Chapter 3
Afucking angel.
The words hit Knox square in the chest and he takes a step back before he can stop himself. His shoulders meet the cold metal of the doorframe and he presses against it, the rust and the cold grounding him in the physical world, because the demon is staring at him with those red eyes and he knows.
Nobody knows.
The Order knows, in the abstract. It's in his file somewhere, buried in sealed records that only Sanctus Cael has access to.
Nephilim. Half-blood. A footnote in his intake paperwork, stamped classified and locked away.
Fiora the archivist knows because it is literally her job to know everything.
Vale knows because Vale is his partner and Knox trusts him with his life, and because Vale once caught him reaching into the underworld and Knox is a good liar but he's not that good.
Three people. In eighty years of living and forty years of service, three people know what Knox is, and every single one of them understands without being told that the information does not leave the room.
The angelic bloodlines are rare, poorly understood, and deeply inconvenient for an organization that prefers its soldiers human and obedient.
Knox has spent four decades keeping his head down and following protocol, being so relentlessly by the book that no one has any reason to look twice at him.
Good at his job. Quiet. Dependable. The kind of Templar who files his reports on time and doesn't ask questions above his clearance and never, ever gives anyone cause to open those sealed records and read what's inside.
And now a demon is standing in a scorched warehouse calling out the one secret Knox has built his entire life around protecting.
"I'm not—" Knox starts.
"Don't." The demon's lip curls. The horns curving from his temples catch the faint light from the broken windows, dark and ridged. "Don't insult me. I can see it. It's right there, shining out of you. What are you, second generation? Third?"
Knox doesn't answer. His mind is already cycling through alternatives, grasping for any explanation other than the one the demon has handed him.
A curse. A hex. Some parasitic enchantment the witch laid on them both that mimics the symptoms of a binding but breaks clean under a standard cleansing ritual.
That would explain the pull, the shared pain, the way the blessing rebounded.
But it wouldn't explain the electricity.
It wouldn't explain the way their skin had lit up at the point of contact, the circuit that closed between them, the heat that scorched through Knox from scalp to sole and settled into his bones and refused to leave.
And it wouldn't explain the fact that he can feel the demon's fury right now, hot and roiling in his chest, layered on top of his own dread.
He can distinguish them. The demon's anger is sharp and sulfuric, a taste at the back of his tongue.
Knox's dread is cold and heavy, a weight in his gut.
But they're occupying the same space inside him, pressed together, tangled, and the intimacy of it is so profoundly wrong that Knox wants to crack his own ribs open and rip it out.
A binding. A soul binding. With a demon.
He closes his eyes. The darkness behind his lids does nothing. He can still feel the demon there, a presence at the edge of his awareness that pulses with rage and something beneath the rage that Knox doesn't want to identify. He opens his eyes.
The demon is already moving.
Three long strides close the distance between them. Knox's hand drops to the mace at his hip on instinct, fingers closing around the handle, blessing rings flaring, but the demon is faster. His hand shoots out and locks around Knox's wrist, and the contact detonates.
The same electricity from before tears through them both.
It races up Knox's arm and scorches down his spine and lights every nerve in sequence, bright and blinding and utterly beyond his control.
He gasps. The demon's grip tightens, his red eyes going wide for a fraction of a second, something raw and unguarded flickering across his face before he buries it under a snarl.
Then the demon shoves him away with a hand against his chest.
It’s hard enough to send Knox staggering.
He catches himself against a rusted support beam, one hand braced on cold metal, the other still wrapped around the mace.
His wrist is tingling where the demon grabbed him, a residual hum that won't quiet down, and his pulse is doing something erratic and unhelpful that he refuses to examine.
It occurs to him, distantly and without his permission, that no one has ever made his blood move the way this demon does, and that the thought itself is so catastrophically inappropriate that he buries it immediately and hopes the bond didn't carry it across.
The demon stands where Knox left him, shaking out his hand as though it burned him.
