Epilogue I

“What can I do?” she asked, anxious to help.

“Nothing.” Silas clicked something into place and then turned to adjust a dial on one of the machines. A pale blue liquid began to flow through clear tubing that snaked beneath the bottom edge of the chest piece. “You’ve already done everything I needed you to do, baby. Just sit back and watch.”

Silas stood hunched over the table, his hands moving quickly doing gods’ knew what. He appeared to be securing all Tal’s limbs into their proper places, but there were so many tubes and wires and strange fluids pumping through the machines arrayed around the table that she couldn’t be sure of anything.

“What if it doesn’t work?” It seemed insensitive to ask when Tal was within hearing distance, but Petra had to know.

“Then no harm done. We’ll just try again.”

Petra picked her way around the tables to perch on a chair identical to the one he had in his lab in Tennessee. “You’re sure it won’t hurt him?”

“We’ve tried this several times before and it hasn’t,” Silas replied, gaze flicking her way. “The worst thing that’s ever happened is he had to lay low for a couple weeks and recuperate.” There was a pause, then, begrudgingly, “He says thanks for the concern.”

The lights in the lab were dim, so there were too many dark corners for her to guess where he might be. But she’d gotten pretty good at sensing him in the weeks since she and Silas had officially moved into the mansion, so she felt him there.

Speaking to Silas, she said, “Of course I’m concerned. He’s your brother. That means he’s mine, too.”

Silas stilled. He turned his head ever-so-slightly to one side, to a corner of the room that was just a fraction darker than the rest, and murmured, “I know.”

Petra strained to make out Tal’s form in the shadows but couldn’t quite manage it. “What’d he say?”

He cast her a lingering glance over his shoulder. “That we got lucky.”

A lump formed in her throat. “Yeah, well, me too.”

She’d never had a brother before, but no one had ever said she struggled to adapt to new circumstances. Petra didn’t take any kind of family for granted, especially now, after everything. If he was Silas’s brother, then he belonged to her, too, and she was nothing if not intensely loyal to her people.

And whether or not he admitted it, Petra knew it was important that his brother got to stand with him at their wedding.

He didn’t have very many requests, since demons didn’t put much stock in something as ephemeral as vows, but when they discussed eloping, he’d hesitated. Tal really had waited a long time to get his body back, Silas told her, and it seemed a little rude to not invite him to the wedding.

It was so casual, almost flippant, that she was pretty sure he believed he’d gotten away with admitting he cared. Of course he hadn’t, because Silas was about as subtle as a bull in a china shop. She’d seen right through the act, and moreover, she agreed with him.

They couldn’t get married without his brother there to witness it — in the flesh, such as it was.

Her mate’s focus was perfect, his every movement fluid and precisely calculated as he buzzed around the table. Magic gradually built in the air as he worked. Petra’s breathing deepened, her body falling into a meditative state as Silas channeled more and more of her power into his task.

She watched from under heavy-lidded eyes as he shut off the machines one by one. It was as if the air pressure in the room had increased, which simultaneously made her drowsy and invigorated as the sense that something was happening built and built.

Gradually, Silas cleared away everything except for the body on the table. It was whole now, its limbs connected in all the ways they should be, but it was lifeless, limp like the body of a dead giant.

Empty eyes stared at the ceiling, waiting.

The lights began to flicker, first intermittently, then with increasing frequency until, one by one, they began to go out. For just a moment she was taken back to the night she met Silas in The Broken Tooth, when she glimpsed him for the first time in the shadows between flickering lights. She’d been terrified then, but now his appearance in the darkness only filled her with relief.

“Everything is gonna be okay,” she whispered to herself and to the men in the room, too, even if they were too distracted to hear it. She willed it, and she sent that will outward, into Glory’s radiant ear.

When the magic in the air grew almost too thick to breathe comfortably, Silas, wreathed in darkness, circled around the table to stand by the head. He placed his palms down on either side of it and announced, “Let’s do this, Tal.”

It was too dark to see much of anything besides Silas’s pale skin and glowing eyes. Not that it would’ve helped her understand what was going on any better if she could see. He’d given her the basics of how it would work and the warding techniques he’d modified to bind Tal to the biomechanical marvel on the table, but most of it was too high level for her.

For all intents and purposes, he’d explained, it was a real body. It functioned with an artificial circulatory system, senses, and was, for better and worse, mortal. When Tal bound himself to it, Silas was nearly certain that he would be tying himself to the machine’s lifetime. When the magic that powered it at last guttered out, so too would he. After that, they really weren’t sure what would happen.

