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“Le Jeune Martyre.”
“I know damn well what the painting is!” I nearly choked, swiping angrily at my cheeks to rid any sign of weakness. “I mean, how the hell do you have this painting in your house? A replica of the very one my mother painted shortly before she died!”
“This isn’t a replica. This is the original by Paul Delaroche.”
I blinked in confusion. That was impossible.
“The original is in the Louvre in Paris,” I snapped.
“They do have an original by Delaroche, a second the artist modeled after this one. This is actually the first I commissioned for myself.”
Hold up. The one in Paris was painted in 1850-something. I’d researched it for a project in high school as I struggled in my angst-ridden teenage years, while still grieving the loss of a mother who obsessed over this beautiful drowning martyr.
“Do you mean you’re like one hundred sixty years old or something?”
“No, Genevieve.”
Whew. Because that would make him freakishly old. I stepped away from him. His pupils were inky orbs of pitch. No spark of light at all.
He faced the painting. He was remembering. “This woman was the first Vessel ever to walk the earth.”
His voice became steady, even, almost too calm. My mind flipped to what I remembered about the history of the painting.
“She was a Christian martyr, according to the history books,” I said softly.
“She was that,” he agreed, tone thick with disdain. “But she was so much more.”
I waited, thinking he wouldn’t continue. But he did.
“She was twenty-four when a high demon found her. She’d learned to cast illusion on her own. Actually, the summoning chant we use now was of her own making.”
I wanted to interrupt and ask how, why. I thought demon hunters had created the cast of illusion. But he was in a trance. I didn’t dare stop him.
“She had evaded the high demons for four years past her awakening. But when he found her—”
I felt heat rolling in waves. The orange shimmer of fire barely caressed his shoulders.
“He used her. Most foully.”
I winced at the gruffness tinged with pain in his voice.
“The stain of his evil threatened to steal her very soul, so rather than let him abuse her further, she sought an honest death. She did die as a Christian and a martyr, but she was also a sacrifice so that the damned, pernicious demon Ru’um could not use her as an instrument to do his evil.”
The name tingled cold up my spine. I tried the pronunciation in my head.Roo-um. I didn’t know the name, yet something tugged deep.
“Ru’um?” I asked.
Jude faced me then. The black had not crawled beyond his irises, but I knew he ventured too close to the edge.
“You know him by another name. Danté.”
I sucked in a breath, unable to move or make a sound. He wasn’t speaking of a history handed down to him by others. He was speaking of memory, his memory, of a past pain lodged deep within him. My heart raced.
“Do you mean that, that you knew this Vessel?”
A single nod.
“She was my duty to protect, and I failed her. So she died.”
