Chapter 2
Dimitri wakes up angry, which is normal.
He wakes up angry most days, on account of existing in a realm that keeps getting interrupted by mortals who think the fabric between dimensions is a revolving door.
A thousand years of existence and he has been summoned by priests, by kings, by desperate fools with more ambition than sense, and every single time it has been the same tedious performance.
They draw their little circles. They chant their little chants.
They ask for power, for knowledge, for the name of the person their spouse is sleeping with, and Dimitri has to stand there in their chalk prison and pretend he doesn't want to pull their tongues out through their nostrils.
But this anger is different. This anger has edges.
He's on the floor of the warehouse, inside the scorched remains of the circle, and every inch of his body feels as though it's been fed through a meat grinder and packed back into shape by someone working blind.
The chalk lines around him are dead. Burned to carbon.
The rift is gone, which is the only good news he's had all night, because the rift had been using him as a battery and he can still feel the places where it ate into him, raw and blistered beneath his skin, wounds that should have healed by now and haven't.
The little witch is gone. His barrier, his book, his silver knife, all of it, vanished into the night along with whatever was left of the boy's courage.
Good. Smart. Because if Dimitri ever sees that freckled little bastard again, he is going to peel his skin off in strips and make him eat it.
But something is wrong.
Not the pain. Pain he can work with. Pain is an old companion and Dimitri knows all of its rhythms. This is something else.
He can feel it before he's fully upright, a pull beneath his sternum that has no business being there.
Not a tug. A pull. The kind that sinks into the soft tissue behind his ribs and draws taut toward something on the other side of the warehouse with the patience and weight of meat hooks buried in living flesh.
It doesn't ask. It doesn't negotiate. It simply pulls, and for a creature who has spent a millennium answering to nothing and no one, the sensation is so profoundly, personally offensive that he lies on the scorched concrete for a full ten seconds just to spite it.
Then it pulls harder, and Dimitri's lip curls, and he gets to his feet.
His legs are unsteady. He hates that. The summoning took more out of him than he will ever admit to anyone, because admitting weakness is an invitation to be exploited and Dimitri has not survived all of these years by being generous with information.
But the pull doesn't care about his pride.
It drags him forward, step by step, across scorched concrete and puddles of cooling ichor, past the smoking remains of the beasts the Templar put down, toward the loading dock doors.
Toward the Templar.
He's on the floor. Of course he is. Crumpled on his side near the doorframe with one hand still loosely gripping rusted metal, his gray coat fanned out around him, his mace lying a few inches from his hip where it slipped from his belt. He is unconscious. Breathing, but unconscious.
Dimitri stares down at him.
The Templar is, infuriatingly, even more attractive up close.
Which is a problem, because he'd been plenty attractive during the fight, and Dimitri had been actively burning alive at the time, so the fact that he'd noticed at all is a personal failing he'd like to set on fire and never speak of again.
But up close, it's worse. The blond hair has come half loose from its ponytail, pale gold strands falling across a face that belongs in a stained glass window.
High cheekbones. A jaw that could cut paper.
Dark lashes fanned against skin that practically glows with the residual holy energy the Templar Order pumps into its soldiers, all that consecrated light simmering just beneath the surface, and it makes Dimitri's teeth ache in a way that is not entirely unpleasant.
He's small. Compact. Built with a wiry, efficient strength that had been far more effective against those creatures than a man his size had any right to be, and he is unfairly, absurdly pretty in a way that makes Dimitri want to break things.
He nudges the Templar with his boot. Not gently.
"Hey. Wake up."
The Templar stirs. A low groan, barely conscious, and he shifts on the concrete with his brow creasing.
And Dimitri is hit by a wave of confusion so sudden and so complete that it nearly takes his legs out from under him.
It's disorienting in a way that has nothing to do with the warehouse or the aftermath of the spell.
One moment he's standing over an unconscious Templar with a clear head and a foul mood, and the next he doesn't know where he is.
Can't piece together the sequence of events that led him here.
Can't hold a thought long enough to examine it before it comes apart in his hands.
