“No worries,” I said with a dark smile. “Happens to the best of us.”
When the last of the arcane smoke cleared, Devon rose to his feet, his face a mask of confusion as his eyes darted back and forth between the two of us.
“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out for the connection over Devon as I forced my will into him. “I truly am. But the last piece of my brother died the night his flesh did on Saint Mark’s.”
“What are you doing to me?” he cried out in panic, clutching the sides of his head as if that could somehow stop my intrusion.
“The same thing you and Kejetan did to Stanis,” I said.
“You think you can control me?” he shouted. “Force your mind upon my own and hold it down as a slave?”
Devon thrashed about as if wrestling with something I could not see, but I knew his struggle was internal, and he had no way to contend with what I was doing. My brother had been an opportunist, even a slick businessman, but in a contest of spirit and will, he was not my match. Certainly not after all that had happened. To him. And to me.
I pushed my will further upon him, feeling his spirit being crushed beneath the power of mine.
“No, I’m not looking to control you,” I said. “That would mean taking responsibility for you in this form. But what I will do is drive you down so far into the background of this creature that you won’t have the ability to even blink on its behalf. Then? I’m shutting it down. With you inside it.”
“No!” he cried out. “Please, take pity.”
“I am taking pity,” I said, stepping to him, inches from his face now as I met his eyes. “On humanity. You? I couldn’t give a shit about.”
I wondered if Stanis would approve of this, having gone through it himself, but if he had any problems with it, he did not voice them. I wasn’t sure I would have stopped even if he had.
Devon tried to speak, but I refused to let him, shutting down any ability he had to control the gargoyle. I could feel his last desperate attempts to struggle, allowing them to surface for just a moment, the gargoyle’s face becoming a mask of twisted pain as I silenced Devon and shut the creature down. The gargoyle’s muscles tensed as the stone skin turned to solid stone, bits and pieces of it crumbling off until the figure stilled completely.
Stanis and I stood there for a moment, staring down at the unmoving form.
“Is it done?” he asked.
“For the most part,” I said, feeling no remorse.
“I am sorry for your loss, Alexandra.”
“I’m not,” I said, as my mind began hatching a plan. I slid my backpack back on, leaving Bricksley sticking out of the top. I grabbed the arms of the broken gargoyle that had once been my brother, and using every last bit of my strength and little help from my powers, I started dragging him down the remains of the Belarus Building as the sound of approaching sirens filled the air. “Devon may prove far more useful to me in death than he did in life.”
Twenty-six
Alexandra
While I could appreciate the artistry of the architecture that went into the building of a church, I always found the statuary within them a bit on the morose side, more so when I was the one dragging it into the damned place.
The staff all around the Libra Concordia watched with curiosity as I pulled the cowering, twisted form of my former brother down the main aisle, letting it drop with an echoing thud in front of the half-walled partition of Desmond Locke’s office.
Locke rose from his desk, peering over the wall as he crossed his space and pushed through the half door to it, joining me in the aisle.
“Miss Belarus,” he said with a tight-lipped smile. “This is an interesting surprise.”
Several of the other workers stopped what they were doing to rise from their own desks farther back in the church; my heart caught in my throat when I spied Caleb among them. I hadn’t talked to him since the fiasco on the roof of the Belarus Building, yet a small, dark part of me had secretly hoped I would find him at the church. Still, it was not the main reason why I had come.
I turned my focus back to Desmond Locke.
“Is this a present?” he asked, holding his hand to his chest. “For me? I am flattered.”
“You know, I’ve never particularly liked you,” I said. “Always creeping around my family. Then these past few weeks, finding out what you were really all about . . . I used to think maybe I hated religion, but I think the truth of the matter is maybe I just hate you.”
Locke circled around the tormented, broken form of the gargoyle until he was standing opposite me. The rest of the crowd kept their distance, all except Caleb, who moved away from the bull pen he had been working in to come down the aisle toward us.
“Why do you bring me this?” Desmond asked, looking up at me for a moment.
“You wanted my father’s ‘angel,’” I said. “This is what remains of him. This is the creature that watched over our family for centuries. Stanis.”
Desmond stared down at the broken gargoyle. “And why bring him to me now, when he is broken?”
“I want an end to all this,” I said. It was true. Years of my family’s being influenced by this man, the fact that there was a secret society keeping tabs on us . . . the creep factor was off the charts. The lie that the remains on the floor of the church were actually Stanis’s was one easily told for the freedom it might bring me.
“There’s a new world order starting out there,” I continued. “The skies over Manhattan are full of his kind now. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding another to fixate on.”
Desmond stood there, examining the broken gargoyle at me feet. “This is not Stanis,” he said.
I didn’t react, fearing any reaction might betray me. “What makes you say that?”
“I know this piece,” Desmond said, squatting down next to it, running his fingers against the stone of it.
“You do?”
“Yes,” he said, bitterness in the single word. “Of course I do. It comes from one of Alexander Belarus’s churches. If there’s one area of architecture I do know, it is most certainly the churches of Manhattan. I believe this one belonged to one of the closed ones that is now a nightclub or some such monstrosity. Dreadful treatment of the divine, if you ask me.” His hand lingered on the face. “Funny. I do not recall the face looking so tortured from my memory of it.”
A twinge of pain shot through my chest at having been the cause of that torture, regardless of the fact I was perfectly justified in my actions.
Desmond stood. “Why do you bring this lie before me?” he spat out.
“It was worth a shot,” I said, shrugging. “I had hoped to do this the easy way.”
His eyes filled with wariness, and he stepped back from me. “And what is the hard way?”
I didn’t respond, my mind and will already reaching out beyond the confines of the church, allowing an old connection to familiar stone to call out. In response, the enormous stained-glass panel to my left erupted, shards of it crashing down into the room as a familiar figure came through it.
Stanis’s wings were spread wide, catching the air as he gently glided down into the gap between me and Desmond Locke.
“I know you,” Stanis said to him. “You are the one who has kept watch over Alexandra’s father all these years.”
A fascination crept over Desmond’s face, his eyes sparkling like those of a child on Christmas Day.
“Yes,” he said, addressing Stanis. “And the Libra Concordia will always be watching.”
“No,” I interrupted, his face falling at the word. “They won’t. I want you to call your people off of researching the Belarus legacy, and I want you, specifically, to stay the hell away from my family.”