Chapter Five
CHAPTER
FIVE
Weary limbs and the pallid sunlight seeping over the horizon were the only indicators of how much time had passed since the attack.
Aurelie awoke atop the rubble, her gaze drifting upward to the exhausted face of an angel.
Azriel’s hands rested gently over her, warmth radiating from his touch to chase away the cold gnawing at her bones.
Behind him, smoke twisted skyward, and the cloying scent of burning flesh lingered.
It caught in her throat, and she choked on the stench.
“Breathe,” he said, his voice a steady anchor as her body trembled. “Breathe, Aurelie. You’re alive.”
She wished she could say the same for those around her. Bloodied corpses lay strewn amid the wreckage, and while Aurelie took grim solace in seeing that most were demons, her heart squeezed at the sight of familiar faces.
A squire lay crumpled, his arm severed and his cheek scorched beyond recognition.
Nearby lay the baker’s son, his fingers curled around a broken pitchfork, eyes glassy.
Beside him was the torso of a woman whose lower half had been lost to the battle, and Aurelie pressed quivering fingers to her lips, forcing down a wave of nausea.
Fortunately, there were many familiar faces left alive, too. Nicolas paced nearby, his gaze flitting repeatedly toward her, and her chest tightened. Hours ago, they’d been laughing, dancing. Such revelry felt a world away.
Nicolas halted, his shoulders sagging in relief when their eyes met. “You’re awake.”
“The boy refused to leave until he knew you were well,” Azriel whispered, then held his hand out to stop Nicolas from coming any closer. “She’ll be fine, Sir Beaumont. Go assist with cleanup.”
Though he opened his mouth to argue, it snapped shut a second later. Few would dare defy an angel.
Casting her one last glance, Nicolas bowed and departed to join the other knights. Only then did she take a shaky breath.
“Aurelie.” Azriel took her right hand, gently turning it upward. The demon’s tail pressed sharply into her palm. She hadn’t realized she was still clutching it. “How does it feel to have made your first kill?”
Her grip tightened on the barbed trophy.
Could she lie to an angel, or would doing so somehow smite her? Rather than risk it, she chose to deflect. “Does my father know?”
Azriel shifted to crouch over the squire’s lifeless form, closing his eyes with a tender hand. “I thought you’d want to be the one to tell him.”
Blasted Nicolas. If he and Solange hadn’t come after her, no one would have ever needed to know. She could have let the demon go without anyone the wiser.
That, or she could have succumbed to blood loss and died in the woods. Though perhaps that would have been safer than lying to one of the Divine.
Aurelie’s body was liquid, her knees threatening to buckle under the weight of her exhaustion. She clung to Azriel’s steady grip, her breath ragged as she forced her legs to move. “Where is he?”
The angel hesitated. “By the pillory. He’s caught a demon. I’d take you there, but…”
There was no need for him to finish the sentence. Azriel was a Guardian angel; his place was with the wounded.
“Stay where you’re needed,” she told him, her tone more confident than she felt. “I can walk on my own.”
She left him no chance to argue, peeling away from Azriel to slowly make her way toward the pillory.
The air was stifling, heavy with the stench of death.
Even in the crisp autumn air, every breath felt too warm, as if the heat of battle still clung to the ground itself.
Her clothes stuck to her skin, soaked through with blood and sweat.
With each step her body grew heavier, sickened by the devastation of her home.
Once-vibrant streets lay silent, merchant stalls abandoned with their colorful awnings torn and blackened, fluttering in the breeze like tattered flags.
Ash drifted down from the canopy of a scorched stall, settling like dust across the cobblestones.
Shattered glass littered the ground like teardrops, as if the homes themselves were lamenting their devastation.
Townsfolk wandered the streets, shadows of themselves.
The blacksmith’s son wrung his cap as he searched the deceased while the tanner’s wife grabbed the shoulders of all she passed, inspecting their faces.
She trembled when she looked upon Aurelie, kissing her forehead and exhaling a quick “Light be with you” before moving to the next survivor.
Aurelie understood the desperation. She, too, was starved for familiar faces.
Though she knew her family was safe, her heart would not settle until she saw the proof with her own eyes.
