“Traitor!” one of the blood mages screams at Annabeth, which, fair assessment, honestly. Annabeth’s face goes white, then hard, and she raises her hands with a snarl that makes Dimitri think maybe she does have a spine after all.
Knox moves first. He always moves first. It’s one of the things about him that drives Dimitri up the wall, the way he puts himself between danger and everyone else without a second’s hesitation, not as a choice but as reflex. The mace comes off his belt in one fluid motion, the head of it already glowing with that warm, terrible gold, and Knox is running.
He closes the distance to the first whip-wielder in three strides and brings the mace down on the man’s guard with a crack that reverberates off the stone walls. The whip comes up, sparking, furious, and wraps around the shaft of the mace, and a lesser warrior would have been pulled off balance. Knox plants his feet, twists, and tears the whip out of the man’s hands entirely, the leather uncoiling and flying into the dark. Then he brings his elbow up into the man’s jaw with a crunch that Dimitri feels in his teeth.
The loyalist drops. Knox is already turning.
Dimitri doesn’t bother with weapons. He never does, unless it’s something fun, a stolen blade, a convenient chain, once a ly heavy candelabra that he’d swung with enthusiasm. His body is the weapon. Has been for millennia. He lets the glamour slip, just a fraction, just enough for his nails to lengthen into claws and his eyes to bleed fully black and his grin to show too many teeth, and he lunges.
The first blood mage sees him coming and throws a spell that tastes of dead things and bad decisions. It hits Dimitri in the chest and he feels it try to burrow in, try to find purchase, try to unravel him from the inside out, and it’s cute. It really is. On a lesser demon it might have worked. But Dimitri is soulbound to a nephilim Templar whose holy magic is threaded through every fiber of his being whether he asked for it or not, and the blood spell hits that golden thread and shatters.
“A for effort,” Dimitri tells the blood mage, and breaks his neck.
Knox has engaged two of the whip-wielders simultaneously and the sight is enough to make Dimitri’s brain stall. The thing about fighting alongside Knox is that he’s a tiny powerhouse who can jump on someone twice his height and knock their teeth out before the target even knows what’s hit them and Dimitri likes it. He likes it a lot. It gets his blood boiling, in the best possible way.
Knox is all economy and precision, trained since childhood by an Order that valued discipline and control, but underneath that polish there’s something savage. Something the Order didn’t put there and probably wouldn’t approve of. He moves through the two whip-wielders with a fluidity that is entirely at odds with how brutally he hits them, flowing around the snapping arcs of their charged weapons, and one of them lashes out and the whip catches Knox across the forearm, his coat sleeve splitting, the sigils burning against his skin, and Knox doesn’t flinch. He grabs the whip with his bare hand, golden light flaring where his skin meets the leather, and yanks the wielder forward into the arc of his mace.
The loyalist crumples. The second whip-wielder screams and swings wild, and Knox slides forward on his knees to evade a fireball that the warlock in the back has finally managed to launch, the flames screaming over his head close enough to singe the flyaways from his ponytail, and in the same motion hedrives the mace upward and hits the spellcaster in the chest with the full force of his momentum and his holy magic combined.
The man lifts off his feet. He hits the wall six feet behind him and doesn’t get up.
The sequence is so unbelievably hot that Dimitri almost considers praising a higher power.
The swordsman comes for Knox next, and the duel would be funny if it weren’t so brutally one-sided. Knox parries a thrust with the shaft of his mace, steps inside the man’s guard, and delivers a headbutt that shatters the loyalist’s nose. The follow-up is the mace, swung in a tight upward arc that catches the swordsman under the chin and sends teeth scattering across the stone floor.
The woman with the barrier spell in the back has been hanging back, watching, calculating. She’s the dangerous one. Dimitri can feel it, the weight of her magic, the density of it, the way the air warps around her. She’s been waiting for an opening, and she finds one.
Dimitri feels the spell before he sees it, a lance of concentrated force aimed directly at Knox’s back while he’s finishing the swordsman. It’s fast. Faster than most humans can cast. Faster than Knox can turn.
Not faster than Dimitri.
He moves without thinking, the bond screaming at him, every fiber of it pulling taut with the urgent, overwhelming need to protect, and he puts himself between the spell and Knox’s exposed back. The lance hits him square in the chest and it hurts, a white-hot impact that drives the air from his lungs and sends cracks through his ribs. He staggers but doesn’t fall. He’s taken worse. He’s taken so much worse.
Knox turns. Sees Dimitri. Sees the barrier witch. And his face does something that Dimitri has only seen a handful of times, that quiet, terrifying shift from kind man to soldier of the divinethat reminds everyone in the room that nephilim are not just half-angel by blood. They are half-angel by wrath.
He extends his hand and the mace flies back to it and he hurls it at the barrier witch with the full force of his arm and his fury and his light. It hits the barrier and the barrier holds for exactly one second before the holy magic eats through it and the mace connects with the woman’s shoulder and demolishes it. She screams and drops, the barrier collapsing, and Knox is on her before she can reform the spell. He pins her. Knee on her chest, one hand on her remaining functional arm, the other gripping her jaw so she can’t speak the words for another spell. His eyes are blazing, his nephilim heritage burning behind the green.
“Stay. Down,” he says.
She stays down.
Behind them, Annabeth finishes her blood mage with a binding circle that inverts the woman’s own summoning and traps her inside it. The remaining loyalists are either dead, unconscious, or very much wishing they were.
The dust settles. Annabeth’s ragged breathing is the only hint of a witch left standing. She’s got blood on her hands that isn’t hers and her bun has come partially undone and she looks shaken in a way that tells Dimitri this is the first time she’s fought against her own family.
He doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care about Annabeth or her family or the bodies on the ground or the mission or the phylacteries or anything else in this godforsaken crypt because Knox is standing three feet away from him, breathing hard, mace in hand, blood spattered across his jaw, his ponytail half-undone and his coat torn at the sleeve and his eyes still burning, and Dimitri has precisely zero self-control left.
He grabs his disheveled Templar by the lapels, hauls him in close with bloody hands, and kisses him hard enough to leave bruises.
It’s not a gentle kiss. It’s all teeth and tongue and the metallic taste of someone else’s blood on both their lips. Dimitri’s hands are slick with it, leaving dark smears on the fabric of Knox’s coat as he fists it, as he drags Knox closer until there’s no space between them, until he can feel the rapid hammer of Knox’s heartbeat against his own cracked ribs.
Knox fucking bites him, the absolute menace.
His teeth sink into Dimitri’s lower lip hard enough to split it, hard enough to draw blood, and he doesn’t let go. He bites down and pulls and a sound comes out of Dimitri that is not human, has never been human, a low guttural snarl that resonates in the stones under their feet.
Apparently Dimitri is not the only one turned on by competence.
