out where to start going through all the data, but as soon as I don’t feel like I was hit by a truck, I’m going to track down everyone involved with Vanderpoel. Then I’ll kill them.”

“But what if that’s the entire Gloriae?”

“Might be,” he replied, recalling Rasmus’s mutterings about soldiers. “Antonin probably acted relatively independently, and I can’t rule out that he didn’t have leverage over the High Gloriae, but I think it’s more likely that whatever he was up to, it was being done with the permission of the Temple’s ruling body.”

Maybe not all of them. Maybe not even most of them. But enough. Someone gave that man the power and money to do what he’d done. Someone set everything in motion, and Silas had a gut feeling it wasn’t Antonin. Tyrants couldn’t exist without enablers, and they tended to be far more dangerous.

A tyrant couldn’t resist making himself known, but an enabler was a snake in the grass, hidden and waiting for an opportunity to strike.

“Silas, you can’t kill the Gloriae,” Petra protested.

“We’ll see,” he replied, giving her an indulgent smile. Not wanting to make her headache worse, he changed the subject. “Weres— when were they made?”

Giving him an odd, sleepy look, she replied, “I— I don’t know. Near the end of the war, I think? What does that have to do?—”

“How old was Antonin?”

“I don’t know.” She paused. Her brow furrowed. “Not too old. If he was involved with that, it had to have been when he was pretty young.”

“The resources and the planning something like that would have taken wouldn’t have come from a man at the start of his career.”

He was willing to admit that Antonin was smart, but making one’s own army was very rarely the first step a young man took to taking power. Even if he was fabulously wealthy, even if he was ambitious, that kind of plan didn’t come from nothing.

Petra rubbed her forehead. “I want everyone to be held accountable for their actions — for the weres and Max and everything — but I don’t necessarily want everyone dead. That’s not always real justice, Silas. A lot of the time people need to live to get what they deserve.”

“What do you want to do with the Temple, then? Do you want to be the new High Gloriae? Do you still want to be High Priestess? Tell me.” He couldn’t let threats to her survive, but he’d make sure she got what she wanted, even if it didn’t look quite like she imagined.

Petra opened her mouth, but it was a long time before words came out. “I… I don’t know.”

“Your assistant said that no one would accept you with a demon for a mate.” He didn’t care what anyone thought, and he found the taboo nature of their union pretty damn enticing, but that didn’t mean he was ignorant to what it would cost Petra. People would have a problem with Glory’s own flesh, her representative on Earth, being mated to a demon.

It didn’t matter that he was only half, and it didn’t matter that Glory and Blight were once mated themselves. There was no hiding it when his shadow would remain around her throat for the rest of her days.

And certainly not after she carved the marriage sigils into their brows.

She would be seen as inviting Blight — his cursed gaze, his disease, his creeping darkness — into Glory’s sacred house whether Silas stood by her side or not. If she wanted to remain High Priestess, he’d silence every critic and force worshippers into the pews at gunpoint, but somehow he doubted she’d be in favor of that.

Petra shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what I want. I can’t go back there.”

He scowled. “Of course you can. I’ll take care of everything.”

“You can’t un-murder a man, demon.”

“No, but I can make sure no one asks any questions. You’d be surprised how many people get away with murder, you know.” Skimming his palms up her arms, he urged her, “Stop thinking about what you can’t do. Think about what you want. I told you I’d make you happy and that I’d give you everything you ask for. So tell me what that is and I’ll do it.”

Her eyes darted, clearly searching for something in his expression. “What about what you want?”

“I have everything I want.” He gave her arms a small, possessive squeeze. “My mate in my bed. That’s it.”

She cocked her head to one side. The small movement sent her hair slithering over his naked chest with a ticklish caress. “What about Tal? The wraiths?”

“Tal will get his body as soon as we get back to San Francisco,” he explained, thinking of the empty shell waiting in his lab. He wished he’d thought to bring it, but those last few days in the city had been too chaotic, and he hadn’t wanted to risk something happening to the delicate internal machinery in transit. “And the other wraiths will just have to wait until I can sneak into Solbourne Tower to get a peek at that generator.”

Petra looked away, her expression troubled, when she said, “I wish I’d known about them before. I would have been able to ask Margot, but now…”

“Now, you’ve just gotta tell me what you want and I’ll make it happen. Do you want to be High Priestess again, or do you want to be Petra? Just Petra.”

Everything hinged on her answer. No matter what, he’d destroy the people connected to Vanderpoel and the Ardeo, but the rest was up to her.

Petra laid her head back down on his chest. She tucked her arms in close, folding herself into a small bundle there in the circle of his arms. She belonged there, nestled between his lungs, far more than his heart did.

“I don’t know what I want,” she admitted in a small, hushed voice. “Or maybe I do. I guess… I know I don’t want anything to happen to my people at St. Emaine’s. I know I don’t want to go to jail for murder. I know I want to still be friends with Margot. Better friends, even. I…”

She trailed off, but Silas didn’t push her. He was content to wait for her as he stroked the bumps of her spine.

