The red glow reaches the circle.
Then the pain hits.
It is not a pain that Knox has any reference for, and he has several decades of references. This is not the clean, bright hurt of a blade, or the searing scorch of acid, or the deep ache of a bone cracked through. This pain starts in his blood in a way that nothing ever has and it moves outward, rewriting him from the inside, carving into the marrow of his bones with a language he cannot read. Something dark and foreign and ancient pours into him, filling spaces that nothing has ever touched, stitching itself to the very fabric of his being with claws that dig in deep and will not let go. He feels the pain settle into his bones, his blood, his skin, etched so deeply into him that he cannot tell where it ends and he begins.
He stands for as long as he can manage, but time is irrelevant. He drops to his knees and his hands hit the concrete. He curls his hands into fists, the silver rings biting into his fingers as he presses his knuckles against the cold floor, and tries desperately to anchor himself to something physical, something real. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. The chanting is a roar now, and the rift is screaming as it collapses, and even through the haze of his agony he can hear the demon making a sound that is not quite a scream and not quite a laugh. Beneath it all, something settles into Knox with the permanence of a brand.
Knox tries to hold on. He tries to breathe through it the way he was trained, the way he’s breathed through broken bones and holy fire and the burning of his first sigils. But this isn’t any of those things. All of those things pale in comparison to whatever this is.
The last thing he sees before the dark takes him is the red of the demon’s eyes, wide and furious, burning through the collapsing light of the circle.
***
He wakes on cold concrete with blood in his mouth and silence in his ears.
The rift is gone. The ceiling above him is dark and still, the air no longer charged, no longer wrong. Just cold. Just the damp and the iron and the faint drip of water somewhere in the pipes above. Knox pushes himself to his knees and the room tilts hard before it steadies. His arm throbs where the witch cut him, but when he looks down the wound has closed, sealed over by a thin line of scar tissue that looks weeks old instead of minutes.
The summoning circle is scorched into the concrete, the chalk burned away and replaced by blackened grooves that still radiate a faint heat he can feel through the soles of his boots. The witch is gone. His barrier, his book, his knife, all of it, and Knox cannot find it in himself to be surprised. The boy was drowning in water he'd poured himself, and running was the only smart decision he'd made all night.
The demon is not gone.
He's crumpled at the center of the burned circle, his duster singed at the edges, his body slack, one hand outstretched on the concrete with clawed fingers curled loosely inward. He's breathing. Knox can see the shallow rise and fall of his chest from across the room, but he isn't conscious. He looks smaller somehow, the dangerous elegance stripped back by whatever the spell carved out of him, and there is something in Knox's chest at the sight of him that he does not examine. A tightness. A pull. Something that wants him to cross the room and put his hands on the demon and make sure he's whole, which is insane, which is the precise opposite of everything his years of training hasdrilled into his bones, and which does not go away no matter how hard he tries to smother it with reason.
He should deal with him. He should bind him, or banish him, or at the very least secure him until the Order can send a retrieval team. That is the protocol. That is the job Knox has done for four decades with the precision and commitment that Vale has always admired and occasionally mocked him for.
But the beasts. Some of them made it through before the rift collapsed, he's certain of it, and every minute he spends here is a minute they spend loose in the city with civilians who have no idea what's hunting them. The demon is unconscious and contained within the burned remains of the circle. Knox can come back for him.
He gets to his feet. The room sways and then rights itself, reluctantly, and there is a strange heaviness behind his sternum that wasn't there before. A weight. A presence. Something lodged deep in his chest that pulses with a rhythm that doesn't match his own heartbeat. He pushes through it and crosses the warehouse floor, stepping over the smoking remains of the beasts he killed, the ichor already cooling to a dark crust on the concrete.
He makes it maybe sixty feet from where he woke before the pain hits without warning.
A wrenching, tearing agony that starts in his chest and radiates outward, as though something inside him is being stretched to its limit and has started to come apart. He staggers and catches himself on the doorframe, fingers white-knuckled on rusted metal, and for one terrible, airless moment the world narrows to a single point of sensation. The wrongness of it. The feeling of being pulled apart from the inside by something he cannot see or name or fight. Every step he's taken away from the demon is a thread being yanked taut, and he can feel each one of them now, burning in his blood and his marrow and his teeth.
He tries to take another step and the pain doubles, then triples, and then it stops being something he can register at all. His knees buckle. The concrete rushes up and his cheek scrapes against the rusted frame of the door on the way down, and the last thing that goes through his head before the dark swallows him again is that he should have dealt with the demon when he had the chance.
Chapter 2
Dimitri wakes up angry, which is normal.
He wakes up angry most days, on account of existing in a realm that keeps getting interrupted by mortals who think the fabric between dimensions is a revolving door. A thousand years of existence and he has been summoned by priests, by kings, by desperate fools with more ambition than sense, and every single time it has been the same tedious performance. They draw their little circles. They chant their little chants. They ask for power, for knowledge, for the name of the person their spouse is sleeping with, and Dimitri has to stand there in their chalk prison and pretend he doesn't want to pull their tongues out through their nostrils.
But this anger is different. This anger has edges.
He's on the floor of the warehouse, inside the scorched remains of the circle, and every inch of his body feels as though it's been fed through a meat grinder and packed back into shape by someone working blind. The chalk lines around him are dead.Burned to carbon. The rift is gone, which is the only good news he's had all night, because the rift had been using him as a battery and he can still feel the places where it ate into him, raw and blistered beneath his skin, wounds that should have healed by now and haven't. The little witch is gone. His barrier, his book, his silver knife, all of it, vanished into the night along with whatever was left of the boy's courage. Good. Smart. Because if Dimitri ever sees that freckled little bastard again, he is going to peel his skin off in strips and make him eat it.
But something is wrong.
Not the pain. Pain he can work with. Pain is an old companion and Dimitri knows all of its rhythms. This is something else. He can feel it before he's fully upright, a pull beneath his sternum that has no business being there. Not a tug. A pull. The kind that sinks into the soft tissue behind his ribs and draws taut toward something on the other side of the warehouse with the patience and weight of meat hooks buried in living flesh. It doesn't ask. It doesn't negotiate. It simply pulls, and for a creature who has spent a millennium answering to nothing and no one, the sensation is so profoundly, personally offensive that he lies on the scorched concrete for a full ten seconds just to spite it.
Then it pulls harder, and Dimitri's lip curls, and he gets to his feet.
His legs are unsteady. He hates that. The summoning took more out of him than he will ever admit to anyone, because admitting weakness is an invitation to be exploited and Dimitri has not survived all of these years by being generous with information. But the pull doesn't care about his pride. It drags him forward, step by step, across scorched concrete and puddles of cooling ichor, past the smoking remains of the beasts the Templar put down, toward the loading dock doors.
Toward the Templar.
He's on the floor. Of course he is. Crumpled on his side near the doorframe with one hand still loosely gripping rusted metal, his gray coat fanned out around him, his mace lying a few inches from his hip where it slipped from his belt. He is unconscious. Breathing, but unconscious.
Dimitri stares down at him.
