62. Syneca
Syneca
Leave the last stair unswept. Something is always climbing toward the living, and a single layer of dust tells you, by its prints, how close it has come.
Timber hit us before my knees had found the floor.
Not an attack, a wall of warm muscle and curved horn shoving between me and Dez, the cinderhowl’s yellow eyes blown wide, a sound rolling out of him I’d never heard him make. He’d felt it the second we landed.
“Easy.” Dez had both hands up and was backing into a chair, going down into it gracelessly. “Easy, big guy, that’s a lot of teeth for this hour.”
“Take me back.” I was already up, already turning on him, the screaming starting somewhere I couldn’t control. “Take me back right now, you coward. You absolute—”
He held his palms up. “Syn—”
“Where’s Silas?” Pip came off the back of the couch like a thrown knife, hovering between us, her small face fierce. “Dez. Where is he? Why isn’t he with you?”
I hadn’t even realized the others were back.
Dez cleared his throat. “Everyone needs to—”
“Take me back!” I had him by the collar before I knew I’d crossed the room, both fists in the fabric, hauling him out of the chair, and the edges of his shirt burned away where my hands closed because I couldn’t hold any of it in anymore.
“Our bond is broken, Dez. Do you understand me? It’s broken and you brought me here. ”
“I swore to him I would.” Dez didn’t fight my grip. He let me hold him there with his collar smoking. “I swore it. Get you out first. That was the whole deal, Syn.”
“You go get the fucking book and you take us back right now.”
He shook his head. “There's a bargain in place. I can’t take you back with us.”
I threw the demon into the chair and headed straight for the front door. “Then I’ll find my own damn way.”
Calder’s voice cut across the room. “Syneca, be reasonable.”
He stood by the couch, Ramiel behind him, watching me with an expression I was too far gone to read.
“She’s not going to stop.” Ramiel said it quietly, to Calder. “Look at her. You can leave her here and go back for Silas, and she’ll be out that front door and halfway to the mountains before you return. You know she will.”
“I’m right fucking here, asshole. Don’t talk about me like I can’t hear you.”
Calder took a slow breath. “Syn, you have to trust us to get him out.”
“You’re still fucking here and he’s on his knees on the side of a mountain. No one is moving. Don’t tell me what I have to do, Calder Grimm.”
I spun, going for the door. Calder caught me around the waist and hauled me back through a barrage of kicking and screaming for him to put me down.
“She’s going to keep doing that,” Dez said. “We can’t go back for him if we’re standing here holding her down. The second we leave, she’s out that door.”
“Then she can’t be somewhere with a door she can use.
” Ramiel said it almost idly, already turning toward the window like the matter bored him.
“The Underworld. Take us there. Leave her where her legs can’t betray her, and the rest of you go get Silas.
I can keep her safe.” A shrug. “Or hold her here all night. Your call.”
Calder looked at me for a long moment.
Then he crossed the room and took my hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, and I knew he meant it.
As long as I was a thing that had to be restrained, every hand in this room was on me instead of on Silas. They didn’t trust me to stay. And they were right not to. I couldn’t even trust myself to be rational. The fastest way to Silas was to take myself out of their way entirely.
I went still in Calder’s grip. He felt it and didn’t loosen, waiting to see if it was a trick.
“Fine. I’ll go,” I said, letting my shoulders drop. “If I’m there, you don’t have to worry about me. But you and Dez go get him immediately. Do it fast. Kill every mother fucker between you and him. Witch, dragon and otherwise. And I’m taking my fucking wolf.”
He didn’t argue. He bent and hauled Timber up against his side. Ramiel gripped his shoulder.
The last thing I saw of that room was Pip’s stricken face and Dez half out of his chair, his collar still smoking, and then the world folded and we were gone.
We came down somewhere dark.
Calder set Timber on his feet and didn’t let go of me until I was steady. The second I was, he stepped back. “I’m coming back. I swear it to you.”
“Not without Silas.”
Something crossed his face. He didn’t promise it. He just looked at me one more second, and then he was gone.
I don’t know how long I stood in that dark, waiting for the world to bring Calder back with Silas.
Long enough that my legs ached from holding still.
Long enough that the flame I kept banked in my palm burned down and I let it.
Long enough to hate every second that passed without a book cracking open and a demon stepping through it.
But Timber never left my side. He tracked the room with me, ears back, and neither of us made a sound, because sound would have meant admitting how long it had already been.
Eventually, I let myself take in the low light. The long bar down one wall, bottles glinting. Velvet and shadow and the smell of smoke. We were in Ramiel’s club.
Timber pressed against my legs and growled low, his eyes fixed past me. Ramiel set a drink I hadn’t seen him make down and walked to the far window, drawing the shade.
I tried not to react to the sight. The street was full of demons, shoulder to shoulder, crowding the building as far as I could see in the twilight, still and waiting, every face turned toward the glass. Every warning bell in my mind rang at once.
“I know what’s happened to you.” He said it almost gently, without turning around, watching them through the window.
“The bond between you and Silas was broken, as was the bargain holding you together.” He turned then, and the gentleness didn’t reach the rest of him.
“Do you know what happens when a bargain with a demon breaks?”
I said nothing.
“You become one of us.” His smile was a slow and cruel thing as he stepped toward me.
“A member of the Underworld. Unclaimed. But ours. You belong to us now, Syneca. Four princes of equal power, and you with no court to stand behind. That’s a dangerous thing to be down here.
A Phoenix, full of stolen power, alone and unclaimed in a place like this.
So let me offer you the obvious solution. Swear yourself to my court.”
