Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

Petra didn’t sleep well and never had, but she could admit to herself that knowing Shade had disabled the camera in her bedroom made rest come a tiny bit easier.

Unfortunately, rest was a relative thing when her worries still kept her up half the night.

She spent most of it agonizing over her uncharacteristic lack of self-control in front of Shade, of all people. You can’t afford to break, she’d admonished herself. Not now. Not after all this time. You just have to hold on a little longer.

Normally, she held onto her emotions with an iron fist — a necessary thing when every one of her movements and words were tracked. If it wasn’t the cameras and the microphones she discovered during her first few months in the cathedral, then it was the acolytes, none of whom could be entirely trusted not to report back to Antonin to curry favor.

If it wasn’t them, then it was a worshipper. A photographer for The San Francisco Light. A child who’d wandered away from the nursery.

Not once since she’d taken Max’s position had she been alone.

Really, she had no reason to trust that she was at that moment, either. Shade very well could have installed his own camera, or simply lied about disabling the one she already knew existed.

But for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, she believed him.

Maybe it was the rage that had glowed in his molten metal eyes or the quick, raw look of panic he wore when she’d begun to unravel. Or perhaps it was the almost childlike confusion he’d expressed just before he left.

Shade was undoubtedly a monster. Only the gods knew how many people he’d killed, the secrets he knew, and the money he’d raked in with bloodied claws. But the more they interacted, the more she thought she understood the way his mind worked.

Shade was a monster, but he was an honest sort of monster. Unlike her.

Petra tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable spot in a bed that had never really felt like hers. Now it felt even less so. No matter where she settled her head, she could smell him there.

Thyme, citrus, and amber.

Every time she breathed, she could almost taste him on her tongue. Memories of walking into her bedroom to find him there, transformed into his monstrous shape, lounging amongst her pillows, haunted her as surely as her mortification did.

Why was the sight so compelling?

Why had something hot and heavy curled in the pit of her stomach when he pressed himself against her back and hissed into her ear? It had to be the stress. Finally, after so many years of constant vigilance and grief, she’d begun to lose it.

No wonder, she thought, drawing her pillow a little closer to her nose for a deep breath of thyme.

The stress was bound to catch up with her eventually. It wasn’t just her situation, either, but running the cathedral and all its programs, carrying the weight of so many lost souls seeking comfort… add Antonin’s ultimatum, and her meltdown didn’t look so unreasonable.

That didn’t clear the bitter taste from her mouth, though.

Being exposed was never comfortable for her. Being exposed to Shade, a man who seemed to take great pleasure in taunting and humiliating her, was a different level of pain.

It was impossible not to lose it with him, though. He apparently boasted a preternatural sense for exactly where her buttons were hidden. He picked and picked and picked. Why he took such great delight in hounding her, she really couldn’t say.

That man wants me to bind myself to him. Her stomach turned at the thought.

Petra couldn’t say she was sentimental. That had been beaten out of her early on, when her parents sold her toys to pay for food and when her friends at the children’s home snitched on her to save their own skin. Life in the Temple wasn’t kind to the soft, either.

Despite what the High Gloriae preached to the public, witchbonds weren’t always the result of a fated love connection. In the Temple, they were used to carve out alliances that could never be broken. It was hard to stab someone in the back when your souls were tied together. The Gloriae encouraged the practice of exchanging witchbonds amongst acolytes, since it tied all involved parties to the fabric of the Temple that much tighter and, if they were lucky, could result in a new crop of magically gifted children.

Petra had entertained a handful of offers herself before her machinations brought her to San Francisco and some small measure of power. But she hadn’t been a rising star then, and the people who’d proposed matches were as low level in the hierarchy as she was.

Out of all the ways her plan to discover the truth Max’s murder could have gone awry, never, not once, did she suspect it would have to do with her suddenly being a desirable match.

A cold sweat broke out across her skin. Shade’s demand rang clear as the cathedral’s bells in her mind.

Ideas of what it would be like to give her magic over to the demon, what he might do with that power, made her gorge rise. She could admit that some stupid, tiny part of her was attracted to him — surely a byproduct of her dysfunctional upbringing amongst criminals — but she could never imagine willfully tying herself to him.

And that was why she lied.

The likelihood that she would live past Antonin’s visit was slim, and that was the best possible outcome. Because surviving meant one of two things: either she tied her life to a half-mad, sociopathic demon…

Or she tied herself to Antonin.

Two days crawled by after Shade broke into her bedroom, and Petra knew for certain she was going crazy.

The cathedral was in an uproar. There’d been no time to panic before the Protector’s last visit, when he’d shown up with his entourage and his easy smile just after sundown service.

“I was in town to meet a friend,” he’d said, oozing charm even as her staff quivered with fear behind her in the dining hall. “But I couldn’t pass up a chance to visit our rising star. I hope you don’t mind.”