His mind scatters, fragments, becomes a handful of shards he can't reassemble, and for three terrible seconds Dimitri, who has never once in lost control of his own mind, does not know who he is.
Then the Templar opens his eyes, vivid green, and the confusion sharpens, and Dimitri understands.
It's not his.
The confusion is not his. It's the Templar's.
Pouring off the man and bleeding into Dimitri's chest through that insistent, violent pull beneath his sternum, so seamless and so complete that for a moment Dimitri couldn't tell the difference between the Templar's mind and his own.
The Templar's disorientation had become his disorientation.
The Templar's confusion had overwritten his thoughts.
And the implications of that are so catastrophically, unspeakably awful that Dimitri needs to stand here for a moment and let the full scope of his hatred settle into his bones.
"Fuck," Dimitri says, with feeling.
A soul binding. The little witch, with his shaking hands and his stolen book and his crude chalk circle, has managed to perform a soul binding.
On a demon. And a Templar. By accident. Using the Templar's freely given blood as the anchor.
The sheer improbability of it is almost impressive, in the same way that it's impressive when you accidentally shoot someone even though you’ve never used a gun.
It shouldn't be possible, but the universe has a sense of humor, and it is not a kind one.
The Templar's green eyes focus. They land on Dimitri. They widen.
What happens next happens very fast.
The Templar rolls onto his knees and lunges. His left hand comes up, blessing rings blazing white across his knuckles, four bands of consecrated silver flaring with holy light, and he drives his palm flat against Dimitri's chest.
Dimitri sees it coming. He has time to think don't, to think stop, to think you stupid fucking—
The blessing erupts.
It is holy energy in its purest form, searing through every nerve in Dimitri's body with the concentrated fury of a thousand years of divine wrath compressed into a single point.
He's thrown backward, boots leaving the ground, spine hitting concrete hard enough to crack it.
The pain is immense. Blinding. It whites out his vision and turns his thoughts to static and he is going to kill this man, he is going to wrap his hands around that pale throat and squeeze until those green eyes—
The Templar cries out in pain.
He collapses to the floor clutching his chest, his back arching off the concrete as the same holy energy that just tore through Dimitri rips back through him with nowhere else to go.
His blessing rings sputter and die. His eyes go wide and blank with shock, and Dimitri can feel the Templar's pain layered on top of his own, doubling it, an echo chamber of agony bouncing back and forth between them through the bond, and he cannot tell where his ends and the Templar's begins, and this, he thinks with a viciousness that is almost clarifying, is the worst day of his very long life.
They both lie there, gasping, staring at the ceiling. The concrete is cold beneath Dimitri's back and the blisters on his chest are screaming and he can feel the Templar's pain and his own pain and the bond between them humming with the shared trauma of it like a wire pulled taut between two posts.
Dimitri kicks his foot out and catches the Templar in the shoulder.
Pain lances down his own shoulder. Dull, throbbing, a sympathetic echo that makes him grit his teeth. But it makes him feel better. Marginally.
"You're so fucking stupid," Dimitri snarls. He drags himself upright, one hand pressed to his chest where the blessing hit him. The skin beneath his shirt is blistered, and it's going to heal ugly, if it heals at all. "You absolute brain-dead holy moron. Have you not noticed we are bound together?"
The Templar is still on his back, one hand pressed to his sternum, breathing in short ragged bursts.
His green eyes are glassy with pain, and even wrecked, even gasping on the floor of a filthy warehouse in what is clearly some of the worst agony of his life, he looks like something Dimitri wants to consume, and Dimitri resents it with every fiber of his being.
"We're not—" The Templar swallows. "That's not—"
“What a fantastic rhetoric. Just exactly what I’ve come to expect from someone who hits things with a stick and who offered himself up as a blood sacrifice to a witch not even old enough to drink.”
"It's a mace." The Templar grits the words through clenched teeth, and the fact that this is the hill he chooses to die on, correcting Dimitri's terminology while lying on a filthy floor with a chest full of his own reflected blessing, tells Dimitri everything he needs to know about this man.