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Oh… SHIT!
“By the time I realized what I was doing, it was too late. The binding shattered, and everything Malgrave had was already sent into Hell…” She looks toward the chasm again, and this time I see the tears gathering in her eyes. “It all came loose.”
Her voice drops to barely anything. “I gave it to him.”
No. I shake my head immediately.
Echo tries to pull away, but I don’t let her. “Carnage, I gave the fucking Devil your power.”
There it is.
Not fear of him.
Not fear of what’s waiting in Hell.
She thinks this is her fault.
I take her face in both hands, force her eyes up to mine, and shake my head slow enough that there’s no mistaking it. You didn’t do a single fucking thing wrong here. I yell in my head, hoping she can understand what I am saying. He did.
Because it’s true.
He turned Malgrave into a leash, turned Thessaly into a courier who never understood what she was carrying. He built an entire war around the Conclave’s obsession with what Echo’s throat can do, positioned every piece for months, maybe years, until she stood in exactly the right spot and sang exactly the right note without a single idea she was finishing his ritual for him.
I am not letting her carry his choices home in her chest like they’re hers to keep.
Behind us, the Devil finally speaks again, and there’s no reason left for him to pretend otherwise. “You and the angel built something remarkable.” His gaze slides toward the chasm, almost fond. “Hellfire that carries Divine Grace without tearing itself apart. Do you have any idea how many centuries something like that was supposed to be impossible?”
I do now. I have it in my chest.
Or I did.
“And now I have it…” he continues, unbothered, “… sitting exactly where I want it. Which is a problem for you, because it didn’t come from a vessel I can discard when I’m finished.” His red eyes come back to me, and something almost like delight moves through them. “It came from you. Which means as long as you’re breathing and that fusion holds… I can reach for it, and use it whenever I please.”
Sentinel’s voice comes from beside me, low and furious. “You’re describing mass destruction at your fingertips whenever it suits you.”
“I’m describing convenience,” the Devil says. “Why walk the earth myself when I can simply reach down and take a city with me instead? Volcanoes, fault lines, all the natural disasters your species spent thousands of years blaming on angry gods, when really it was just something like this, slipping loose for one terrible moment in time. Humans will call it an ‘act of God,’ isn’t that the most ironic thing of all?”
Nobody in the chamber says anything, because there’s nothing to say to that. We didn’t just lose a fight. We handed him a weapon he never has to put down.
The Devil’s eyes settle on me.
That faint smile comes back.
He lifts one hand between us, turns it palm-up, and slowly curls his fingers.
The chasm detonates, and fire surges from somewhere deep below, bright enough to turn the chamber red as the lava around its edges bubbles violently. Beneath the roar of it, something else rises.
Something I fucking know.
My hellfire.
And Sentinel’s Grace burns through the middle of it.
The Devil closes his fist, and agony detonates through my chest.
My knee slams into the stone before I even know I’m falling. Hellfire rips beneath my skin, every vein lighting up as something hooks into the hollow space where my roar used to live and pulls.
My hand hits the floor.