No one knew much about Antonin Vanderpoel besides two essential facts: firstly, that he was the head of investigation and security for the entire Temple and secondly, that the people around him tended to simply disappear.

Not his closest entourage, of course. They were a terrifyingly dull-eyed, silent unit rumored to be packed with intensely magically gifted witches he’d hand-selected as children.

But everyone else, from esteemed Priestesses to lowly acolytes to domestic staff, seemed to vanish with a snap of his fingers.

Max had warned her to steer clear of the Protector’s all-seeing eye long before he’d shocked her by accepting the position as San Francisco’s High Priest. But when she pressed, he refused to elaborate on the danger. She still wasn’t entirely certain what he’d tried to warn her about, only that Antonin Vanderpoel was a very dangerous man.

She would know, since she was certain he’d had Max killed.

Whether the staff knew that or not, they were, to a one, terrified of his upcoming visit. In the three years she’d been in charge of them, she’d never seen the marble floor of the cathedral shine so brightly, nor the brass fittings on the doors and archways gleam like gold.

One by one, the paintings of Glory were freed of dust and the greasy leavings of reverent fingertips. Curtains were pulled down and beaten outside. Young acolytes redoubled their studies of ancient epics, tales of the gods and their trials and triumphs, in the library. She swore even the staff’s children, who normally frolicked in the nursery attached to the cathedral’s living areas, were more subdued than normal.

And against this tense backdrop, Petra swore she was being followed.

Not in the way she might have expected, and not by the usual crawling eyes she knew so well, but by shadows.

At first she thought it was Shade, hiding in the corner of her office again, or haunting her as she walked up winding staircases. It made sense. He’d already demonstrated how little he cared about breaking and entering.

But whenever she caught sight of a shifting shadow, an unnatural movement in the dark, there was nothing there. It would have been unnerving on the best of days, but with Antonin’s visit rapidly approaching and the way Shade seemed to have disappeared after her breakdown…

Petra sat at the head table in the dining hall and pushed food around her plate. A hum of anticipation filled the air in lieu of conversation. Normally she could eat no matter how she felt and she always, always cleaned her plate, but even her knotted stomach had its limits.

It seemed absurd to miss the damn demon, but not seeing him actually caused her more worry than when he was right in front of her.

They needed to talk. She’d gotten her hands on the floor plan for what would be Antonin’s suite and it was essential she tell Shade exactly what she needed him to find, then what to do with it.

Not to mention that there will likely be five to ten terrifyingly loyal witches standing guard at all times.

Petra’s lips thinned as she speared a roasted potato the size of a marble. No, I’ll handle that.

Based on their last meeting, the bulk of Antonin’s entourage went where he did. Theoretically, when she joined him for the private meal he’d requested, he’d bring them with him. She doubted he’d leave his things unguarded, but dealing with one or two lackeys on guard duty was infinitely better than the half a dozen bodyguards he boasted.

They would be her problem.

Petra popped the buttered potato into her mouth and tried to savor the rosemary and salt it had been seasoned with, but even the absurd spread of food the chef arrayed on her table couldn’t distract her from a thousand ways her plan could go wrong.

If Shade didn’t show back up, she’d be screwed. If Antonin caught onto her, she’d be screwed. If Shade’s tampering with the surveillance in her room was discovered, she’d be screwed. If Antonin caught him breaking into his suite…

Screwed, screwed, screwed.

A faint buzzing in the pocket of her slacks nearly startled the fork right out of her hand.

Petra froze. For just a moment, a wild, mad hope bloomed in her chest.

That particular phone never left her side. Not even when she slept. It was paid for by a buried account held under a false name, one not even connected to the money Max had hidden away for her.

The phone was one of a pair. It only had one number saved in its contacts, and its twin had been destroyed at some point between the last conversation she’d shared with Max, when he quietly but urgently begged her to leave the Temple, and his murder.

She knew it had been destroyed because she found the pieces hidden beneath a loose tile in her bathroom. Petra remembered the terror that had pierced her when she realized what he’d done, how scared he must have been when he did it.

Max hadn’t just crushed it, plucked out the SIM card, or factory reset it.

No, he’d first removed the SIM card, then melted it. Next, he’d drilled a hole in the battery, effectively incinerating the phone from the inside, before he crushed it to pieces and buried what remained beneath the tile.

That was why, when she discreetly pulled it from her pocket beneath the table, her heart lurched at the sight of the screen lit with a text notification.

For a single second, the span of a blink, Max was alive again.

And then he wasn’t, because the number on the screen was marked as private.

Petra’s stomach sank so fast, she worried she might actually be sick. Her hand shook as she unlocked the screen and, after checking to make sure no one was watching her, glanced at the message.

It was an address.

She blinked and read it again. As she did so, another message came in.

Don’t make me wait, little goddess.

The blood drained away from her face in a woozy rush. Petra shoved the phone back into her pocket and stared, sightless, at her half-finished plate. How? How had he gotten the number to her phone? The implications of that were… sweeping. Horrifying.

