I awoke to the sound of running water and the smell of freshly-baked bread.

On the floor, next to the bed, there was a white carrier bag with EATALY printed on the side, and poking out of the top, was a generously-sized olive-topped focaccia that smelled like Heaven, or at least, my idea of it. My stomach, clearly feeling neglected, grumbled angrily. I hadn't eaten a thing since the pastries Ethan had given to me before our trip to the Basilica and I was struck then by the realisation that I had no bloody idea at all how much time had passed since.

So much had happened. Our journey through the wormholes. Getting inside the Vatican. St. Peter's Tomb. The Vaults. Here. Ethan. Me. Us.

It felt like we'd lost hours in this room, wrapped up in each other, attempting to satiate a hunger that never seem to dissipate no matter how much we fed it. If anything, the hunger just seemed to grow, all vulnerabilities and all fears cast aside until it became something wild and untameable, only stopping when our exhausted, sweat-slicked bodies were too knackered to go on.

Still feeling the aftershock of that exhaustion, I sat up, gathering the blanket around me as I stared in the direction of the source of the noise, rubbing my eyes to clear the sleep that still fogged my gaze.

On the opposite side of the room, there was a door I hadn't noticed until then and the more I stared at it, the more I was convinced it hadn't been there before. But there it was. A door, slightly ajar, a bright white light shining through the gap. The sound of the running water was coming from within.

Reaching over, I grabbed at the pile of clothes, sorting through it until I found my shirt, slipping it on and haphazardly doing up a few of the buttons. Padding warily towards the doorway, I peeked through the gap to see Ethan standing at a basin, brushing his teeth. Pushing lightly on the door, I stepped into a bathroom, gazing around wide-eyed at the shower in the corner, the toilet, the sink unit where he stood with his back to me.

While I'd slept, he'd been busy. It was small and basic, but it was real. I prodded a finger at the toilet cistern just to check. I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to get used to how he could do these things, creating whole rooms out of nothing, rooms with furniture and showers and basins and doors.

Bending down, Ethan drank water straight from the flow running from the tap and rinsed his mouth, spitting it out into the sink, before raising his head and turning slightly to look back over his shoulder at me. My mouth dropped open, my gaze darting from his face down to his hands where they gripped the edge of the basin.

He was Ethan again. The Ethan I had first met. No blackened hands. No obsidian eyes. No tendrils of oily veins snaking down his cheeks.

I started towards him, grabbing his free hand as he used the other to wipe his mouth with a towel.  Flipping his hand over, I examined the fingertips and every inch of skin, before staring into his eyes, leaning closer as if it was some trick of the light and I was imagining the whole thing.

'How?' I said. 

'I could hardly go and fetch supplies looking like that, could I? It tends to alarm people.'

Sensing my confusion, he threw the towel to one side and slipped a hand around my waist, pulling me closer. I tried to ignore the butterflies that stirred instinctively, warming the base of my stomach with a pleasurable glow.

'I rebuilt the shield, that's all,' he explained. 'We demons all have one. It's the only way we can walk undetected in your world. Your Albert-clone managed to sabotage mine. It's like planting a virus in the main circuit board. Takes a bit of time to reinstall the firewall.'

When I said nothing and continued to stare at him, he narrowed his eyes and smiled. 'You know, you look almost disappointed. You don't like this face?'

I stood on my tiptoes and brushed my lips gently over his. 'I like this face just fine. But I also happen to like the other one too.'

He grinned, gripping my waist and pushing me backwards against the wall. Nuzzling at my cheek, he trailed his mouth down to meet mine, kissing me deeply. 'You're so weird,' he murmured, pulling back slightly as his fingertips skimmed the top of my thigh, his eyes widening. 'And you're not wearing any underwear.'

'Thought we had an intruder,' I said, trying to steady my breathing as his hand moved higher. 'Came to investigate. Didn't have time for underwear.'

'Hmm,' he said, his mouth finding my neck, sending little tingles of heat cascading over my skin. 'And if there had been an intruder, what exactly would you have used for a weapon?'

I clutched at him as he pressed his body against mine and saw my hands curled around his shoulders, a momentary flash of memory bombarding me with images of my hand gripping the Erelim's wrist, its eyeball bursting open.

