Knox watches. He can feel the spell through the bond, a subtle shift in the tether between them, and for a moment there is something close to hope in his chest, fragile and tentative. The glow from the runes intensifies slowly, white light pooling around Dimitri's feet, and the humming in the air deepens, and Knox thinks,please let this work.
The witch grabs his arm.
Her grip is sudden and strong, far stronger than she looks, her fingers digging into his sleeve. She hauls him backward, away from the circle, and the soft expression is gone. What replacesit is something hard and bright and certain, and Knox knows that look. He has seen it on the faces of zealots his entire career. He has seen it on the faces of people who believe so completely in their own goodness that they cannot conceive of the damage they are doing.
He opens his mouth. He doesn't get the words out.
The runes flare.
Not all at once. The first rune on the far side of the circle brightens from white to blinding, and a tongue of fire licks upward from the chalk, pale and clean and unmistakable. Holy fire. Knox recognizes it the way he recognizes his own heartbeat, a fundamental, bone-deep knowing that comes from a lifetime of wielding divine power. The runes aren't unbinding runes. They're purification runes. Cleansing runes. The kind designed to burn demonic essence out of existence. He didn’t recognize them because, despite devoting his life to hunting demons, he’s never actually burned one out alive before.
The second rune ignites. Then the third.
The fire is building quickly, deliberately, the circle lighting up in sequence, each rune feeding the next, and the holy fire is climbing, creeping inward from the perimeter toward the center where Dimitri stands. It's not the explosion Knox expects. It's worse than an explosion. It's patient. It's methodical. It's a trap designed to close by degrees, and Dimitri realizes what's happening in the same moment Knox does.
Through the bond, Knox feels the exact instant Dimitri understands he's been betrayed. It lands in Knox's chest with the force of a punch, a spike of fury so pure and so hot that it scorches through the tether between them, and Knox staggers, one hand pressed to his sternum. Beneath the fury there is something else, something Dimitri is trying to bury under the rage but can't, because the bond strips everything bare: fear. Not the abstract, intellectual fear of a creature who has lived ahundreds of years and knows what holy fire does to his kind. This is visceral. This is animal. This is the fear of a living thing that has just realized it is about to die.
The fire reaches Dimitri's feet.
It starts at the soles and climbs. The hem of his duster catches first, the black fabric curling and charring, and Dimitri hisses through his teeth and his hands clench at his sides. The pain comes through the bond in waves, sharp at first and then deeper, building as the fire builds, and Knox can feel it layering on top of his own distress, doubling it, the two of them locked in a feedback loop of agony that tightens with every second.
Dimitri doesn't beg. He doesn't plead. He goes to his knees as the fire climbs his legs, scorching through fabric and into skin, and he screams at the witch in defiance. Raw. Ragged. Furious. The sound of a creature that refuses to go quietly, that has spent a thousand years answering to nothing and is not about to start now, and through the bond Knox can feel the depth of that defiance, the sheer stubborn refusal to give this woman the satisfaction of his surrender.
"This is what demons get," the witch says.
Her voice is steady. Calm. The voice of someone doing holy work. She still has Knox's arm in her grip, though her hold has loosened now that the circle is doing what she designed it to do. She looks down at Dimitri with absolute, unshakable conviction.
"You don't deserve to corrupt someone good," she says. "Someone who fights to protect people from your kind." Her gaze flickers to Knox, and there is warmth in it, genuine warmth, the warmth of someone who believes she is doing him a kindness. "The circle will keep you safe. It won't touch you. When the demon dies it will sever your link without any harm to you. I've done this before."
Knox barely hears her. The bond is screaming.
The fire has reached Dimitri's chest. His skin is blackening, cracking, splitting open in lines of white heat that trace the paths the summoning fractures had taken the night before. His shirt is charred rags. The horns at his temples glow faintly, as though the fire is burning him from the inside out as well as the outside in, and the pain pouring through the bond is so immense that Knox cannot separate it from his own. He can feel Dimitri's flesh burning as though it is his flesh. He can feel the fire eating through muscle and tendon and reaching for bone as though it is reaching for his bone. Every nerve in his body is lit with borrowed agony, and he is shaking, his hands clenched at his sides, his jaw locked so tight his teeth ache.
This is not the clean, distant observation of someone watching a demon die. This is participation. This is immersion. The bond has made Knox a passenger in Dimitri's destruction, and he is living every second of it in tandem, and it is unbearable.
Dimitri's defiance starts to crack.
Knox feels it happen. The rage is still there, still burning, but beneath it something is giving way, a structural failure in the architecture of a creature that has survived an untold amount of time by being harder and meaner and more stubborn than anything that tried to kill him. The fire is stripping that away. Layer by layer. Not just his skin, not just his flesh, but the thing underneath, the essential core of him, the part that is Dimitri and not just demon, and Knox can feel it fraying through the bond, can feel the edges of Dimitri's selfhood starting to thin and dissolve.
It is the worst thing Knox has ever felt. Worse than the binding. Worse than the angelic rejection grinding through his blood. Worse than any wound he has ever taken. Because this is not happening to him. This is happening to someone else, and he is feeling every moment of it, and he cannot make it stop, and thehelplessness of that is a kind of agony that Knox has no training for and no defense against.
The witch is saying something. Knox can't hear her over the roaring in his ears, over the bond's screaming, over the sound of Dimitri's raw voice breaking against the fire. He stares into the circle and watches the demon burn, and the anguish in his chest is so vast and so total that his vision blurs and he realizes he is close to tears, which has not happened to him in decades.
Dimitri's head drops forward. His shoulders bow. His body is curling in on itself as the fire reaches the core of him, and he is smaller now, diminished, the dangerous breadth of him reduced by the flames to something that looks less threatening and more human with every passing second. The defiance is nearly gone. What's left is raw suffering, pouring through the bond without filter or restraint, because the fire is burning away Dimitri's ability to hide anything, and Knox is receiving all of it, every ounce of pain and fear and fury and, underneath all of it, a grief so deep and so quiet that it nearly breaks Knox in half.
Dimitri is grieving. Knox can feel it as clearly as he feels his own distress. Not grieving for himself exactly, not mourning his own death with the self-pity Knox might have expected. Grieving for something lost. Something he never had the chance to understand. Something that formed between them in the warehouse and the alley and the club and the apartment, something that lived in the electricity when they touched and the pull of the bond when they were close, and Dimitri is dying before he could figure out what it was.
Knox can't stand it.
He can't stand here and feel another person die. He can't stand here and live through Dimitri's unmaking while the witch holds his arm and tells him it's for his own good. He can't. It is tearing him apart more thoroughly than the bond or the angelic rejection ever could, because those are forces acting on his body,and this is acting on something deeper, something that Knox has spent his entire life protecting from a world that doesn't know it exists.
"Please, you have to stop this," he says.
The witch blinks at him. "I'm sorry?"
"Stop this. Now. Break the circle."
"He's a demon." She says it as though she is explaining something to a child. "He's evil. He would sacrifice you in a heartbeat if it served him. You know what his kind are capable of. You've spent your life fighting—"
