Chapter 12
The dog hits him before he can turn.
It comes from the shadows as though a piece of the darkness has sheared free, all charred muscle and exposed bone and a jaw full of razors, and it slams into Dimitri’s back and drives him sideways into the canal wall. His shoulder hits stone, and then teeth sink into his bicep.
The pain is extraordinary.
Not just the bite. The teeth are bad enough, serrated and hooked, designed to shear through metal, and they go through Dimitri’s flesh as though it’s paper.
But the acid. The foam that drips from the creature’s jaws seeps into the wound and begins to burn, not on the surface but deep, in the muscle, in the blood.
It spreads outward from the bite in radiating waves that turn his vision white at the edges.
And then Knox screams.
The sound bounces off the canal walls, sharp and ragged, and Dimitri feels the echo of it through the bond.
His pain, doubled, reflected back at him through Knox’s body.
The Templar is somewhere behind him, staggering, clutching his own arm where phantom teeth are tearing into phantom flesh, and the feedback loop is devastating.
Dimitri’s pain feeds into Knox, Knox’s pain feeds back into Dimitri, and the two sensations spiral around each other until Dimitri can’t tell which agony belongs to whom.
He goes to his knees. The stone is wet and cold under him and the rifthound is still latched onto his arm, shaking its head, acid-foam sizzling against his skin.
Dimitri grabs its jaw with his free hand, burned fingers closing around charred bone, and wrenches.
The pain is blinding. He can feel tendons tearing, muscle shredding, the wet grinding sound of teeth being pulled from flesh.
He roars through it, a sound that is more animal than language, and the creature’s jaw cracks open and Dimitri rips free.
Blood pours from the wound, dark and viscous, not quite the red of human blood. The rifthound scrambles to its feet, acid dripping, and lunges again.
Dimitri flinches.
The mace catches it in the jaw.
Knox’s swing is brutal and precise, the blessed iron connecting with the creature’s skull in a burst of white light that sends it cartwheeling into the canal wall.
It hits the stone, crumples, and dissolves into a spreading stain of black ichor.
Knox stands over the spot where it fell, legs braced apart, mace in both hands, breathing hard.
His face is slick with sweat and his skin is the color of chalk and Dimitri can feel through the bond exactly how much pain he’s in, all of Dimitri’s pain filtered through a body that is already at war with itself. But he’s standing.
He’s always standing.
Dimitri gets to his feet. His left arm hangs at his side, the bicep mangled, blood running down his forearm and dripping from his fingertips. The acid burn is still spreading, eating deeper, and every heartbeat sends a fresh pulse of fire through the wound.
The other two rifthounds come at them together.
They move as a pack, one high, one low, coordinated in the way of predators who have learned to hunt in tandem. They pour out of the drainage pipe and the shadows simultaneously, acid-slick jaws gaping, and the narrow canal becomes a killing floor.
Dimitri fights with one arm. He fights with fury and teeth and the shadows that answer his call, darkness lashing out from the walls to snare and bind and crush.
He grabs one rifthound by the throat with his good hand and slams it into the stone hard enough to shatter the wall behind it.
He tears into the other with claws that extend from his fingertips, black and curved and longer than they should be, ripping through charred flesh and corrupted bone.
Knox fights beside him. Not behind him. Beside him.
The Templar moves in the spaces Dimitri leaves, darting in where Dimitri’s injured arm creates an opening, covering his weak side, the mace singing in tight efficient arcs that compensate for what Knox has lost in speed and power.
They don’t coordinate. They don’t plan. They just move, and the bond fills in the gaps.
Dimitri feels Knox’s intention a half-second before he acts, Knox reads Dimitri’s movements through the shared current of their awareness, and the result is something that shouldn’t work but does.
It’s over in minutes. The canals are painted in gore, black ichor on the walls, acid eating into the stone, the dissolving remains of three rifthounds spreading across the narrow ledge.
Dimitri stands in the middle of it, chest heaving, his ruined arm dripping, and the adrenaline is the only thing keeping the pain at bay.
He’s tense. The ambush has him coiled tight, fury and frustration building in his chest. He’s angry at being caught off guard.
He’s angry at the acid in his blood and the weakness in his arm and the bond that made him feel Knox’s pain on top of his own.
