“Teresa?” Mrs. Martinal said, her disbelief growing. The girl still wouldn’t say anything.
Hardin continued. “We’ve only been at this a few days, but we’ll find something. We’ll find the bolt-cutters you used and match them to the cut marks on the padlock. We’ll match the salt in your cupboard with the salt on the body. We’ll make a case for murder. But if you cooperate, I can help you. I can make a pretty good argument that this was self-defense. What do you say?”
Hardin was making wild claims—the girl had been careful and the physical evidence was scant. They might not find the bolt-cutters, and the salt thing was pure television. And while Hardin might scrounge together the evidence and some witness testimony, she might never convince the DA’s office that this had really happened.
Teresa looked stricken, like she was trying to decide if Hardin was right, and if they had the evidence. If a jury would believe that a meek, pregnant teenager like her could even murder another person. It would be a hard sell—but Hardin was hoping this would never make it to court. She wasn’t stretching the truth about the self-defense plea. By some accounts, Teresa probably deserved a medal. But Hardin wouldn’t go that far.
In a perfect world, Hardin would be slapping cuffs on Dora Manuel, not Teresa. But until the legal world caught up with the shadow world, this would have to do.
Teresa finally spoke in a rush. “I had to do it. You know I had to do it. My mother’s been pregnant twice since Ms. Manuel moved in. They died. I heard her talking. She knew what it was. She knew what was happening. I had to stop it.” She had both hands laced in a protective barrier over her stomach now. She wasn’t showing much yet. Just a swell she could hold in her hands.
Julia Martinal covered her mouth. Hardin couldn’t imagine which part of this shocked her more—that her daughter was pregnant, or a murderer.
Hardin imagined trying to explain this to the captain. She’d managed to get the werewolves pushed through and on record, but this was so much weirder. At least, not having grown up with the stories, it was. But the case was solved. On the other hand, she could just walk away. Without Teresa’s confession, they’d never be able to close the case. Hardin had a hard time thinking of Teresa as a murderer—she wasn’t like Cormac Bennett. Hardin could just walk away. But not really.
In the end, Hardin called it in and arrested Teresa. But her next call was to the DA about what kind of deal they could work out. There had to be a way to work this out within the system. Get Teresa off on probation on a minor charge. There had to be a way to drag the shadow world, kicking and screaming, into the light.
Somehow, Hardin would figure it out.
Bellum Romanum
GAIUS ALBINUS stood before the locked gates of Diocletian’s Palace. Fifteen hundred years of planning, and he could not get to where he needed to go because of a chain and padlock, an electronic security system, and a modern sense of reasonable working hours, helpfully marked out on a placard bolted to the stone. What had once been a palace was now a museum, and it was closed.
So many obstacles in this modern era did not involve armies, weapons, or violence. No, they were barriers of bureaucracy and officious politeness. Venerable institutions of old Rome he ought to know well, passed down to successive civilizations.
He couldn’t help but smile, amused. To come so far, and to be confronted now by a sign telling him the site had closed several hours before and that he could not enter until daylight. Impossible for him.
Well. He would simply have to find another way. There was always another way.
What most impressed Gaius Albinus wasn’t how much the city of Split had changed, but how much remained the same and recognizable. Even now, the city felt Roman.
The central palace complex still stood, amidst the sprawl that had grown up around it. The temple walls were identifiable. Many pitted stone blocks had fallen long ago and were now arranged in artistic piles, in the interest of archeological curiosity. At some point, cast-off stones had become valuable, worthy of admiration. Entire towns had turned into relics, museum pieces. And the roads—the roads still marked out routes across the Empire. The great engineers of Rome remained triumphant.
These days the one-time retirement retreat of Emperor Diocletian was a university and tourist town, raucous with nightlife, young people crowding into cafés, spilling onto the beach, drinking hard under strings of electric lights. Not so different from youth cavorting under suspended oil lamps back in the day, letting clothing slip off shoulders while pretending not to notice, making eyes at each other, offering invitations. That hadn’t changed either, not in all his years.
Now, as then, tourists were easy to spot by the way they wandered through it all with startled, awestruck expressions. Most likely not understanding the local language. Gaius remembered going to Palestine as a young soldier, expecting to hear a cacophony of languages, yet not being prepared for the sense of displacement, a kind of intellectual vertigo, that came from standing in the middle of a market and hearing people shout at one another using strange words, laughing at jokes he couldn’t understand. The way people became subdued when he spoke his native Latin. More often than not they understood him, even when they pretended not to. They marked him as a foreigner, a conqueror.
Since then, he had learned not to particularly care what people thought of him.
Outside the old Roman center, the city was comprised of the blend of modernity and semi-modernity along narrow medieval streets that marked so many European cities. After traveling out by car, he stopped at a squat town house of middling modern construction: aluminum and plywood. Clearly a product of the time when this country had been part of Yugoslavia, communist and short on resources. That era had lasted less than a century. The blink of an eye. Hardly worth remembering.
The hour was late. Gaius knocked on the door anyway, and a mousy-looking man answered. In his thirties, he had tousled black hair, and wore dark-rimmed glasses and a plain T-shirt with sweats. An average man dressed for a night in. He blinked, uncertain and ready to close the door on the stranger.
“I need your help,” Gaius said, in the local Croatian.
“What is it?” The guy looked over Gaius’s shoulder as if searching for a broken-down car. There wasn’t one.
“If you could just step out for a moment.” The man did, coming out to the concrete stoop in front of the door. People were so trusting.
Gaius needed him outside his house, across the protection of his threshold. In the open, under a wide sk
y, the Roman could step in the man’s line of sight and catch his gaze. Then draw that attention close, wrap his own will around the small mortal’s mind, and pull. In the space of three of the man’s own heartbeats, Gaius possessed him.
Gaius’s heart hadn’t beat once in two thousand years.
“Professor Dimic, I need to get inside the palace. You have access. You’ll help me.”
He didn’t even question how Gaius knew his name. “Yes, of course.”