Chapter 9
“We need to go to the Cathedral.”
Knox says it over coffee. One mug, his only mug, the one with the faded logo, filled and handed to Dimitri because Knox was raised with manners even if his guest is a demon who slept on his couch and filled his apartment with an ambient darkness that made the lights flicker.
Knox drinks water and stands at the kitchen counter and watches Dimitri hold the mug in his burned hands and says it again.
“Fiora. The archivist. She’s our best chance at understanding how to reverse this.”
Dimitri’s burns look better this morning.
Still raw, still angry, but the blackened edges have receded, the cracks in his skin knitting together with a speed that no human body could manage.
The salve helped, Knox can tell, and the knowledge that Dimitri used it after Knox went to bed, alone in the dark, with no one watching, does something to Knox’s chest that he doesn’t examine.
“I haven’t survived for all these years,” Dimitri says, “to waltz into a holy cathedral and present myself to Templars of the Order on a silver fucking platter.”
“Even if we find our witch, and we will find him, I can guarantee he doesn’t know how to reverse the spell. He didn’t even know what he was casting. We need someone who understands the mechanics of what was done to us, and Fiora has access to texts that don’t exist anywhere else.”
“Texts kept inside a building full of people who want to kill me.”
“I’ll be with you the entire time.”
“Oh, well, that changes everything. I feel so safe.”
Knox sets his jaw. Patience. Years and years of patience. “Dimitri.”
The demon’s name feels different this morning. Not strange, exactly, but weighted in a way it wasn’t before, and when Knox says it Dimitri’s red eyes flicker and something warm passes through the bond before it’s buried.
“If you have a better idea,” Knox says, “I’m listening.”
Dimitri doesn’t have a better idea. They both know it. The silence stretches, and Knox lets it, because he’s learned in the past twenty-four hours that pushing Dimitri only makes him dig in harder.
“Fine,” Dimitri says eventually. He sets the mug down on the counter with a click. “Fine. But if a single one of your holy brothers so much as looks at me wrong, I’m leveling the building.”
“Noted.”
***
The Cathedral of the Holy Order sits in the heart of Haven, white stone raised against the sky.
Knox has walked through its doors hundreds of times.
He’s prayed in its nave, trained in its yards, bled in its infirmary.
It’s been his anchor for years, the one place where he knows exactly who he is and what he’s for.
But today, walking up the broad stone steps with a demon at his side, the familiar weight of the place feels different.
Heavier. As though the building itself knows something is wrong.
“Stay close to me,” Knox says as they approach the entrance. “Don’t speak unless spoken to. If anyone asks, you’re a subdued hostile that I’m bringing in for processing.”
Dimitri stops walking. He stares at Knox. Then he throws his head back and laughs.
It’s a real laugh. Loud and sharp and delighted, the kind that shows all of his teeth and crinkles the corners of his red eyes, and several passing civilians startle and give them a wide berth.
Knox feels the laughter through the bond, bright and effervescent and dangerously infectious, and he has to clamp down hard on the corners of his own mouth to keep them from doing something inadvisable.
“Subdued,” Dimitri repeats, wiping his eye with the back of one burned hand. “You subdued me. You, five-foot-eight, a hundred and fifty pounds, armed with a glorified stick, subdued me.”
“It’s a mace.”
“You couldn’t subdue a house cat.”
“I’m more than capable,” Knox says stiffly, “of handling you.”
Dimitri moves so fast that Knox doesn’t see it coming.
One moment they’re standing on the cathedral steps, six feet apart.
The next, Dimitri’s hand is on Knox’s jaw, thumb on one side, fingers on the other, tilting his face up with a grip that is firm and precise and makes Knox’s entire body go rigid.
Dimitri leans down until their faces are inches apart, until Knox can see the individual flecks of darker red in those ember irises, until the bond between them is vibrating at a frequency that makes Knox’s teeth ache.
“Exactly how much of me,” Dimitri murmurs, “do you think you could take?”
Knox’s breath catches. His pulse slams against the inside of his wrist. His face is burning, and he can feel the heat of it, knows it’s visible, knows Dimitri can see every shade of the flush climbing his neck, and his body has gone absolutely still in the way that prey goes still, which is mortifying because Knox is not prey, Knox has never been prey, Knox has killed things that would make Dimitri—
Dimitri laughs again. Lower this time, darker, a private sound meant for the two inches of air between them. He releases Knox’s jaw with a slow deliberate drag of his fingers and steps back, looking enormously pleased with himself.
“After you, Templar,” he says, and gestures toward the cathedral doors.
Knox turns on his heel and walks inside before his face can get any redder.
***
The archives are in the cathedral’s basement.
Three floors of vaulted stone chambers lined with shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling, crammed with texts and scrolls and bound volumes spanning centuries of accumulated knowledge.
The air is cool and dry and smells of old paper and preservation spells.
Fiora is at her desk.
She’s been the Cathedral’s archivist for as long as Knox has been a Templar, and he suspects she was here long before that. She looks up when they enter and her expression shifts through several phases in rapid succession: recognition, confusion, alarm.
Her gaze locks on Dimitri.
“Knox,” she says carefully. “You’ve brought a demon into my archives.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I need your help.”
“Yes, I assumed so. But there's a demon with you.”
“Fiora—”
“A demon. Into my archives. Where I keep the irreplaceable texts. The ones that are older than the city. The ones that are older than the country.” She takes off her glasses and polishes them on her sleeve, which Knox knows is something she does when she’s resisting the urge to yell. “Start talking.”
