Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

Walking into the tiny, darkened cottage was maybe the single stupidest thing Petra had ever done.

Once upon a time, she’d taken pride in her self-preservation instincts. She’d survived circumstances that would have landed most people face down in a gutter solely because she kept her eyes open at all times and trusted no one. She didn’t take risks. She didn’t believe kind words unless they were backed up by cold, hard facts.

But that was before Max’s murder.

The Petra that had survived, the one content with a safe life obscured in the hierarchy of the Temple, died the day she received his ashes in the secret post office box they’d set up so many years prior.

Every day since, a little bit more of her caution had been rubbed away by the grit of grief and anger. By the time she stood in the doorway of Shade’s — Silas’s — cottage, she’d been worn down into a new shape, a different sort of woman.

That woman took risks because she had nothing left to lose.

Petra watched Silas stride into the dark entryway of the cottage, his movements almost feline in their grace, and felt the weight of the necklace he’d given her. It rested beneath her shirt, heavier than the one she’d received upon accession from initiate to priestess, and imbued with enough raw, wild power to hum against her flesh.

Silas. His name is Silas. The thought carried more weight than the necklace. More power. More everything.

It was an odd thing, to realize one stood on the precipice of the end of their life. No matter what she chose in that moment, her life as she knew it would end, and she felt the weight of it in the necklace, pulling her down until her spine strained under the force.

The old Petra would have balked at following Silas. She would have rejected the burning coal of attraction smoldering in her stomach. She would have walked away.

But that woman had the luxury of a long, independent life. The new Petra did not.

Her time to make choices had narrowed into days, not months or years or the centuries she should have had. To some degree it hadn’t truly felt real until that moment.

If she didn’t die by the Protector’s hand, then she would become his creature, bound to him by magic and blood. Either way, her world would end.

She’d accepted that weeks ago, but now, here, she realized she’d been given a gift — not a reprieve, not a savior, but a chance to make a choice before all else was stolen from her.

Fuck it, she thought, forcing her feet across the threshold.

She didn’t trust Silas, but it didn’t really matter because something had shifted between them, a great leveling that she felt more than she could truly articulate. Silas hadn’t just given her his name — real or fake, she couldn’t say — but the knowledge that she held power over him.

In a moment when she knew her agency would be snatched from her, it was a heady thing.

So she followed him, risks be damned, and watched him with new eyes as he flicked a light switch on, revealing a quaint little sitting room and corner kitchen. A short hallway led to what she could only presume was a bedroom and bathroom.

“Sit,” he ordered, gesturing to a small couch situated across from an old fashioned iron stove.

It was a habit to argue, as she’d never been one to take direction well, but she was so overwhelmed by the turns things had taken that she shrugged it off. Petra sank onto the couch’s cushions and watched in a daze as the demon knelt to open the stove’s grate. He expertly piled kindling from a basket in the belly of the stove and reached for a box of matches.

“I can do that.”

Petra wasn’t entirely sure why she offered. The season rested on the cusp of summer and though the night had a coastal coolness to it, she wasn’t cold. Even if she was, he had matches to light the thing. It was pure habit, she realized, to help him light a fire.

Silas turned his head to give her one of those knife-sharp smiles. “Does the little goddess wish to bless the flame for me?”

She could do nothing about the flush that infused her cheeks. “Figured you might not want to waste a match is all.”

“By all means.” Silas shifted away from the stove and gestured grandly toward the kindling. “Go ahead, your grace.”

His taunting drew her spine up, but she got up from the couch anyway. Kneeling as close to him as she dared, Petra reached into the stove to press her fingertips against the kindling.

Magic bubbled up from somewhere deep in her body — a molten core of power that was both a gift and a curse from Glory herself. For those like Petra, witches powerful enough to be called gloriana, that same power would eventually eat their soft, human bodies alive without the assistance of a witchbond.

