Sins of the Flesh

She was up there somewhere. He only needed to go find her. His lungs pulled in air, his chest expanding as though he’d run a marathon. In a way, he had. He’d kept pace with Calliope as she ran through the streets, seeing what she saw. Feeling what she felt. Terror. Helplessness. And in the end, horror and grief and despair.

He’d wanted to kill those who had planted the seeds of that grief. He wanted to rip their hearts out and harvest their darksouls. To protect her. To wrap her in his embrace and keep her safe. He didn’t like the intensity of those inclinations; they were instincts he’d thought long buried.

Beating his chest over a woman and howling, “Mine,” wasn’t his thing. But this woman, who didn’t need—or want—his protection, brought out the primitive.

Why?

He couldn’t say. Didn’t want to say.

He’d seen both his brothers, Dagan and Alastor, slam into a wall and fall hard. Fucking love at first sight.

He didn’t believe in it. Didn’t trust it.

And sure as hell refused to feel it.

He was a one-night kind of guy. And he liked it that way.

But he admired her, the woman who had grown out of that little girl who had had the presence of mind to hide, to stay quiet, to follow the instructions her mother had given her time and again.

That child had saved herself.

And that child had made a mistake, one that had colored every choice since. She’d built her whole life on a lie, and she had no fucking clue.

How was he supposed to tell her that? How was he supposed to tell her that what she’d seen wasn’t actually what she believed?

Yeah, that was going to go over like a car through a guardrail at the edge of a cliff. Crash and burn, baby. Crash and burn.

He reached for the last tendrils of her dream. His dream. One and the same. And he saw what he needed to see. A room. A bed. A small table. A chair cocked back on two legs, the back propped under the door.

Not much, but enough.





CALLIOPE SWUNG HER LEGS over the side of the bed. Her heart was pounding as it had in the dream, her breath rasping in the silence. For a second, she thought he watched her still. But there was only darkness, inky and black.

The dream hadn’t come to her so vividly for a long while. It had felt so real. The terror her childish self had lived through left her heart pounding even now. She had seen Malthus Krayl there in her dream, and that left her emotions in a tangled knot. Because it was his kind who had murdered her father. And because his eyes made her think of the man who had dragged her—saved her—from the mob hours later. He’d had gray eyes and dark hair. She remembered that he’d seemed old to her then, but she supposed he’d been about thirty. She remembered almost nothing else about him except those eyes and dark lashes and the feel of his hands on her shoulders, steadying her before he left her alone once more. As far as saviors went, he hadn’t exactly been Sir Gallahad. In the end, she’d had to save herself.

She reached for the bedside lamp. Only when light flooded the room did she realize that the enhanced night vision she’d enjoyed since she had taken the reaper’s blood had faded now. Before she’d turned on the light, she hadn’t been able to see a thing. Perhaps his prana was fading, and with it, the impediment to her prescience. She missed it, the ability to sense what was coming. She’d had it so long, it was just another sense she accepted as being part of her.

A quick scan told her the chair was still in place under the door handle, and the tray of half-eaten food rested on the table. There was no one else in the room. Only her and the ghosts of her nightmares.

Yet, she felt that there was threat here. Danger.

The air was cold enough that she could see her breath. With a sharp exhalation, she surged to her feet and claimed a pair of socks from the pile of clean clothes her jailors had left her. Then she pulled on a sweatshirt and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Her mouth tasted like bile, like tears and desperation.

A child’s tears.

She didn’t cry anymore. Hadn’t for a very long time.

The last vestiges of the dream snaked through her waking thoughts. She didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to wonder what Malthus Krayl had been doing in her memories.

There had been only three soul reapers who had taken advantage of the chaos of the pogrom, killing her father under the cloud of mass violence that had descended on Odessa in the form of a group of sailors who had become drunk on the high of killing and dragged others into the frenzy.

Malthus Krayl had not been one of those three reapers.

But somehow, he had been there tonight.

“I am serene. I am a cool, deep well,” she whispered, staring at herself in the mirror over the sink in the bathroom. And when the turmoil inside her didn’t ease, she gave a short, bitter laugh and said, “I am a fucking placid lake.”

That long-ago day, she had been a child, tossed about by the whims of fate. She had huddled in the shadows and had no choice but to let events happen to her.