Chapter 1 #2
The demon laughs despite himself. It’s a sharp, startled sound, warm in a way Knox does not expect, and it cuts off abruptly when another crack of light splits up his forearm. He hisses through his teeth, curling his hands into fists at his sides.
“I think I found it!” the witch shouts. “There’s a banishment spell, but it’s—it says I need a blood sacrifice to close the circle and send the entity back.”
The warehouse would be awfully quiet, if it weren’t for the growling, snarling beasts still lingering in the shadows.
“That doesn’t sound right,” the demon says. His voice has changed. The acidic humor is gone, replaced by something careful and flat. “Blood sacrifices are for binding, not banishing.”
“It says it right here.” The young man holds up the book, pointing to a page Knox can’t read from this distance. “A sacrifice of blood freely given to seal the doorway and return the summoned entity to its plane of origin.”
“Let me see that.” The demon leans toward the edge of the circle. The light flares and he jerks back with a snarl. “Dammit—”
He regroups. Turns those red eyes on Knox and lets his voice go smooth, reasonable, almost kind, as though they are two sensible people having a conversation over drinks instead of screaming over the sounds of things trying to eat them.
“Just let me out of the circle. We all walk away. I’ll even deal with the dogs on my way out. Everyone wins.”
“Don’t break the circle,” Knox tells the witch firmly.
“Why not?” he asks.
“Because the second that circle breaks, he’ll possess you.” Knox meets the demon’s gaze. “He’ll wear your body, and I’ll have to kill you both. I’d rather not do that tonight.”
The demon grins at him. It’s slow and sharp and full of teeth, and it should not make Knox’s pulse kick the way it does.
“You can try,” the demon says softly.
Knox holds his gaze and feels that heat again, low and unwanted and entirely inconvenient, and turns away from it. Another creature crashes through the rift, and he buries the feeling under the weight of the mace.
They’re coming faster now. The rift is widening, the edges of it fraying, and the light pouring from the circle is getting brighter, hotter, more desperate. The demon is running out of time. They all are.
“Can you do the spell or not?” Knox asks.
“I can do it.” The young man’s chin comes up. His hands are still shaking, but there’s something stubborn in his freckled face, something that refuses to buckle. “I can do it. But I need the blood.”
Knox kills two more creatures in quick succession, the first with a swing that takes its jaw clean off, the second with a downward strike that drives it into the concrete.
Then he hooks the mace back on his hip and crosses to the barrier in three long strides.
He rolls up the sleeve of his coat and holds out his forearm.
The blessing rings on his left hand glow faintly in the violet light.
“Use mine.”
The witch stares at him. “You—are you sure?”
“Do it. Quickly.”
The witch drops the barrier just long enough to grab Knox’s arm.
He produces a small silver knife from somewhere inside his jacket, so at least he came prepared for something, and draws a shallow cut along the inside of Knox’s forearm.
The pain is bright and clean, nothing compared to the acid burns sizzling on his coat.
Blood wells up, dark and vivid, and drips onto the concrete.
The witch works fast. He draws a chalk outline around the pooled blood with trembling but determined hands, connecting it to the summoning circle with a series of symbols Knox doesn’t recognize. Then he opens the book, presses his palm flat against the page, and begins to chant.
The air changes.
Knox feels it immediately, a pressure drop, a shift in the atmosphere, as if the entire warehouse has taken a breath and is holding it.
The symbols on the floor begin to glow, not white but deep arterial red, the color of the blood that feeds them.
The beasts in the shadows shriek, but don’t advance, which is a bad sign in and of itself.
The demon has gone quiet, which is the other sign something isn’t right.
Knox looks at him. The demon is staring at the chalk lines, at the blood, at the spreading red glow, and the fury is gone from his face. The sharp grin is gone. What’s left is something Knox can’t name, something that looks almost like recognition. Almost like dread.
“Boy,” the demon says slowly. “What exactly are you reading from?”
The witch doesn’t answer. His eyes are closed, his lips moving rapidly, and the chant is building, each word layering on the last, the sound of it vibrating in Knox’s teeth and the base of his skull.
The red glow reaches the circle.
Then the pain hits.
It is not a pain that Knox has any reference for, and he has several decades of references.
This is not the clean, bright hurt of a blade, or the searing scorch of acid, or the deep ache of a bone cracked through.
