HOLY BLOOD, BLACK RAIN

The rain had turned to needles by the time Aria stopped feeling her feet. Somewhere back near Liam's building she'd lost a shoe, and she hadn't even noticed until the broken asphalt started tearing at her skin. It didn't matter. Nothing hurt as much as the hollow place in her chest where her whole life used to sit.

No phone. No money. No home. No father's legacy left to fight for. In one night, every single thing holding her upright had been kicked out from under her at once.

Headlights swept across the wet street behind her, slow and patient, the kind of slow that wasn't looking for a parking spot. Aria's heart slammed into her throat. A black SUV crawled along the curb, matching her pace exactly, like it already knew she had nowhere left to run.

They won't just shut off your mom's machines. They'll make sure you disappear too.

Liam's voice, still fresh in her ears, snapped something awake in her legs. She ran. Her soaked dress dragged against her knees and she ran anyway, ducking into a narrow cobblestone alley in the old part of the city, praying the maze of side streets would swallow her before the SUV could turn around. Behind her the engine roared louder. Tires screamed against wet stone.

The alley dead ended at the foot of the old Santa Maria cathedral, its broken spires clawing up into the storm like something that had died standing up and never fallen over. Aria threw herself up the cracked marble steps and pounded both fists against the iron doors. Locked. Of course they were locked. Everything in her life was locked to her now.

"Going somewhere, pretty?"

Three men stepped out of the alley mouth below her, dressed in the same dark tactical jackets Liam's cartel friends wore in her nightmares. The one in front had a scar splitting his eyebrow and a switchblade already open in his hand, the steel catching a flicker of neon from somewhere down the street.

"Liam said you might cause trouble." He climbed the steps slow, unhurried, a man who'd done this before and knew she had nowhere left to go. "Nothing personal. Just cleaning up a loose end. Tragic mugging, wrong place, wrong time. That's what the report will say."

Aria's back hit the cold iron door and her legs simply stopped holding her. She slid down onto her knees, rain and tears running together down her face, and closed her eyes. She thought of her mother's chest rising and falling under that thin hospital sheet, and hoped, stupidly, uselessly, that whatever happened to her next wouldn't reach that hospital room.

The man crouched in front of her, gripping her jaw hard enough to bruise, tilting her head back until she felt the flat cold edge of the blade against her throat.

"Shh," he said. "Make it easy."

And then the whole world stopped making sound.

The storm didn't fade, it simply cut off, the way a radio cuts off when someone yanks the cord. Aria opened her eyes and watched her own breath turn to smoke in front of her face. Frost crawled across the iron doors at her back in thin, spidering lines. Above her, raindrops hung frozen in midair, thousands of tiny beads of glass suspended in a sky that had forgotten how to move.

The shadows along the cathedral's stone arches began to peel themselves off the walls.

He stepped out of the darkness like the darkness had simply decided to become a man.

His coat moved around him even though there was no wind left to move it. His eyes, which she'd seen flash brown once in a lit corridor, now burned a deep, unnatural red, the color of something that had waited two hundred years to be angry about something.

The scarred man didn't even have time to turn around.

Valerius closed the distance between them faster than her eyes could track, and his hand went through the man's chest with a wet, terrible sound she would hear in her sleep for the rest of her life. The second man clawed for the gun at his hip and never got there. Valerius lifted him off his feet by the throat and drove him down into the marble steps hard enough to crack the stone, and the frozen air filled with the smell of copper and rain.

The last man dropped his knife and turned to run. He didn't get two steps. Valerius was simply there, blocking the way, his jaw stretching wrong, his mouth full of teeth that didn't belong to anything human. One motion, and it was finished.

Silence. Steam rising off blood that had already started to freeze against the old white stone.

Aria couldn't move. Her mind, already cracked wide open by grief, simply gave out. The steps tilted sideways beneath her and the last thing she felt was falling.

He caught her before she hit the ground.

Pulling her small, shaking body against his chest, Valerius breathed her in without meaning to, and the scent of her hit him like a fist to the sternum. Sweet. Rare. The same impossible frequency that had cracked his frozen heart back to life hours earlier, now doubled by fear and blood and the salt of her tears. Something ancient and starving woke up all at once inside him.

His fangs ached. He tilted her head back gently, almost tenderly, his mouth grazing the soft skin just below her jaw where her pulse jumped fast and frantic against her throat.

He wanted her. All of her. Every last drop.

His lips had barely touched her skin when a light exploded above them, blinding and gold, pouring off the carved stone crest set into the cathedral doors.

He recoiled with a snarl, pain tearing through his hand where it had brushed the light, smoke curling off his skin like his flesh had remembered, too late, exactly where it was standing.

Consecrated ground.

He'd forgotten. In two hundred years he'd forgotten what it felt like to stand somewhere the old laws still held teeth. She hadn't just stumbled onto church steps. She'd stumbled onto the one patch of earth in the entire city where the ancient Sanctuary Law still stood, a vow written in blood so old even a king of the night couldn't break it without burning for it. The law bound her to his protection and, in the same breath, forbade him from ever hurting her here.

He looked down at her, pale and unconscious and utterly unaware of what she'd just done, and something dark and almost amused flickered across his face.

Fate had a sense of humor. It had just handed him exactly what he wanted and then chained his hands the moment he tried to take it.

The rain began falling again, ordinary and gray, washing the blood in thin red rivers down the old marble steps. Valerius gathered her up against his chest, weightless in his arms, and turned away from the wreckage of the three men he'd left behind.

He bent his head close to her ear, his voice low enough that only the storm could hear it.

"You picked the wrong church to die on, little bird."

But as he carried her down into the rain, away from the cathedral's golden light, he felt it for the first time in two centuries: something underneath his own ribs that felt uncomfortably close to fear. Because whatever she was, whatever had just protected her on those steps, it hadn't only been the church's magic answering.

It had been hers.