He hates humans. He hates their fragility and their arrogance and their pathetic little spells and that stupid fucking witch who dragged him into this, and—
Knox touches his arm.
It’s the good arm. The right one. Knox’s hand settles against Dimitri’s forearm, just above the wrist, and the touch is gentle and worried and so impossibly careful that something in Dimitri’s chest seizes.
He grabs Knox’s wrist.
His grip is a vice, punishing, tight enough to grind the fine bones together, and Knox flinches.
The flinch travels through the bond and Dimitri feels it, and he doesn’t let go.
He stares through Knox with unfocused eyes, seeing something beyond his face, past it, into some middle distance where the anger lives.
Knox doesn’t retreat.
He stands there with his wrist in Dimitri’s grip and his green eyes on Dimitri’s face, and he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t reach for his mace, doesn’t summon a blessing.
He just looks at Dimitri with an expression that is kind.
Open. Patient in a way that makes Dimitri want to shake him, because nobody looks at a demon covered in blood and fury who has their wrist in a crushing grip and chooses kindness.
Nobody does that. Nobody except Knox, who has been doing it since the moment they met, and Dimitri’s existence has not prepared him for it.
Something in Dimitri cracks.
Knox has been nothing but kind to him. Despite the bickering, despite the provocations, despite Dimitri punching him in the mouth and pinning him to walls and calling him angel and unwanted and half nothing.
Despite every cruel thing Dimitri could think of to make those green eyes flinch.
Knox has been patient and gentle and stubbornly, infuriatingly good, and Dimitri has no framework for this.
He has lived for as long as he has and been met with fear and hatred and worship and hunger, and not once has anyone simply been kind.
He releases Knox’s wrist.
Knox doesn’t rub it. He doesn’t step back. He reaches out, slowly, and his fingers find the mangled flesh of Dimitri’s bicep.
Dimitri hisses. The touch is featherlight, Knox’s fingertips barely grazing the edges of the wound, tracing the torn muscle and the acid burns with careful precision. It hurts. It hurts in a sharp immediate way that makes Dimitri’s jaw clench and his breath stutter.
But it’s also good.
Good in a way that has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the fact that it’s Knox.
Because they’re bound, and Dimitri feels everything Knox feels, and what Knox is feeling right now is a concentrated quiet concern that flows through the point of contact and pools in the wound and eases something that the pain alone couldn’t reach.
It doesn’t fix the damage. It doesn’t stop the acid.
But it softens the edges of the agony, rounds them off, and for a moment Dimitri can breathe.
Knox is so painfully gentle. His fingers move across the destroyed flesh of Dimitri’s arm with a tenderness that Dimitri has never experienced from anything or anyone, and it’s almost worse than cruelty, because Dimitri knows what to do with cruelty.
Cruelty is familiar. Cruelty makes sense.
This doesn’t make sense. This man who fights demons for a living is touching Dimitri’s wounds as though Dimitri is something worth being careful with, and Dimitri’s throat is tight and his eyes are burning and he is not going to fall apart in a sewer because a Templar touched him gently.
“We need to get off the streets,” Knox says quietly. His fingers withdraw from the wound, and the absence of his touch is a small cold shock. “Before we find more of them.”
“I’m not afraid of a bunch of drooling mongrels.”
“I know you’re not. But you’re bleeding, and I’d rather stitch you up before you pass out and I have to carry you home.”
The corner of Dimitri’s mouth twitches. “You couldn’t carry me.”
“Try me.”
Dimitri looks at him. Small, pale, stubborn, exhausted, kind. Standing in a sewer with gore on his coat and a mace at his hip and concern in his green eyes, offering to carry a demon home, and meaning it.
Dimitri follows him out of the canals.
He doesn’t have a word for what he’s feeling.
He’s not sure one exists. It sits in his chest beside the bond, beside the anger, beside the reluctant unwelcome tenderness that Knox keeps pulling out of him, and Dimitri carries it in silence through the dark streets and doesn’t know what to do with any of it.
He has never once been undone by kindness, and the fact that it’s happening now, in a city he doesn’t care about, with a man he shouldn’t want, is either the cruelest joke the universe has ever played on him or the beginning of something he is not equipped to survive.