Demon Blood

and wonderful and frightening. And she hadn’t known that even when she could predict his reaction, she couldn’t control her response to it.
    Perhaps she should have seen it, but she’d always been better at anticipating other people’s reactions than anticipating her own.
    And Deacon . . . She knew he’d keep resisting her.
    She could put him in front of more demons who were a threat to vampires, and he’d slay them. She could put him in front of demons who weren’t an immediate threat, and he’d slay those, too. She could use his need for revenge to slay every demon that she needed slain.
    But she didn’t want to use him. Rosalia wanted him to see the danger that she saw, and take a stand against it, just as he did against every evil and injustice he’d ever faced. Unfortunately, ninety years had taught her that Deacon didn’t take decisive action against hypothetical threats.
    Rosalia couldn’t let go of this, however. She did deal in hypotheticals. And those said that in a few weeks, hundreds of vampires in London would die. Eventually, either Belial’s demons would come together to destroy the Guardians—or Anaria and her nephilim would. The nephilim had to be stopped, but they were stronger and outnumbered the Guardians. And Anaria . . .
    Above all, the Guardians and the vampire communities needed to be safe from Anaria. She was too strong, and too convinced that she was right.
    And so although Deacon would prefer never to see her face again, Rosalia planned to return to him shortly after dawn—and she had even more reason now. Taylor had said she arrived in Deacon’s room every day. Though Taylor hadn’t noticed any regularity to her arrivals, several hours passed between each one. Once the new Doyen regained control over Michael’s impulses, she kept it for a little while—and so Rosalia had a little time before she had to find Deacon.
    Time that she needed, so that she could see clearly again. Destroying the nephilim, protecting the vampires—both felt so right, but Rosalia couldn’t shake the feeling that, with Deacon, she’d been going about it all wrong. She just couldn’t see why . . . but she suspected that her emotions clouded her vision.
    She needed to talk. She needed advice. And she needed to take her heart out of the equation.
    Yet another thing that was easier said than done.

    Rosalia descended out of the cool, high-altitude air into a hot, sticky Rome night where everything seemed to drip and droop. Humans slept restlessly, sweating. Trees stood with branches outspread and no breeze to stir their leaves. The air smelled both stagnant and full of life—unmoving and stale, yet the fragrance of food and flowers and exhaust wafted through pockets of still air, filling every humid breath she drew.
    For a long time, she’d resented this city almost as much as she’d loved it. She’d always thought that once Lorenzo was gone, she’d leave Rome. But in the six months since she’d returned from the catacombs, she couldn’t imagine making a home anywhere else. Her resentment had fled, the scales had tipped toward love, and she suspected that humanity’s Eternal City would also be hers.
    It felt more like home than even Caelum had.
    She flew over her abbey to check that nothing was amiss before continuing on to the parish church. For more than two hundred years, the church had been a foundation of the neighborhood—and the priests acted as Rosalia’s liaison to the Vatican. Twelve different men had she outlived, and most of them she’d mourned their passing. A few of the priests she’d had to work around rather than with, others merely passed on messages, but others had become her close friends.
    The latest, Father John Wojcinski, she counted as a friend and confidant. The priest had been her liaison when the Church had not just quit of her services, but quit of her. She had not even been excommunicated—the Church simply no longer acknowledged her existence.
    That rejection hadn’t been as hurtful as their first. After Rosalia’s transformation to Guardian, the Church had not heard her confessions or allowed her to participate in any other sacraments—and so when they had turned away from her six months ago, the loss had not been so deep. She could not repay them to her satisfaction, but she no longer needed the physical and spiritual support that she’d relied upon so heavily as a human. Nor was it so terrible to say farewell to the faceless priests who’d once