“Tragic. It shows.”
I descend the porch steps. The damp grass blackens faintly beneath the heat of my boots, then steams. “Continue.”
“How generous of you.”
“That was not a request.”
“Even better. I do love being commanded before breakfast.”
He retrieves a longer iron rod from the rack and resumes the sequence. The weapon hums as it cuts air. His shoulders remainloose, breath controlled, heartbeat steady enough that a lesser observer might believe nothing unusual is happening.
I open essence sight.
The world alters.
Color drains from the yard first, then returns in truer forms: the iron anchors beneath the soil glow cold blue; the old sealed circle rests like a scar of rose-gold and crimson under the grass; the house behind me is laced with ward-lines, some Corin’s, some mine, some Sable’s newer work, all woven together with the uneasy cooperation of people who have survived too many emergencies in the same room.
Corin’s aura appears last.
It should be silver-white threaded with scholar’s green, sharp along the hands, clever at the brow, a mortal field strengthened by discipline, iron practice, and proximity to dangerous magic. Instead, infernal resonance is interwoven through his blood in fine strands of gold and ember-red. Not coating him. Not clinging like contamination. Integrated at capillary depth, pulsing with every beat of his heart.
My jaw tightens.
Corin strikes the target again. His pulse emits a faint demonic echo.
It is quiet, but unmistakable: a second note beneath the mortal rhythm, like a distant drum answering from underground. Each heartbeat sends it outward through his veins. Not enough to transform him. Not enough to make him demon. Enough to mark him as altered.
I probe gently through essence sight.
Gently, because I am not a fool, despite recent evidence.
My awareness touches the edge of his aura, no deeper than a hand hovering over flame. The resonance recoils for a fraction of a second, then settles. It recognizes me. That is the part I do not like. The infernal strands respond to my essence as kin-adjacent, a borrowed frequency seeded during intense exposure to my healing fire, Sable’s bloodline, and the destruction of Maltherion’s corruption.
The healing.
That is where it happened.
When Corin anchored the ward posts and absorbed the ritual’s structural backlash, the merged field must have used him as a grounding point. His body took in infernal residue at the exact moment the bond stabilized. The later cut did not create the change; it revealed it.
Corin’s next strike falters by half an inch.
He felt the probe.
He turns his head and meets my gaze over his shoulder.
His eyes are human in the visible spectrum, pale and amused and far too clever. In essence sight, gold flickers behind them, faint as fire seen through old glass. He does not look surprised. He does not ask what I am doing. He knows.
The realization lands cold.
Corin has known longer than Sable believes.
Perhaps not the full mechanics. Perhaps not the name of what is happening inside him. But he knows enough to hide it with jokes, posture, and that infuriating habit of making honesty sound gauche.
I let essence sight fade.
The yard returns to ordinary morning: mud, targets, wet wood, frost clinging under the fence, Corin standing with an iron rod in hand and his expression arranged into mild boredom.
“Well?” he asks.
