The cathedral crouched under the bruised sky like a guilty thing that knew it should be ashamed. Stained glass threw weird, colored bruises across the snow as we ran up the steps, breath steaming, Dominic's boots slapping beside mine. He'd been moving like a wrecking ball all evening, nothing flashy, just a blunt, reliable force. The steadiness was a small comfort in a world that had just folded in on itself.
Outside, the square smelled of smoke and iron. Dominic hooked a shoulder under a plank of shattered oak and shoved, teeth bared. He was built like a tower, violet eyes as bright as flare gas. When he smiles, it looks like an apology. When he gets serious, he becomes a rock. Today he was granite.
The front door held. For a second I thought we'd ned a battering ram, then Dominic planted both palms on the wood, and the whole thing came down in a clean crash. Splinters flew like pale rain. He laughed once as we went in.
The foyer was a ruin. Candles guttered, pews were overturned, and a carpet of ash lay underfoot. No bodies on the first floor, only the black ashes of a flame painted on the ground. Nothing but silence that felt watched, as if the building itself had gone cold and was holding its breath. Dominic and I moved without talking, muscle memory, and the kind of tight synchronization that builds when eight years of shared fights make you predictable to one another.
"Second floor," I said with my voice low. The stairs were narrower than I remembered from childhood visits against my will. They smelled old and resinous under the smoke. Halfway up, something shifted in the dark, not a sound, but the pressure of it. My skin tightened like wire. Dominic's hand dropped to the metal bat slung at his hip. We both froze.
Two points of blue in the dark. Eyes that were not small points but clean, unblinking moons. The pupils seemed to drink the light around them. They weren't angry. They weren't hungry. They were merely… patient.
When your life has been a succession of fights, you learn how to name danger. This felt named something else: deliberate, refined danger. It had the arrogance of someone who had the time to enjoy cruelty.
A man stepped forward as my vision adjusted. Neck-length hair the color of storm-tide, dark blue that drank the light. Face enough like a man that I almost accepted it. But the hands, when he turned them, trails of faint, blue light traced the air where his fingertips had been. Not a weapon, but a form of spiritual energy.
"Follow me," he said. Voice soft, carefully polite, like a host showing you the best wines. "They're in the room."
We followed because people follow instructions in a place like this until they learn not to. Dominic stayed close. The corridor opened into a chapel, and there they were.
Rows of people, familiar faces, gagged, huddled. Panic stitched the space between them like a second, ragged skin. Children, old men, a woman holding a child so tight it seemed like the child's ribs might give. Eyes of the woman who would present me with a free roll of bread every morning for my services, Eyes that looked too young, too old, too tired.
I stared until something hit me in the back of the skull. Not physical, but an intuition, a cold certainty that the air itself had turned on a hinge. I raised my crowbar behind me just in time, steel shrieking against glowing claws. The impact rattled through my arms. I froze, breath sharp, and turned my head slowly.
"What is this?" I growled. Fury wrapping around my words.
He tilted his head, as if confused by the need to explain anything so obvious. "I'm making them watch," He said primly, like a teacher describing shapes. "Now They're watching."
"Watching what?" My voice was a snarl now. Watching wasn't an answer you'd give while smiling.
He dropped the smile, just enough. Blue light crept along his throat like a pulse. "Life," he replied. Too soft, too clean. "Their endings. The great service that waits for them."
Something cold and heavy fell in my chest like a stone. It was the way his voice didn't shift. The way his eyes did not dilate when he spoke of killing. The way he said service was as if arranging towels in a spa.
"Dominic," I barked. "Get them out. Now."
He moved to the hostages like he could move mountains, trying to cut the bindings, pull at ropes. He was slow, methodical, but as he stepped close, the room changed as if someone exhaled.
There was no sound. No warning. In the blink of an eye, the people in their bindings, with their hands tied and mouths gagged, convulsed violently. Not with a demon's roar, not with the tearing we'd come to expect. They shredded themselves. Blood spattered the wooden beams, painting icons red. Limbs buckled like tight ropes had been cut. The air filled with the sick, tight scent of warm iron and something else, something that made me want to vomit and laugh at the same time.
For a second, my brain refused to accept what it saw. My hands went numb. Dominic froze, a gloveful of the nearest man's remains in his fist. The man's head sagged and slid off Dominic's grasp as if elastic had been snipped.
"No-" I started, but the sound left me hollow. There are things you can't unsee. The way people collapse into themselves. The abruptness. The policy of horror.
"Move!" I screamed. Dominic's jaw clenched, eyes hard. He looked at me like I'd asked him to betray himself.
"This is different," he said through his teeth. "We can still—"
"No." My voice was ice. "You leave. You take whoever's alive and you run. If you don't, he'll kill you the same way."