I sucked in breath and pushed gently on Ethan's shoulders. He looked down at me, his cheeks a little flushed, but his brow raised in concern.

'I don't know,' I said, suddenly feeling those butterflies for a different reason, one that didn't feel quite so good as it had before. 'I was hoping you could tell me? What happened in the Vaults? What did I do?'

Ethan sighed, but I saw the tension flicker in his eyes, felt it in the way his shoulders tightened under my touch. 'Okay,' he said, scraping his teeth over his bottom lip. 'We should talk.' He planted a kiss on my forehead. 'Take a shower and I'll tell you what I know.'

*

I sat on the bed opposite Ethan, my legs curled up underneath me, my hair still damp from the shower. I'd hoped the water could wash away the sense of unease that had been slowly building, but as I swallowed down a small chunk of the bread we were now sharing, I felt it stick there in my throat, my ragged nerves hampering my ability to digest what my stomach had been begging for.

Ethan chucked me a bottle of apple juice and I opened it, taking a much-needed swig.

'Most of my kind don't believe that your kind exists anymore, and there are even some who refuse to believe your kind ever existed in the first place,' he said. 'You've become a story. Nothing more. You exist only in the pages of the Old Testament, which is undoubtedly a good thing, because if the fact of your existence was to become truth, then many of my kind would stop at nothing to hunt you down.'

A shiver rippled down my spine. 'Aren't they doing that already, so they can try and collect my soul?'

'Yes, at least, they would if you were an ordinary maledicti. But you're no ordinary maledicti.' He frowned, shaking his head. 'I should have worked it out before. The signs were there – the fact that the Angels were practically sending an army of Watchers into London, how you managed to conceal your powers from Berith, the Cherubim turning up. I had all the pieces of the puzzle lined up in front of me and yet I couldn't see it. Maybe I didn't want to.'

He reached for the tatty brown leather satchel he'd brought with him from the Vaults and tugged it towards him, pulling it onto his lap. There was a strange wistful look in his eyes as he ran his hand over the bag, finding the small hairline cracks in the leather and tracing them with his fingertips. With a sigh, he unbuckled both the straps and opened it, reaching in carefully to retrieve what looked like a hand-bound book, crammed with pages that seemed to be made from different kinds of paper and not all cut to the same size.  Some pages were thicker with battered edges, some so thin they could have been made from spiderwebs. Ethan laid his palm on top of the book and inhaled, almost as if he was breathing in whatever secrets were contained within those ancient pages.

'I carried this bag around with me for so long when I was younger. At the time, I didn't realise how much my body had adjusted to the weight of it on my shoulder, but when I left it at the Vaults, it was like leaving a limb behind. Took me ages to get used to it not being there.'

'Wait,' I said. 'You put the bag in the Vaults? I thought you said the Angels stole the book and took back the blood of the First when they... you know, when they killed your parents.'

Ethan glanced up from the book, briefly meeting my questioning gaze. 'Yeah,' he said with a grimace. 'I might have lied a little about that.'

'A little?'

'Okay, I lied. You got me.' He squirmed uncomfortably and leant back against the wall. 'They took the blood, but not the book. My mother gave me it and told me to keep it safe. I told Berith that they'd taken the Gospel. I couldn't risk him finding out that I still had it, so I kept it hidden where I knew he wouldn't find it and then, when Blake got wind of the fact that it might not have been taken after all, the burden of it became too much to bear. So, I gave it up. I hid it in the only place I knew it wouldn't be found, at least not by my kind.'

His shoulders slumped slightly as he looked back down at the book in his lap, his palm now stroking the cover, his thumb brushing up and down the spine. A flicker of pain darkened his features.

'I lied about it feeling like losing a limb,' he said, bitterness creeping into his voice and twisting it into something harder, colder. 'It was like cutting my fucking heart out of my chest and leaving it there to bleed out on a dusty shelf for centuries. I might not have been carrying the burden of it anymore, but I carried the pain of losing it every single fucking day. It was the only thing I had left of them. My last connection. It meant everything to me. Losing this book was like losing them all over again. But I had no choice. I had to keep it from Berith and Blake and anyone else that would subvert its meaning and twist my mother's words for their own gain, and what better hiding place than the Vault of the Divine Council itself?'

