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expression, and he sighed. “And now you’ve made me a liar.”
    “I’m sure I am not the first to do so,” she said, kneeling on the floor and pressing her ear to the wooden door. Suede pulled tight across a bottom framed by the straps of her leather stockings and arcs of white feathers.
    “We are none of us saints,” Alejandro murmured, grateful that they had long since passed the altar. His thoughts were far too impure to cross himself now.
    With both relief and regret, he watched Irena stand and vanish her wings.
    “I hear nothing,” she said, calling in her kukri knives from her cache. The angled blades were sharp and sturdy, but at only sixteen inches, their length forced her into closer proximity with an enemy than a sword would.
    Alejandro tightened his jaw against his protest. Using the knives demanded that she was nearer to the kill—and, for that reason, it was also more satisfying to her.
    He understood her; how could he not, when he took so much pleasure in his own weapons? When he anticipated the feel of their grips against his palms and treasured the memory of their creation?
    Irena stilled when his swords appeared in his hands, and he immediately wanted to vanish them again.
    She didn’t lift her gaze from the swords. “Did you repair the blade yourself?”
    He gave a short nod. She studied the fracture, her expression impenetrable. He’d mended the break with his Gift by heating the steel and hammering it back into shape—and no one but Irena would have noticed the faint discoloration of the blade, the slightly uneven balance.
    Oh, he was a fool. He wished he’d brought out any blades but these—the last of the weapons they’d made together in her forge. But he hadn’t considered it; he used no other swords.
    “Why did you not come to me? We could have—” She caught herself with an indrawn breath. Her gaze hardened and snapped up to his. “You thick-brained ass. I should let you be killed when it shatters.”
    “Yes,” he agreed, to punish her for saying it so casually now. When it had mattered, she had not let him die.
    The punishment became his when pain slashed across her features, and she looked away. But he could not unspeak his response.
    Her voice was flat. “Rid yourself of them, Olek. Then open your hands.”
    As soon as he did, a pair of swords appeared in his palms. He examined the intricate hand guards, hefted the deceptive delicacy of the blades, and fought the ache building in his chest. They had perfect length and balance—had been created specifically for him.
    Had she made them recently, or carried them in her cache for the past four hundred years? He didn’t know which he hoped it was.
    “These are satisfactory,” he finally said.
    Deacon cleared his throat, and reached back for his short swords. “So, Irena—do you have anything nosferatu-sized in there for me?”
    Irena tossed him a semiautomatic pistol before swinging the door open. Deacon caught the gun and raised his brows in query.
    Alejandro explained as Irena dropped into the catacombs. “The bullets have been coated with hellhound venom. A shot will slow the nosferatu down.”
    “Good to hear. Thank—”
    “ Barely slows it. If the nosferatu comes close enough for you to use your swords,” Alejandro said, moving to the hole in the floor, “then you are already dead.”

    Two steps beyond the narrow, spiraling stairwell that brought them to the third level beneath the church, Irena froze.
    Not just one nosferatu. A nest of them.
    Her heart pounded. She stared down the gray stone corridor, praying that she’d been mistaken. An unlit string of electric lights ran along the ceiling, but she had no difficulty seeing through the darkness. None of the pale, hairless creatures lurked in the corridor, but she detected three distinct heartbeats in a chamber ahead and to the left.
    The nosferatu were lying in wait for them.
    She clamped her lips, swallowing the invectives that leapt to her tongue. They