Despite its apparent fragility, Petra was astonished at what her mate had accomplished, and deeply humbled that she’d had some small part in seeing it come to fruition.

Sigils, unseen until that moment, blazed to life all around the table and bathed the body in a kaleidoscope of colors.

She had no doubt that they would have a fight on their hands when the truth of what Tal was came to light. People would be scared. Some would think it was blasphemous, a crime against the gods, necromancy, or a slap in the face of the natural order of things.

But at that moment, when her magic blazed a path from sigils to shadow to body, she knew it was a miracle. It was magic that flowed through the grooves and joints of Tal’s new form. If there was such a thing as the divine, Petra could find no better proof of it than that.

Glory was the goddess of warmth and magic and sunlight, but she was the goddess of wildfires and wrath and rebirth, too. And when the empty eye sockets began to glow, something passed over the back of her neck — a warm, tender touch from a hand unseen.

There was one last flare, a controlled explosion of magic so intense Petra had to close her eyes and turn her head away instinctively.

Then it was over. Her ears rang. The stench of magic and blood and something like ozone permeated every breath.

When the spots cleared from her vision, Petra turned her head just in time to see Silas stagger away from the table. She rushed to him, heart pounding, and caught his arm before he stumbled into one of the machines. “Are you okay?”

Silas shook his head hard and blinked several times. The expression on his face was slack-jawed with awe. “Holy shit.”

Petra’s hands fluttered around him uselessly. “Demon, are you okay? What’s wrong? Did you get hurt?”

“I’m fine.” A laugh exploded out of him. It had an edge to it, the kind of laugh one might let out after being pulled out of the way of a moving vehicle. Focusing on her, he gasped, “Good gods, Petra. Is that what it’s like for you all the time?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Like you’ve got a supernova inside you. Like it could burn you alive.”

Petra gave him a questioning look. “Isn’t that what everyone’s magic feels like?”

Silas stared at her like she’d grown a second head. “Having all that inside of you with nowhere to go— No wonder witches blow up. Using my magic isn’t like that. I thought my cells were roasting one by one. I never want to try that again. As soon as the m-generator is running, we’re calling in that favor.”

“Well,” she replied, “I don’t think blow up is really accurate. And you are half demon, so?—”

A metallic clunk interrupted her. Petra and Silas shared a wide-eyed glance for the span of a heartbeat before they both whirled around to stare at the table.

At some point the lights had come back on. They cast a soft yellow glow over the enormous form sitting up on the table. Two huge hands curled over the edges, one finger at a time, almost like he was practicing his grip.

Tal sat very still. There were no tiny motions that gave the subconscious indication of life — no movement of the chest with each breath, no twitching fingers, no blinking. He simply sat there, eyes blazing with an ever-shifting range of colored light, until he slowly, so very slowly, turned his head to peer at them.

“He— llo,” he whispered, synthetic lips forming the word with some difficulty.

Petra could scarcely breathe, but she still somehow whispered, “It worked. It really worked.”

Silas shook himself and broke away from her. “Everything normal?” he demanded, voice pitched a little higher than usual, as he came to a stop at Tal’s side. Silas’s gaze swept over his brother’s huge body, assessing his work like he hadn’t just completely shattered the wall between life and death. “Can you move everything? How’s the temperature?”

He can feel temperature? Petra’s mind spun. She knew he’d said something about a synthetic nervous system and skin, but…

“It’s… wa-rm,” Tal replied. His voice was deep, kind of throaty in a way that reminded her of crooners from the 1950s. She wondered if Silas had made that, too, or if that was something Tal had brought with him. Petra couldn’t even begin to guess how that would work.

The wraith slowly moved his hands away from the edges of the table and held them up to his eyes. Flexing his fingers in and out of fists, he added, “Hands work. Toes… also.”

“Can you stand?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Let’s find out.” Silas held out his hand to his brother. Tal looked at it for a long time before he tentatively raised his own and clasped Silas’s forearm.

Petra blinked back a wave of intense emotion as she watched her mate help Tal off the table. He didn’t rush him or get impatient when the wraith took a moment to consider every small movement required. And when Tal’s huge feet touched the ground, Silas held him steady, his own knees locked to take his brother’s weight when at first his knees couldn’t hold him.

The white sheet that had covered his groin slid away. Petra was glad neither men paid attention to her when she found herself balking at what was revealed. Hastily averting her gaze, she decided it wasn’t appropriate to ask questions like who decided to make it that big and did Silas have to hand-sculpt that?

Really, she shouldn’t have been surprised that he was fully equipped. Silas told her that Tal wanted a body so badly because he wanted a second chance at finding a mate and having a family, so it stood to reason that he’d want the whole kit and caboodle.

