A Time to Rise: Second Edition by Tal Bauer

Author:Tal Bauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-12T22:00:00+00:00

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Pounding in Archbishop Santino Acossio’s temples sent him back to his apartment late in the afternoon while the Roman sun smoldered over the city and heat waves rose from the pavement and cobbled streets. He’d spent the day in tedious negotiations, appointing nuncios to fill openings in Latin America. He’d had to end the last phone call early, cutting off the archbishop of Caracas almost midsentence.

He didn’t want to spend his days pandering to the aged drivel of men clambering for a richer station, for the trappings and mortal powers of the earthly world. Banal desires bored him.

Santino kept his apartment locked, unlike the other bishops and archbishops with whom he shared Saint Martha’s Residence. There was too much he kept hidden, too much that could be revealed.

An old iron key fitted into the antique lock set in his door. Metal clanged on metal, rust crunching as the key turned. A sigh of wood scraping over plush Turkish rugs greeted him as he pushed into his home. He dropped his briefcase by the front door and rubbed his eyes, and the hem of his cassock shifted across the wood floors as he headed for the kitchen. A glass of wine would set him right.

“Santino.”

He paused, one foot still in the air, at the sweet slide of a voice calling out his name from his front room. The voice was clean and cold, holding a touch of laughter inside. But not happy laughter. Mocking, if he had to put a name to it.

Turning, Santino stepped into his front room and stopped. He swallowed, his lips pressing together.

Asmodeus, or at least, the shadow of his being, cloaked in smoke and shuddering with darkness, perched on the edge of his French silk sofa. Rolling wisps of midnight mist tangled off the edges of the man-shaped column, sitting prim and with his head tilted to one side. The Venetian mask, white as death and plain of any decoration, hovered over the shadow where a face should be. Empty sockets in the mask, filled with black, still managed to stare into Santino’s soul.

Santino dropped to one knee, wincing as his old bones hit the floor. “My lord,” he breathed. “This is a surprise.”

“Why? You think that you can only summon me to appear? That I am constrained by your circle of silver and salt? Your runes?” A dry chuckle, like glass shards falling to the ground. “You devoted yourself to me, Santino. I can come to you whenever I choose.”

Santino licked his thin, aged lips. “It has been some time.” His hands fisted in the loose folds of his cassock. “I thought, perhaps, you had changed your mind.”

A whip of smoke, almost like the wave of a hand, and then a dark swirl circled lazily through the air. “The time was not right. There were others at work.”

“Others?”

“They don’t concern you. All you need to know is that they failed.” Asmodeus’s mask tilted again. “We require their work to be completed. Are you

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