The highway spat us out into the city like a dare. Boston’s skyline rose sharp and cold, glass towers flickering with winter light. Traffic was thin; snow kept most people home. Not us.
Richard swung the Range Rover into a side street near Beacon Hill, then down a ramp that looked like it belonged to a delivery garage. Steel doors groaned open after a card swipe, and suddenly we were inside a different kind of silence—the thick, reinforced kind.
The garage smelled like motor oil and candle wax. The walls weren’t bare concrete; they were lined with discreet lockers and weapon racks, each one marked with tiny brass plaques in Latin. A half-dozen people in plain clothes were already waiting.
Not cops. Not soldiers. Templars.
Their coats hung open just enough to reveal ink just above the collarbone: the same mark, again and again. Templar crosses, etched dark against their throats like oaths that had been carved into skin instead of spoken.
Templars. My brain clawed up everything it could remember from late-night history rabbit holes. Crusaders turned bankers, warriors turned martyrs. Supposedly dissolved in the fourteenth century—burned at the stake, scattered, erased. But they never really went away, did they? Rumors said they funneled their knowledge underground, guarding relics, guarding bloodlines. A secret order inside the Church that knew more about monsters than about mercy.
And now they were here, in a Boston garage, waiting for Richard.
They wore the uniform of blending in: neutral coats, dark jeans, boots. But everything about them vibrated with readiness. The way their eyes scanned corners before they even greeted us. The way one man’s hand brushed the outline of a rosary like it doubled as a sidearm.
They greeted Richard first. Not with salutes—worse. With deference. One of them, a woman with short hair and shoulders like a Marine’s, said simply: “Sir. Orders?”
Sir.
I looked at Richard. He didn’t flinch, didn’t wave it off, didn’t tell them he was just another guy. He gave orders like he’d been doing it for centuries.
“Secure perimeter,” he said. “Two on comms, two on relic prep. Eyes on Corwin’s haunts within the hour. We go into the Gardner in seventy-two hours, no later.”
They moved before he even finished. Smooth, silent efficiency.
I stood there clutching my bag like the only untrained freshman in a room full of special ops.
Weaponry clinked as they unpacked it onto a worktable: blessed steel knives whose edges hummed faintly in my bones; iron bullets cross-scored with sigils; bottles of holy water sealed with wax. A silver-tipped spear rested against the wall like it had been waiting for its cue since the Crusades. Next to it, a laptop hummed with surveillance feeds. Faith and technology laid out side by side like uneasy allies.
Candy stepped closer to one of the relic cases and muttered, “So that’s what happens when Rome and RadioShack have a baby.”
Nina tried to laugh but it came out brittle. She pressed closer to me, her hand brushing mine as if we were tethering each other against the weight of all this history.
I couldn’t stop staring at the weapons. They didn’t feel like tools; they felt like choices. Every blade sharpened meant someone was going to bleed. Every relic unwrapped meant the Church had decided which stories counted as sacred enough to weaponize.
And Richard moved among them like a man visiting old friends. He checked seals, tested weight, murmured in Latin under his breath. The specialists gave him sidelong glances that weren’t just respect. They were awe.
One of them—a younger man with a scar cutting through his eyebrow—watched Richard handle a sword with easy precision and said casually, “Field instincts like that don’t fade. Not after all your years in the field.”
All your years.
Richard didn’t react, but I did. My stomach dropped. My mind shuffled through the hints— old photographs where he never seemed to change, stories told like memory instead of history, the way he’d spoken about Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech like he’d been there to hear it.
He wasn’t just experienced. He was timeless.
He caught my gaze, like he knew exactly what I’d just pieced together. His eyes said: not now. And he shook his head, ever so slightly.
The team finished their preparations. Maps pinned. Relics cataloged. Weapons sheathed.
The garage hummed with a tension that wasn’t fear. It was anticipation, the kind that makes people sharpen blades and tie laces tighter.
And me? I pressed my palm against the journal in my bag, feeling its slow burn. The Vatican had their steel and sigils. Candy had her charms. Nina had her history and the uncanny ability to influence people when it mattered. Richard had his centuries.
All I had was blood that recognized blood.
And in this place, even that felt like a weapon waiting to be drawn.
The safehouse apartment looked like a bookstore that had given up on retail and decided to keep secrets instead. One floor above a locked shopfront, shelves sagged with paperbacks that smelled like dust and cedar. A single lamp glowed amber, and the radiator hissed like it was in on the surveillance chatter from downstairs.
The Vatican team had claimed the lower floor with laptops, scanners, and hushed voices. Through the floorboards came the faint static of radios, the clatter of cases being opened and shut, the staccato rhythm of men and women who lived their lives by drills. Someone brewed coffee down there—burnt and metallic, already bleeding through the vents.
Upstairs, it was warm, almost cozy, but the air felt charged, like the whole building knew it was surrounded by crossfire waiting to happen.
Tudor was stalking the third flood and filling up on mice’s. He periodically sat at the top of the stairs and supervised the crew below.
