“I saw him leave, and he hasn’t come back; I’ve been up since he left.”

“All right. Never mind. Get to the Tabernacle as quickly as you can and wait for me there, all of you. I’m going to get Melliane some help, and then I’ll come back for you. We can’t stay here anymore.”

More shocked whispers and shuffling, but no one challenged her openly. In the absence of Caesar or Silas, she was the temporary head of the colony and they had to do what she said…at least until one of them came back.

“Bettina, please, help me.” Eliana slid her arms gently beneath Mel, who sagged against her, heavy, but then someone stepped forward. Fabrizio—universally called Fabi—was a gentle giant, one of the Castratus charged with guarding the harem in his former life, now charged with doing all the cooking for the tiny new colony; it was his eggs she took such pains to avoid eating every morning. How she wished that was the least of her problems now.

“I’ve got her,” Fabi rumbled, his deep voice like a balm on her shredded nerves. He lifted Mel easily in his arms as if she were a child and cradled her body against his chest. Mel moaned, her eyes shut, her lips a terrifying shade of pale blue. The pulse at the base of her throat had grown faint.

“Hurry. Hurry,” Eliana urged, moving to the door and waving him along. The gathered group parted to let them pass, and Bettina followed close on her heels, pressing the bloodied remnant of sheet against Mel’s chest to try and stanch the bleeding as they quickly made their way through the echoing, arch-ceilinged common room toward the back of the abbey. Behind them, the whispering crowd began to split apart into smaller groups, conferring.

Eliana didn’t give herself time to wonder how many of them would actually be waiting for her when she got back. She had her own loyalists, but so did Caesar.

So did Silas.

To get to the back of the abbey where the main gates opened to the only access to a road, they had to pass through the old church, dusty and gloomy in the half-light of dawn that spilled down from the windows carved into the white-pink stone far above. There was an iron door set into the east wall in a niche adjacent to the altar. It was rusted and padlocked, but Eliana gave it a vicious kick and the lock and chain crumbled. The door swung open with an eerie groan, and they pushed through, heading for the weed-choked gravel driveway.

And Geo was already driving up.

Relief surged through Eliana, and she ran toward the black SUV, waving frantically, her boots crunching over the gravel. The headlights blinded her for a brief moment, and she lifted a hand, shading her eyes against the glare, and then pulled up short as her vision adjusted and her heart threatened to crawl right out of her throat.

It wasn’t Geo behind the wheel of the SUV.

It was Demetrius.

He wasn’t smiling.

D wasn’t surprised to see the look of stunned horror on Eliana’s face when he drove into the tree-lined gravel drive of the abandoned abbey. He wasn’t surprised the pulse had led him here. He’d long ago learned to trust his instincts, and the instinct had led him directly to this shadowed, abandoned place near the Sacré-Coeur as certainly as a homing beacon or the rays of a lighthouse cutting through fog.

What he was surprised about was Melliane. A bloody, unconscious Melliane, cradled limp in the arms of the Castratus.

He slammed the Range Rover into park and jumped out. “What happened?” he barked, staring hard at the Castratus. Fabi—he remembered past his shock. The man’s name was Fabi.

It quickly became apparent Fabi remembered him, too.

He snarled, “One more step, King Slayer, and your head will be auditioning for a spot on a new body!”

Fabi glared at him with open hostility. He was big and solid, and D thought he’d give him a run for his money if he tried to get to Eliana, who Fabi had edged in front of in a display of protectiveness that had D clenching both his fists and jaw. The midwife Bettina, beside him, was even more openly antagonistic. She hissed a warning through her teeth the minute he stepped from the car and hadn’t let up since.

“I didn’t kill Dominus,” he said flatly, looking only at Bettina and Fabi. Eliana, he saw from his peripheral vision, was trying to decide what to do. She was fingering something under her long coat that he suspected was a sheathed sword. He put up his hands in a show of surrender and lowered his voice, letting the tension ease out of his stance. “I’m no danger to any of you, but I can help Melliane—”

“You won’t touch her!” Bettina stepped forward, hands curled into fists, hissing like a snake. “And if you think for one second we believe anything you have to say—”

“It’s not me that’s been lying to you—”

“So says the King Slayer, a man of his word, no doubt!”

“Now is not the time to argue about this—”

“Go back to whatever rock you crawled out from under—”

“Bettina—”

“Don’t you dare speak my name!”

D was beginning to lose his patience. He watched a rivulet of blood roll down Melliane’s bare arm, gather at the tip of one finger, and then fall and land with a soft plash to the gravel at Fabi’s feet. “I’m not here to hurt you—”

“No, you’re just here to kill us!”

D shouted, “If I wanted you dead you’d already be dead, woman!”

Bettina’s jaw closed with a snap. Eliana stepped forward, put a hand on her arm, and stared at D with a strange look, dark and unfathomable.

“He’s right, Bettina, Fabi. If he wanted us dead, we already would be.”

Bettina shoved back a stray tendril of gray hair that had escaped from her bun and wrapped her arms around herself, glaring murderously at him. “Why are you here then, if not to kill us? What do you want?”

Instantly, D’s eyes cut to Eliana.

She stared back at him with that odd look, one hand flexed open at her side, the other wrapped around the hilt of the sword she’d been fingering moments before. It pierced him, seeing the defensiveness in her stance, that hand on her weapon. It cut him to the bone. Their eyes held, and though her face did not change, he thought he sensed a great tumult inside of her, a silent battle she waged against herself.

“Fabi,” Eliana said finally, very soft, her gaze level with his, “put Mel in the back of the car.”

Bettina gasped and Fabi took a step back. Still soft, still watching him, Eliana said, “He knows how to remove bullets, I can vouch for that. Mel trusts him. And we can’t take her to a hospital. So he’s our only option.”

She sounded as if she wished she had another option—any other option—and the knife in D’s heart sliced deeper. Mel trusts him.

Not her. She didn’t trust him. She wouldn’t defend him against their accusations.

Why should she? he reminded himself. She didn’t know the truth because he hadn’t told her the truth. He couldn’t tell her, because he swore a Blood oath to defend his brother Constantine to the death, which—very, very unfortunately—included tragic misconceptions, present circumstances included.

Like truth, honor is only a hollow platitude if it can be discarded when personally inconvenient.

Or soul-killing, heartbreaking, I’d-rather-die-than-have-to-do-this hard.

“Put her in the back of the car, Fabi,” Eliana said again, still with that terrible softness, that eerie look on her face. She said it again, sharper, when Fabi didn’t move, and the big male finally drew in a breath and relented. He stepped forward, bristling, the cords in his neck standing out, his eyes flinty cold.

“I swear on Amun-Ra, Ma’at, and Sekhmet, if any harm comes to her while under your protection, I will dedicate my life to killing you. I will hunt you down like a dog, and you will die like one, too, with my sword buried in your gut and your lying tongue torn out and flung to the buzzards. Your name will be cursed for a thousand generations, and your soul will writhe on the end of Osiris’s spear for all eternity.”