This pain starts in his blood in a way that nothing ever has and it moves outward, rewriting him from the inside, carving into the marrow of his bones with a language he cannot read.
Something dark and foreign and ancient pours into him, filling spaces that nothing has ever touched, stitching itself to the very fabric of his being with claws that dig in deep and will not let go.
He feels the pain settle into his bones, his blood, his skin, etched so deeply into him that he cannot tell where it ends and he begins.
He stands for as long as he can manage, but time is irrelevant.
He drops to his knees and his hands hit the concrete.
He curls his hands into fists, the silver rings biting into his fingers as he presses his knuckles against the cold floor, and tries desperately to anchor himself to something physical, something real.
He can’t breathe. He can’t think. The chanting is a roar now, and the rift is screaming as it collapses, and even through the haze of his agony he can hear the demon making a sound that is not quite a scream and not quite a laugh.
Beneath it all, something settles into Knox with the permanence of a brand.
Knox tries to hold on. He tries to breathe through it the way he was trained, the way he’s breathed through broken bones and holy fire and the burning of his first sigils. But this isn’t any of those things. All of those things pale in comparison to whatever this is.
The last thing he sees before the dark takes him is the red of the demon’s eyes, wide and furious, burning through the collapsing light of the circle.
***
He wakes on cold concrete with blood in his mouth and silence in his ears.
The rift is gone. The ceiling above him is dark and still, the air no longer charged, no longer wrong.
Just cold. Just the damp and the iron and the faint drip of water somewhere in the pipes above.
Knox pushes himself to his knees and the room tilts hard before it steadies.
His arm throbs where the witch cut him, but when he looks down the wound has closed, sealed over by a thin line of scar tissue that looks weeks old instead of minutes.
The summoning circle is scorched into the concrete, the chalk burned away and replaced by blackened grooves that still radiate a faint heat he can feel through the soles of his boots.
The witch is gone. His barrier, his book, his knife, all of it, and Knox cannot find it in himself to be surprised.
The boy was drowning in water he'd poured himself, and running was the only smart decision he'd made all night.
The demon is not gone.
He's crumpled at the center of the burned circle, his duster singed at the edges, his body slack, one hand outstretched on the concrete with clawed fingers curled loosely inward.
He's breathing. Knox can see the shallow rise and fall of his chest from across the room, but he isn't conscious.
He looks smaller somehow, the dangerous elegance stripped back by whatever the spell carved out of him, and there is something in Knox's chest at the sight of him that he does not examine.
A tightness. A pull. Something that wants him to cross the room and put his hands on the demon and make sure he's whole, which is insane, which is the precise opposite of everything his years of training has drilled into his bones, and which does not go away no matter how hard he tries to smother it with reason.
He should deal with him. He should bind him, or banish him, or at the very least secure him until the Order can send a retrieval team. That is the protocol. That is the job Knox has done for four decades with the precision and commitment that Vale has always admired and occasionally mocked him for.
But the beasts. Some of them made it through before the rift collapsed, he's certain of it, and every minute he spends here is a minute they spend loose in the city with civilians who have no idea what's hunting them.
The demon is unconscious and contained within the burned remains of the circle. Knox can come back for him.
He gets to his feet. The room sways and then rights itself, reluctantly, and there is a strange heaviness behind his sternum that wasn't there before.
A weight. A presence. Something lodged deep in his chest that pulses with a rhythm that doesn't match his own heartbeat.
He pushes through it and crosses the warehouse floor, stepping over the smoking remains of the beasts he killed, the ichor already cooling to a dark crust on the concrete.
He makes it maybe sixty feet from where he woke before the pain hits without warning.
A wrenching, tearing agony that starts in his chest and radiates outward, as though something inside him is being stretched to its limit and has started to come apart.
He staggers and catches himself on the doorframe, fingers white-knuckled on rusted metal, and for one terrible, airless moment the world narrows to a single point of sensation.
The wrongness of it. The feeling of being pulled apart from the inside by something he cannot see or name or fight.
Every step he's taken away from the demon is a thread being yanked taut, and he can feel each one of them now, burning in his blood and his marrow and his teeth.
He tries to take another step and the pain doubles, then triples, and then it stops being something he can register at all.
His knees buckle. The concrete rushes up and his cheek scrapes against the rusted frame of the door on the way down, and the last thing that goes through his head before the dark swallows him again is that he should have dealt with the demon when he had the chance.