Smoke from the doused fire stung her eyes as she journeyed into the thick of where the battle had taken place. Flies buzzed over refuse and corpses alike, and she covered her nose and mouth with her free hand, uncertain whether the stench or the sights made her queasier.
Rhovar lay in shambles, a ghost of the place that had been brimming with laughter only hours ago.
There was a glazed expression in the eyes of the survivors who shuffled through the wreckage.
Ash and blood clung to their skin, their stares caught somewhere between this world and the horror they’d just survived.
Aurelie knew that look well. She’d seen it on her father after every battle, and in her own reflection the night she’d lost her mother and Orion.
She clenched her fist around the tail in her hand, ignoring the blood that welled up as the barbs pierced her palms. It was a mistake to have let that blue-skinned beast live.
Already Rhovar’s people were hungry, diseased land and feuds with the demons having made food scarce.
Now smoke rose from distant fields, and she knew in her gut that although their forces still stood, Rhovar had lost this battle.
Moving carefully through the debris, she let her fingers brush over the angel wings etched into the pommel of her sword, a crystal eye in its center.
Though she was too weak to wield it now, the cool steel brought a small measure of comfort.
At least she knew how to wield it—how to protect herself—unlike so many who lay dead and burning in the streets.
Varen was by the pillory as expected, though she would have preferred to find him in better company. Solange loitered nearby, swatting at flies that swarmed the carnage. Her eyes went briefly to the tail in Aurelie’s hand, then back to her face.
“Look who’s finally awake.”
“Does that stick up your ass ever get uncomfortable, or have you grown to favor it?” Aurelie shot back.
Solange, curse her, had the gall to smile. “It’s nice to see that tongue of yours is getting sharper.”
She didn’t dignify that with a response. “Has the captain learned anything?”
“What do you think?” Solange shifted her weight to one hip, attention pulled back to the green-skinned envyborn in the pillory.
“Come closer, poppet,” the demon crooned. For someone whose head and arms were confined, the beast looked unnervingly at ease. It kept its gaze half-lidded, eyes roaming lazily over Solange and lingering down her figure in a way that made Aurelie’s skin crawl.
“I bet you taste real sweet,” the demon said, its forked tongue flicking out between jagged teeth.
Solange bared her teeth, but Varen moved before she could. He gripped the demon’s face, forcing its attention back to him.
“You speak only to me,” he warned, voice glacial. He pressed the tip of his dagger against the demon’s cheek. “One word to anyone else and I’ll gut you.”
The envyborn averted its stare. It strained against the pillory, trying to create distance from the blade.
“Good.” Varen’s smile didn’t touch his eyes as he pressed the flat of the blade harder against the demon. “You seem to know what this steel can do. I’ll give you one chance to tell me where you came from and who ordered this attack.”
The demon’s lips curled. “Or what, you’ll kill me?” It spat at Varen’s feet, and Aurelie could have sworn she heard a quiet hiss as saliva hit the dirt. She glanced down but saw nothing.
Varen pressed the dagger beneath the demon’s chin.
“I wonder if your resolve will last after a week. Or a month,” he murmured, each word sharpened to cut.
“After you’ve starved in a cell, thirsting, given just enough to keep alive.
You don’t need to tell me anything today.
But know this, demon—you will break. Sooner or later, I will make you. ”
A smile ghosted across Solange’s lips, her eyes alight with admiration.
Meanwhile, Aurelie’s throat grew thick.
This man was not her father. He wasn’t the one who’d told her stories growing up, or the one who had wept in his room the night she’d taken up the blade.
This was the killer whispered about in the barracks, who terrified even the knights.
He was the man who had slain a thousand demons and lived to tell the tales.
Varen was his own kind of monster, and while Aurelie held no taste for seeing that side of her father, she forced herself to recall the feeling of having a demon’s body beneath hers, its throat bared to her blade.
A demon would never hesitate to kill. Humans, however, let their emotions cloud their strikes.
Aurelie had trained her entire life to avoid that flaw, and still she had failed to deliver a lethal blow.
Hesitation was a crack in the blade. A weakness.
Which was why the captain standing before her could not be the father she knew.
To face a demon meant separating yourself from humanity.
It meant becoming every bit as monstrous as the enemy.
