We lost the berserkers by the Tuileries, though Cas didn’t slow down or pause.
I was more confident from that point, as I remembered the way to the Moulin Rouge. Kleos and I had visited the Louvre and gone up to watch a show just a couple of years back, in the summer. The day was so nice, we’d walked the whole way.
The Sacré-Cœur was a stone’s throw away from the club—merely four jumps for Cas.
“All right, here’s the basilica,” he said impatiently. “Where’s the bank?”
“As I said, Gideon just said it was around here,” I grunted.
Cas was on high alert, watching the quiet hill from all angles. “I suppose we’d better start looking.”
With danger no longer imminent, I could stop following blindly. “And why, may I ask, are we looking for the bank? It’s probably closed at this time.”
“It’s never fully closed, doll,” Cas said, walking fast as he passed little crêperies, touristy little shops, all shut up at two in the morning. “Not for people with accounts as old as ours.”
“Yes, but why—” I insisted, not really understanding the need to go there now.
The first clue I got that something was amiss was the way Cas tensed, his head snapping towards a disturbance I didn’t feel. Again, he brutally shoved me, and by now I understood he was pushing me out of the way because he sensed danger before I did.
This time, he was too late.
First, I heard a dull sound, then smelled iron and copper. And then pain, the likes of which I’d never even thought existed exploded inside me.
I lowered my eyes to my midsection, shocked to see the jagged end of what looked like a road sign, torn off its post, shoved through my skin—the same ironskin almost nothing had ever breached.
Someone was screaming, and I was vaguely aware that it was me. Shadows loomed, approaching from all sides, as my visions blurred, out of focus. I could see the streetlights blinking, so far away.
I was going to die. I knew it with complete clarity.
I could feel familiar magic, coated with darker intent, spreading through my skin, sucking up my strength.
It was comforting, in a way, to feel Kleos’s presence, however twisted, at the end.
I fell slowly, or so it seemed, to my knees. My blurry vision caught sight of what looked like a living bolt of lightning flash around me as wild screams echoed in the distance.
“Stay with me. Damn you, Silver,stay with me.”
But I couldn’t.
“I promise you shadows, and blood, and ruin if you dare die, you infuriating woman. Keep your eyes open, damn you!”
He had the nicest voice, and such pretty eyes. I managed a smile.
Everything faded to black.
24
CAS
I’d been careful since my arrival in this wretched mortal world. First, to keep my presence private, and second, because I wasn’t particularly fond of pain. At least, not of experiencing it. Causing it for the right reasons had never bothered me.
As I watched my doll’s blood—silver, with a slight iridescent shimmer like a crow’s feather in the sun—spurt out of her stomach, all thoughts of caution became quite simply irrelevant.
She was dying, and I had to stop it. The cost didn’t matter.
I didn’t even retrieve the ancient iron piece I’d used to divert the pain to a magic suppressant earlier. I let the full extent of the power inside me out, burning through the flesh and soul of each of the creatures who’d dared harm her.
I should have done this before, from the first, and damn the consequences.
