Chapter 39

Everything happened too fast—Baron hadn't even processed it yet.

By the time he'd put three more rounds into Baron Cambera's chest and a final one through the skull, then spun back to help, Miss Elisa was already high above the blood-fiend's head. With a casual toss, the creature hurled her into the crimson pool.

Baron's eyes widened as the impact sent a geyser of blood arcing upward like a waterfall in reverse. Beneath the crimson spray lay the small, broken bodies of children.

The blood-fiend—Sister Theresa—licked the tattered blood from her fingertips and smiled gently at Baron. "Mister L, I've come from hell to find you."

His answer was the crack of a gun.

Caught off guard, the blood-fiend staggered as alchemical rounds punched hole after hole through her torso. She had meant to laugh—ordinary bullets were nothing to a creature like her—yet searing pain followed every impact. Inside her veins, the flow of mana slowed to a crawl.

These were special .500 Magnum rounds, Baron Baggin's own design. Each bullet carried a compressed pellet of mercury that, once embedded in flesh, severed the target's arcane circulation. Even a Templar—those "flesh monstrosities" Baggin had once described—would be left powerless.

The hard part, Baggin had always warned, was actually landing the shot. So Baron had chosen the decidedly un-heroic path of a sneak attack.

The half-trained demon-hunter kicked Baron Cambera's corpse into the pool, emptied both revolvers of their alchemical loads, then reached for his broken blade—only to find nothing. The blade had gone with the body.

No—

Baron whirled. He had never heard the splash of the Baron hitting the blood.

He looked back.

Sure enough, the seal-like Baron had dragged himself ashore. Slowly but steadily he crawled toward the altar beneath the dead viscount's body, a smear of red unfurling behind him like a carpet.

A raw mixture of fury and panic seized Baron's heart. Pity, sorrow, sympathy—he cast them all aside. Whatever else happened, he could not let the Baron reach that altar.

The instant the thought formed, he was moving.

Before Theresa could strike, Baron produced the iron-thorn bolts he'd lifted from Sevi. "Sister Theresa, I believe you're a good person," he said, igniting the tip of one bolt with Dragonfire. "Why help a tyrant?"

He hurled the burning shaft. It buried itself in the fiend's wound with a hiss of steam and sizzling flesh. Yet Theresa only yanked the bolt free, flames and all, and bared her claws. The black membrane of her wings burned away to bone, yet her face remained gentle.

"Mister L... I love you. Let's go to hell together."

With the bloodiest confession in history, she tore the skeletal remnants of her wings from her back and lunged.

"Sorry—I'm Chinese. If I'm going anywhere, it's to the Chinese underworld!"

Two more iron-thorn bolts slid from Baron's sleeve, catching the fiend's claws in a shower of sparks. Dragonfire roared over his skin; the snow-steel heads of the bolts began to melt, releasing billows of vapor.

The embedded alchemical rounds detonated, forcing the blood-fiend back step by step. A single volley like that could drop a Bronze-rank dragon-crocodile, yet Theresa advanced as if she felt nothing, body breaking into a fractured human shape. Her robes tore; pain flickered across her face like a scolded child.

"It hurts, Mister L... it hurts. Do you hate me so much just because I'm no longer pure?"

In the moment Baron faltered, the nun threw herself at him. She lifted her face and, in the same motion, drove a dagger toward the barrel of his revolver. The blade snapped against the steel; sparks danced.

Baron wrapped his arms around the fiend once more. Flames blazed along the revolver's broken bayonet as he rasped, "You're stalling, aren't you?"

Softly Theresa said, "Cambera will become the new viscount beneath the twin moons, exactly as planned. You're already too late..." She moistened her lips. "Go. I've persuaded the Baron to spare Olivia's life."

"Why?" Baron asked. "Why help me?"

"Perhaps... because once you broke your black bread and gave me half."

"Yes... but you killed the baker."

The demon-hunter kicked the nun away, sprang to the edge of the pool, and launched himself like a black hawk diving on its prey. Cambera had just reached the foot of the altar.

He propped himself against the stone, turned, and opened his arms to the onrushing hunter with the golden eyes. No evasion, no fear—only two simple, forceful words.

"Blood! My Lord!"

Twin shafts of moonlight lanced from the cross above, forming a transparent wall that sealed altar, daughter, and viscount's corpse away from the world. The fire-blade struck the barrier and rebounded without so much as a scratch; the recoil sent the hunter tumbling into the blood pool like a black butterfly in a storm.

Baron surged up without hesitation or despair. He slammed the fire-blade against the wall again and again. Each blow rippled vermilion patterns across the surface like scarlet glass.