“You know, four years ago I was totally happy with what I was doing. I know I wasn’t very high up in the hierarchy, but I liked teaching. I was content to live a little, safe life all by myself. Now I can’t imagine going back to that.”

“Four years is a long time to work at something,” he replied, thinking of all her mad plans and her hunt for justice. “And living like you did for that long will change a person.”

He wondered if he would have been as drawn to that version of Petra — the school teacher, the devoted niece, the quiet priestess content with her work. He thought so. Silas was drawn to every facet of her and suspected that wouldn’t have changed no matter when they met. However, he doubted that Petra would have ever given him the time of day, so he was glad their paths crossed when they did. It saved him the hassle of kidnapping her, probably.

He liked his fierce, canny priestess. He found the sharp edges of her beautiful. This Petra was a perfect match for him.

She let out a soft sigh. “Yeah. Four years is—” Petra cut herself off. She went stiff under his hands.

Alarms ringing in his mind, he bit out, “What? What’s wrong?”

Petra lifted her head, but she didn’t look at him. Her gaze wandered sightlessly as she propped herself up. “Four years.”

“…Yes? That’s how long you’ve been High Priestess.”

Petra sat up completely. He followed her up, despite the fact that his body protested every tiny movement. The rut hit him hard, and the bond had taken what little strength he’d had left, but he ignored his discomfort in favor of peering into his mate’s pinched expression. She looked like she was trying to solve an invisible puzzle and failing.

“Petra, what’s happening? What are you doing?”

Without looking at him, she grasped his forearm and held tight. “Four years ago. What happened four years ago?”

He really wished he had some psychic abilities. That way he could have rifled around in her mind to see what on Earth she was trying to put together. “You decided to find out what happened to Max.”

“Yes, but before that?”

“Max died.”

Petra nodded, but her eyes had squeezed shut. “Uh-huh. What else?”

“I don’t know. He caught Antonin with his hand in the cookie jar?”

“Max refused to tell me what he’d found. I asked Antonin to tell me why he killed Max, but he wouldn’t say. Not until we were bonded.” Petra didn’t seem to notice the way a growl rumbled out of Silas’s chest. “But?—”

“It had to have been something he uncovered around that time.”

“I assumed it was blackmail,” she muttered. “Everyone knew the rumors. I thought maybe Max found out he was abusing his power, using the blackmail to do awful things. I mean, for Max to think it was bad enough— It had to have been really, really bad. Something awful happening within the Temple, like when the scandal broke about the orphan indoctrination in 1930 and half the High Gloriae stepped down. Then I thought maybe it was the stuff with the weres. Except that’s not urgent. Not something that he would recklessly run into without a plan.”

Petra finally opened her eyes. There was so much dread in them when she asked, “What happened the summer Max was murdered?”

The hair stood up on the back of his neck. His shadows began to ripple with agitation and the need to protect her from an unseen threat when he demanded, “What do you mean? What else would it have been?”

“What happened four years ago?”

“I don’t know.” And it was really starting to annoy him that he didn’t.

Her nails bit into the flesh of his arm when she rasped, “What event would have even brought him to St. Emaine’s in the summer of 2044? Not Max’s appointment as High Priest. He’d been there for years and St. Emaine’s was considered extremely stable. No money problems, no bad acolytes, no scandals. The Protector would have had no reason to go, and if there was an internal issue — something or someone worth dragging the Ardeo in — I would have heard rumors about it by now.”

“So it was something outside the Temple.” Silas’s mind raced.

Soldiers, Rasmus had said. They wanted to make soldiers.

Why would an organization need soldiers like werewolves? Why did anyone want an army?

Speaking slowly, like she didn’t want to say the words, she asked again, “What happened, Silas?”

“Delilah Solbourne abdicated,” he answered slowly. “And everyone thought the EVP was about to tear itself apart.”

Why did anyone want an army? To take something they wanted, usually a territory.

When was the best time to take a territory? During a war. Civil wars were preferable, as a fractured society was easier pickings than one united by a common cause.

But no war had come to pass. Theodore Solbourne managed to calm the territory down and hold his seat. His marriage to Margot Goode had significantly strengthened his position less than a year later. Whatever opportunity Antonin might have seen in the power exchange hadn’t manifested.

But it could’ve.

With a few hundred brainwashed Ardeo soldiers in Solbourne Tower, the wealth and religious sway of the Temple, as well as the potent blackmail Antonin had on the leaders of the UTA…

Successful coups happened with far less.

Gray-faced, Petra asked, “Max was invited to the ceremony as a gesture of good will. I remember because that’s what I called to ask him about that last time we talked.”

“What did he say about it?”

“Nothing. He refused to talk about it. About anything. He was terrified. So upset it was hard to understand him. He just told me he’d learned something about the Protector and he planned to confront him. It never occurred to me that the events might be related.”

She swallowed hard. “If that’s what brought him to San Francisco in the first place… What brought him back?”