"He doesn't deserve this!"
The words come out of Knox with a force that surprises even him. They come from somewhere deep and immovable, somewhere that decades of training and doctrine have never been able to reach. The bedrock. The part of him that chose this life not because of what it let him destroy, but because of what it let him protect.
The witch's expression hardens. "All demons deserve to suffer," she says quietly. "Every last one of them. For what they've done to this world. For what they've done to people like you and me."
Knox pulls the mace from his hip.
The witch's eyes widen. She takes a step back, hands coming up, not in surrender but in the careful posture of someone assessing a threat.
"You won't hurt me," she says. No fear in her voice. Just certainty. "You're a Templar. I'm abiding by the laws of the Church. This is sanctioned. This is righteous. This is what you should be doing, if you weren't compromised by that bond."
Knox stares at her. The mace is heavy in his hand, and she's right. He won't hit her. He won't hurt a mortal witch who believes she's doing God's work. That's not who he is. That has never been who he is.
He looks past her, into the burning circle.
Dimitri's red eyes find his through the flames. They are nearly gone, the color fading, replaced by something dull and flat, and he is not screaming anymore. He is not fighting. The fire has taken everything except this: he is looking at Knox, and the expression on his face has been stripped of every pretense and every wall and every sharp grin and every wicked word until there is nothing left but the barest, most fundamental question a dying creature can ask.
Knox makes a decision.
He drops the mace. It hits the floor with a heavy clang and the witch flinches, and then Knox is moving, crossing the room in three strides, his left hand rising, the blessing rings on his fingers blazing to life. He doesn't think. He doesn't weigh the consequences. He doesn't consult decades of training or protocol or the teachings of Sanctus Cael.
He punches through the fire.
The blessing erupts from his rings in a shockwave of silver-white light, meeting the holy fire head-on, and for a single impossible second the two forces collide. His blessing against the witch's purification circle. The barrier cracks. Knox feels the fracture travel up his arm, feels the fire catch and hold and burn, white-hot agony searing through his fist and up his forearm and into his shoulder. The holy fire is not his blood's kin this time. The circle was built to destroy, and it does not care who is in its way, and the pain is immediate and immense and Knox drives forward anyway, shattering the circle's wall with the blunt force of his consecrated fist.
He reaches through the flames and grabs hold of Dimitri.
The fire burns him. It burns him badly. It catches his arms from the elbows down, searing through the sleeves of his coat and into the skin beneath, and the pain is blinding, a white scream that joins Dimitri's pain already flooding through thebond until Knox cannot tell whose agony is whose. His hands close around Dimitri's arms, around burned and cracked and blackened skin that is still hot to the touch, and the electricity hits him again, that same scalding impossible current, but this time it is tangled up in the fire and the pain and it doesn't feel like connection. It feels like being torn open.
Knox holds on.
Dimitri is heavy. Dimitri is bigger than him by a significant margin, dead weight now, barely conscious, and Knox is five-eight and a hundred and fifty pounds with holy fire eating through his arms and the bond screaming in his chest and he should not be able to do this.
He does it anyway.
He hauls Dimitri out of the circle. It takes everything he has, every ounce of strength in his arms and his back and his legs, the fire blistering his skin and charring his coat as he drags the demon's body across the chalk line. Dimitri's weight clears the perimeter and the circle collapses behind them, the runes sputtering and dying, the white fire guttering out as the purification sequence loses its anchor.
They both hit the concrete floor of the shop.
Knox lands on his back with Dimitri's weight half on top of him, the demon's burned arm draped across his chest, the smell of scorched skin and sulfur and charred wool filling his nose. The ceiling above him is smoke-stained and spinning. His blessing rings are dark, spent, the silver bands cold against his blistered fingers. His arms are ruined from the elbows down, the skin angry and red and weeping where the fire caught him, and the angelic rejection is screaming through his blood, louder now, furious at the proximity of so much demonic damage pressed against his body.
Knox holds on anyway.
The bond is still there. Gutted and thin and barely breathing, but there. Pulsing weakly between them. On his side of the connection Knox can feel Dimitri, faint and flickering, alive in the way a candle is alive when the wick has burned down to nothing and the last of the flame is cupped in a hollow of melted wax. Barely. But there.
Dimitri is alive. Burned, broken, unconscious, but alive.
The witch is saying something. Knox hears her distantly, through the ringing in his ears and the roaring of the bond and the pain in his arms, and her voice is sharp with disbelief and outrage, and Knox does not care. He does not care what she thinks or what the Church sanctions or what protocol demands. He stares at the smoke-stained ceiling with a demon in his arms and burned skin weeping against charred fabric and wonders what he's done.
He hopes he hasn't made a horrible mistake. The thought arrives quietly, threading through the pain and the exhaustion, and he lets it sit there because he owes himself that much honesty. He just punched through a purification circle for a demon he's known for less than twelve hours. He broke Church-sanctioned magic with his bare hands. He chose the creature his Order has spent centuries teaching him to destroy over the woman who was trying to protect him, and he did it on instinct, on something deeper than thought, and he does not know if that makes him brave or compromised or simply, irreversibly foolish.
But he held on. Whatever comes next, whatever this costs him, he held on.
He hopes that's enough.
Chapter 6
Dimitri is alive.
