Contained.
Coiled beneath her skin like a held breath.
That scares me more than if she were unleashing it, because it's like her power is waiting to respond at the precise moment when it needs to.
The demons adapt quickly. They shift tactics, press harder, driving us back toward the ruins themselves. The ground fractures under the strain, ancient stones collapsing into jagged traps.
I push forward, water surging at my command, forcing a path through the chaos.
And that’s when it happens.
A surge of heat slams into me from the side, hard and heavy, carrying a scent that makes my stomach drop.
Fire.
But not Sophie’s.
This flame is blackened at the edges, warped, consuming rather than illuminating. It roars toward me like a living thing, mocking in its intent, and for the first time since the battle began, I feel the ground tilt beneath my feet.
I brace myself, summoning water with everything I have, but realize too late that this was bait.
Somewhere at the edge of the battlefield, I know Sophie has seen it,feltit, and the demons are succeeding in luring her out.
The corrupted fire hits my water head-on.
Steam detonates outward in a violent shockwave, but this isn’t the clean, harmonizing reaction Sophie and I created at the riverbank. This flame eats through the water instead of yielding to it, black tendrils curling around my magic like tar, clinging, corrupting, changing it.
I stagger back a step, teeth gritting as heat lances through my arms.
“Damian!” Heinrich shouts somewhere to my left, but I barely hear him over the roar in my ears.
The demon responsible for this corruption rises from the smoke, taller than the others, its form denser, more deliberate. Its fire isn’t wild, it’s intentional, but still heinous. It lifts its clawed hands again, blackened flames coiling around its limbs like an imitation.
Mockery of her.
Rage explodes through me, and I drive my foot into the ground and pull harder, deeper, dragging water not just from the river, but from the moisture in the air, from the damp soil beneath the ruins. A wall of surging force slams into the demon, sending it skidding backward through collapsed stone.
But the flames don’t extinguish; they cling to me. Pain sears along my shoulder where the corrupted fire grazes my skin, not burning cleanly, but rotting, eating at flesh and magic alike, like acid burning through me. I snarl, forcing myself upright as my wolf claws at the inside of my chest, demanding dominance, retaliation.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
Fire is meant to answer Sophie, not the demon. Water is meant to overwhelm everything else.
The demon laughs then, and it’s not a sound, but more like a vibration that crawls along my spine and lodges behind my eyes.
Around me, the battle worsens.
A wolf goes down near the ruins, his howl cut short as another demon pins him to the ground. Heinrich breaks away to intercept, but a second demon cuts him off. Conan barrels in from the right, feral and unrestrained now, tearing into shadow with reckless fury, but even he’s bleeding.
Another blast of blackened fire surges toward me, faster this time, tighter, honed. I raise water again, but my control slips for a fraction of a second as the pain in my shoulder flares, white-hot and nauseating.
The flame punches through.
I hit the ground hard, stone cracking beneath my weight as the impact rattles through my ribs. My vision blurs, smoke choking the air from my lungs as heat presses in from all sides.
For one terrifying moment, I can’t feel the river. I can’t feel the water. But I can feel the bond.
Sophie.
