Cassiel sighs. “All right,” he says finally. “I last longer than any of you in a different sense. My quickness isn’t only muscles. My reactions are… instantaneous. There is a speed to me that feels like unharnessed light.” He spreads his hands a little as if to prove it. “My wings are not just for flying. The tips are sharpened. They can slice. They can slash. I can move through the battlefield in ways your eyes cannot track.”
He hesitates, and when he speaks again I hear the weight beneath his words. “There is also what remains of where I came from. I can call light. Not the small, pretty sort. Holy fire. Purifying, yes, but also a weapon. I rarely use it. Not because I am shy but because it changes the landscape of whatever it touches.”
I look at him like I am seeing him fully for the first time, the pieces all rearranged. “Show me,” I say before I can think better of it.
Cassiel sits up carefully, as if the motion costs him. He draws something in the air with a fingertip. The courtyard answers, the small sparks along the stone leaping up to meet his intent. Heat gathers in his palms and then it spills, a tongue of white-silver that eats the air between us and sends a line of brightness rushing out into the courtyard. For a breath the shadows flatten against it and then curl again, and smoke rings bloom on the edges of the flame like bruises.
I inhale. “That’s—” The word catches in my throat.
“Holy fire,” Cassiel says softly. He looks at me like I am a confession. “It’s not all heaven and hymns. It is a harsh thing. It burns clean and leaves a wound that means something afterward.”
I look at Deimos, then at Bastion, then at Cassiel. “So what about Zepharion? Should I be scared of him? Should we run, find hiding places, put traps on the gates?”
Deimos’s fingers find mine and hold them. The bond flashes: a tug of mutual heat and a thousand small promises. “No,” he says, but his smile is sharp enough to cut. “You should not be the one who is scared. He should be.”
His declaration makes a different kind of fear. It is not comfort because I am safe. It is comfort because Deimos meant to stand in the line between me and whatever fury is coming. “How?” I ask. The question is childish and fierce both. “What can we do?”
He shrugs one shoulder, deceptively casual. “Everything we can do tonight, but in a larger, meaner way. We can find names. We can hold a line. Our bond makes us both stronger. I can go into a mind that is simple enough and read the map like a book.”
I stare at him for a long beat, then ask the question that’s been curling under my skin. “You can go into people’s heads? Could you ever—go into mine?”
Deimos turns his head slowly, a little surprised, like I’ve asked for something dangerous and lovely at once. “I tried once,” he admits, his voice low. “In the confessional. I tried to slip into your head and you shut the door on me without even knowing.”
My mouth goes dry. “You tried?” The word feels small and enormous. “And I—blocked you?”
He gives a slow, impressed smile. “You blocked me like an iron shutter. It hurt. Not many do that naturally.”
My heartbeat skitters. “Could I learn to enter minds?”
“Yes.” He smiles, a small, soft thing that belongs only to me. “If you want, I’ll teach you how to slip a finger where a thought lives. But it is not clean. It gets messy. You could break something in yourself by learning to open other people.”
I chew on the warning, tasting honey and iron. “And the rest? The seduction, the kneeling, the—” I spread my hands and find no shame in the memory. “Was that just me or did I really do something to you all?”
Deimos presses his forehead to mine, warm and smug. “It was you. Your pull is older than your body. Succubi do not merely want. They take truths and shape them. You make men want in a way that is… deep. We can both shift mood, calm a beast, steady a soldier’s hand. But it is temporary. Think of it like a predator’s breath on prey. It steadies. It sharpens. It does not rewrite a man’s story.”
I stare at the sky until the colors blur into memory. In the distance the petals keep their slow, private dances. I taste ash and Deimos and victory. My hand tightens on his. “Teach me everything,” I say.
He laughs. “Pick what you want first.”
The sky presses down, closer now, as if the world is leaning in to hear our plan.
“Promise me one thing,” I say. “If Zepharion comes, don’t let him find me alone.”
Deimos slides an arm around my waist and pulls me close until my cheek rests against the hollow of his throat. The bond thrums like a drum under his skin, steady and huge. “I promise,” he says. “I will make him afraid of the thing he thinks he owns.”
Even in the soft dark of exhaustion, his voice is a weapon I like the feel of. I close my eyes. The courtyard hums and the sky remembers its colors. We lie there, three demons and a girl who wants to be more, and the night keeps its counsel. For a while, that will have to be enough.
FORTY-SIX
By the time we step back through the portal and into the human world, my body feels like a history lesson in bruises. The courtyard of Hell still trembles under the prints of our bodies in memory. Here, in the apartment, reality settles on me like a second skin: heavier, colder, threaded with obligations I have been pretending not to hear.
I drop onto the couch and fumble for my phone where I left it. The screen blinks awake and immediately vibrates like a trapped animal in my palm. Calls, missed messages, voicemails stacked like small accusations. My mother’s name is first. Then my father’s. The words jumble as I thumb through them.
Mom
Lillien, where are you? Call me.
We’re worried sick. Are you safe? Are you hurt?
