“I don’t want her to die. I just want Evie to live more. I can call the ghost, but I don’t know how much she’ll change.” His eyes were darting now, no doubt looking for another bottle, and Ilan wasn’t sure which woman Mihály was referring to.

“Csilla thinks you care about her.” Ilan couldn’t keep the disgust out of his voice. Csilla looked at Mihály with eyes luminous as a saint’s image, trusting and sure. “She’s ruining herself to help you, and you don’t even like her.”

“I don’t have to like her; I need her to like me. And I know she’s trying to help herself. She wants a soul. It’s as selfish as anything else.” He moved to a cabinet, looking through leftover bottles for something still drinkable.

It wasn’t. But people often saw others as a reflection of themselves. People often mistook Ilan for callous, not understanding that what he did came from deep care and devotion. This was callous.

“It’ll be fine once she’s Evie, I’m sure I won’t be able to help but love her then. If you want to tell me how awful I am, that’s fine. I tell myself every day.”

The hair on the back of Ilan’s neck stood. “If you just want to whine and self-flagellate you might as well let me grab a horsewhip and do it for you.” If that’s what he wanted absolution from, he wasn’t going to get it. The self-loathing rant made him want to shove Mihály’s face in an icy well, possibly not let him come up, and place Csilla in the nearest cloistered order.

Mihály raised an interested eyebrow, then took another long sip. The darkness was suddenly gone, replaced by troubled confusion. He set the bottle down, though the glass rattled with his unsteady hands, went back to the chair, and put his head in his hands. “I want to be better. But I’m not. And you can’t tell her that.”

It made him itch to get back to the city, and he sincerely regretted not bringing the cart. The entire walk back was probably going to be keeping the damned drunk Izir from tripping into a ditch. If it wouldn’t have made Csilla sad, Ilan would let him break his neck.

What would make Csilla sad shouldn’t matter.

There was sharp electricity in the air as they left, the picks before a storm, gray clouds that promised violent rain and couldn’t be outrun.

Ilan watched the landmarks as they passed as a way to take his mind off the track that he would have to tell Sandor that he was right, Ilan had found nothing that would help the city, and the body itself was another mystery, a black splotch of a dot he couldn’t make connect. So instead he stomped and counted. A fallen tree, roots overturned and tangled, a shattered wagon axle tossed aside, the sealed demon…

What should have been a black mark on the road was only dirt.

“Mihály,” he said quietly, looking at the trampled mud, long ruts that looked like claws digging in the earth. The dog trotted around the furrow with a low whine in his throat, the fur of his ruff prickled. “Tell me I’m misremembering where we are.”

Judging by the Izir’s pale face, he wasn’t. Darkness danced in the air, coming together like a swarm of flies, coming together, then breaking again.

Demons could take temporary physical forms but they couldn't hold those shapes for long. And they enjoyed crawling into human shells, stealing closeness to the splintered brilliance they were denied.

“Mihály,” Ilan hissed. “Are you going to do something about this?” A divine touch should dispel the shadow.

But Mihály was frozen.

Ilan stepped forward, prayers racing through his mind. If the demon had gotten free, it meant the holy magic had weakened even more, here and everywhere. The Servants of the Road were useless without the Church’s power behind their prayers.

He might not even have the strength to seal it back, much less banish it. He touched his mark and reached for faith. Asten guided him, but the distance between dirt and the divine had never felt so far. Ilan stretched his hand out, asking for power he didn’t have.

“Leave,” Ilan said, and the creature tilted its head and clacked its beak, a sharp sound he felt in his skin like a shallow slice. But it slunk towards him, light catching scales in ripples of hide stretched over too many bones and joints, alluringly grotesque. A memory of fishing flashed in his mind, putting a knife to the soft belly of a trout and gutting it to the jawbone.

He had his sword, but this thing couldn’t be fought with blades.

It won’t work. You’re just going to get possessed yourself.

That was the insidious nature of demons, the most corrupted version of everything the divine had tried to create. Just being near them brought every shadow impulse out to smother brilliant purity. Fear and doubt were easy to drag out, but if he gave the creature time, rage and lust and all their kin would surface until he welcomed the shadow and begged it to take him. A demon couldn’t possess the unwilling, but they had so many ways to make you want to open yourself.

