51. Syneca #2
I looked away. Beside me I felt rather than saw it happen, the air around Ramiel and Dez going briefly thick, the way it had in the emporium.
When I let myself glance back, the two demons were gone.
In their place stood the scarred man and the bored man, exact down to the charms at their belts and the crooked pull of a mouth that wasn’t Ramiel’s but wore his eyes underneath if you knew to look.
Dez rolled the bored hunter’s shoulders, testing the fit of him. “I hate how good he is at this,” he muttered, and even his voice had changed, gone rougher.
“Try to look like you’ve never enjoyed anything in your life,” Ramiel said in the scarred man’s flat drawl. “You’re a hunter now.”
“So, dead inside. Got it.”
Ramiel crouched and opened his bag.
The iron came out heavy and dull, no shine to it at all, the kind of metal that drank light instead of catching it. Four collars. Four sets of cuffs. My stomach dropped at the sight of them, a cold animal part of me recoiling before my mind could catch up.
“We talked about this,” Calder said, watching my face. “They may not check. But if they do, illusion won’t survive a hand laid on it. Iron will.”
“I know.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.
“There was a version of this where you stayed behind,” Silas said to me, low, and I knew he’d been holding the words since we left. “I want it on record, I argued for it.”
I smiled sweetly. “Noted and ignored. Same as always.”
He held back his smile. I saw it in the twitch at his mouth. I know I did.
We’d settled the rest of it days ago, in a kitchen that felt very far away now.
Morgana had told us there was no way into Aventh Gate.
But demons dealt in deception. Morgana had never imagined someone simply pretending to be the cargo, because she’d never once in her life pretended to be less than she was.
It had to be witches walking in. The Gate took witches without blinking.
They were likely the one thing the sentinels were trained to receive.
Their kind wanted them, he got them without question.
And of the people who could pass for one, I was the only one who actually knew how a witch moved, how she held her power, what she’d say if a chronicler came and decided to test her.
Calder and Silas were going in as witches because if the iron came off and the lie came apart, I wanted the two of them standing between us and the rest of that mountain.
Which left one problem.
“I’m too big to hide in either of your pockets like we planned. The hunters weren’t large enough,” Pip said. “And no one’s going to believe you caught a sprite worth dragging up a mountain.”
“No. They won’t.” Ramiel looked at her for a moment. “I think we have to go with plan B, Pip. May I?”
“You may,” she said, with enormous dignity.
He pushed his magic forward. And Pip grew.
It started slow and then wasn’t slow at all, the buns on her head rising, her small frame stretching, the air bending around her as she came up and up until she stood a full head taller than me, taller than Dez, broad-shouldered and fierce and absolutely furious-looking in a way that had nothing to do with the magic and everything to do with finally being a size the world would have to reckon with.
Her clothes had grown with her. Her wings, unfurled, threw a shadow across three of us at once.
For a moment nobody said anything.
Pip looked down at her own hands like she’d never seen them. Then she looked at us, and there were tears standing in her enormous eyes. Her chin came up.
“Well,” she said, and even her voice had depth to it now, a low, sultry ring it had never had. “Now who’s going to be left behind.”
“No one,” I said, and my throat was tight. “No one’s being left behind.”
“Damn right.” She flexed one large hand, marveling. “I could throw a demon now. I could throw Ramiel.”
“Please don’t throw Ramiel,” Dez said. “We need his face.”
“We have to hide the good bits,” the demon prince said softly. “I’m afraid if you walk out there with those wings and that hair, we’ll draw a different kind of attention.”
She sighed, “Fine.”
The spell was over in a second. In a blink, she was an ordinary woman, with no wings and blonde hair. Beautiful, but nothing memorable.
Ramiel held the collar up to her, and now it fit.
He fastened it at her throat with a gentleness that didn’t match the borrowed cruelty of his face, and to her credit Pip held still and let him, the way you’d hold still for something you’d decided to be brave about. The cuffs went on next. Then mine.
The iron closed around my throat with a weight I felt in my back teeth, cold enough to ache, and every instinct I had screamed to claw it off.
I made myself breathe through it. I thought about the witch with the manacle scars on her wrists, about how many people had worn exactly this on the way up this exact mountain and never came down, and I let the fury of that settle into me where the fear had been.
Fire answered, low and banked. I left it there.
Silas’s collar went on last. He held my eyes the entire time, and didn’t look away even when the iron clicked shut, and there was something in his face that wasn’t fear and wasn’t anger but lived in the place between them.
And I knew it wasn’t for himself, but for us. For what this life debt had made us do.
“If this goes wrong,” he said quietly, only to me, “I will get you out of this mountain. Iron or no iron. Do you understand me?”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why it’s you.”