I swallowed. 'So, it was you,' I said. 'Albert... I mean, the Erelim said that he'd met someone like me before and that she'd brought someone else with her to the Vaults. A thief. At the time I thought he meant your parents, but then when he saw you, he recognised you immediately. He remembered you from when you were there before. He thought you'd stolen from him, but you didn't. You were just hiding the book there.'

Ethan's mouth twitched at the corners, but the smile remained there, never reaching his eyes, which seemed to be drowning in a sadness that made me want to wrap myself around him and never let go. Opening the book to the first page, his fingertips brushed lightly over the beautiful italic-style script.

'The Erelim was confused. Maybe it's because I look like my father, I don't know. As I said, I did go to the Vaults, but I didn't go with a maledicti like you.' He looked up at me, his gaze cautious. 'The maledicti he was referring to was my mother. She was an Endorian. Like you are.'

'An Endorian?' The unfamiliar word sounded strange on my tongue as I repeated it. 'But what is that and what makes an Endorian different to an ordinary maledicti?'

'A maledicti's powers are limited,' he explained. 'They possess an extra-sensory perception that allows them to see our world and yes, they can bewitch an Erelim, but that's pretty much it, hence why I'd call it a curse more than a gift. The ability to see into our world isn't something any human should desire, because you'll either end up dead or living the rest of your life having to screw a rogue demon like Rosier.'

I wrinkled my nose at the thought of it and put the last of the bread back in the bag.

'Sorry,' he said, catching my disgusted grimace. 'An Endorian is different to a maledicti. Have you ever heard the story of King Saul of Israel?'

I shrugged. 'Must have missed Bible class that day. Probably had better things to do. You know, boys or something.'

He raised a brow. 'Did you ever go to any classes, Bible or otherwise?'

'Yeah, if there were boys in them.' I winked. 'I always liked geography class.'

'You liked geography?'

'I liked the teacher. He was freshly graduated. Mr. Williams. Was in his early twenties and fit as fuck.'

Ethan sighed. 'Casey...'

'What?' I said, laughing. 'At least I listened in that class. That man had my undivided attention.'

'I'm sure he did.' He shook his head, smiling. 'Okay, well seeing as you were otherwise occupied during Bible class, I'll fill you in. So, the story goes that on the night before the great Battle of Gilboa, Saul, the first King of Israel, was so desperate to learn his fate that he sought out a witch in Endor in Galilee, despite having made witchcraft an offence punishable by death. He assured the witch that no harm would come to her and she conjured the spirit of Samuel, a prophet who, before he died, had been the one to anoint Saul and bring him to power. The prophet's spirit berated the King for disobeying God's instructions by seeking out a witch and told Saul that the battle would be lost, as would his kingdom and his life. Sure enough, the next day came and the Philistines defeated him, and Saul fell on his own sword.'

He stopped and flashed me a wry grin. 'I hope I have your undivided attention by the way?'

'Of course,' I replied with a shrug and a mischievous grin of my own. 'I mean, you're no Mr. Williams but...'

Ethan narrowed his eyes. 'And this is not a geography lesson. More like history for you. Anyway, the story itself served only to demonise witchcraft and those who practised it. Some said the Witch of Endor was nothing but a trickster, seeking to bring an end to Saul's reign after he had ordered the execution of anyone known or rumoured to be a witch. They said that she fooled him into thinking he was communing with Samuel's spirit, with nothing but a few well-staged tricks and her own skill of ventriloquism. Others said she was a necromancer, an evil witch with dark powers, conjuring up the spirits of demons and that it was a demon that spoke with Saul, and not Samuel. Of course, neither stories were true.'

'So, what was the truth?'

'The Witch of Endor was neither an illusionist nor a necromancer and she certainly didn't conjure up the spirit of a prophet. What she told him was derived from her own powers of foresight,' he said. 'There was a connection between the Witch and demons, but not in the way the story claimed. She was a friend and protector of demons and she could use her powers to defend them should the need arise. Imagine that? A human that could stand up to the Angels!'

