Epilogue
The months that followed were difficult. I’d given you up in the past, but never like this. Never so absolutely. Before, I knew I could visit you at any time to see how you were faring. Now I had to trust Azrael would keep his promise and that your spirit would be kept safe until you returned to the earthen realm. Time, again, had little meaning. It was the space that kept us apart, and though I longed for us to be reunited, I also dreaded having to face you again.
I received several summonses from my mother. Even more so in my bloodborn body, we shared a telepathic connection that couldn’t be severed. And then she began visiting me in dreams. I refused at first, but I was searching for some meaning in your death, something I mistakenly thought she could provide.
Over the course of several months of visits in the dream realm, where we sometimes spoke not at all, and other times just a word or phrase, I determined Lena had been captured and was being detained indefinitely in a lesser-known Shade Vale. Its location was a mystery, even to her. She presented to me in her bloodborn body, the same as I remembered from when I was young, so I deduced that she had, at the very least, recovered it.
When she learned of what I’d done—how I’d sacrificed your body to Azrael in exchange for the redemption of your soul—she was furious.
“Your loyalty to our angelic overlord never ceases to amaze me,” she said bitterly. One of us had conjured a beach, and we were walking together along the shore. The temperament of the ocean changed with our moods. At the moment the water was choppy, the waves cannibalizing each other. “You’re far too gullible, Andronicus. Especially for a demon.”
“Half-demon,” I corrected.
She ignored my insolence. “Have you ever considered your faith in Azrael might be misplaced?”
“Azrael rescued me from that infernal forest when all others had forsaken me.”
“Yes, his timing on that was impeccable.”
“Speak plainly, Lena.”
Her piercing blue eyes searched mine.
“I was coming for you, Andronicus. I’d bartered with the gods for your release. Azrael received notice of it and reached you first. Why is that, I wonder.”
I had no counter to that claim, nor proof she was telling the truth.
“Azrael has never lied to me,” I said with less confidence.
“Azrael prophesized you’d kill your beloved, then manipulated you into doing it. Perhaps you should ask yourself if you’re truly serving a benevolent master. Or if you’ve been deceived into a crime of the highest order under the guise of righteousness.”
My dream self was too distraught to contemplate much more than that, so I left her on the shore.
In the days that followed, I pondered what my mother had said. And Azrael’s prophecy that you’d present me with your instrument of death. In the end, my bloodborn body had killed you. Is that what the Potesta seers foretold, or was my mother’s implication valid? Had I been used as a pawn for both sides yet again?
And you… you were always the innocent in these games. I’d allowed them to use you as well.
It was weeks before Lena and I communed again. This time we were in the Square of the Mouth of Truth in Rome. We stood together before the Fountain of the Tritons, which depicted two seaborn brothers bearing up a massive oyster shell between them. Their backs were bowed and muscles straining from the weight of it.
It must have been me who chose this location. The Mouth of Truth was known to compel its visitors to be honest.
“You would have tortured him for an eternity if it meant keeping me under your control,” I said. “You used him just like you used Lior.”
Her tone was acerbic when she said, “Ah, yes, you were so quick to blame me for the slave boy’s death.” She shook her head. Her long tresses were snakes that framed her face like our matron Medusa. “Do you think I was the only god invested in the outcome of that battle?”
“Are you saying that wasn’t your influence?”
“Does it matter? You’ll believe what you want. Our reputations speak for themselves, don’t they? I only wished you had the same faith in me, your own mother, as you do in the word of the almighty Azrael.”
“He’s allowing me to keep my bloodborn body,” I said as my only defense.
“It was yours all along. Tell me, what was the cost of his generosity?”
“I’ll hunt down unlawful demons and their mortal accomplices until my debt is paid.”
“A demonslayer,” she hissed. Or perhaps it was her snakes. Every bit of condescension was concentrated within that word,demonslayer. “You agreed to be a killer of your own kind?” she said in disbelief.
“A hunter, not a killer,” I said.
