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A current beneath the current. Hotter than Malgrave… older. It moves through his hand and into me like his own signature barely registers against it, a single struck match held up in front of something that could swallow the whole-fucking-house without noticing it was there. Whatever’s doing the actual pulling isn’t Malgrave at all. He’s just the fingers wrapped around my throat because he’s borrowing them from something with claws.
A wave of dread nearly sends me staggering, and for one horrible second, I understand exactly why my hellhound went dead still the moment those doors opened—he recognized it before I did.
Malgrave releases my throat.
“The binding holds,” he says, his robes settling back into place as though nothing happened, like he didn’t just stand there wearing another creature’s hand like a glove. “I’ll return within the week.” He turns. The doors groan open ahead of him without anyone near the handles, and he’s gone before the temperature in the room even starts falling back toward normal.
Nobody moves.
Nobody except Sentinel, whose head has already turned toward me, his gold eyes narrowed with the same look he gets right before he catches something invisible mid-flight.
He felt it too.
I grab his sleeve and drag him toward the hallway before Ruckus can crack whatever joke is already forming behind his teeth, shoving Sentinel through the nearest door and slamming it shut behind us both.
“Carnage, what—”
I cut him off with both hands, jabbing a finger at my own throat, then dragging it slowly outward like I’m pulling something loose. I point at the door Malgrave just walked through. I mime a hand closing around something small and hold it up, then throw both arms wide, filling the whole fucking room.
Sentinel stares at me like I’ve lost my mind.
So I do it again. Point at my throat, pull, and point at the door. Small. Then arms wide. Big.
“You’re—” He drags a hand down his face. “Are you doing a fucking puppet show?”
I grab his shoulders and shake him once, hard, then repeat the whole thing slower, more deliberate, jabbing my thumb toward the door with every ounce of urgency I can force through a body that can’t say a single goddamn word.
Something shifts behind his eyes. “Wait.” His wings twitch under his shirt, feathers bristling. “Malgrave’s not doing this alone.”
I nod so fast my neck aches.
“That thing I felt during the first binding. It came back.” His jaw works, gold flickering along the edge of his irises as the pieces click into place behind them. “It’s not his. He’s just…” I point at him and mime holding up something tiny between two fingers, “… a candle.” The word comes out of him like it costs something. “Malgrave’s a fucking candle held up in front of whatever’s actually doing this.”
The color drains out of his face fast enough that I watch it happen in real time, his usual golden warmth going flat and pale, and for the first time since I’ve known him, Sentinel looks less like an angel and more like a man staring straight down the barrel of something he’s spent his entire existence being trained to fear.
His hand finds the door handle. “We need Raze,” he says, voice low, steady in the way that only happens when everything underneath it isn’t. “Now!”
Chapter Nineteen
ECHO
I’m still standing exactly where Carnage left me. Malgrave has been gone for several minutes, but the common room hasn’t recovered from him yet. Brothers talk in low voices around me while Raze and Scar stand near the bar with their heads together, and somewhere behind them Ruckus is saying something I don’t catch because my brain is still stuck on one thing.
Malgrave’s hand around Carnage’s throat.
I felt it the second he touched him.
Whatever hit Carnage tore through me hard enough that I nearly doubled over, all that familiar hellfire inside him suddenly buried beneath something hotter, something that pushed into him and kept fucking going.
Then came the pull.
That’s the part I can’t get out of my head.
I felt something inside Carnage being dragged away from him.
Not held.
Not contained.
