The fire came unbidden. Fed by the truth about Pol, by Seth’s own pain, it poured from him.
He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t the only one left, but what that meant . . . just trying to comprehend it cracked his heart open and fire poured out.
The flames filled his vision. The demon screamed. She ranted, but Seth didn’t hear it.
The roar filled his ears. Glorious and golden, its light filled his eyes. Seth grappled with it, forced it to his will, to spare the lives of those entrapped and burn only the wood, the tree, and the thorns. It burned him as well.
The flames snarled, crackled, and lashed at him, but he would not give it its freedom.
Only the wood, he willed, pushing and pushing the flames higher, further.
Someone was shouting his name, but it sounded so far away. Seth couldn’t really hear it. Not this time.
The burning went on and on. It was like trying to weave a tapestry at lightning speed. His mind ached, but somehow he kept up. He kept the flames leashed. Like a score of hounds, they pulled, were almost beyond him, outracing his control.
Someone struck him.
The Bishop. His helmet rang like a bell. The fire cleared from his sight. Everything smelled of burning wood and sizzling blood.
Ash fell like snow, hot and cold by turns, as the tree and the spirits inside it burned.
Seth came back to his body, to awareness, full of aches, bloody where the thorns had pierced him.
On the dais, Pol squared off with the demon.
Raef. He said his name was Raef. He’d survived. The Bishop had survived. Seth took a heaving breath. He’d mastered the flames. He needed to get to Raef, to help, but his strength was spent.
Raef held a knife, a sliver of perfect blackness that Seth knew had come from Phoebe, from the darkness they shared in their corrupted blood.
Seth wasn’t alone. Raef was like him, had hidden right beneath his nose.
His broken heart sank in his chest. Of course he’d find someone who intrigued him and of course he’d be Phoebe’s. Seth could never escape where he’d come from.
He forced himself to straighten, to stand, but the Bishop put a hand to his shoulder.
Raef and the demon circled, taunting each other. He’d lunge. She’d sidestep. Seth inhaled, trying to find a little more fire, but he felt empty, bloodless in a way that even the carnivorous plant had not engendered.
“You could have lived,” she snarled, casting about for cover, but all the furniture and the vines were gone. Only ash and the comatose Thivans remained of her kingdom.
She no longer resembled a child. Her true form was a monstrous woman made of the bound vines and red flowers. Blood ran in streams from her eyes.
“They’re not yours to feed upon,” Raef said.
“They are insects!” she said.
It was her turn to lunge, her arm extended, her fingers spiny thorns meant to pierce Raef’s chest.
He was quick. He dodged her strike and drove his black knife into her side as she swept past him.
She hissed and whirled, her other arm lashing out, coiling like a barbed whip around his throat. Raef choked, bloodying his hands as he tried to break her hold. She grinned, red eyes narrowing, her teeth a row of thorns.
Seth put aside his aches.
“Father, guide my hand,” he prayed.
Seth lifted his palm and summoned flame. It lanced out, slicing through the vines strangling Raef.
The demon screamed. The blood sap oozed from her severed arm. It rewound, strips of vine reforming into a hand.
It took her long enough that Raef tore himself free. He charged her again.
The black knife emerged from his hand. It was part of him.
He drove it into the demon’s heart.
She screamed as blackness spread from her center. Chest heaving, Raef watched her fall, his dark eyes narrowed, as veins of shadow spread from the wound.
Raef stepped to her as she struck the ground. He crouched to meet her darkening eyes.
“I’m sorry, cousin, but I can’t let you hurt anyone else.”
“They’ll turn on you,” she rasped, gaze dropping to Seth, to where their quarry lay weak and coughing. “They know what you are now.”
“I don’t care,” Raef said.
Seth knew now that Raef was a liar. He was a good one, but not when it came to this. He did care, at the deepest level.
The demon saw it too.
She laughed, a rasping, creaking sound.
Raef lifted his fist, called the knife again, and plunged it into her heart a second time.
She burned away, as if the darkness were a different kind of fire.
Seth felt cold. The flames lay spent and sated within him, and the only arms he could imagine warming him belonged to another of his ilk. He didn’t even have the strength to shudder.
Raef’s neck was collared in blood. His hands, too, were painted with it, but he was in no danger. Seth had burned away the shades. Only ash-like snow remained.
“You’ve got it all wrong, you know,” Raef said, looking to him. “We’re not evil. You’re not evil, just because we’re born from them. We have a choice.”
He nodded back to the black-and-red stain that had been the demoness.
“You don’t know me,” Seth said.
Raef laughed, perhaps a little madly.
“Sure I do. Who else could?”
“You don’t know what I’ve done. That beach—those people.”
“I was there, Seth, and at the ball too. That was me in the mask. It was me you asked for a dance.”
Seth swayed, ready to fall to the ground again.
“I went to get him.” Raef nodded to their quarry. He did not look well. “I stole him. I’m the one who opened the box.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You know what I am now. What’s the point of hiding? I can’t leave him. If you take him, I’ll follow. If you kill me, I’ll haunt you.”
