Chapter 6
Dimitri is alive.
He knows this because death wouldn't hurt this much.
Every inch of his body is screaming. His skin is a ruin, cracked and blackened and weeping something that isn't quite blood, the demonic equivalent of third-degree burns covering his arms, his chest, his neck.
His clothes are charred scraps barely clinging to his frame.
The holy fire is gone but its ghost lingers in his nerve endings, a bright persistent agony that pulses with every heartbeat and doesn't dull between beats.
He can feel the damage at a structural level, the places where the fire ate past skin and muscle and reached for something deeper, something essential, and didn't quite get there but came close enough to leave scars that won't fade.
And beneath all of it, beneath the pain and the fury and the acrid smell of his own burned flesh, he can feel Knox.
Relief. Bone-deep, shuddering, overwhelming relief, pouring through the bond with a force that has no business existing.
Knox is relieved that Dimitri is alive, and the feeling is so vast and so genuine that it floods Dimitri's chest and drowns out everything else for a single disorienting moment.
It makes no sense. No one has ever been relieved that Dimitri survived anything.
He has been summoned and bound and bartered across centuries, and when he walked away from those encounters the reaction was disappointment or fear, never this.
Never this raw, uncomplicated gratitude that he is still breathing.
The feeling is enormous and alien and it makes Dimitri want to tear something apart with his bare hands because he doesn't know what to do with it and he has never not known what to do with a feeling.
Darkness curls at the edges of the room.
It bleeds from him, tendrils of shadow licking along the floorboards, crawling up the walls, dimming the bare bulb overhead until the light gutters and swings.
The witch sees it. Her eyes go wide behind her wire-rimmed glasses and she takes a step back, her chalk-stained hands rising.
Dimitri untangles himself from Knox’s body and climbs to his feet.
It shouldn't be possible. The holy fire should have left him too weak to stand, let alone move, but fury is a hell of an anesthetic and Dimitri has more of it right now than he's had in centuries.
He rises from the floor the way things rise from graves, slow and deliberate and inexorable, and the shadows rise with him, thickening at his back, spreading across the floor in tendrils that reach for the witch with a hunger that mirrors his own.
He lunges.
She recoils. Stumbles backward into her workbench, scattering tools and texts, and her mouth opens in a scream that doesn't quite make it out because Dimitri's hand is reaching for her throat and his burned fingers are inches from her skin and he is going to kill her.
He is going to wrap his cracked and blackened hand around her neck and squeeze until something gives and he doesn't care what it costs him.
She put him in a circle and set him on fire and watched him burn and told Knox it was righteous.
She looked at Dimitri the way people have looked at him for his entire existence, as a thing to be destroyed, a problem to be purified, and he is so fucking tired of it.
Knox hits him like a linebacker.
For someone his size, the impact is staggering.
Knox throws his entire body into Dimitri's side, shoulder-first, one stubborn Templar driven forward with enough force to send them both crashing to the floor.
Dimitri's burned back hits concrete and the pain whites out his vision for a full second, and when it clears Knox is on top of him, hands on his chest, pinning him flat, those green eyes blazing.
Dimitri punches him in the mouth.
It's not calculated. It's not strategic.
It's raw and graceless and animal, a closed fist driven into the face of the man holding him down, and the crack of impact is followed immediately by a bloom of pain across Dimitri's own face, the bond faithfully transmitting, making absolutely goddamn sure he feels every ounce of what he just inflicted.
Knox's head snaps to the side. His lip splits. Blood wells up, bright and vivid and impossibly red, spilling down his chin, and he flinches, one hand coming up to his mouth, those green eyes wide with something that lances through the bond with the precision of a blade.
Hurt.
Not the physical pain. Something underneath it.
Something that runs deeper than a split lip, something raw and open, as if Knox expected, as if Knox actually fucking expected that saving Dimitri's life would mean something.
That it would change something between them.
That Dimitri would wake up on the floor of this woman's shop with Knox's arms around him and feel anything other than the white-hot rage of a creature that just had its mortality rubbed in its face.
And the hurt is not angry. That's what gets Dimitri.
It isn't indignant or resentful or accusatory.
It's quiet. It's the hurt of someone who knew better and hoped anyway.
And the worst part. The absolute worst fucking part. Is that it bothers him.
The anger stutters. The darkness at the edges of the room flickers, uncertain, and Dimitri stares up at Knox from the floor, breathing hard, his burned chest heaving, and something cracks open inside him that he didn't know was sealed shut.
The nephilim saved his life.
Knox is crouched over him with blood on his chin and spent blessing rings on his blistered fingers and burns on his arms that weren't there before.
Burns. Dimitri stares at them, at the angry red skin visible through charred sleeves, and understands with a sudden, vertiginous clarity that the holy fire burned Knox too.
Knox punched through a purification circle with his bare fist and hauled Dimitri out of the flames and the fire ate him for it.
He had no reason. He had every reason not to.
Dimitri is a demon and Knox is a Templar and the witch was right, this is what Knox should want, this is what his Church would sanction.
Dimitri's death would have freed Knox from the bond and earned him a commendation in the same breath.
And Knox chose to burn for him instead. And is sitting on Dimitri's chest with blood on his face and agony in the bond and he still isn't angry.
Something vast and unfamiliar moves through Dimitri's chest. It's not anger.
It's not the bond bleeding Knox's emotions into him.
It's his, entirely his, and he doesn't have a name for it because he's never felt it before.
Not in a thousand years. Not once. Gratitude, maybe, if gratitude were a wound.
If gratitude were a hook sinking into soft tissue and pulling taut.