"It's useless," Cambera called. "The ritual began some time ago. Crimson Canon governs this space now... Unless you possess another First Law, you'll never break the blood barrier—"

"—not even with a Dragon-Knight's Promise."

Beyond the wall, Cambera studied Baron through the golden glare and the flames. Those eyes made the hunter's calling obvious.

"Such pure golden draconic pupils... You must be contracted to a true-blood dragon. After the Law Wars, it's rare for any human to win a dragon's favor."

Even as he spoke, the wounds on the Baron's body began to knit shut. Clearly he was—or had never been—ordinary.

Baron said nothing. Fire, blade, gun, iron thorns—he exhausted every option. When the last bolt snapped, he kept gouging with its broken head; futile effort was better than surrender.

"But why!?" Cambera roared. "Why fight me to the death? You're a bounty hunter, a Dragon-Knight—what could possibly make you throw everything away?"

Baron kept chipping. "Certainly not for justice."

Cambera stared, then looked past him to the distant pool where Theresa soaked in blood, healing herself. Slowly he began to speak.

"Cecy is my daughter. She carries my blood; the ritual needs her."

Baron froze.

Cambera turned toward the altar, words tumbling out in fragments.

"Elisa made a bargain. She let herself become a blood-fiend, let me cut Cecy's throat so she could never speak again, in exchange for her freedom. But it was only ever a delay. All I gave her was a brief redemption during the long wait."

Alone, he whispered, "I loved Elisa. I love my wife. I love my daughter Cecy. I posted the bounty for the God-cursed man because the villagers wanted to kill my child."

"Elisa's death grieves me, but what good is grief? L, half your guess was right—half was wrong, catastrophically wrong."

He rolled up his right trouser leg, revealing a withered calf that looked as if it belonged to someone else.

"Some devoted husband and father you are," Baron said, cold and mocking, eyes flicking from the ruined viscount on the cross to the Baron's own leg. He saw it now—the lame Baron was another layer of disguise. That shriveled limb was the missing piece of the viscount's body, grafted onto Cambera by some unspeakable art.

Under the moonlight, the corpse on the cross began to dissolve like snow in sunlight. At the same moment, the Baron's squat, heavy frame stretched taller, remade.

On the far cross, Cecy stirred, moaning in pain—perhaps thinking she dreamed. No nightmare, though, is crueller than a father who would kill his own child.

Cambera's eyes shifted to the rose-red of a vampire. Fangs lengthened as he spoke.

"I never made a pact with the Lamb-Blood Nunnery, never swore faith to the Crimson Sect. I allied with them not because they coveted this ugly shell, but because they coveted my soul."

Baron's breath caught; understanding dawned.

Cambera lifted a scarlet cross from the altar and pressed it to his forehead. A faint crimson mark appeared simultaneously on the dead viscount's brow and on Cecy's.

"I was never Baron Cambera. I am Viscount Cambera of the vampires—brother to Count Moriarty!"

Under the twin moons, the Baron's body swelled and grew as the corpse on the cross vanished entirely.

"L, I admire you. When the ritual ends and I am viscount once more, I shall sign a blood-servant contract that will grant you immortality."

"Immortality..." Baron gazed up at the light leaking through the shattered glass ceiling, his face bleak. "Nothing is immortal."

He lifted a hand toward the twin moons overhead. "Three questions."

Certain of victory, the viscount smiled with courtly grace. "Ask anything."

Baron glanced toward the nun bathing in the blood pool. "Is all this blood real?"

"From poor children, yes. But rest assured—I will see their blood flows where it belongs."

"Where?"

"To God." His tone turned solemn.

God... God...

Baron offered no reply. He raised a second finger. "Second question: were your words about Sheila true or false?"

"A dead woman—yet you still care for her honor..."

The viscount rolled his neck; joints popped. But under Baron's molten stare he admitted, "It was anger speaking. I lied."

In the pool, Theresa watched as Baron nodded, drew out a small notebook, flipped to a page, and asked, "Third question: the vampire corpse on the cross behind you—genuine?"

Before the Baron could answer, Baron Constantine tore out the page stained with the vampire's blood and, right in front of Baron Cambera and Theresa, stuffed it into his mouth.

"Whether it's true or not..."

He chewed the paper, then pulled out a second sheet—parchment taken from the demon-hunters' codex.

"From here on, it's just a question of which of us the old Blood God favors."

He bit his thumb until it bled and pressed the crimson print onto the parchment.

In that single heartbeat, Dragon-Knight Constantine's eyes blazed the red of the Golden-Blood Queen.