Petra thought she could be forgiven, however, since she never could’ve expected the caboodle to be the size of a wiffle ball bat.

“How’s your balance?” Silas asked, thankfully derailing her train of thought safely away from his brother’s genitals.

Tal shifted slightly, testing it, before he answered, “Good.”

“Test your resistance.” Silas patted his chest. “Push.”

He’d seemed large on the table, but standing, Tal was a behemoth. He dwarfed even Silas, who was a large man in his own right. When Tal pressed his palms against Silas’s chest and pushed, her mate staggered back sharply before he caught himself. Her mate looked incredibly pleased when he declared, “You almost knocked me flat on my ass!”

Petra had no idea how Silas had managed to make Tal’s face so human and inhuman at the same time, but he had. At rest, his features were a little too bold, his glowing eyes uncanny, but when he smiled, it was real.

Tal shook out his arms and began to move from foot to foot, obviously testing his limbs. He rolled his shoulders and paced a few steps. Each new movement seemed to bolster his confidence. Every stride was a little more graceful. In a matter of minutes, with a bit more testing and prodding from Silas, Tal moved naturally, with a straight spine and easy balance. Speech came easier, too.

“How do you feel?” Silas asked after about an hour of experimentation.

Tal ran his palms over his short horns and answered, “Good. Very good.”

“Do you feel strong? Stable?”

“I feel like I could… take on Tem-pest himself.”

Silas uncrossed his arms. A warning bell rang in her mind when he cocked an eyebrow and asked, “You strong enough to take a hit?”

Tal paused for a beat before he gravely answered, “Yes.”

Those bells rang even louder. Speaking up for the first time since Tal sat up, Petra asked, “Silas, why are you asking him?—”

Before she’d even finished the sentence, Silas’s fist shot out to clock Tal clear across his cheek. His head whipped to the side, but he didn’t rock backward like a normal person might have. He merely shook his head and lifted a hand to rub his jaw.

Aghast, Petra hurried over to get between them. Pushing on Silas’s shoulders, she demanded, “What was that for? He’s barely been here an hour!” Craning her neck to peek at Tal over her shoulder, she asked, “Are you okay?”

“He knows he earned that,” Silas assured her with a roll of his eyes.

“For what?”

“For letting you get hurt,” Tal answered, like it should have been obvious. He didn’t even sound upset that Silas had punched him as hard as he could. And she knew he had, because the knuckles of his right hand were busted and bleeding. “You were my responsibility and I failed. This makes things square.”

“He’s lucky I don’t want to ruin all my hard work,” Silas muttered, drawing her closer with a hand on her waist, “or else I’d take a crowbar to one of his new knees.”

“Silas!”

“What? I’m not gonna.”

Petra wiggled out of his hold to stand back a bit, allowing her to glare at them both. “I can’t believe I have to say this, but you should not settle scores with your loved ones with violence.”

In any other circumstance, it would have been cute how they wore identical expressions of confusion.

“But it’s more efficient,” Tal argued.

“You literally just got a body back and he welcomed you with a punch to the face,” she replied, exasperated.

He nodded. “If I were in his… place, I would have done wo-rse.”

Great, she thought, pinching the bridge of her nose, there are two of them now.

“Tal, come here.”

He stepped closer cautiously, and when she waved him down, he hunched his massive shoulders until they were at eye-level. Ignoring Silas’s rumbling growl, she clasped Tal’s cool cheeks. The texture and give of his skin was almost normal. There was even a subtle heat to him that felt very human. The only thing that her brain couldn’t account for was the layer of metal just beneath the soft flesh, and the smoothness of the skin that was normally broken up by tiny, nearly invisible hairs.

“There’s a blessing we give to new babies. Do you know it?” she asked, staring into his glowing eyes. Up close, she was astonished to realize that they gave off a very faint kind of exhaust, like the magic that fueled him burned up the air when it escaped his eye sockets.

Tal gave a tiny nod of his head.

“You’re not a baby, but I think it’s still appropriate. Since Silas clearly has no idea how to welcome you back to corporeality, I’d like to bless you, if you’re comfortable with that.”

After a beat, he answered, “I would… be honored. Th-ank you.”

Petra touched their foreheads together and closed her eyes. Magic tingled in her palms, warm and gentle, when she whispered, “The world was made in love and so were you. May the first siblings send you down a safe path. May Burden hold you. May Glory warm you. May Blight guide you. May Craft hear you. May Grim have mercy on you.”

She pressed a kiss to his brow. “Welcome to the light, brother.”