And underneath it, tangled up in it, threaded through it, something that feels dangerously close to longing, a gravitational pull that has nothing to do with the soulbind and everything to do with the way Knox is looking at him right now.
Bloody-lipped and wary and still so goddamn gentle, even now, even after Dimitri just hit him in the face.
Dimitri wants to close the distance between them.
He wants to press his forehead against Knox's.
He wants to grab him by the collar of that ruined coat and pull him down and put his mouth on the blood on Knox's lip and taste whatever holiness lives in it.
He wants, and he doesn't know what the wanting means, and he has never not known what he wants before, and the uncertainty is more terrifying than the fire.
Knox stares back at him. Lip bleeding, breathing hard, coiled tight, his weight shifted forward on the balls of his feet as though he thinks Dimitri is going to swing again. Waiting for it. Braced for it. Still not leaving.
Dimitri turns his head toward the witch.
She's pressed against the far wall, clutching a shelf for support, her glasses askew and her face drained of color. The fury rises again, dark and liquid, flooding back into the spaces that the unfamiliar feeling briefly occupied. The shadows in the corners deepen.
A hand closes around his arm.
Knox's hand. Firm but careful, smaller than Dimitri's own but strong in the way that everything about Knox is strong, quietly, stubbornly, in complete defiance of all reasonable expectation.
His fingers wrap around Dimitri's forearm, just above the worst of the burns, and the touch doesn't spark the way it did before.
It steadies. It anchors. It says stop without saying anything at all.
"She's not worth it," Knox says. His voice is low and rough-edged from exertion and the split lip. "And I can't let you hurt her."
"I'd like to see you fucking stop me," Dimitri says, but some of the venom has bled out of it. He can hear it in his own voice, the anger losing its edge, dulling into something that's more exhaustion than rage, and he hates that Knox can hear it too.
Knox's hand stays on his arm. It doesn't tighten. It doesn't pull. It just stays.
Dimitri climbs to his feet. Knox follows, keeping pace, and for a moment they stand side by side in the ruined back room of the apothecary, the demon scorched and smoking, the Templar bloodied and burned, and look at the witch who tried to kill one of them and save the other.
She stares back with an expression of utter scandalization, as though Knox is the one who has committed an unforgivable act.
As though saving a demon's life is the crime here, and not, say, luring a living creature into a death trap and setting it on fire.
Dimitri would laugh if he weren't so close to tearing her head off.
He holds her gaze for one long, poisonous moment. Then he turns and walks out of the shop, fury in his bones and conflict in his chest and something new and unnamed lodged beneath his sternum right next to the bond, and the bell above the door chimes cheerfully behind him as he goes.
The street is bright and cold and smells of rain.
Dimitri stands on the sidewalk and breathes and thinks about Ruby.
Ruby, who recommended this witch. Ruby, who knew exactly what Madame Vex was. Ruby, who sat at her velvet card table and sent Dimitri into a trap with a smile and a shrug and a your funeral. Ruby, who he has known for years. Ruby, who just tried to have him killed.
"I'm going to tear her apart," Dimitri says.
Knox emerges from the shop behind him, pulling the door shut with his burned hand and wincing when the metal meets raw skin. "What?"
"Ruby. She knew. She sent us here knowing exactly what that woman would do." The shadows are back, curling around Dimitri's boots, bleeding from his clenched fists. "I'm going back to The Sable and I'm going to make her regret every second of her miserable immortal life."
"That's stupid."
Dimitri rounds on him. "Excuse me?"
"You're going to walk back into that club, burned, half-dead, held together by spite, and fight Ruby and every creature in there?" Knox's green eyes are steady, unflinching, even with blood still drying on his chin and his arms cradled against his chest. "That's stupid."
Something snaps.
Dimitri moves. His hand closes around Knox's throat, not squeezing, not yet, but firm and possessive, his burned fingers bracketing the pale column of Knox's neck, and he drives him backward into the brick wall of the apothecary.
Knox's shoulders hit brick and Dimitri leans in, using every inch of height he has, crowding the smaller man into the wall until there's nowhere left to go.
"You have no idea who you've been bound to," Dimitri says. His voice is low and quiet, the kind of quiet that comes right before something detonates. "You have no idea what I am capable of."
Knox doesn't flinch. His green eyes stare up into Dimitri's from six inches away, and his pulse beats steady and calm against Dimitri's palm. "I've fought plenty of demons who thought they were special."
Dimitri leans closer. His lips peel back from his teeth, too sharp, sharper than they were a moment ago, and the shadows at his back thicken and writhe.
"I've eaten demons stronger than anything you've fought," he says softly.
"Consumed them. Taken their power and worn it.
You're eighty years old, little Templar.
I have centuries on you. You are a child playing at being a holy man, and if you think your mace and your rings and your angel blood make you safe from me, you are tragically fucking mistaken. "
Knox says nothing. His pulse doesn't change.
His eyes don't waver. And Dimitri's hand is around his throat, burned and cracked and aching, and he can feel Knox's heartbeat against his palm, steady and calm and infuriatingly unafraid, and his hand is not tightening.
Dimitri has had years of hands on throats and he knows the mechanics of violence better than he knows anything else in this world, and his hand is not tightening on Knox's neck.
And some quiet, terrible part of him knows it never was going to.
He lets go. Steps back. Shakes out his hand as though the contact burned him, which, in a way it did, because Knox's skin is still warm against his palm and his heartbeat is still echoing in Dimitri's fingers and the memory of it is not going anywhere.
He turns and stalks down the street toward The Sable, his burned skin cracking with every step, his shadow stretching long and dark behind him.
Knox follows.