A laugh cracked out of me before I could stop it. “You waited until he was on his knees on a mountain and then came to collect.” I shook my head. “Silas would peel the skin off anyone who tried this. And you thought you’d just ask. Go fuck yourself, Ram.”
He stepped in front of me, though cautiously because of Timber. “I’d make you a princess of the Underworld, untouchable and protected, and when Silas comes back to you, it will be to my court. The two of you, safe, together, under my name and protection.”
I went very still. Not from fear, but rather the sharp focus women always felt when a man circled. “Silas is your friend. He would never want this. You know he wouldn’t.”
The demons outside moved a step closer to the building, all of them at once, the dark of them pressing up against the glass. Then another step, slow and deliberate, and I understood it for what it was. A countdown. Ramiel wasn’t showing me a threat. He was showing me a timer.
I took a step back, shaking my head. “You have to call them off. You can’t do this, Ramiel.”
“Swear yourself into my court, witch.” He didn’t even look at the window. “And I’ll send them home before they reach the unlocked door.”
I looked at the crowd. At the dark pressed against it, all those faces waiting for a word from their master. I looked at the wolf leaning into my leg, at the door I had no way through, at the demon prince who’d arranged every piece of this.
“And if I say no?”
“Then I close the shade,” he said gently, “and I go upstairs, and I sleep very well, and what happens when they drag you out to that street is nothing I had a hand in.” He spread his palms. “I’m not the one who’ll hurt you, Syneca. I’m the only one offering not to.”
I could almost see the logic of it settling into me one cold inch at a time.
Silas was gone. I had no bond. No escape.
A city full of things that wanted my power, and a man holding out the only shield in the room.
I thought of Calder’s face when he’d said I’m sorry.
I thought of how long I’d been standing here already and what that time might mean for Silas.
I thought, for one traitorous second, that maybe the smart thing, the surviving thing, was to take the hand that was offered.
Timber growled and I didn’t know if it was at Ramiel or me.
“Fine.” The word came out like it cost me every precious bit of freedom I’d had left.
I dragged in a breath. “But not like this. Not as someone your minions can continue to threaten. If I’m going to belong to a court, I belong to it as something with a fucking spine.
” I lifted my chin. “Swear that every soul sworn to your court also answers to me. That I will not become a victim today and they must stand down.”
Ramiel smiled. “Sworn, my princess.”
I took a step, surprised I couldn’t feel the chains of a bargain weigh me down. Timber moved with me. “May I test it?”
He swept an arm toward the demons at the window, magnanimous and delighted with himself. “See what I’ve given you, my princess.”
“Oh.” I took another step, and flame came up around my fingers as I walked, curling over my knuckles. “I don’t intend to test it on them. Make me a drink, demon. And don’t ever call me yours again.”
There was a breath before his eyes went wide. His body answered before his face could finish reacting, feet moving to the bar, hands working with no will of his own behind it.
“You’ve gotten one giant part of this wrong, Ramiel.
I have never trusted you. Not once. I have watched every step you’ve taken, every conversation you leaned in to listen to, every little move you made while you thought I was too busy falling in love to notice.
You think you’ve been circling me this whole time.
” The flame curled higher around my hand.
“But I led. And you followed, in your own desperation, exactly where I wanted you.”
He gasped trying to fight the command. His body wouldn’t let him as he crossed back to me, glass in hand. I’d never tell him the other part he’d gotten wrong. The steps he’d followed to land here. My grandmother’s bargain was broken. Not mine. I belonged to no one. But that was my secret to guard.
I took the drink, letting the ice swirl as I continued. “One would think a demon with all your knowledge and all your experience would be more careful with his words. Tell me. Are you not a soul sworn to your own court?”
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
The air before me shifted and Timber’s low growl died in his throat as Aureth stepped out from a curtained alcove, blindfold gone as her clouded gaze swept over the room with Corvus perched on her shoulder.
“What the hell?” Ramiel whispered.
I didn’t care how she got here. I didn’t care if she was alive or dead or anything in between.
I had only one question for her but she spoke before I could ask.
“He lives. But only just. It was close enough that I felt the realms lean toward losing him. You should know, there was another bargain made to save his life.”
The floor tilted under me. I locked my knees and didn’t let it show. “What did he do? Whatever the price is, I’ll—”
“It isn’t what he must do.” Her head turned toward me. “It’s what he’s already taken. He gave you all of his power, on that mountain. Freely. So a bargain was struck to give him all of another’s.”
“Whose?”
She didn’t answer.
“Whose?” Ramiel demanded. “What has he become now?”
The oracle ignored him. “I worried you wouldn’t do it.
That you’d find a reason to stay small, the way you always wanted to.
But you didn’t. You might believe everything I did was to return here to the one that was lost. That every step was for her.
” Her head tilted. “But you’d be wrong. It was to put you on a demon’s throne. ”
“Absolutely fucking ludicrous,” the demon prince snarled.
I rounded on Ramiel. “You don’t get to speak.
” The words came low and my fire came with them, burning inside of me the way it did when I stopped holding it back.
“You don’t get to have an opinion. You don’t get to breathe unless I allow it.
This is your fault. Every piece of it. You should have never betrayed us.
” The flame climbed my arms now, gold shot through with something darker that had never been mine before tonight.
“He was your friend. And the second he couldn’t stop you, you came for what was his. ”
The power rose with the anger, both of them mine now, and I stopped fighting either one.
“Bow.”
He folded at the waist, dragged down toward the floor. Timber crossed to him slowly and lowered that great horned head until they were nose to nose, lips peeling back off his teeth.
I crouched in front of them both.
“Lower.”
…TO BE CONTINUED