Candy had taken Mrs. Vickers to Club Cafe – apparently her third husband came out of the closet there. I’d been getting increasingly wild texts from both.
Nina sat cross-legged on the bed, a takeout container balanced in her knee, chopsticks moving with the precision of someone too tired to care if they stained the sheets. She pushed a carton toward me. “Eat. You look like you’ve been living on coffee and bad decisions.”
“Excuse you,” I said, digging in. “They’ve been excellent decisions. Poorly timed, maybe.”
We ate in companionable silence for a while, the kind that comes from shared exhaustion. Then Nina leaned back against the wall, wine glass in hand, and said, “So. Richard.”
I nearly inhaled a noodle the wrong way. “What about him?”
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“Don’t play dumb. You’re not good at it.” She sipped. “I saw the look in the garage. And I saw the kiss before we left Vermont.”
My ears went hot. “That was… situational.” “Sure,” Nina said. “And so was Pearl Harbor.”
I set my carton down a little too hard. “Okay, look. Full disclosure? I’ve never done this before.”
“Never kissed someone?”
“Never… any of it,” I admitted, waving my chopsticks like punctuation. “I mean, yeah, I’ve kissed people. But relationships? Serious ones? No. My longest romance was with an oat- milk latte punch card. And technically I’m still…” I dropped my voice. “…a virgin.”
Nina blinked, then laughed—not unkindly, but the kind of laugh that says oh, honey. “Well. That explains the deer-in-headlights thing.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. It just means you’re stepping into this with your heart unscarred. That can be good. Or catastrophic. And it’s probably what drives the old boy wild about you.”
I flopped back against the headboard. “You’re making me feel so reassured right now.”
Nina twirled her wine glass, gaze thoughtful. “I’ve known Richard a long time. Longer than I probably should admit. He doesn’t change, Sadie. And I don’t just mean he’s stubborn. I mean he literally… doesn’t change. Old photos, old records—he’s always him. The same face, the same posture, the same damn coat. Time seems to skip over him.”
The radiator clanked, like it agreed.
She set her glass down and leaned forward, her voice low. “The first time I met him, I was nineteen. He was already like this—polished, unreadable, impossibly sure of himself. I saw him again twenty years later, and he looked exactly the same. Not older, not even tired.
Just… Richard. I used to joke he had a painting in his attic, but after everything I’ve seen, I don’t think it’s a joke anymore.”
I swallowed. “So how old do you think he really is?”
Nina shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. Decades at least. Maybe centuries. He talks about history like he’s quoting memory, not books. And when people defer to him, it isn’t just respect—it’s recognition. Like they know he’s been doing this longer than their whole families have been alive.”
The thought settled like lead in my chest.
She leaned closer. “And that can be intoxicating. Someone who carries centuries of memory like they’re postcards? Who can make you feel like you’re part of some endless story? It’s easy to fall. But it’s dangerous, too.”
I stared at the ceiling, pulse loud in my ears. “Yeah, well. I think I already fell.”
Nina sighed and bumped my shoulder with hers. “Then promise me you’ll keep your eyes open. Immortality doesn’t make someone stable. It just makes their wreckage take longer to see.”
I looked at her, at the calm lines in her face, the way she carried forty-something years like they were thirty. Nearly fifty, and she looked younger than me most mornings. “Okay, side note,” I muttered. “When this is over, you’re giving me your skincare routine. Because if Richard’s immortal, you’re at least cheating.”
That got the first real smile out of her all night.
The takeout sat forgotten. The wine tasted too sharp. And for the first time since Vermont, I wondered if surviving this meant more than just beating Corwin. It might mean surviving Richard, too.
The safe house stirred like a hive—creaks on the stairs, voices half-muffled by doors. A sudden burst of laughter cracked the tense air. Then the front door banged open, and in swept Mrs. Vickers and Candy, both wildly drunk, arms linked like a vaudeville act.
“Darlings!” Mrs. Vickers crowed, dripping perfume and gin. “We conquered the Club Café!”
Apparently, she had. From the fragments of chatter, I pieced together that the club still had a shrine to her in the back room—faded polaroids, lipstick prints, and scrawled signatures from the 1980s. Candy, cheeks flushed, confirmed it with a giggle. “She was the toast of the place. Absolute legend.”
Vickers tossed her turban onto the couch like a trophy and lit a cigarette no one had given her. Between smoke rings, she shared gossip she’d plucked from the crowd. Corwin had shown up there plenty of times over the years, usually with a different boy toy on his arm. Young, pretty, and then—gone. Never seen again. “Like rabbits in a magician’s hat,” she said dryly, dragging on her cigarette. “And no one ever, ever saw his house. Slimy little bastard. Even the bartenders hated him.”
The room fell quiet at that, a shared shiver of recognition. Then—out of nowhere—half a dozen templar-issued phones buzzed and began to blare Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. The sound echoed off the stone walls, absurd and dazzling.
