Or opened a bank account.

Obviously they couldn’t have, however, because large cash deposits tend to invite the curiosity of certain legal entities, whose curiosities they could not afford to pique, so they’d been forced to stash it all in the catacombs, like rats plumping a nest. Eliana had been almost too efficient in her moneymaking endeavors, because moving all this cash quickly was proving to be an unforeseen problem.

Stupid bitch.

He sighed, watching Aldo and one of the others who’d stayed behind—men, all of them, because only a moron…or a neutered male in Fabi’s case, which didn’t count…would follow a woman—try to shove one final black leather case into the back of the rental van. They succeeded against all odds, and Aldo drew down the rolling metal door and latched it.

“Good,” said Caesar with a nod. “Now all we have to worry about is moving the weapons.”

“They’re in shipping containers,” said Silas from his right.

Surprised, he turned and looked at Silas, who stood rigidly to the side of the gravel drive with his arm in a makeshift sling and pain etched on his face. Caesar was frankly shocked he was standing at all. He’d passed out cold when they cauterized his amputation with the heated dagger, and the pungent stench of charred meat still lingered in his nose, gamy and sweet. But he’d awoken within minutes, sucked down half a bottle of whiskey, and that was that. Not a single murmur of pain, not one complaint; only the sweat on his brow and his expression gave him away, and Caesar could tell he was trying his damnedest to quell even that.

He had to hand it to him, Silas was one tough bastard. No wonder his father trusted him so much. Perhaps he’d underestimated him. Caesar would have appreciated a few more of those lovely screams of his, but you can’t have everything.

Besides, when he got his hands on Eliana, she’d make up for it in spades.

“I moved all the weapons to the docks at Le Havre so she wouldn’t have access to it without my—your—knowledge, my lord, and the inspectors were paid handsomely to overlook the lack of proper paperwork and ensure the freight is forwarded without incident. We can have the containers ready to be shipped to wherever you like within eight hours.”

And when had he been planning on telling him about that? “Why, Silas,” Caesar drawled, his eyes narrowed, “you wily old dog, you. You’re proving to be even more resourceful than I thought.”

Silas inclined his head, the picture of deference, but suddenly Caesar found himself not only convinced he’d underestimated him, but wondering by exactly how much.

“If you like, we can load the money onto the containers as well, ship it all together.”

His voice was mild, entirely without guile, but Caesar realized that a man who could be stoic when a limb was chopped off could certainly manage to conceal a great many other things, without much effort.

He smiled cheerfully. “No, Silas, thank you, but I’ll make arrangements for the money to be sent to our final destination.”

A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, there then gone, and then Silas said, “As you wish, my lord. Shall we begin the taping?”

“Ah!” At once, Caesar forgot his suspicions. He clapped, and Aldo jumped down from the lift gate of the truck and snapped to attention in front of him. “Is it ready?”

“Yes, sire, the camera and lights have all been set up!” Aldo sounded nearly as excited as he felt; this little endeavor was, against all odds, proving to be fun.

“Well, then, hup to!”

Aldo and the five others scattered like ants, heading toward the shack at the end of the driveway. It was a ramshackle mess of a place that he guessed used to be a gamekeeper’s shed or kennel, with a caved-in ceiling and one wall missing. They’d draped a sheet across one of the standing walls and had set a wooden chair in front of it.

Opposite the chair was a video camera on a tripod, and to another tripod in the corner was affixed a light.

“My lord.” Aldo gestured to the chair and positioned himself behind the camera. He flipped a switch, and a little red light at the front of the camera blinked on. “We’re recording.”

Caesar seated himself in the chair, smoothed a hand over his hair, and smiled. Into the unblinking eye of the video camera he said, “Merry Christmas, humans, and allow me to introduce myself.” His smile grew wider. “I’m your new God.”

The taping had, of course, been Silas’s idea.

He watched Caesar smile and preen and posture, reciting the words he’d written himself, and in spite of the pain searing white pathways down every nerve ending in his body, he felt deep, deep satisfaction.

Caesar would be the one the humans blamed. It would be Caesar’s name they cursed, his likeness they remembered. Silas would be free to operate behind the scenes as he always had, planning and scheming without the burdens notoriety inevitably brought.

No matter what happened now, his days of servitude were over.

Because when Caesar’s part had been played, he would have to die.

Remembering the look on Caesar’s face when he’d pressed the heated steel against the raw, bleeding stump of his wrist, Silas smiled. Yes, Caesar would have to die. By his hands. Hand, he mentally corrected himself. By his hand.

He was really looking forward to that.

Three hundred and fifty miles away across the English Channel, the Queen of the Ikati was once again sitting up in bed in the pale pink rays of early dawn. She sat peering around the opulence of her bedchamber for a moment, listening hard into the silence, her heart thundering inside her chest.

It wasn’t a phone call that had awoken her this time, but a dream. She dreamt of a comet streaking across the night sky, trailing fire in a long, flared tail of orange. The comet had illuminated a dark landscape below, an ancient, hilly city with miles of twisting streets and red-roofed houses and a river winding through all of it, slow and serpentine.

There was a familiar dome in the center of the city, an enormous white dome that glittered atop an even more enormous cathedral, which was built atop the bones of the most famous saint in all the world. In all of history.

Beneath the fiery glow of the comet, St. Peter’s Basilica and Vatican City looked bathed in red.

They looked bathed in blood.

With a glance at the slumbering form of her husband beside her, Jenna slid from beneath the warmth of the goose down duvet and crossed the room on silent feet to stand at the lead-paned window. She pushed aside one heavy velvet drape and gazed up at the heavens, a sense of dread gnawing at her like swarming insects.

Her father had once told her the ancients believed comets were a sign of ill repute, an omen of terrible things to come. Famine and earthquakes and floods, destruction and death and crops lost to frost.

Plague. Pestilence.

War.

The last time she ever saw her father, when she was ten years old, a comet had blazed a brilliant trail across the night sky. A comet with a tail of fiery orange, just like the one in her dream.

She shivered, suddenly ice cold, cold straight down to her bones, as if a ghostly wind sliced right through her.

“What is it?”

The voice was smooth and masculine, carrying that wary weight she’d come to know so well. Jenna turned from the window to see Leander sitting up on his side of the massive, four-poster bed, staring at her through the silvered half-light. He was alert and on edge; she felt the tension in him even from all the way across the room. As he must have felt her thundering heart. Her pulse like a kettledrum beating a dire warning through her veins.

“Wake the others,” she said into the hush. “Wake everyone. Something is going to happen. Something very bad.”