Ethan looked back down at the book in his lap. 'Not long after the time when my father and the others like him were cast out, the Council discovered the existence of the maledicti and learned how a maledicti's soul could be used to increase a demon's power. Of course, they set about searching for such humans, but it wasn't until sometime later that they realised there was a worse threat on Earth. Rumour has it, that it was the Seraphim themselves who foresaw the terrible power that the Endorian witches would wield, and it was that discovery which led Saul to decree that all those who practised witchcraft must be put to death. They hoped to destroy the line before it flourished, but they failed because they didn't bank on putting that responsibility on the head of someone like Saul. He was human, after all, and power-hungry and it was that hunger for power which led him to defy the supposed word of God and seek out the Witch for his own selfish means. Instead of putting her to death for her craft, he let her live.'

I frowned, putting the bag of bread to one side and shuffling over on the bed until I was sat next to him. His fingers were still absent-mindedly tracing the perfectly-neat script on the page.

'I don't get it,' I said. 'Why didn't Saul kill her? I mean, she gave him some pretty shit news, to be fair. If she'd told him he would be victorious, I could understand. But she basically told him he was fucked and that he was going to lose the battle. Why did he let her live?'

'Because she was kind to him,' Ethan said. 'She could see he was completely terrified and she offered him comfort in his darkest hour. He might have been her enemy, but she knew that he had been manipulated by the Angels, like so many others. Ironic really that the man they sent to destroy the line of the Endorians, was the one who helped beget it.'

My eyes widened. 'Wait, do you mean...'

Ethan chuckled. 'Yeah. Saul and his three sons died in battle the next day, but his daughter – a daughter of Endor – lived on. Since then, the Council have sought to find and destroy Endorians above all others. In fact, they were so successful that most of my kind believed that the Endorian line died out when the Cherubim killed my mother. Even I believed it.'

'But if your mum was an Endorian witch, doesn't that make you one?'

'No, it passes only to females,' he said. 'Another reason to believe the line had died with her.'

I sat for a moment, thinking about everything he had said. 'So where do I fit in all of this? You really think I'm one of these Endorians?'

He looked at me solemnly. 'Yes. I'm afraid there's no doubt.'

'Why are you saying it like that? You're afraid there's no doubt?' There was something in his tone, something in the way he was looking at me that made my stomach flip with dread. 'Is this where you tell me I'm not just cursed, I'm actually really fucking screwed?'

He exhaled a long, drawn-out breath. 'Look, you have definite advantages over an ordinary maledicti, that's for sure. Endorians survive much longer than maledicti because of that sub-conscious ability you have to cloak yourself. It's like you have a built-in self-defence mechanism that kicks in whenever you're in danger of being exposed. I think that's what happened with Berith and why he never realised what was standing right in front of him. The problem is that most Endorians don't know how to use their power, mainly because they don't even know what they are. You're not born knowing that you're different and for many, that knowledge comes far too late. Harnessing your power can take years, a lifetime even. It's temperamental. Unreliable. However, if you can learn to control it, an Endorian can become a formidable weapon against the Angels and that's where the problem lies.'

The hair on the back of my neck was prickling. 'Because the Angels will stop at nothing to kill us?'

'Yes, but also because it makes an Endorian a very valuable commodity.'

He flicked through some of the pages, until he came to one that was folded inwards. Opening it up, there was a charcoal-tracing of Lucifer, similar to the image that marked the entrance to the wormhole in St. Peter's Tomb.

'My father was powerful,' he said. 'Without doubt the most powerful demon to have existed, but he would never have survived as long as he did without my mother there to protect him. She was a highly-skilled witch and having been afforded longevity of life through the blood of the First, she had many years in which to hone her craft. Dissent in the ranks was rife even then. There were many loyal to my father, but there were also some who believed his love for my mother was holding him back, preventing him from really taking hold of the revolution and giving them the war they so desperately craved. Some of them knew my mother was an Endorian and were jealous of my father, they wanted what he had for themselves. They wanted her, or more to the point, they wanted the protection of her powers. Berith always believed that it was one of my father's enemies that betrayed them to the Angels, hoping to see Lucifer dead and enabling them to get their hands on a Witch of Endor.'

'But even if they'd succeeded, your mother would never have protected them, surely?'

Ethan's jaw tightened, an angry line furrowing between his brows. 'She wouldn't have had a choice. There's an old ritual. One steeped in dark magic that enslaves Endorians and forces them to bend to a demon's will. My father's enemies could have kept my mother imprisoned for eternity, compelling her to protect them, whether she wanted to or not.'

