Conquest jumped up when he saw us coming. He ran down the steps and tore down the street, but Marcus turned it up, cutting off his escape route. I came up behind him. We had him boxed in.
Conquest looked from Marcus to me, like he couldn’t decide who posed the lesser threat. He faced me. Wrong choice.
“Hey, man,” I said. “Are you Jode?”
“Who are you?” he said, scowling at me with bloodshot eyes.
No mistaking his accent. He was English. And rich, judging by his threads. Double-breasted coat. Fisherman-style, but the kind you saw on runways, not gangways. He was weaving in place and reeked of alcohol.
That sealed it for me. I hauled off and punched him.
He fell gracefully. Knee, hip, shoulder. Like some part of him had decided, What the heck. I’m passing out tonight anyway. Might as well get started now.
“Gideon!” Daryn gaped at me. “What did you do?” She rushed over, kneeling beside him.
There was no way to explain it all. I couldn’t shake the fears Ra’om and Samrael had planted in my mind. Something felt different inside me. Darker. And we didn’t have time to stand around and try to convince Conquest to join up. I wasn’t going to say all that, so I shrugged and said, “I came. I saw. I conquered.”
Daryn sprang up. “That’s not funny!”
I hadn’t intended it to be funny. But I didn’t clarify that either. My logical, rational mind was slowly coming back online. I had to get us off the street. Daryn and Marcus had been spotted in the Fiat, so we had no wheels anymore. We also had no Sebastian, but my first priority was getting present company to a safe location.
I crouched by Conquest and rolled him onto his back. A bruise was spreading over his cheek where I’d hit him. He let out a big snore, which got a laugh out of Marcus that honestly surprised me. I hadn’t known he could laugh. I pulled Conquest’s sleeve up. His cuff was bright white and had clean lines, more like mine than Sebastian’s and Marcus’s. Right guy.
Then I checked the pockets of his fancy not-fishing coat and found a wallet made of butter-soft leather. Moving through the contents quickly, I came up with a small stack of euros in crisp new bills, credit cards, and a student ID for Oxford University issued to James Oliver Drummond Ellis. No wonder he went by Jode.
Between the wallet, his clothes, the gleaming watch at his wrist, and the pretty boy face, I was starting to worry I had a Wyatt Sinclair on my hands.
Checking his other pocket, I finally found what I wanted. I held up the hotel security card. “The Great Gatsby’s staying in town.” I pulled the radio from my pocket and checked the address on the GPS. “His hotel’s less than three miles away.”
“Really?” Daryn said. “That would be so doable if we could all walk.”
Three minutes ago she’d been hugging me, all worried. Now she looked like she wanted to finish the job Samrael had started.
“No problem,” I said. I grabbed Jode’s arm and pulled him over my shoulder. Thankfully, he had a light build. A buck fifty and five-nine or so. Also thankfully, I’d done a lot of this in RASP. Carrying Cory on my back on forced road marches had prepared me. Cory was my size. One eighty and six-one. I knew I could handle Prince Conquest.
“Race you guys,” I said, settling him over my shoulders.
Marcus and Daryn looked at me like I was a nut, which felt normal and gave me a needed morale boost. Then we were off, trudging along the dark city streets of Rome.
By the time we came to the Ponte Sant’Angelo, I was sweating bullets but the adrenaline was finally leaving my body. Some of the fear, too. But I still felt like if I closed my eyes for too long, the images Ra’om had shown me would come right back.
I tried to focus on my surroundings. According to my guidebook, the bridge had stood for almost two millennia. As I passed one angel statue after another, I felt the centuries the bridge had seen. All the days and nights it had spanned the waters of the Tiber below. Looking at it, I felt insignificant. Linked to every human on the planet. Everything seemed awesome now that I wasn’t in the mental clutches of a demon.
“What are you thinking about?” Daryn asked. “At this very second?”
“I was thinking that this is great,” I said.
“No, you weren’t.”
“Was so. I’m in the moment, Martin.” This moment was a lot better than the ones I’d just been in.
We walked for a little more. Marcus was ahead of us, out of earshot. He wasn’t clutching his shoulder anymore. Maybe it was already healing. “Is this really what you do all the time?” I asked. “Run all over the world like this?”
Daryn shook her head. “Not like this. This is by far the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.” She glanced at me, her eyes sparkling. “In large part because of you.”
I grinned. “But who doesn’t love a good challenge, right?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes a challenge is just a challenge,” she said, but she was smiling.