Knox talks. He tells her everything. The warehouse, the rift, the witch, the blood, the binding.
He tells her about the bond’s mechanics: the emotional bleed, the distance limitation, the pain.
He doesn’t tell her about the electricity when they touch, or the wall outside the apothecary, or last night in his living room with Dimitri’s hands on either side of his head and a clawed finger tracing his jaw. Those things are not relevant.
Fiora listens without interrupting. Her eyes move between Knox and Dimitri, and Knox can see her mind working, cataloging, cross-referencing, pulling from decades of accumulated knowledge.
“You should tell the Order,” she says when he finishes.
“I know.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“Not yet. Not until I understand what we’re dealing with.”
Fiora sighs. She puts her glasses back on and turns to the shelves behind her desk, running her fingers along the spines of a row of ancient texts.
“A soulbind forged with freely given blood,” she murmurs. “Anchored to a botched summoning circle. Between a nephilim and a demon.” She pulls a volume from the shelf and drops it on her desk with a thud. “You don’t do anything halfway, do you, Knox?”
“Not usually, no.”
She opens the book and begins turning pages, scanning text that Knox can’t read from where he’s standing. After several minutes, she stops.
“There are steps,” she says. “The bond is anchored to the summoning event. The rift, the circle, the blood. To sever it, you need to dismantle the anchors.” She looks up at him over her glasses.
“First, the breach. The rift in the warehouse was closed, but it left a scar, a weak point in the dimensional barrier. That scar needs to be destroyed. Sealed permanently. As long as it exists, the bond has a foundation to cling to.”
Knox nods. “What else?”
“The lesser demons that came through the rift. The rifthounds. They’re fragments of the same event, loose threads from the same torn fabric. They need to be exterminated. Every last one. As long as they’re alive in this dimension, the bond’s anchors remain intact.”
“And then?”
Fiora closes the book. She takes off her glasses and looks at Knox directly, and her expression is serious in a way that makes something cold settle in his stomach.
“Then the witch who bound you has to sever the bond himself. He’s the caster.
His intent, his blood magic, his connection to the event, those are the threads that hold the whole thing together.
He has to unpick what he stitched.” She pauses.
“And he has to accept the original terms of the summoning. Whatever deal he made with the demon when he called him through, that contract is still open. The binding redirected it, but it didn’t cancel it.
The witch has to honor his end, or the bond won’t release. ”
Knox absorbs this. Three steps. Destroy the breach. Kill the rifthounds. Find the witch.
He thanks Fiora. She tells him not to thank her, to tell the Order, and to get the demon out of her archives before he touches anything.
Knox glances at Dimitri, who has been suspiciously quiet throughout this exchange and is now examining a shelf of scrolls with the casual interest of someone browsing at a bookshop.
He catches Knox’s look and smiles innocently. Knox doesn’t trust it for a second.
They leave the archives and climb the stairs in silence.
The cathedral is busy. Templars move through corridors, administrative staff carry files, the distant sound of training drifts from the courtyard.
Knox keeps Dimitri close, guiding him through the halls with the practiced authority of a man escorting a prisoner.
No one questions them. A few Templars glance at Dimitri with sharp, wary eyes, but Knox’s presence is enough to keep them at bay.
They turn into an unoccupied hallway, and Dimtri's good behavior comes to an end.
“How delightful.” His voice is light, conversational, with a razor edge underneath. “That little witch is going to be indebted to me after all. He summoned me and then bound me to you instead of holding up his end. When this is done, he’ll owe me everything he promised and then some.”
Knox stops walking. He turns.
“You need to release the witch from the contract,” he says. “When this is over.”
Dimitri looks at him. The pleasant expression doesn’t change, but something behind it goes very still.
“I’m sorry?”
“The kid didn’t know what he was doing. He was twenty years old and terrified and in over his head. Whatever deal he made, he didn’t understand the terms. You need to release him.”
Dimitri laughs. It’s cold, nothing like the bright startled sound on the cathedral steps. This laugh is old and empty and has seen the inside of places Knox doesn’t want to imagine.
“You don’t know how the world works, little Templar.
” Dimitri’s red eyes are flat. “The boy summoned me. He reached across dimensions and pulled me out of my existence and into his, because he wanted something. He asked for help. And he’ll get it.
I always honor my contracts. But when the debt comes due, and it will come due, I will collect.
That’s the deal. That’s how it’s always worked. ”
“He’s a child.”
“He’s twenty. Old enough to cast. Old enough to bleed. Old enough to face the consequences of what he summoned.”
“Dimitri—”
“I will destroy him,” Dimitri says softly. “Not because I’m cruel. Not because I enjoy it. Because that is the nature of what I am, and what he invited into his life. And no amount of green-eyed earnestness is going to change that.”
Knox grabs the front of Dimitri’s shirt.
It’s instinct, the same instinct that drove him to punch through a holy fire barrier, the same stubborn immovable refusal to let something terrible happen when he has the power to stop it.
His fist closes in the charred fabric and he pulls, dragging Dimitri down toward his level, and his mouth opens to say something, a threat, a plea, a demand, he doesn’t know which.
Dimitri moves.
His hands close around Knox’s wrists and he spins him, fast and fluid, years of predatory reflex compressed into a single motion, and slams Knox face-first into the stone wall of the corridor.
Knox’s cheek hits cold stone and his arms are pinned above his head and Dimitri’s body is pressed against his back, solid and warm and so much bigger than him, and the bond detonates with sensation that Knox cannot parse and cannot control and cannot, for the first time, suppress.