The very same power that manipulated the light around her, refracting it and honing it to suit her will, was the thing both Silas and the Protector craved. She never had ambitions for her abilities, preferring to keep the elemental force of her magic tucked close to her heart. Petra used the gift Glory had given her to bless others, lighting sacred fires, burning marriage sigils into flesh, and offering comfort to worshippers.

This was no sacred fire, but she worked her magic on it all the same. In an instant, her will narrowed the focus of the light around her and within her, refracting it like the lens of a magnifying glass, to set the kindling ablaze.

Petra withdrew her hand slowly. She savored the warmth of the fire like the touch of a loved one. In every lick of flame, she felt the life of the goddess and those who’d basked in her light. Sometimes, she even imagined she could feel Max there, speaking in the crackle of wood and sparks.

“What do you see in there?”

She sat back on her haunches, her attention drawn to the demon who’d sprawled on the floor beside her, one knee drawn up to his chest and his unnerving eyes fixed on her.

Wiping her fingers on her pant leg, she answered, “Glory isn’t just the goddess of sunlight, you know. She’s also the wielder of flame. She exists in all fires.”

Silas quirked a brow. His expression wasn’t just mocking. It was disbelieving. “You don’t honestly believe in all that, do you? You’re too smart for that.”

“Believe in what? The gods?”

“Yes.”

Petra scrutinized him for a long moment. Slowly, she asked, “Do you think I get up in front of hundreds of people every day and lie about what I believe in?”

He didn’t even have the grace to look abashed, but then again, she never really expected him to. “You lie about other things. Why wouldn’t you lie about that?”

Silas had unknowingly touched on a nerve, but Petra did her best to keep her temper in check when she answered him. “I don’t necessarily agree with all the pageantry and ceremony and hierarchy of the Temple, but I believe in what I say.”

“If you don’t like the pageantry and the ego of the Temple, then how come you’re the High Priestess of San Francisco?” That smile played around the corners of his mouth. “I find it hard to believe that someone who doesn’t play by the Temple’s rules would skyrocket to power like you did.”

The hair on the back of Petra’s neck stood on end. “And what would you know about that?”

Silas braced his weight on his hands. The firelight bathed the angles of his face and curve of his horns in gold and orange when he answered, “Good question. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually. See, I took a little trip up the coast to see if I could answer some of the questions I had about you, but the more I dug, the more questions I had.”

She wasn’t sure why she was shocked, but she was. There was nothing for him to find in her past. Max had made sure her records were clean, that there would be no trail back to her parents or organized crime or the children’s home. After that, she’d lived in perfect obscurity, content with a safe life in Max’s shadow in Seattle.

“What do you want to know?” she asked, trying to keep her tone as neutral as possible.

Silas was quiet for a moment. He studied her from under half-lowered lids, before he leaned close enough to brush a lock of hair behind her ear. “Remove the glamour.”

“Can’t you?”

She held her breath as he skated his fingertips over the curve of her ear and side of her jaw. “I would, but you were smart enough to put the sigil in a different place this time.”

It was deeply worrying, the way something warm sparked in her chest at the hint of pride in his voice. Instead of dwelling on that, she ran her fingers through the hair at her temples, pressing the pads against her scalp until she felt the slightly oily texture of the eyeliner she’d used to draw the sigils.

Two were needed to anchor the “mask” in place. Usually she used concealer just below her ears or under her jaw, but with how easily he’d spotted them the first time, she’d taken the extra precaution of drawing tiny ones just inside her hairline. If anyone caught a glimpse of them, they might simply pass them off as freckles, which was helpful, but being in her hairline meant she could easily fidget and wipe them away.

Not that it matters now, she thought, nose tingling with the metallic scent of magic that burst in the air with the release of the spell.

Silas’s smile fell. A new expression tightened his features — a thing of such intense scrutiny, she almost recoiled from it. His thumb skimmed the curve of her jaw again, only stopping when he could pinch her chin and turn her face one way, then the other.

Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears when he murmured, “Ah, there she is.”

And just like that, he was back to lounging, the smile firmly fixed in place as if it had never disappeared. “Now, I want you to tell me everything.”