Huntress

spell, but he didn’t stop to explain. He just flipped carefully through the pages until he found the prediction he was looking for. Quickly, he skimmed the text, located the correct passage and read the Latin with a growing sense of mingled rage and dread.

“You need to forget about upstairs,” he said, cutting Lilli off mid-rant and pointing to the words he’d just read. “We’ve got much bigger things to worry about at the moment.”

“Like what?”

“Like the world as we know it is about to end, and it looks like Samael will be leading the parade that brings a new and literal meaning to the phrase ‘Hell on earth.’ ”

SIX

“Um, ex-queeze me?”

Lilli felt a bit like she’d just taken a home run swing straight to the stomach. She wondered vaguely if she looked like it as well, since she was having a hard time keeping from bending over as she struggled to get back the breath that had been knocked out of her.

Aaron gave her a sympathetic look and gestured toward the page he’d just read on the left side of the book. “This is one of the most famous prophecies in the Praedicti. Scholars have been debating it for centuries. Some of them link it to the same sort of events depicted in the Revelation of St. John of Patmos, but there have always been a few dissenters who thought that this pointed to an entirely different war between good and evil.”

Lilli took a good look at the ancient manuscript for the first time. Before, it had always been just a means to an end for her, but now she could actually appreciate the beautiful illustrations, the colors still vivid and vibrant, even after centuries had passed. Even the pages it was printed on were beautiful, more striking than the finest luxury paper she’d ever seen, still thin and delicate, yet somehow conveying the strength of all those years of survival.

“My Latin is a little rusty,” she said, bending closer and struggling to make out the antiquated script, “and I’ll never get used to u’s that look like v’s, but this looks like it’s talking about exactly the same thing as the Bible—armies of good and evil meeting in a final battle for domination of the world.”

“Okay, so there are similarities,” he said impatiently, and she couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at his dismissive understatement. “What’s important is that in this version, there’s no antichrist and no certain victory for the forces of good. According to whomever wrote this text, if this book falls into the hands of a leader on the side of evil, three human sacrifices could be used to break the seals that separate the planes of Hell from ours, and thereby unleash every kind of devil or demon that has ever plagued mankind, and every one who hasn’t. The population of the earth right now is around six billion, right? Well, there are experts out there who estimate that the legions of Hell encompass at least five times that number, all of whom have powers humans can’t even dream of, and the kind of bloodlust that makes Adolf Hitler look like a Girl Scout! And the only way to avert it for once and for all is to do the impossible—to get a righteous child of Hell to spill the blood of both human and devil. Why do they even offer that as an out? It’s completely ridiculous!”

Lilli heard every word Aaron was saying, and it wasn’t that he didn’t make a good point; it was just that when she finished reading the prophecy he was pointing out—which was much shorter than she’d imagined, really—her eyes skipped naturally to the next page, which contained a striking illumination of a medieval knight locked in battle with a huge, serpentine dragon against the backdrop of a lush garden. In the picture, the knight brandished a long, silver sword and wore only a tunic of chainmail over his regular clothes. The dragon, by contrast, appeared to be covered with thick, heavy scales that glistened almost like steel in the light of the afternoon sun.

The illustrator had made sure to indicate that this battle had not just begun, but had raged on for hours, perhaps even days. The knight’s garments were torn and stained. Debris consisting of splintered wooden shields and broken scales littered the ground at their feet, and several less stalwart knights lay dead in a heap beneath a castle wall. Once again, the theme here was good against evil, but this time, the illustration seemed to imply that good might very well win out in the end. The knight’s expression was grim and set, while the dragon’s head bobbed low, its red eyes narrowed in pain or exhaustion as blood seeped from a wound in its side. The death blow would come soon.

Around the edges of the illustration—above, below, and running down each side—were four brief paragraphs of text that appeared to discuss three different prophecies. They almost resembled the quatrains of Michel de Nostradamus: succinct, poetic, and emphatically honest. It was the one on the left side of the page that caught Lilli’s attention. Even with her shaky declensions, she recognized it as a verse and translated in her head as best she could:

A valiant knight, the page acquired
with love and brilliant mind,
Shall slight a prince both dark and fair and fat
with kith and kine.
A battle fought, a battle won, a price by both agreed
A knight is fall’n, a prince is fled, the magic’s in the seed.

Lilli frowned, then repeated the lines over in her head. Typical poetic rambling, she told herself. Most likely it meant nothing. Prophets loved to make their visions as vague as possible so that they could be interpreted to fit any given situation or outcome.

Something about this, though, niggled at the back of her mind. She read it again.

Valiant knight.

She looked back at the apocalyptic page, then back at the verse that intrigued her.

