Chapter 5 #2
The shop is quaint. Comfortable. Wooden shelves crammed with jars and bottles and bundles of dried herbs line the walls.
The air smells of lavender and old paper and something faintly metallic underneath.
A large tabby cat is asleep on the counter.
Crystals hang in the window, casting fractured rainbows across the floorboards.
It looks as though someone's grandmother runs it, and Knox finds the normalcy of it reassuring in a way he recognizes as probably naive.
The witch emerges from a back room. She's older, sixty maybe, with brown hair pulled into a loose bun and sharp brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.
She wears a long cardigan over a simple dress, her hands stained with ink and chalk dust. She looks as though she could be shelving books at a library.
"Good morning," she says pleasantly. "What can I help you with?"
"We need a soulbind undone," Dimitri says.
Something shifts behind the witch's eyes, quick and calculating, there and gone. Knox catches it. He files it away but doesn't act on it, because he doesn't know what it means yet and he has spent a long career learning not to draw weapons on a feeling.
"A soulbind," she repeats carefully. "That's not a simple request."
"I'm aware."
"Soulbinds are meant to be undone by the original caster. The witch who wove it would have the clearest path to—"
"We don't know where our witch is," Dimitri interrupts. "And regardless, he was barely capable the first time. He was a novice who didn't know what he was casting. If we wait for him to undo it, we'll be waiting until one of us is dead."
The witch looks from Dimitri to Knox. Her gaze lingers on Knox, on the coat, the rings, the mace, and something in her expression softens.
It's a warm look, almost maternal, the kind of look someone gives a person they want to help, and Knox lets himself believe it because he is tired and hurting and he wants this to be over.
"I see," she says quietly. She's silent for a long moment, then she nods. "I can try. Follow me."
She leads them through a curtained doorway into the back room.
It's larger than the shop front and considerably less charming: bare concrete floor, whitewashed walls, shelves of materials that belong in a workshop rather than a home.
A workbench cluttered with tools and texts. A single bare bulb overhead.
The witch pulls a stick of chalk from her cardigan pocket and kneels on the concrete.
She draws quickly and precisely. A circle first, six feet in diameter, and then a series of runes around its perimeter.
Knox doesn't recognize them. They're not demonic, which is reassuring, but they’re also not of any tradition he's encountered in decades of study.
They look old. Older than the city. The unease from before surfaces again, pressing against the inside of his ribs, but the thought still doesn't form, not fully, because the witch straightens up and smiles at them and says:
"The demon will need to stand inside the circle. For the spell to take hold."
Knox shifts beside Dimitri. "Why not both of us?"
The witch turns to him. "I only know how to unbind a demon from a soulbond," she says gently.
"The demonic tether is the active element.
If I remove the hook from him, your soul should be released as well.
The circle is designed specifically for this, to expunge a demon from an unwilling soul.
It won't harm you. You'll be protected."
Knox looks at the circle. He looks at the runes. He doesn't recognize them, and that bothers him, because he has studied every major runic tradition in the Cathedral's archives and these belong to none of them.
But Dimitri is already moving, and the bond is aching in Knox's chest, and the angelic rejection is grinding through his blood, and he wants this to be over.
Dimitri steps into the circle.
The chalk lines flare to life, a low steady glow seeping up from the runes. The witch raises her hands and begins to chant, her voice low and rhythmic, the words unfamiliar, and the air inside the circle starts to hum.
Knox watches. He can feel the spell through the bond, a subtle shift in the tether between them, and for a moment there is something close to hope in his chest, fragile and tentative.
The glow from the runes intensifies slowly, white light pooling around Dimitri's feet, and the humming in the air deepens, and Knox thinks, please let this work.
The witch grabs his arm.
Her grip is sudden and strong, far stronger than she looks, her fingers digging into his sleeve.
She hauls him backward, away from the circle, and the soft expression is gone.
What replaces it is something hard and bright and certain, and Knox knows that look.
He has seen it on the faces of zealots his entire career.