She forced herself not to look away, though her blood ran cold when the demon lifted its gaze.
“Its eyes!” The warning tore from her throat, her body moving before her mind could catch up. She lunged for Varen, seizing him by the neck of his armor and hauling him back.
Smoke curled in thin tendrils from the scorched ground where he’d stood, blackened by the strike Varen had not seen.
The demon’s eyes weren’t like the pure scarlet of the beast she’d fought in the woods, nor were they the bloodshot gaze of a demon starved. They were somewhere in between—a sign of a demon that had been separated from its bonded for a long while, its reserves of magic waning but not yet depleted.
“Stop it!” Varen roared, but the command fell like a stone into a bottomless well, swallowed by the chaos.
The demon dipped its head, breath rasping as it summoned the last of its magic. “My only regret,” it said, “is that I won’t be here to watch all of you burn.” Fire erupted from the beast’s mouth, setting its tunic alight in an instant.
It didn’t scream as the fire consumed it. Instead, the envyborn’s laughter was a deep, grating sound that rose above the crackle of the flames. Even as Varen plunged his arm into the inferno, clamping on to the demon’s shoulder in a futile effort to wrench it free, the laughter persisted.
The demon’s fangs snapped shut around Varen’s wrist, piercing hard enough to draw a stream of blood that pooled onto the scorched earth.
He wrenched back with a snarl, his face carved with pain.
But the demon’s bite was unrelenting. It wasn’t until a blade sliced through the air, embedding itself in the demon’s skull with a brilliant flash of silver, that its grip faltered.
The demon’s jaw slackened and Varen staggered backward, blood dripping from his mangled wrist.
“Must you always be so reckless?” Azriel crossed toward them in a blaze of anger, taking a firm hold of his bonded’s injured arm. Varen hissed through gritted teeth, but the angel was no gentler for it. “You grow arrogant in your age.”
“I grow restless,” Varen ground out, his words strained as Azriel began his work. The jagged wounds on his wrist closed under the angel’s touch, fresh skin forming around exposed muscle. He winced, jaw clenched against the pain.
The demon’s laughter had faded, its charred form collapsing into ash, and Azriel reached into the embers to retrieve his dagger. His wings remained tightly furled against his back, held far from any lingering flames.
“You shouldn’t have killed it,” Varen said, his tone sharper than the blade itself.
Azriel fixed him with a scornful glare. “Next time, I’ll be sure to let it kill us both.” He crouched lower, driving the tip of his weapon into the dirt to clean the soiled blade.
“Damn it,” Solange growled, her gaze fixed on the crumpled body within the fire. She kicked a loose stone in frustration. “We almost had this one.”
“We almost have all of them.” Aurelie’s gaze lingered on the demon’s scorched remains. Even now, she could have sworn it wore a mocking smile.
Their situation was not new. No matter how many demons they captured, all ended up dead before they could ever hand over anything useful. Aurelie couldn’t fault them for it. If their roles were reversed, she’d do the same.
Still, the pattern grated.
“It’s fortunate that this day is not without hope.” It was Solange who spoke, her tone only a little mocking. Aurelie flinched as the knight seized her wrist, lifting it high before she could pull away.
The sight caught Varen’s attention immediately, and his frustration seemed to evaporate as if swept away by an unseen wind.
“Aurelie.” His awe struck her like a shuddering chord. “Tell me that’s what I think it is.”
How many years had she dreamed of this moment? Of seeing pride in her father’s eyes? How often had she imagined offering him this solace, proving that she could stand beside him and that he no longer had to bear Rhovar’s burdens alone?
She should tell him the truth, yet as she saw the relief in his eyes, she couldn’t form the words.
And perhaps there was no need to.
She would have killed the demon, she reasoned, if it hadn’t been bonded. She would have killed the first one, too, if not for Azriel’s interference. Surely those fights had to count for something.
Yes. A small lie could be forgiven, so long as she made good on it. The next time a demon set foot in Rhovar, she would kill it and make her amends.
Aurelie squared her shoulders, willing the doubt to drain from her. Willing herself to meet her father’s gaze as she held the tail aloft.
“It’s exactly what you think it is,” she told him. “And there’s much we need to discuss.”