“Mihály!”

There was no answer, and he couldn’t risk looking away. He shoved his palm against the creature’s chest, groaning at a sudden paralyzing fear that turned his vision gray. The demon pressed its sharp beak against the soft meat of his cheek, the gentle nuzzle of a lover matched with knives. Ilan gritted his teeth as his body tingled, darkness pulling as the demon tried to fight its way in.

And he prayed harder than he ever had before, begging for brilliance. The muffled sound in his ear became a roar as he spoke in an ancient tongue, a language brought from Asten to command the broken parts of the world and repair the cracks with what caulking faith could do. His fingertips sunk into softening gelatinous flesh, the darkness in the demon’s eye sockets writhing like so many worms. The smell that soaked the air was the cold ashiness of an extinguished hearth. It was a smell of nothingness, of doused potential.

It would be easy to welcome the darkness. All he would have to do was let it claw him enough to offer his own blood and an entryway. Humans had dual souls, and if the demon was horrifying, it was also familiar. Ilan had long starved his shadow soul, but it was gorging itself by the second, and the cold dredge was as comforting as any moment of brilliant worship. Souls found home in both.

It was up to the person to choose. And he would, before his brilliance drowned and left him a puppet to this shadow.

The creature stilled against the fervor in his touch but didn’t dissipate. “Mihály.”

If he died gasping the fucking angel’s name he was going to forgo his blessed eternity to haunt him.

It seemed to shake the other man, and as Ilan’s vision dimmed with shadow-born images, Mihály touched the demon from behind.

That should have been enough. Ilan stumbled backwards, cursing a litany that tasted of sulfur and poison, as the creature turned and took Mihály’s own face in its hands.

It cooed a question in a language that sounded like the scrape of rocks rolling down a dry mountainside, and Mihály’s answer was an avalanche wind. The Izir spat on the ground, and under the touch of the demon, his saliva steamed on the dirt.

“What are you doing?” Ilan asked between fervent prayers. “Get rid of it.”

Unless even Mihály wasn’t holy enough. His blood still had magic, but it was old and weak. He couldn’t even heal someone properly.

A snap of his shoulders, and his posture changed. This time, his prayers were in language Ilan understood but were spoken with a resonance that raised bumps along his skin. The Izir was lit with a glow of divinity, tall and handsome and effortlessly righteous, and in his deepest heart Ilan knew it wasn’t the demon’s presence stirring the jealous hatred he couldn’t smother.

The creature hissed more clacking words as it clawed down Mihály’s leg, ripping fabric and flesh as it disappeared into an inky black. Mihály stamped on the last of it, and it disappeared into a dull mica shimmer, then plain and honest dirt.

“Mihály-”

The Izir fell to his knees and promptly vomited, a yellow-brown stream of bile puddling in the dirt.

Ilan continued to stare at the ground, no trace of darkness remaining. There were similar corrupted creatures bound all over the Union, and not every territory was lucky enough to have an Izir.

Every territory. The most recent body had been found in the former territory seat of Zsig, the same place they stood now.

There had been refugees from Orban, whose seat was just up the river bank from where Lili had been slain.

Whoever was behind this had figured out how to take down power across the entire Union from the city itself. Seven districts, Seven angels, Seven territories. They couldn’t get to Arany’s heart, but they could break off every limb of magic piece by piece until it didn’t matter. The only reason they weren’t seeing the direct result in Silgard was because they were in the eye of the storm.

“We’ve been so stupid.” His fist clenched with a need to punch the ground. The demon had told them exactly what was planned from the first time it’d put two lines on a body. The Shadow was dark, but it still came from Asten. It hadn’t been corrupted enough to lose all connection to the divine order. It only mirrored it.

Far down the road he could hear the steady march and low voices of another caravan, lucky pilgrims who had no idea of the danger they’d just been saved from, or unlucky refugees who knew it all too well.

They deserved a safe place, but Silgard couldn’t offer it. After his report, the Prelate would want to close off the city and lock down the citizens, at least until they confirmed the gate wards held. Better a handful of people sleep rough than risk bringing more demons through.

24

Csilla

“They can’t shut the city.” Csilla’s shoulders shook as she looked at Mihály’s drawn face, Ilan’s stoic one. “People need to come in. They’ll be safer here.”