He reached out and linked his fingers with mine, the pad of his thumb brushing over the thin skin of my wrist. 'So, you see, if I say that I'm afraid there's no doubt of what you truly are, it's because I am afraid. You just became the most powerful maledicti in existence. You're an Endorian, Casey, and the likes of Blake would happily sacrifice half his loyal followers just to gain control of you.'

My trembling breath whistled out through my clenched teeth.

'Well... that's shit,' I said, finally.

'That's one way of looking at it, yeah.'

I squeezed his hand. 'Is there any other way of looking at it? I mean, on one side I have the Cherubim wanting to pull my spleen out through my nostrils and on the other, I have a power-crazed demon wanting to make me his trophy witch. I'm struggling to see the positives here, I've got to be honest.'

'Well, from what I saw you do to your Albert-clone, I would say that one positive is that your powers are already insanely fucking strong.'

I gawped at him. 'You're kidding me, right? Ethan, I have no idea where that even came from. It was like one minute I was shitting myself because I was so terrified, the next I was holding onto him and forcing him to stop. I don't know how I did it, I just knew that I could. I knew that I had to.'

'My mother always told me that the basis of an Endorian's powers is instinct,' he said. 'The rest of it is about control. What you did back there in the Vaults was instinctual, but you had no real control over it. You were on auto-pilot, doing what you were born to do without much thought as to how you were even accomplishing it and yet you defeated the Erelim. It was your first attack upon an Angel and it was fucking spectacular. Really, Casey, it was off the scale.'

I snorted in frustration. 'Maybe, maybe not. But I don't have control of it. I don't know what I'm doing. I could apparently hide my identity, so Oscar couldn't see what I was, but I couldn't stop the Angels from hunting me. That Watcher on the train...'

'...knew you were a maledicti, but not that you were an Endorian.'

'Okay, but I still couldn't protect myself from them. You said that your mother had all those years to learn how to develop and control her powers. I don't have that time, Ethan.'

He looked at me strangely then, an odd expression etched on his handsome face. There was a wariness there, but something else lingered in his eyes, an excitable glint that wouldn't be stifled. He swallowed hard as he reached into the bag again, retrieving an A5-size red velvet pouch, gathered at the top by a drawstring cord. Pulling on the cord, he opened up the pouch and withdrew a glass vial. The dark liquid within was viscous and thick, a slight oily sheen floating on the surface.

I held my breath.

'Tell me that's not what I think it is,' I whispered.

'It wouldn't take much,' Ethan said. 'A few drops of the blood of the First and you would have those years.' He paused, chewing pensively on his lower lip. 'We would have those years.'

I stared at him, my mouth dropping open. A tightness pulled on my chest, a fire burned in my throat.

'You would want that?' I said, my voice cracking.

This was madness. He didn't mean it. How could he? Why would he?

Running his fingertips around the cork stopper on the vial, Ethan gave a half-smile, a slight flush creeping into his cheeks.

'I thought I was okay on my own,' he said. 'I lived on a diet of take-out and TV and I convinced myself that I didn't need anyone. I just wanted them, my parents, and every day without them that damn hole in my chest just got bigger and bigger and the pain just got worse. I was an empty space. A void. Berith told me it would get easier, but it never did. Until you.'

Pulling my hand onto his lap, he placed the vial of blood into my palm and closed my fingers around it. The glass felt cold against my skin.

'I was wrong,' he said. 'Wrong about so many things. I thought the only thing that could save me, the only thing that I needed was them, but it's you I need. Stay with me, Casey.'

Stay with him. For years.

No, not just years. Centuries maybe. Centuries with Ethan. Centuries with my ghosts.

Confusion swelled, a monstrous thing filling my head with a rush of white noise and panic. I'd spent so long looking for a way out, desperate to destroy those years behind me by destroying the years ahead of me. The future had seemed like a burden, a weight on my chest that was slowly crushing the life out of me and whenever I'd thought about it – those years, those long endless fucking years of reliving it all, over and over again – I couldn't breathe.

And now, he was asking me to stay. To carry on. To live. To relive.

I stared at the vial in my hand.

Just a few drops, he'd said. Like it was simple. Like choosing to have a future was easy.

Just. A. Few. Drops.

'Will you do it?' Ethan said. 'Will you stay with me?'

I looked into his eyes and took a breath.

***