He has seen it on the faces of people who believe so completely in their own goodness that they cannot conceive of the damage they are doing.
He opens his mouth. He doesn't get the words out.
The runes flare.
Not all at once. The first rune on the far side of the circle brightens from white to blinding, and a tongue of fire licks upward from the chalk, pale and clean and unmistakable.
Holy fire. Knox recognizes it the way he recognizes his own heartbeat, a fundamental, bone-deep knowing that comes from a lifetime of wielding divine power.
The runes aren't unbinding runes. They're purification runes. Cleansing runes. The kind designed to burn demonic essence out of existence. He didn’t recognize them because, despite devoting his life to hunting demons, he’s never actually burned one out alive before.
The second rune ignites. Then the third.
The fire is building quickly, deliberately, the circle lighting up in sequence, each rune feeding the next, and the holy fire is climbing, creeping inward from the perimeter toward the center where Dimitri stands.
It's not the explosion Knox expects. It's worse than an explosion.
It's patient. It's methodical. It's a trap designed to close by degrees, and Dimitri realizes what's happening in the same moment Knox does.
Through the bond, Knox feels the exact instant Dimitri understands he's been betrayed.
It lands in Knox's chest with the force of a punch, a spike of fury so pure and so hot that it scorches through the tether between them, and Knox staggers, one hand pressed to his sternum.
Beneath the fury there is something else, something Dimitri is trying to bury under the rage but can't, because the bond strips everything bare: fear.
Not the abstract, intellectual fear of a creature who has lived a hundreds of years and knows what holy fire does to his kind.
This is visceral. This is animal. This is the fear of a living thing that has just realized it is about to die.
The fire reaches Dimitri's feet.
It starts at the soles and climbs. The hem of his duster catches first, the black fabric curling and charring, and Dimitri hisses through his teeth and his hands clench at his sides.
The pain comes through the bond in waves, sharp at first and then deeper, building as the fire builds, and Knox can feel it layering on top of his own distress, doubling it, the two of them locked in a feedback loop of agony that tightens with every second.
Dimitri doesn't beg. He doesn't plead. He goes to his knees as the fire climbs his legs, scorching through fabric and into skin, and he screams at the witch in defiance.
Raw. Ragged. Furious. The sound of a creature that refuses to go quietly, that has spent a thousand years answering to nothing and is not about to start now, and through the bond Knox can feel the depth of that defiance, the sheer stubborn refusal to give this woman the satisfaction of his surrender.
"This is what demons get," the witch says.
Her voice is steady. Calm. The voice of someone doing holy work. She still has Knox's arm in her grip, though her hold has loosened now that the circle is doing what she designed it to do. She looks down at Dimitri with absolute, unshakable conviction.
"You don't deserve to corrupt someone good," she says.
"Someone who fights to protect people from your kind.
" Her gaze flickers to Knox, and there is warmth in it, genuine warmth, the warmth of someone who believes she is doing him a kindness.
"The circle will keep you safe. It won't touch you.
When the demon dies it will sever your link without any harm to you. I've done this before."
Knox barely hears her. The bond is screaming.
The fire has reached Dimitri's chest. His skin is blackening, cracking, splitting open in lines of white heat that trace the paths the summoning fractures had taken the night before.
His shirt is charred rags. The horns at his temples glow faintly, as though the fire is burning him from the inside out as well as the outside in, and the pain pouring through the bond is so immense that Knox cannot separate it from his own.
He can feel Dimitri's flesh burning as though it is his flesh.
He can feel the fire eating through muscle and tendon and reaching for bone as though it is reaching for his bone.
Every nerve in his body is lit with borrowed agony, and he is shaking, his hands clenched at his sides, his jaw locked so tight his teeth ache.
This is not the clean, distant observation of someone watching a demon die. This is participation. This is immersion. The bond has made Knox a passenger in Dimitri's destruction, and he is living every second of it in tandem, and it is unbearable.
Dimitri's defiance starts to crack.