Whatever civilized veneer he wore in order to function in a world that demanded niceties was shrugged off, abandoned. What was revealed was a beast. Higher function shut down. He melded with his shadows in a way he never had before. They were another set of limbs as they crawled across the rough concrete floor of the tower, telling him the speed and direction of the wind that tossed Petra’s hair, the strength of the concrete, the taste of magic in the air.
The barrel of the gun pressed more firmly into Petra’s temple as the weak little man demanded, “Who are you?”
The air had begun to warm unnaturally, but his shadows knew with the certainty of instinct that it wasn’t Petra’s magicthat did it. This warmth was sweltering, sticky. The magic was clumsy. When the Protector’s eyes began to glow with the hair-thin ring of white light around the pupils, even those twin circles looked pale and flickering in comparison to the raw radiance of his witch.
Silas didn’t speak. He just stalked toward them, his mind quiet. There was no man left in him to reason with, and there was no mercy.
“Petra,” the Protector hissed, backing them up until they both hit the window’s ledge, “who is this? Tell him to stopnow.”
He didn’t like Vanderpoel’s tone. He liked it even less when the man clamped one hand on her arm, his other still pointing the humming gun at her head.
Petra appeared unable to speak. Her eyes were wide and her normally soft glow was a flickering, violent thing — the roar of a wildfire just beneath her skin. That roused the animal even more. His shadows moved with a hunter’s deliberation around the pair, circling them both in a living net.
She glanced down, quick as lighting. “Silas?”
There was no room in his mind for speculating on the odd inflection in the syllables, let alone time. As soon as his name left her mouth, the gun swung away from her temple to aim squarely at him.
“Silas,” the Protector said, voice smoothing into perfectly polished charm. “Call him off, Petra, or I’ll shoot. Now.”
Silas had seen many of Petra’s masks, her secret faces and the soft thing she kept hidden beneath them all, but this was the first time he saw something truly vicious in her. Ignoring the gun between them, she rounded on Vanderpoel and hissed, “You shoot him and I’ll kill you with my bare fucking hands, you son of a bitch.”
The Protector was so outraged by that, apparently, he seemed to forget who the real predator was. He swung his gunback toward Petra and flinched reflexively at the white-hot glow of her. Squinting, Vanderpoel tightened his grip on the gun. Silas had enough.
Things happened very quickly then.
The air went bright and hot, filled with a searing sort of light like the flash of a bomb blast. Petra’s magic unleashed like a supernova just as the ward he’d painstakingly carved into her necklace released, throwing Antonin back with a wet crack of bone against one of the belltower’s columns.
Sightless, Silas lunged, claws of compressed shadow aimed for where the Protector should have been. The whine of a bolt shot firing followed. Then another in quick succession. One he felt when the white-hot plasma struck the nearly indestructible armor of his shadow, but the other went wide. In response to the hit, the shadows around Silas exploded into action, arrowing toward the only thing that mattered: Petra.
In the time between heartbeats, the light guttered out and was replaced by the flickering glow of a man set ablaze.
A guttural scream erupted from Vanderpoel’s throat as his suit and hair caught fire. He began to frantically wave his arms — one of which was already melting away, its flesh little more than sizzling fat and splintering bone. Petra collapsed against the ledge, the air around her thick with the scent of pure magic, at the same time that Silas’s claws found the Protector’s vulnerable throat.
He fell on the man like the animal he was, ripping and tearing with teeth and claws even as he burned alive. The flames didn’t bother Silas, not when he was protected by his shadows, and not when his witch’s magic was what fed them. They danced over Vanderpoel’s flesh in unnatural waves, moving away from wherever Silas chose to attack next.
The stench of human fat, burning hair, and Petra’s magic mingled in the air. Disgusted, Silas grabbed what was left ofVanderpoel’s carefully crafted, half-burnt hair with one fist and raked his claws across the last remaining sinews holding his head to his neck. Before the body could fall to the floor beside Petra, he pushed it out through the window.
The flaming mass of flesh landed hard on the metal roof of the cathedral, where it rolled until it landed in a gutter. Silas lifted his arm and chucked the head in the same direction. It flew like a fiery bowling ball until it, too, hit the roof and rolled to rest face down in the gutter.
From the window, Silas watched the flames continue their work, burning with a heat so violent, so unnatural, that within a handful of moments, there was little left of the remains except smoldering bones and greasy streaks on the roof.
A stuttering breath snapped his focus back to Petra.
She was propped up against the wall, her hair catching in the rough surface to make it look like a mass of golden cobwebs behind her. Shadows writhed over her bare legs, over her middle, and around her throat to cradle her jaw. It was an infinitely gentle hold, but a jealous one.
And as they swirled over her, curling around her wrists, her ankles, her neck and waist and even through the locks of her hair, Silas knew.
She’s mine.
Not just his toy. Not just a means to an end. Not just his little goddess.
She waseverything.
He knelt down before her, slow and cautious. A profound sense of some great key slotting into place overtook him. Bolts slid, a tumbler was repositioned, and the thing inside him he hadn’t even known existed until a few days ago was finally unlocked.
Silas crawled on his hands and knees until he was nearly on top of her. Petra was saying something, babbling, as her gaze roved over him in an unfocused way that spoke of shock.
“I killed him,” she croaked. “Oh gods, I killed a man. I burned him alive. Silas, Silas?—”
