“I’m used to it.” She tilts her head, something shifting in her expression, calculation replacing fury for one precise, terrible moment. “How long do you think you can keep this up, Draven? You’ve always been strong. Always been the one they all defer to. The Apostate’s mark is new, though. Still raw in your blood. Still volatile.” Her chin lifts. “I’ve had two centuries to understand my own power. You’ve had what… two months?”
She’s not wrong.
The blood magic is powerful, but it’s mine, and I’ve learned it well enough to keep myself functional in a fight of this magnitude. But there’s a limit to how long I can sustain it at this intensity before the cost starts to accumulate in ways that matter.
I feel the Heart Bind before I feelherpresence. It burns open in my chest, the specific warmth of Sloane’s power pressing through the connection with deliberate intent.
She’s close.
‘Take it,’ she says, not in words but in the language of two people whose blood has been intertwined long enough to develop its own vocabulary. ‘I have enough. Take what you need.’
I exhale once and open my end of the Bind. The Bloodfire moves through it like water through a broken dam. Not the destructive, externalized heat Sloane uses as a weapon, but something cleaner, something that moves through the Heart Bind the way warmth moves through the blood. It spreads outward from my sternum into my limbs, into the Apostate’s mark, igniting the blood magic with a heat source it didn’t have before. The exhaustion doesn’t vanish, but the ceiling lifts. The volatile edge of the Apostate power steadies, Sloane’s Bloodfire a second fuel source. Her strength braids through mine until, for a moment, we are something neither of us could be alone.
Valeria registers the change. I watch it happen in her face… the calculation flickers, and the smile wavers.
“Your Blood Witch,” she says, and there’s something new in her voice. It’s not fear, but it is a close cousin of it. Recognition of miscalculation. “You always did have better allies than you deserved.”
“I built them,” I say. “Chose them… earned them.” I roll my shoulders, feeling the Bloodfire settle fully into the Apostate’s mark, feeling the shadow at the edge of my awareness sharpen into something crisp and ready. “The difference between us, Valeria. You built weapons. I built brothers and a family.”
She lunges.
I let the shadow go, and they erupt from every surface, from the floor, the fractured walls, the gaps in the ruined ceiling where the sky shows black, snapping inward from all directions simultaneously in a cage of living dark that closes around her mid-stride. She hits it at full speed, and the shadow holds,Sloane’s Bloodfire-infused power making it something far more concrete than darkness has any right to be.
Valeria tears at it with both hands. She’s strong—old and furious—and for ten seconds she’s genuinely competing with it, ripping chunks of shadow loose, her hands cutting through with the sheer supernatural force of two centuries of undiluted rage.
Then Sloane steps out of the wreckage of the east wall, her veins are incandescent. The Bloodfire is fully external, crawling up her arms, across her collarbone, climbing toward her jaw in branching lines of molten crimson-gold, and her eyes have gone the full luminous amber of her power at its peak. She doesn’t run or shout, she walks forward with the absolute, terrible calm of someone operating at the exact intersection of their ability and their purpose.
The Bloodfire she feeds through the Heart Bind doubles.
My shadow solidifies.
Valeria screams in pure rage, her hands tearing at the cage with renewed violence, and for three seconds it’s genuinely uncertain, three seconds of her fighting with everything she has against everything the two of us can bring to bear. The church shakes around us as the last structural elements give up on the argument. Another section of the gallery tears free and falls. A wall cracks through its full height with a sound like a gunshot.
Then Valeria buckles.
One knee, then the other.
The shadow cage drives her down to the floor, and I cross the distance in two steps, one hand planting between her shoulder blades with the full weight of the Apostate’s mark behind it, driving her flat against the cold stone. She fights me every inch of the way, clawing at the flagstones, at my wrists, at the air itself, her entire body a single, violent argument against what’s happening to her.
I ride it out.
Pin her down.
Sloane is three feet away, the Bloodfire pouring off her in waves I feel against my skin from here, every flame precisely controlled.
I reach into my cut and close my fingers around the stake. Old wood, hawthorn, cured and carved and weighted for exactly this. The grain of it is smooth under my palm, familiar from years of carrying it, and somewhere at the back of my mind, I hope that Valeria is actually dead.
I press the point against the center of her back, directly over the heart.
She goes still.
Not compliance or surrender. It is the absolute, animal stillness of a creature that has run out of options and is deciding how to spend the last of what it has left.
Her breathing rasps against the stone.
“Any last words?” I ask.
Then she laughs, wet and broken, blood bubbling from her mouth to spread across the flagstones beneath her face in a dark halo. She turns her head enough to look at me, one eye visible, the rust-dark color of it undimmed even now, even here.
