22. Syneca #2
Blanketed in Ramiel’s magic, Calder looked smaller.
Less severe. His skin was still as beautifully dark as before, but the scar through his brow was gone and his eyes seemed larger.
Pip, tucked in his pocket, remained sprite-sized but different.
She looked like a miniature version of Lore now, complete with dark hair and sharper features.
Breathtaking, even with raven wings instead of her usual iridescent.
“Weapons,” Silas said, and the word cut through whatever softness the homecoming might’ve stirred.
We moved before I’d finished registering the command.
Calder didn’t reach for a blade. He didn’t need one.
He simply turned, putting himself between me and the open mouth of the alley, sliding into a predatory stillness that had earned him a name people whispered: the Heartless One.
Every line of him had gone quiet and lethal, reading the street for the first thing that twitched.
Dez, who still looked like himself, minus the horns and marks, planted himself at my right shoulder, that easy grin nowhere to be found. Ramiel’s attention swept the rooftops.
Silas stepped in front of me from the other side, putting his body between mine and the street behind. He was violence at rest; even though I couldn’t see him, I could feel the anticipation, as if he wanted a fight with Wickett. Or maybe that was me.
Pip rose from Calder’s pocket, sword out, hovering near his ear. “I’ll take the high ones,” she whispered, dead serious.
I reached for my own fire and felt it answer, coiled and ready beneath my skin where shame used to live.
I held it there. Didn’t let it flare. Didn’t send up a beacon.
Just kept it close, a match I could strike the second I needed to.
Ignis sat behind my teeth, one word from becoming an inferno.
I kept it caged there, the way Gran had taught me to hold a spell half-spoken, built, but not yet given to the air.
For a long moment, nothing moved but the smoke.
I ran my fingers over the raised skin on my palm. The mark Wickett had left when he’d pressed his Promise stone into my hand. He’d marked me as his to hunt. His to kill. And yet, despite everything we knew, every warning Silas had given about Wickett’s army, there wasn’t a hunter to be seen.
The only thing out of place were the banners suspended in the air with magic.
The headline across the hundreds filling the sky ticked over as they changed in rhythm, reading: The Magistrate is dead.
The Phoenix re-identified. If seen, report to the Ripper.
And then, as clear as the Chancellery Office in the distance, was a near-perfect sketch of my face.
Freckles, unruly curls and all. I turned my eyes away, focusing instead on our group.
“My hells.” Ramiel whipped out a kerchief and covered his nose. “What is that horrible smell?”
“It’s home,” Pip whispered, eyes lit with pride.
Soot stained the brick walls, black and gray competing with the sprite dwellings carved into every available surface.
Somewhere above, a tiny shutter banged in the wind.
The smell wasn’t bad, despite Ramiel’s dramatics.
It was freshly baked bread from the bakery on the corner mixed with the factory smoke already filling the morning air.
I knew this place. Every crooked street.
Every building. The music floating down from upper windows, tinny and off-key.
The way the cobblestones dipped in the center from centuries of feet wearing them down.
They’d never been built to last more than two hundred years.
Nothing in Fuerlis had. But it’d been over five hundred years since the last burning and some things just showed their wear.
Old protection runes were woven into the stones above the doorways, the witches who’d woven them long dead, but the workings weren’t.
Magic didn’t die with its maker, but you had to have the craft in you to feel it the way I did.
Layer on layer of it, centuries deep, all of it pressed flat and muted.
The Magistrate’s doing. The runes he’d buried through every street still sat heavy on the city’s power, choking it.
Even dead, the bastard had his boot on Grimora’s throat.
Our apartment wasn’t far from here. Two streets over, then left at the courier station with the faded sign.
I could walk there blindfolded. But that didn’t feel like home anymore.
Not when I remembered Wickett’s blade slicing through Vitoria’s mattress.
Or Lucy’s eyes on the chessboard we’d used to communicate.
Not when I thought of the hunters raiding our space, or Vitoria pretending for years.
“This is what you gave her, Ram?” Dez said, pulling me back to the present as he grimaced at Pip. “She looks like she’s ready to stab someone.”
“She will stab someone,” I muttered. And I meant it. Given enough motivation, I was beginning to think Pip’s vengeance may outshine all of us. She did nothing in small doses.
“When provoked,” Silas agreed, stepping out from behind me.
I’d hoped he’d be hideous. Something worth turning away from. A beast that matched the grumpy, controlling demon I’d been arguing with for days. But of course he also hadn’t changed at all.
Still warm skin and devastating features. Still unfairly attractive with those light blue eyes, such a contrast to every other dark feature, including his thick lashes. No one in this world knew what he’d looked like. He had nothing to hide from. Not even when he shifted and launched into the sky.
“Well,” Pip said from Calder’s shoulder, her miniature Lore-face tilted up toward the banners overhead. “At least they got your freckles right.”
“Come on,” I said, turning down the road. “Just because we can’t see the hunters, doesn’t mean they aren’t here. We’re starting at the Gilded Pestle. You still have the key I gave you?”
Pip reached toward her hair, only to panic because the buns were gone. “Hey!”
“It’s only an illusion. Your buns are still there, you just can’t see them,” Ramiel explained.
She didn’t question him for a second, simply reached up and pulled a skeleton key from thin air. She giggled and spun in a circle before delivering the key to me. “I am a very good keeper of things.”
I caught the edges of Ramiel’s illusion as she moved. Demon-work, drawn straight from himself, smooth and whole in a way that made my own craft feel like patient, careful labor by comparison. Not lesser, just different.
We moved through the narrow streets, keeping close to the buildings. The Tangles were waking up around us. Shutters opening. Voices calling down from upper windows. Sprites darting between balconies with packages and important messages clutched in their hands.
Normal. Everything looked devastatingly normal.
We turned the corner toward the Gilded Pestle, and a crowd blocked the street ahead.
Heretics. At least twenty of them, dressed in their traditional gray robes, faces framed with hoods. They stood in a circle, chanting in unison. “The Phoenix rises. The world burns. Syneca Black will consume us all.”
My blood went cold.
“The Phoenix rises. The world burns. Syneca Black will consume us all.”
They repeated it over and over, their voices rising in volume with each repetition. People passing by gave them a wide berth, some whispering under their breath, others hurrying past with their heads down.
“The Phoenix rises. The world burns. Syneca Black will consume us all.”
Calder’s hand found my shoulder. “We should go around.”
But I couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away from the hooded figures chanting my name like a curse. One of them turned their head and looked directly at me, despite Ramiel’s magic.
And smiled.