Prince both dark and fair.

As if in the distance, she could hear Aaron still talking and knew he was trying to get her attention, but she had felt an idea, still amorphous and shaky, grab hold of her and tug her insistently back to the page with the knight and dragon illustration. She quickly skimmed through the other three verses and discovered with a jolt that each of them shared a common theme—a battle between two single adversaries, one dark and one light, who would settle between them a greater dispute between their peoples. The dark warrior would have superior numbers, superior funding, and greater overall power, but the bright warrior would be able to win the battle by paying a kind of forfeit that would not only avert the coming war but would somehow undermine the loser’s ability to rise up again.

Lilli felt a sudden rush of understanding. Excited, she turned to look back at Aaron and hushed him with an impatient gesture.

“I think you’re wrong,” she said, almost laughing when Aaron recoiled as if she’d just told him she thought he was Jack the Ripper.

“I beg your pardon?”

Then she really did laugh. He sounded so indignant.

“I think you’re wrong,” she repeated, “and I’ll tell you why. I’m sure Samael would very much like to bring about the apocalypse if for no other reason than to curry favor with Lucifer. He’s always looking for a way to suck up to the head honcho, but that’s not what I think he’s after at the moment. Sam doesn’t need the book to bring about the apocalypse. If he wants to do it, all he needs is to perform the right actions in the right order and, voilà! Instant Armageddon.” She shook her head and pointed to the verses on the next page. “I think this is why he wanted the book back. Specifically, I think this is why he wanted the book away from you.”

She waited while Aaron skimmed through the verses, then looked up and shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would Samael care about these prophecies? They have nothing to do with the apocalypse page. I don’t even think they were written by the same oracle. They’re in a completely different style, almost nursery-rhyme-ish.”

“I know, but just think about the main characters in all of them—a dark prince and a valiant knight?”

“So?”

Lilli rolled her eyes. “I think they’re referring to Samael and you.”

“What?”

“ ‘Dark prince’ is pretty self-explanatory, don’t you think? I mean, come on, that one is practically handed to us. It took me a minute to think through the ‘valiant knight, brilliant mind, acquires a page’ thing—that’s a little more esoteric—but it has to be you. You said your uncle left you the house and the contents, right? Including a whole lot of pages. Books full of them. Including this one. Because you were his favorite. He loved you.”

“But—”

Warming to her topic, Lilli didn’t let him finish. “And the brilliant mind thing is a given. I’d bet you a year’s income you’ve got an entire bowl of alphabet soup after your name. You probably got perfect scores on your SATs.”

“I still don’t see what that has to do with anything. Why would Samael care about four badly written rhymes about an interpersonal conflict between the two of us when he could be instigating a rebellion that would lead to the destruction or enslavement of the entire human race?”

Sheesh. For a smart guy, Lilli realized, Aaron could be really thick. “Because if one of these ‘badly written rhymes’ comes true first,” she explained patiently, “Samael wouldn’t be able to start a rebellion. He’d be finished, at least for the foreseeable future. And you, my friend, are the one who’s going to bring him down.”

SEVEN

Three and a half hours later, Aaron found himself standing around his uncle’s basement and feeling like an idiot while Lilli drew a huge circle on the floor with a thick stick of white chalk. Dawn was still more than an hour away, which according to Lilli meant that Samael and his hologram would leave them alone a while longer. He would pop back up once Lilli’s time ran out for retrieving the book for him, but he wouldn’t want to be caught in this realm for very long with the sun approaching. His powers were already weak on earth, and the sun would only drain him further, so he would wait until the last possible minute before he showed his face outside of Hell. When he did, the wards would keep him outside the house, unless someone invited him in.

That should give Lilli just about enough time to answer one more question for Aaron.

“Tell me again why this idea is not completely ridiculous and suicidal,” he urged, leaning against a bookcase with his arms folded defensively in front of him. He was trying not to stare at her ass while she crouched down to draw her circle, but frankly, it was an extremely fine ass, and he could still remember the way it had felt cupped in his hands upstairs.

Aaron swore and shifted. The erection he’d sported then had finally subsided and he really didn’t think now was an appropriate time for its return. Unfortunately, the fire that fed it seemed disinclined to go out as long as Lilli was anywhere within a fifty-foot radius of him. It was becoming damned inconvenient.

“I already told you, I’m sure this is going to work,” she said, setting aside her chalk while there was still about a twelve-inch gap at the base of the circle. “The prophecy says so. You’re going to kick Samael’s ass, the apocalypse will be averted, and then we can call live happily ever after and you’ll know you’re the one who made that possible. Think of the sense of satisfaction that will give