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.
Chapter Six
Antonin Vanderpoel was a ghost.
Silas encountered so few of them that he was taken by surprise when, despite his best efforts, he couldn’t dig up anything on the man.
He sat in the office of his newly purchased house — a mansion, really — and glared at his various computer screens. The office wasn’t quite as sophisticated as his lab back home in the Neutral Zone, but it had everything he needed. Everythingtheyneeded.
What’s wrong?Tal’s voice was gentle, a low rasp in the back of his mind. In the far corner of the office, where the shadows were deepest, the vague shape of a person only visible to Silas wavered.You look upset.
“I don’t get upset,” Silas lied.
Shadows couldn’t roll eyes they didn’t have, and yet…You throw tantrums every other day.
He quibbled over the use of the wordtantrum,but Silas could admit that he wasn’t exactly pleasant to be around when he didn’t get his way. Tal, his brother in every way that mattered, knew that better than most.
What’s bothering you?The shadows stirred, as they often did, whenever Tal’s interest spiked.Is it the witch again?
Silas glared at the screen. He’d been certain that he would be able to get all the information he needed to satisfy his curiosity with a few keystrokes, but just like everything else involving his little goddess, he found himself thwarted.
One line next to a generated placeholder image rather than a headshot. That was all he’d come up with after hours of sifting through available and less-than-public databases.
Antonin Vanderpoel, a lifetime member of Glory’s Temple and accomplished High Priest, was appointed as Protector of the Gloriae March 12th, 2038.
“Is the name Antonin Vanderpoel familiar to you?” He leaned over, his ergonomic office chair squeaking under the strain, to peer at the shadows.
Tal was a person as surely as he was, just without a body. He identified as male, had a keen mind for crime, and nearly a thousand years of accumulated knowledge from which he pulled regularly. He was also Silas’s first and only friend — a being he’d called his brother for as long as he’d known the meaning of the word.
They’d been nearly inseparable since Silas first began speaking to the shadows at three years old, so sometimes he forgot that Tal was an ancient being who’d seen and done more than he could comprehend. He was a wealth of untapped information, just as all wraiths with the ability to speak were.
Despite what people wanted to believe, demons weren’t the only intelligent life that could thrive in the dark. The trick was knowing where to look.
No,Tal answered.Should I?
“I don’t know.” Silas drummed his claws on the desk, the puzzle that was Petra turning over and over in his mind. “My witch thinks he’s important enough to trade her magic for.”
Tal’s shadows crept along the wall, edging out of the way of what little sunlight Silas let in through a crack in the blackout blinds. Normally he chose hole-in-the-wall apartments for their hideouts. Since Tal couldn’t function well in the light — a fact that wounded him, though Silas couldn’t understand why — they preferred places where sunproofing wasn’t a hassle.
But Silas hadn’t been able to pass up the purchase of this particular house, perfectly placed as it was, and Tal had only given him a knowing sigh when he chose it, saying he’d make it work.
“You can have your own house soon,”Silas had promised him. He didn’t do that lightly. There were vanishingly few beings in the world Silas would even open a door for, let alone break all the laws of man and gods.
And Tal had waited long enough for Silas to fulfill his biggest promise, one he’d made when he was a little boy. The least he could do was tack on a house for the trouble.
But he really didn’t appreciate the skepticism in Tal’s voice when he asked,She really agreed to it?
Silas shrugged. “She’s desperate.”
Now,whyshe was so desperate was something he was keen to discover. His dominant theory was an over-dramatic threat in the convoluted and incestuous power structure of the Temple, but it could have been anything.
Is that an ex-lover of hers, do you think?
