Raphael Read Online Free Page A

of pure, shriveling hate, only to see it deflected by a thread of melody. The malice shuddered sideways and scraped lime off the wineshop wall.
    She dared smile through her teeth as she said, speaking in heavily accented Italian, “You made another of your great mistakes when you took the face of Damiano, you greedy old man. I will crush you for it.” Then the bitch’s song actually did try to squeeze him. Though Lucifer himself was far beyond being hurt by the spell, the wyvern he wore could not breathe.
    With the vision of his spirit, the Devil was very aware of the round eyes and dropped jaws in the wineshop so near. Cursing, he gave up his present ambitions toward Gaspare and rose into the air, determined to escape this constraint and blast the beast-woman from the face of the earth.
    Certainly Lucifer had the power to destroy one silly witch, once he’d recovered from his surprise and from the unbearable feeling of having been cheated by this beast-woman’s popping from nowhere. Simple physical destruction was both Lucifer’s pleasure (albeit not his highest pleasure), and his right.
    The wyvern circled in the air, persecuted by the witch who was once more in dove shape. Lucifer snarled at the bird with the contempt he felt for all simple or straightforward creatures. Once lured out of human shape, the witch’s ability to sing (and therefore her power) was sadly curtailed. The wyvern drew a deep breath, gathering fire.
    But the bird’s anger was so insane as to approach the maternal,
    and she seemed unaware of her danger as she fluttered about the two-legged dragon-thing, pecking at its eyes.
    Lucifer, once collected to himself, was a very clever spirit, and excellent at drawing together odd threads of information and making tangles of them. It occurred to him that there was some connection between this creature and the matter at hand; after all, it was the shape of Delstrego that seemed to set her off.
    And then he remembered a small interchange with Damiano on the streets of Avignon in the mortal’s last days: an interchange not comfortably called to mind.
    He had dropped a gentle hint that the fellow had carried the plague with him into Avignon. (Not true, as it happens, but it very well might have been true, given the dreadful medical ignorance of the populace.) The man had dared to bray back at him a denial. “We were all clean. Saara said so.”
    And when asked who this Saara was, Delstrego had replied, “Someone you don’t know.”
    Now Lucifer laughed, and ashes sullied the hot air around him. So even that septic little trading of insults could be turned to good use.
    Someone he didn’t know. Perhaps. But such an oversight was quite easily rectifiable. He beat off the drab-colored dove (quite gently) with a wing as hard and as supple as chain mail, and he peered at her with new curiosity.
    A mascot of some sort? She could have meant little more, farouche as she was. Pretty enough, in human shape, but he knew quite well that Italians liked their women both clinging and coy. Probably a pet. Whatever, she was doubtless of some value to his sentimental brother, and Lucifer was not one to turn his face from fortune. He cringed from the bird and fled upward.
    Saara’s anger was like a wind which blew through every room of her soul, cleaning it of years of suffering.
    Not since she left the fens had she had an enemy she could fight with whole heart: an enemy she had no compunction about hurting. And she had no fear for herself, for after losing two children and three lovers to death, it was a very familiar presence to her. In fact, there was nothing more appropriate which could happen in her life now, after all she had been through, than to be given the Liar himself as target and a clear field of attack. Especially when she remembered the miserable confusion this breath of wickedness had caused in Damiano, both to the man’s head and his heart, before