Floor-to-ceiling shelves line every wall, crammed with books and scrolls and bound manuscripts that look older than the city. A massive oak table has been pushed to the side, and in the center of the polished hardwood floor, a summoning circle has been drawn in chalk and salt and something dark and viscous that Knox suspects is blood. The runes around the perimeter are different from the ones in the warehouse, more intricate, more deliberate, each one drawn with the kind of precision that comes from decades of practice rather than panicked improvisation.
The coven witches take their positions. Six of them, spaced evenly around the circle, each one dressed in black, each one radiating a focused disciplined energy that makes the air hum. Annabeth stands at the head, her auburn hair catching the candlelight, her expression set in the grim determination ofsomeone who has done this before and would prefer not to be doing it again.
Newt kneels in the center of the circle.
He is on his knees on the hardwood, his hands resting on his thighs, his red hair falling into his eyes. He is scared. Knox can see it in the fine tremor of his fingers, in the rigid set of his shoulders, in the way his breath comes a little too fast. But he is not running. His chin is up. His jaw is set. He is someone who has decided to be brave and is holding onto the decision with both hands.
Knox stands at the edge of the room with Dimitri, close enough to the circle to see but far enough to stay clear of the casting. The bond hums between them, taut with shared tension, and Knox can feel Dimitri’s emotions running hot and close beneath the surface, watchfulness, impatience, and underneath both a dark thread of unease that neither of them acknowledges.
The witches begin to chant.
The sound is low and layered, six voices weaving together in a harmony that is not quite music and not quite speech. It is old. The language is one Knox doesn’t recognize, older than Old Tongue, older than any liturgical text in the Cathedral’s archives. It vibrates in his chest and the base of his skull, and the runes on the floor begin to pulse in time with the rhythm.
The shadows close in. Gradual at first, the candlelight dimming, the corners of the library darkening, the spaces between the shelves filling with a thick liquid blackness that seems to breathe. Then the temperature drops, not slowly but all at once, as though someone has opened a door to somewhere very cold and very far away. Knox’s breath mists in front of his face. The candle flames gutter and shrink to pinpoints.
The chanting builds. The runes glow brighter, deep violet, the color of bruises, the color of the space between stars. The airinside the circle distorts, rippling, and Newt’s hair stirs in a wind that comes from nowhere.
There is a sound of reality tearing, a wet grinding dimensional crack that Knox feels in his fillings and the joints of his fingers. The circle blazes. The violet light erupts upward in a column that hits the ceiling and spreads across it, and the shadows in the room coalesce, thicken, take form.
“Newton!” Annabeth’s voice cuts through. “Move!”
Newt scrambles. He is clumsy with adrenaline, legs tangled under him, hands slipping on polished floor, but he gets to his feet and lurches out of the circle just as the light inside it begins to solidify. He stumbles across the room, staggering, and Knox catches him by the shoulders.
“I’ve got you,” Knox says, pulling the boy close, steadying him against his chest. Newt is shaking violently, his whole body vibrating, and Knox holds him the way he’d hold anyone who needed him, firmly, securely, without hesitation. Newt’s hands fist in the front of Knox’s shirt and he doesn’t let go.
The light in the circle fades.
The demon stands in its place.
He is tall, lean, built with the kind of effortless musculature that suggests his body was crafted from nothing rather than developed by actual work. His hair is long, silver, falling past his shoulders in a straight luminous sheet that catches the candlelight and throws it back in prismatic fragments. His eyes are purple, deep and saturated and faintly luminous, the color of something that exists on the other side of pleasure and has decided to visit. There are two curved, ridged horns protruding out the sides of his head.
He is naked from the waist up. From the waist down, he wears leather pants so tight they look painted on. The candlelight plays across his bare chest, pale and sculpted, and he stretches. It is languid. Slow. Theatrical. His arms rise above his head, his spinearches, his silver hair cascades down his back, and the stretch rolls through his body with the deliberate sensual precision of someone who knows exactly what he looks like and exactly what effect it has.
Several of the coven witches look very interested. One of them has gone visibly pink. Another has stopped chanting and is staring with her mouth slightly open. Even Annabeth’s rigid composure flickers before snapping back into place.
The demon’s eyes open again.
They sweep the room in a slow unhurried arc, passing over the witches, over Annabeth, over the shelves and the candles and the fading runes, and land directly on Knox.
Knox is not expecting it. The demon’s gaze locks onto him with immediate unerring precision, and there is a spark in those purple eyes. The demon smiles. It is slow and devastating and promises things that Knox’s hindbrain reacts to before his conscious mind can intervene.
He crosses the room. He moves with fluid silence, his bare feet making no sound on the hardwood, his silver hair swaying with each step. The witches’ heads turn to track him, and Knox can see the way the demon’s very presence rearranges the room’s attention around himself.
Knox doesn't move. He doesn't really know if he can. Newt is still pressed against his chest, still gripping his shirt, and the incubus is closing the distance with the easy confidence of someone who has never been told no.
Jealousy hits Knox with the force of a collapsing wall.
It slams through the bond, hot, enormous, all-consuming, and it is not his. It is Dimitri’s. A possessive fury so intense that Knox’s chest clenches under the weight of it, a primal territorial rage that scorches through the tether and floods his body. It is the same feeling from Ruby’s club magnified a hundredfold, andit carries with it a single unmistakable message that reverberates through every fiber of the bond:mine mine mine mine mine.
Then Dimitri is between them.
He materializes from Knox’s periphery, his broad shoulders blocking Knox’s view of the approaching demon entirely. The shadows in the room darken. The temperature drops another degree. Dimitri is radiating fury with such intensity that the candle flames nearest to him gutter and die, and the silver-haired demon stops walking.
He tilts his head. Purple eyes blink, confused.
“You need,” Dimitri says, his voice low and shaking with barely contained violence, “to desperately rethink your trajectory.”
The incubus’s beautiful mouth opens. “I was summoned—”