It hurt, the intensity he showed for their quarry, the feeling in his eyes and words. Hyperion, damn it—it hurt when it shouldn’t have.
“We’re made from demons,” Seth whispered.
Raef held up his arm, tore off the leather cuff he wore, and showed Seth the mark there. At first Seth thought it was a tattoo or a bruise, but he could see it was a series of black moons, their crescents woven together in interlocking rings.
“Maybe,” Raef said. “I don’t know why they made us, but we decide who we are and what we become.”
Seth shook his head.
“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it can be.”
A shuffle and clink of metal brought Seth around. The cadre had gathered, limping together, trying to assess their wounds.
Raef knelt by their quarry, his face full of concern.
“Kinos—Keen?”
The man opened his eyes.
“Raef?” he asked.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “Found you.”
Kinos looked around them. His eyes settled on the knights.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”
“It’s all right.” Raef gathered the slighter man into his arms. He turned to the Bishop with a fierce, protective expression that twisted Seth’s insides.
“What happens now?” Raef asked her.
“We do as we were ordered,” she said. “We take you, both of you, to the Hierarch.”
“Will you resist?” Seth asked.
Raef scoffed. “Like I could. But no, I won’t fight you, not if you make sure he’s all right.”
More shapes shuffled into view. The Thivans, those who’d survived the vines. Seth wiped his eyes.
He’d done it. He’d mastered the flames, and yet in the moment he could find no joy or solace.
Nine of the cadre remained. Two more had fallen here.
“We should not let him live,” Lathan said, nodding toward Raef. “He’s like her.”
“He saved me,” one of the scouts, Sera, said. “Whatever he is. He saved my life.”
“We will take them to the Hierarch,” the Bishop commanded. “Alive.”
Seth crouched to check Argos’s injuries. The holes in his flesh had already knit.
“Thank you, Father,” Seth prayed tiredly.
The other knights moved tenderly. The sap remained in their veins, slowing their movements as they shuffled outside. Across the island, the vines had gone, burned away with the demon. The red flowers remained. They melted all around them, rotting to a sticky liquid.
“We’ll march back to the ship,” the Bishop said, looking over the survivors.
“What about them?” Seth asked, nodding to the Thivans.
They cowered together, so thin they looked like skeletons.
“May Hyperion forgive their choices,” the Bishop said.
Choices.
We decide what we become, Raef had said.
Yes, they’d trusted a demon, but so had he. Seth had listened to Raef in those moments, and Raef had believed in him, believed he could control the flames. And he had. Seth had mastered them.
“This is their island. We will leave it to them,” the Bishop declared. She turned to the knights. “Prepare to depart.”
“Kinos is too weak,” Raef called from where he half-carried their quarry from the keep.
The Bishop narrowed her eyes and knelt to make certain he was not lying.
“Carry him, Seth,” she said. “We’ll make a stretcher when we reach the packs.”
“Yes, Bishop.”
Seth opened his arms.
Raef swallowed.
“I will not harm him, I swear.”
Raef nodded.
Seth lifted Kinos gently. He was not heavy. The vines had fed deeply from his veins, leaving him thin, though he looked far less sickly than the surviving Thivans.
“I hope you return to health,” Seth told them. “I will pray for you. Beg the gods’ forgiveness, and perhaps you may have it.”
Some of them nodded, but none of them spoke. He did not know if it was weakness or shame that drove their silence.
Raef followed closely as Seth stumbled under the addition of Kinos’s weight.
Seth wanted to ask what they were to each other, but it was obvious how Raef’s feelings ran. The fire stirred at the thought.
“Do not try anything,” Seth said to Raef.
“I won’t,” he answered. “Just be careful with him. Please.”
“You used us to find him.”
“Yes,” Raef said. “It was the only way to safely reach him.”
“Why were you really in the tower?” Seth whispered, low enough that no one else would hear.
“I wanted answers about myself, about him. Why was he in that box?”
“I don’t know. We are not to question our orders.”
“It was the Hierarch who sent you here?”
“His Oracle. He sent me to guard the box.”
“I am sorry for lying to you.”
“What did you find?” he asked, unable to hold the question in. “In the tower?”
Raef’s eyes darted from side to side, ensuring they were not overheard.
“I found out who my parents are. There are ledgers in the undercroft.”
Seth stiffened and nearly dropped his sleeping cargo.
“You found your parents?” he asked.
“My father is human, but my mother . . . well, all I know is that she was like her.”
Raef nodded back toward the clifftop and the broken castle.
“I don’t know who my parents are,” Seth said. “I don’t know if they’re even still alive.”
“I’m sorry,” Raef said. “I truly understand.”
Seth let out a breath.
Raef seemed sincere, but how could Seth ever know? He had no guile and so he could not see it in others. Raef could have been an Inquisitor. He was that good of a liar, but suspicion was too heavy for Seth’s heart to carry. He decided to believe that he’d gotten a glimpse of the real Pol, the real Raef.
“Thank you,” he said.
Raef was, well, a lot of things, but he felt something like a friend. Yes, he was angry and ashamed that he’d been lied to and fallen for it, but Hyperion forgive him, he wasn’t alone anymore. He had a friend.