His expression has curdled into something between fury and revulsion, and he's apparently confirmed for himself what the electricity already told him, because when he looks at Knox now there is a new quality to his disgust. Not just anger at being bound. Horror at what he's been bound to.
Knox doesn't let that land. He's had a lifetime of practice at not letting things land, and he's very good at it, and it lands anyway, somewhere beneath his ribs where the bond sits and hums.
"This is just great," the demon snarls. He drags both hands through his dark hair and turns in a tight, agitated circle, the duster swirling at his calves, boots grinding against scorched concrete.
"This is just perfect. Summoned against my will, used as a generator, and now I'm soul-bound to a holy-blooded Templar who tried to bless me to death.
Fantastic. Truly the crowning achievement of my existence. "
Knox straightens and says nothing. He has found, over the course of a long career dealing with volatile situations, that silence is often the most effective response to someone building themselves into a fury.
It gives them nothing to push against. It lets the wave crest and break on its own.
Vale has told him more than once that this particular quality makes Knox either the most patient man alive or the most infuriating, and that he's never been able to decide which.
"I'd kill you," the demon continues, rounding on him.
The fracture lines the summoning left in his skin are still faintly luminous, not yet healed, tracing up his neck.
"I want you to know that. If I didn't think it would kill me right back, I would snap your pretty neck and walk out of here and never think about you again. "
Knox's jaw locks. His hand tightens on the mace.
He has faced demons twice this one's size, demons with armies, demons whose power could fracture the earth itself.
He's fought all of them and never lost. Not once.
And he is not going to start now because some sharp-tongued, horned hellspawn with a death wish and a face that belongs on a cathedral ceiling is getting in his space and having opinions about his heritage.
But he keeps the thought behind his teeth. Escalation won't help either of them, and Knox has always been better at control than at conflict. It's the thing that makes him good at his job and terrible at everything else.
"Have you got nothing to say?" The demon stalks closer.
He moves with coiled tension, barely leashed violence rolling off him in waves that Knox can feel through the bond, hot and sulfuric, crashing against his own rigid calm.
"No prayers? No scripture? No righteous proclamation about the will of God? "
Knox holds his ground. He watches the demon approach and catalogs the details because cataloging details is what he does when his pulse spikes and he needs something to anchor to.
The way the demon moves, fluid and predatory, every step deliberate.
The breadth of his shoulders under the black duster.
The sharp line of his jaw and the way his red eyes burn brighter when he's angry, which appears to be a permanent state.
The pointed ears with their glinting jewelry.
The horns, dark and ridged and curving back from his temples.
The low collar of his shirt revealing the hard cut of his chest, and the way his clawed hands flex at his sides as though he's imagining them around Knox's throat.
Knox catalogs all of it and files it under a folder with no name, because they’re not exactly on a first name basis yet, and tries to imagine how this soul binding thing is going to go when they can’t even get through a conversation.
The demon stops inches from him. He's taller by half a head, and he uses every bit of it, looming with those ember-red eyes blazing down.
His hand shoots out and fists the front of Knox's coat, twisting gray wool, dragging him forward until their faces are close enough that Knox can see the fracture lines glowing faintly in the demon's skin, can feel the heat rolling off his body, can smell something underneath the sulfur and the smoke that is warm and dark and distractingly, infuriatingly good.
Knox knocks his hand away. Clean, precise, the way they teach in basic.
A short sharp strike to the inside of the demon's wrist that breaks his grip without escalating to a fight.
The demon's eyes narrow, and Knox catches a flicker of surprise through the bond, followed by something that feels uncomfortably close to interest.
"We need to undo this," Knox says. His voice comes out steady, which is a minor miracle given that his blood is still humming from being in close proximity to a demon who has expressed direct interest in causing him bodily harm. "As quickly as possible."
The demon stares at him. "Oh, do we? Thank you for that insight. I never would have arrived at that conclusion on my own."