She had to hold her breath to stop herself from hyperventilating there at the high table as she considered everything that would mean. Either she and Max hadn’t covered their tracks as well as they thought they did, or Shade was much, much better at his job than she could ever have imagined.

“Your grace?”

Petra swallowed a scream, shoved it down deep enough to echo in the cavern of her belly, and turned her head to meet the questioning look of a young acolyte carrying a tray.

“Do you want me to ask the chef for something else?” The acolyte, no older than eighteen and newly initiated, was a sweet-faced dragon named Yelizaveta — a rarity amongst the sea of witches and arrants who dominated the Temple’s hierarchy. Pale gold eyes flicked back and forth between Petra’s half-finished plate and her superior’s face. “I’m sorry you didn’t like dinner. Please let me?—”

“I’m fine, Yelizaveta,” Petra sighed. “Really. I’m just tired.”

Life was hard for young acolytes. They were the workhorses of the Temple, given the menial and often humbling tasks, and tended to be abused to varying degrees by those who forgot what it was like to be in their position. Like Max before her, Petra had made it very clear that new initiates were supposed to report any hazing or misuse of power directly to her — and those who mistreated them would be met with the harshest possible punishments.

That, of course, had the unintended consequence of making her a bit of a mother hen to the gaggle of wide-eyed devotees who came from San Francisco or were transferred to St. Emaine’s from elsewhere. On the whole, they were good kids.

However, they loved to hover.

Yelizaveta lingered by her elbow, unaware of the jolt of alarm that ran through Petra at the feeling of yet another incoming message.

“But your grace, I noticed you haven’t been eating as much,” she whispered, wings folding and unfolding anxiously against her back. Like all initiates, she wore a pale yellow robe over her clothing. The color stood out starkly against her night-time coloring: a navy so deep, it looked like a starless sky.

Petra could only offer her a wan smile. “The stress of the visit is getting to me, I think. Here—” She stood up from her seat and gently extracted the empty tray from the initiate’s clawed hands. “I know you haven’t had dinner yet, so how about you finish what I can’t?”

The dragon’s eyes went as wide as saucers as they took in the spread of plates on the table — more than enough to feed several people. Petra hated waste, so all Temple leftovers were served to worshippers in need the following day. Not even a hungry dragon could eat enough to make a dent in what they gave out.

“I can’t do that,” the initiate protested. “I’m not allowed.”

Technically, no, she wasn’t. Initiates were expected to eat together in the kitchen after dinner was served to the rest of the staff, and usually far simpler fare than what everyone else got.

Normally Petra would have been more cautious about breaking a stupid taboo like that, as well as the implication of favor it might give, but she was anxious, exhausted, and had to sneak out to meet a mad demon.

I might die in a few days, she thought, firming her spine. So who gives a fuck?

“Sit, initiate,” she commanded.

The room went curiously silent as all eyes turned to watch the girl sit nervously in Petra’s silly, gilded chair while the High Priestess herself stood at her elbow, a sticky food tray tucked under her arm.

Her pocket buzzed again. Petra drew her shoulders back and faced the room. Projecting her voice, she announced, “All of you have been working exceptionally hard the past few weeks to make our cathedral ready for the Protector’s visit. I can’t express my appreciation enough.” Pausing to lay a hand on Yelizaveta’s shoulder, she continued, “But as you all know, nothing would be possible without the hard work of our initiates. In light of that, I’m ending dinner service early tonight. Initiates, please drop off your trays, grab some chairs, and join Initiate Yelizaveta at the high table to enjoy a well-earned break.”

It was a credit to her staff, or perhaps how well her staff knew her, that there was only some minor grumbling when she added in a steely tone, “Everyone will be bringing their own dishes, as well as all communal plates, bowls, and cutlery, to the kitchen tonight. If I find out that anyone left their work for another, I’ll speak to you personally tomorrow.”

Buzz, buzz.

“Thank you,” Yelizaveta whispered, head down, as her fellow initiates scrambled to leave their trays in the kitchen and race back to the dining hall.

Petra gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Enjoy your dinner.”

Her pocket buzzed again, but she ignored it as she strolled out of the dining hall, the tray tucked under her arm, and toward the kitchen. A chorus of appreciation and breathless smiles greeted her as the gaggle of initiates ran by her.

I’m not beholden to you, she thought, imagining Shade’s dangerous smile as she informed the kitchen staff about the change to dinner’s usual structure.

She wasn’t certain how he’d found out about her secret phone. She didn’t know if he was watching her from the shadows. She had no idea what he wanted with her power or what he’d do to her when he found out she had no intention to go through with their bargain.

But she wasn’t powerless.

They were playing a game of cat and mouse. It was well past time she showed him that he wasn’t dealing with some soft, pampered priestess who shook in her vestments whenever he said something crude.

She was a motherfucking witch, and she’d bite any hand that dared hold her leash.