Elias turned back to his client, and Felix walked alone.
Chapter VI
LOREN
If Felix wouldn’t offer answers, Loren would find them himself.
He loved the temple best in the after-hours hush, when fading light stretched over the courtyard, and the columns cast shadows spindly and searching as fingers in prayer. When he sat alone with the cats and quiet reverence. When he could untangle thorn-snared thoughts and riddle through how to turn his curse into a gift.
Castor and Pollux greeted Loren at the entrance, winding between his legs as he pulled on his robes. The altar bowl still smouldered with slow-burning incense. Just that morning, he’d smashed this same bowl over Felix’s head. Loren winced at the memory as he stamped out ashes. At the supply cabinet, he thumbed the cork of a jug of pricey Lassius wine. More satisfying to take it, certainly, but he was breaking enough rules. Besides, the bottle of Eumachius was already open, left over from when they bled Felix.
Poor battered Felix. Loren hardly blamed him for wanting to leave. The sooner Loren figured this out – the sooner he stopped whatever disaster loomed – the sooner he could let Felix go. Even if it took all night, Loren would uncover what the helmet could do. Because the longer the helmet stayed within Felix’s grasp, the worse the danger grew.
Bowl and wine in hand, Loren unlatched the cella door.
Isis glowed in the ever-lit lamp, marble features soft. Loren was drawn to her the way a night lily tilts to find the moon and, for a moment, his anxiety ebbed. He knelt on the dais and touched the stone-cool hem of her gown, inhaling deeply. He could do this.
Wine pooled into the bowl, swirling, murky as an unrefined ruby. He sat cross-legged, bowl on his lap, and rotated his finger sunwise across the surface of the wine, willing his mind to open. That morning, he’d been so close to scrying something, scenes moving deep in the liquid, but he lost his grip when the quake struck. He needed to reach that point again to ask the wine about the cataclysms. About Felix and the ghost. About how the helmet tied them all together.
Most important, Loren needed to know how he could change the outcome.
In his dreams, Felix always died.
When he first slipped into Loren’s dreams years ago, the details were vague, shapeless, a wall of black descending on them both. Felix would cry, or sometimes offered Loren only an empty stare, and the world rolled out to nothing.
Then came Felix’s anger. Months of silent tears and dead eyes turned into nights of copper-streaked chaos. He burned in a wave of destruction, turning everyone Loren ever loved to ash. Aurelia and her mother, Livia. Nonna. Elias. His parents. His childhood nurse, his favourite tutor – all made dust. When Felix finished, he’d turn on himself, and Loren watched that, too.
Each dream brought new details, until finally, six months earlier, a city had materialised around them, a change from the void Loren had come to expect. Red and yellow awnings, pomegranates in the sun, knee-high crossing stones. Nonna’s bakery.
That’s when Loren knew: Felix intended to bring about all of Pompeii’s doom. Not just Loren’s.
Felix would look at Loren straight on. Lift a wood-and-iron knife.
Slit the seam of the sky. Bury the city alive.
Once – the night before Felix tripped into Loren’s life – Felix floated, suspended in the blast of a great force, and Loren crawled to meet him. Stretched his hand. Their fingers brushed. He noted each of Felix’s eyelashes, the lay of every curl, tiny details – the finest, clearest yet.
Then Loren drove the knife home.
The memory soured his stomach, and his shaking hands shivered the wine.
‘Open,’ Loren urged. ‘Show me.’
Wings splayed across the wine’s surface.
The cella door swung open, and light streamed stark against the dim chamber. Loren startled. Cold wine sloshed over his lap, shattering the image.
‘Working late?’ asked Camilia.
‘What are you doing here?’ Loren demanded.
He immediately regretted asking. She was angry. Beyond angry. Fists clenched at her sides, she shot him silent with a gorgon’s stare.
‘The Priest,’ she said, ‘asked me to help him consult the smoke. An emergency reading. Imagine my shock when I arrived to find the altar bowl missing. Again.’
Her tone was lethal, but her words made his heart flutter like a bird’s last hope. Loren latched onto it. ‘Let me help with the reading. I saw something, just now. Wings, or—’
‘Clean up. Bring me the bowl.’
