Then a howl rips through our mourning. From the dark, the demon warrior who escaped us on the stairs steps into the candlelight, blade raised high and angled over its shoulder.
Daed shoves me aside, lifting his arm just as the sword comes down. The blade slams into his gauntlet, metal screaming, and though his armor takes most of the blow, a bright line of blood opens along his forearm.
Daed growls, clamps onto the creature’s wrist and boots it in the gut until it folds. It spits and scrambles, refusing to be finished. Grief hollows me out, and rage fills the space. I want… no, Ineedto tear this thing apart for what it took. The thought is a small, terrible pleasure that steels my hands.
I curl my fingers. Green flame coils in my palm, hot with promise.
The demon lunges again, but no void-beast can stand against parents who have lost their child. Daed drives it back, again and again, pounding it down, forcing it up, his movements almost cruel with restraint. I have no patience for restraint. I want it burned. I want it to feel the same emptiness it left in me.
Daed takes the advantage once more, landing another hard blow that sends the demon reeling backwards. Its sword drops, clanging across the ground. The creature reachesblindly for its blade, but Daed’s foot pins it. He yanks the weapon free, spins it, and levels the point, but before he can strike, I cry out.
“Husband.”
The sword halts mid-arc. Daed’s arms lock, then slacken.
“Look.” I point. There’s a smear of blood across the stone, a thin line that leaks from the demon.
But it is not black. This blood is red. Bright. Ordinary.
Daed blinks. His arms lower and the sword tip scrapes the stone.
I step forward, and the demon drags itself on blood-slick elbows, desperate to get away. I don’t let it. I seize its arm, fingers digging in. It cries out, but the sound is wrong. Not the guttural, hollow snarl from before, but something thinner, frayed.
It fights, and so do I. I wrench hard, refusing to release, until a gauntlet slips free. A ribbon lies beneath, worn and frayed, its color nearly lost to time and filth, but my heart knows it instantly.
Once, it was red.
“Where did you get this?” I breathe, and the room narrows to those words.
The demon does not answer. It still tries to crawl away. It lashes out, boots my abdomen, and I stagger back, breath punched from me, enough time for it to scramble upright and make its escape.
“Daed, stop it!” I scream.
He does. Smoke explodes from him in a shockwave that knocks the creature flat onto its belly, a black tendril lashes out and tangles its leg, dragging it back. It thrashes, fists battering stone, feet kicking blindly, but the magic holds. The howl cuts the air like a knife, but it changes now. Less a triumphant roar than the panic of something caught.
“Hold it,” I tell him. Daed does as I ask, gripping the thing by the shoulders and holding so I can see.
Up close, it is smaller, no longer the hulking nightmare we fought on the temple stairs, its edges blunted as if its terror is being peeled away. The smoke that once cloaked it is gone, whatever ferocity fed it has dwindled. It stands barely taller than me, not much broader. The thing that frightened me two breaths ago is nowhere to be seen.
My hand trembles when I reach for its helm. Behind that hideous mask lie the answers I have been searching for. How my daughter died. What hands took her. What shape her end wore.
I need that truth even if it will splinter the last of me.
I pull.
The mask comes away with a wet, soft sound. I lose my grip, and it falls from my fingers and rolls across the stone, the echo like a bell tolling inside my chest.
This is not a demon. Not at all.
Soft brown skin. Dark curls escaping a careless braid. Pointed ears. Eyes of the storm… just like her father.
“Estra…” The name slips out of me before reason can catch it. The sound is lost to the temple, but it lands in the air between us. “It…it can’t be…”
Daed goes still at the look on my face, at the way bewilderment and a terrible hope war there.
“What is it?” he asks, because he hasn’t seen what I have.
“How?” I murmur. “You were only a baby. It’s been weeks, weeks for us, not years…” My voice fractures. I look to Daed and know he reads every question on my face.