Everyone crowded around the table as one of the men fumbled with his screen. And there it was: Mrs. Vickers herself, perched high on the shoulders of the wait staff, martini in hand, leading a singalong. She waved like a homecoming queen, rhinestones glittering under the lights. The crowd on the video cheered her name.
In the safe house, she only smirked. “Well,” she said, exhaling smoke. “Some girls retire. I headline.”
.
Snow fell thick and slanted outside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, muffling the world to silence in the pre dawn light. . Inside, silence broke.
The Vatican overrides had killed the alarms, but the Spanish Chapel hummed like a living lung. Candles guttered in sconces that hadn’t held flame for centuries, their smoke curling into words no one could read. The air was cold, but the kind of cold that stings behind the eyes and carries the copper bite of blood not yet spilled.
Corwin was waiting.
He stood near the sarcophagus draped in shadows, his coat open, pale throat gleaming where it wasn’t covered in soot-black sigils. Around him, the veil had thinned to rags. Shadow-creatures rippled from the walls, born of the tear—figures with no faces, their limbs too long, their movements stuttering like bad film. They smelled of damp stone and rot. I had a bad feeling I was going to get up and close with them.
“Right on time,” Corwin said, voice rolling smooth as smoke. “How courteous of you to bring her here.” His gaze fell on me and the journal strapped tight against my chest. His smile widened. “Blood calls blood.”
The Vatican team surged forward with the precision of a clock striking midnight. Blessed steel hissed as it cleared scabbards. Iron bullets clicked into place with ritual words murmured under breath. One of the Templars lifted a reliquary cross, and the shadows shrieked as though someone had burned them with salt.
Richard moved past me, coat flaring like a banner, sword in hand. He and Corwin collided not just with metal but with magic—fire blooming from Richard’s blade, shadow exploding from Corwin’s fists. Sparks stung the air, filling it with the scent of ozone and ash.
“Stay with Candy!” Richard shouted, his voice half-swallowed by the roar of energy.
But Candy was already drawing salt lines, hands moving fast, herbs smoldering from her pocket. Nina sketched sigils across the cracked marble floor with chalk, her breath a litany. Together they worked like rhythm and counterpoint, a ritual meant to contain a firestorm.
The shadow-creatures surged. They hit the Vatican blades with screams that made my molars ache. Steel cut them, but the wounds smoked instead of bled, reforming if not salted. One of the Templars slammed a spearpoint through a creature’s chest and whispered Pater
noster as if exorcism could pin down nightmare.
I clutched the crow dagger Candy had pressed into my palm days ago. Its weight felt heavier here, like the room knew it. Like the Queen inside the sarcophagus knew it.
The sarcophagus itself began to vibrate, faintly at first, then harder, its lid groaning against stone. Carved Tudor roses seemed to flex. The journal in my bag grew warm—too warm—until I thought it might scorch straight through the canvas.
“Break the circle,” Nina gasped, pointing toward Corwin. He was kneeling in the center of chalk and bone, a summoning ring lit by veins of light drawn from the portal. His eyes burned black. The ring pulsed like a second heartbeat feeding into him.
Candy threw a charm into the circle—vervain, beeswax, iron filings—but it only slowed the pulse.
My blood thundered in my ears. Haus Kr?mer. Keeper of the threshold. The words weren’t mine but they lived in me anyway.
I sprinted.
Corwin saw me, and his smile broke wider. “Yes. Come, little crow. Fulfill the line.”
The crow dagger flared cold in my hand, colder than the snowstorm outside. My chest seized as if invisible hands tried to wrench me backward, but I pushed. One step. Another. The chalk ring glowed so bright I tasted copper.
“Sadie!” Richard roared, breaking from his duel for half a second, his voice ragged with both fury and fear.
But it was mine to do.
I drove the dagger down into the circle. The chalk shattered like glass, the light screamed upward, and Corwin’s body jolted as if the earth had spit him out. His eyes rolled back, his hands clawing at nothing, and then—silence.
The sarcophagus groaned louder, the roses splitting. Gold light spilled through the cracks. Heat pressed against my skin like a furnace door flung open.
And then—her.
Not fully, not yet. Just presence. The Phoenix Queen, pressing against the veil. A voice in the back of my skull: Again! Free me!. The same words the journal had whispered, now inside
- My knees buckled.
The Vatican team closed ranks, relics raised. Candy shouted something in Latin that made the air shiver. Nina dragged me back, clutching my arm so hard I’d bruise.
The lid of the sarcophagus shuddered, then stilled. The gold glow dimmed. The chapel went still enough to hear my pulse.
Corwin’s body lay crumpled at the edge of the circle, smoke seeping from his mouth. The shadow-creatures thinned into nothing, retreating with screams that faded into silence.
We stood in the wreckage, breathing hard. Ash dusted the marble floor, catching in my throat.
The Vatican team began hustling us out, but Richard lingered. He stood over the sarcophagus, sword lowered, his face carved into something I couldn’t read. Fury, grief, devotion—something older than language.
He touched the carved roses with two fingers, reverent and aching. For a moment, I thought he might open the coffin himself.
Then he turned, eyes blazing, and strode toward me.