"You're asking me to be a coward!" Dominic's hands trembled. "I'm not leaving you."
"You will. You will because I told you to. Because this—" I gestured, and the chapel answered with silence "—is not something you fight for clean. I won't let you stand here and die just because you can't let go."
He looked like he wanted to argue until he heard the sound. A faint, delighted cluck from the blue-haired man. Then he made a choice that was bigger than his body. Dominic backed toward the door, dragging three of the least injured with him. He shot me a look that said I will be back and then he was gone. A wedge of violet light from his spirit flared, and the demons outside staggered back from the blast. Sometimes control is simply a promise you keep.
The blue man watched Dominic leave as though reading a book he'd read before. "You humans are so… stubborn," he said. "But then what is stubbornness but a small, brief hope clinging to denial?"
The word demon didn't click until that syllable. It had to be said, stink of demon and all. He had been too tidy, too polite. Demons had a way of being loud; this one was whisper-smooth. Then he said what made the lungs in my chest go thin.
Did you think I was a human?" He tapped a finger to his temple, blue light rippling like a small tide. "No. I am only at the beginning. Horns will come when I have the right number of lives to feed them. Until then, I'll just play."
He said to play like a child.
The catalog of things I would do to that smile scrolled and burned behind my eyes. Sienna's laugh when she'd first found me in a cell, Mary's stubborn eyes, all of it. I had carried those funerals inside me like tinder. Now there was a flint.
He could be weaker without horns, he said. He would be nothing compared to what he would be later, he said. But he hadn't accounted for the way grief has weight and how I blessedly learned to wield it. Rage is not elegant. It is not pretty. But it is necessary.
I moved before the thought finished forming because movement is always less complicated than thought. Electricity was a language I could speak without filters. I poured it into my crowbar until metal bit into the air like a blade, blue sparks hissing, hair on my arm standing like offended teeth. The world funneled down to a single point: him. His hands. His smile. The slick ease of his voice. I launched.
He didn't flinch as I closed the distance. He didn't widen his eyes, didn't make faces to try and disarm me. He simply met me with one of those same calm, blue eyes and the tiniest tilt of the shoulder. My strike hit him and… It didn't break him. It broke the air between us. He moved, not a fast dodge but a careful re-step, and the crowbar glanced, sending me back on my heels. The vibration went up the shaft, through my arms, into my bones.
He tucked the smile away as if folding a napkin. "Interesting," he murmured, voice like velvet on glass. "You're strong."
That small compliment was a blade. It was the kind of thing meant to unbalance. Someone like him, who called gifts interesting, meant to study the heat of a man's anger. He had the cool curiosity of the patient predator, showing the prey its pulse.
I tasted copper in my mouth. My knuckles were white. The crowd of empty pews watched with the inert stillness of something that knew its part.
"You're going to learn how pointless it is," He said softly. "We are the future's measure. We are tidy," He spread his hands like he was presenting a dish. "You should understand that at your age, you who were made from storms."
I could have struck again. I could have screamed. I could have done any number of things. Instead, something deeper and older slid beneath my ribs. Not fear. Not sorrow. Something like a promise made in bones.
"You won't get away with this," I said. My voice was rough as he looked at me, amused.
"I don't get away," he corrected. "I arrive."
The hallway behind us hummed faintly with the muffled sounds of Dominic and the ones he saved running into the white world. For the first time since I'd been a child, the choice was not about taking or giving. It was about what kind of violence I would be willing to answer with.
He read my face with that unhurried smile and then, as if enjoying a new page in a book, said, almost to himself, "I feel you. You are a bright flash. I will enjoy watching your light."
And then I ran again — not to glory, not to be brave, but because there was something left to stop, and some small mercy I could hold onto.
He stood his ground and caught me. On impact, the world telescoped into the metallic howl of force. He staggered, just a breath. That breath was everything. Admission that I hurt him, tiny, temporary displacement… and the smile that followed like a bench being put back in place.
He said it simply while I tasted blood in my teeth, while the blue light stung my skin, and my lungs burned with the exercise of it: "You're strong." I felt every promise I'd ever made — to Sienna, to the nameless dead, to the people Dominic had trudged away with — line up like soldiers behind my ribs. I roared. The crowbar sang again. He met it, and the cathedral filled with the sound of two things trying to prove which of them could break the other first.
If that was all it was — a thing to test strength — then fine. If he was a child learning to play with bones before horns, then he'd learned a dangerous hobby. I had an entire life of brokenness to sharpen into a blade.
He still smiled, and I stil moved. The world narrowed to the flash of a crowbar, the precise cut of his blue claws through the air, the smell of iron. The rest was a promise that hadn't yet decided if it would be mercy or ruin.