Her eyes roll back as she chants Latin verses. As if she’s actually planning to summon the fucking Devil.
Flames lick at the bottom of my boots. Their stifling heat scorches my lungs. Mama and Papa are still asleep, unaware they’re about to be burned alive.
An impossible breeze lifts my hair, an electric current sliding over my skin. My eyes play tricks on me, elongating the shadows. I swear I see the pentagrampulsea vibrant, bloody red.
Not real. It’s not fuckingreal.
Smoke swirls around the pyre, gripping my throat tight. My eyes slam shut against the sting. I don’t know what is happening or how. Magic is fiction, not reality. Maybe I’m hallucinating. Maybe I’ve finally lost what little I had left of my sanity.
It doesn’t matter because I’m about to die.
But it’s not myself that I care about. It’s my parents on either side of me, the mother and father I’ve been lucky enough to have my entire life. It’s the people I’d be leaving behind. It’s the man I fell for, the angel of a soul I trusted enough with my whole black heart.
For just a moment, I imagine what we would’ve looked like captured on canvas beside each other. Brontë, his arms around me likeprotective wings. Me, wearing a crown like a halo and clinging to him as if he’s my salvation.
My king. My angel.
The love of my life.
As the heat of the flames flares hot enough to scald my skin, I don’t pray to the stars.
I pray to the only angel that I believe in.
PHANTASM
Brontë
St. Aurelius’s Cemetery is crawling with Leviathan guards like maggots on a corpse.
Foot patrols monitor the graveyard, their masks like demons in the dark. Their M16s and flashlights pan over headstones. Not that they can hear or see shit in this torrential downpour drowning the forest and thick fog blinding them to a black panther and three men setting up jars of dynamite powder around the entire perimeter.
Jezebel paces between us as we work. She stares, unblinking, at the Aurelius mausoleum towering over the cemetery. Sensing something none of us can. Edging my every ragged nerve.
“We’re all set, Emi,” I murmur as I carefully lodge the last jar in the mud. Her drone hovers nearby, watching for hostile activity. “Tell Bax I owe him a few drinks.”
“Copy. Be safe, all of you.”
“We will. Over and out.”
Nikolai is the first to take off without so much as a goodbye or a backward glance, KA-BARs in his fists as he vanishes into the dark. Dantë takes a step forward, but I catch his bicep, jerking him back.
“If I fall—”
“You won’t.”
“IfI do, you keep moving and saveher. Got it?”
His eyes lock on mine, fear thrumming under the surface of his mask. “Got it.”
I nod, and he disappears into the spectral fog like a phantasm. That’s it; no goodbyes.
We learned long ago to never give death an opening. It’ll snatch any opportunity with greedy hands and hungry teeth.
Breathing steam through my nostrils, I pull my own blades and start moving. Jezebel prowls at my side, fangs bared.
All good plans are simple, with as little twists and turns as possible to ensure the smallest margin of error. Fanning out, we each claim overlapping sectors of the cemetery as ours to clean, working our way in toward the mausoleum from the outskirts so we don’t miss a single hostile.A clear path will grant us passage into the Aurelius crypt without having to watch our own backs, and the distraction planted along the treeline will turn their heads for that split second we need to slip into the viper’s den undetected.
Jezebel and I stalk as one, targeting our first victim in seamless synchronicity. They don’t even hear us trailing behind them, nor do they feel death’s breath on their neck until my gloved hand is over their mouth, gagging their startled shout. A swift slice through their jugular, and they drop like a weighted sack. Blood pools onto the ground beneath them like molten rubies.
