Hazel
Blood didn't burn like fire did, but it came close enough.
Hazel pressed her palm against the gash in her side and kept running, boots skidding on stone slick with rain and worse things than rain. Behind her, the citadel was screaming — not metaphorically. Towers actually screamed when warded stone shattered, a long keening note that vibrated up through her teeth.
She had eleven men when she crossed into the Ashfall Court three nights ago. She had none now.
"Move," she hissed at herself, because there was no one left to say it for her. Talia would have said it. Talia, who'd gone down covering the east passage with a hex-blade through her throat, still trying to grin around it. 'Go, princess. Go.'
Hazel went.
The mission had been simple, on paper. Paper was a liar. Slip into the Ashfall stronghold, retrieve the sealed relic from the Lord's private vault, vanish before dawn. Her father — the King, she made herself think it that way now, cold and titled, because 'Papa' belonged to a version of her life that had stopped being true the moment he'd signed the order — had sworn the wards would be down for exactly one hour.
The wards had never been down. They'd been waiting.
She understood, somewhere around the second ambush, watching her men get cut apart by soldiers who'd clearly known the exact hour and exact entrance, that this had never been a mission. It had been a delivery. 'Here are eleven demons and one half-blood embarrassment. Do with them what you like.'
A bolt of black flame screamed past her ear and exhausted itself against the wall in a spray of sparks. Hazel didn't look back. Looking back was how Marek had lost his head, literally, three minutes ago.
The forest opened up ahead, the Ashfall border a black smear of trees against a sky the color of a healing bruise. If she made the tree line, she had a chance. If she made the river past it, she had slightly better than a chance.
She didn't make either.
Something vast and silent dropped out of the dark and the ground simply wasn't where she expected it to be anymore.
---
She came up swinging, which was instinct, and met empty air, which was humiliating.
"If you'd connected," said a voice, low and unbothered, like he had all the time in the world and several lifetimes of patience to spend on her specifically, "I might almost have been impressed."
Hazel scrambled back against a tree trunk, dagger up, breath sawing in and out of a chest that didn't seem to want to cooperate anymore. Blood loss, probably. Or him.
Likely both.
He stood in the clearing like he'd grown there. Black hair, wet from the storm, hanging past his shoulders in a way that should have looked careless and instead looked deliberate, like even his hair had been informed of its role in the composition. Purple eyes caught what little light there was and did something with it she didn't have a word for — not glowing exactly, more like the color itself was a held breath.
Behind him, barely visible at the clearing's edge, something huge shifted in the dark. Wings. A wrongness in the shape of the trees that resolved, when she made herself look, into scaled black hide and one slitted amethyst eye watching her with the patient interest of something deciding whether she was a meal or a curiosity.
"Damon," she said. Not a question. Everyone in the Nine Courts knew the shape of that name even if half of them pretended they didn't — Lucifer's half-human son, the one nobody was supposed to say out loud at court dinners, the one who'd inherited his father's reputation and somehow made it worse by being quieter about it.
"You know my name. I find I don't know yours." He tilted his head, slow, assessing, the way a man might look at a blade he was deciding whether to pick up. "Though I know what you are. Half-blood. Demon king's daughter, unless I miss my guess — and I rarely do." His gaze dropped, briefly, to the blood soaking through her fingers at her side, then back to her face, giving away nothing about what he thought of it. "Sent to die quietly somewhere your father wouldn't have to watch."
"That's not—" The denial died in her throat, because it was, wasn't it. Exactly that.
"Don't," he said, almost gently, which was worse than if he'd been cruel about it. "I can smell a betrayal from a mile off. It has a very particular rot to it. Yours is fresh."
Hazel's grip tightened on the dagger. Useless thing, against him — she knew that the way she knew her own name, some bone-deep animal certainty — but her hand wasn't interested in her assessment of the odds. "If you're going to kill me, get on with it. I've had a long night."
Something flickered across his face. Not quite a smile. The ancestor of one, maybe, several generations removed.
"I'm not going to kill you."
"Comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be." He crouched, unhurried, bringing those eyes level with hers, and she hated — hated— that some traitorous animal part of her chest eased at the proximity instead of recoiling from it. Like something in her had been waiting for this specific stranger to crouch in front of her in the rain. "But you're bleeding out in my territory, half-blood, hunted by your own father's men, with nowhere to run and nothing left to fight with. So let's not pretend you're in a position to set terms."
"Then what position am I in?"
"The interesting one." He held out a hand — not to help her up, she realized, but simply offering it, patient, like he could wait until the stars burned out for her to decide. "You strike a deal with me. Your loyalty, your obedience, whatever's left of your pride — in exchange for staying alive long enough to matter again. I have a use for what's under all that blood, Princess. I'd rather not let it go to waste."
Her vision was starting to gray at the edges. Whatever was in that gash wasn't healing the way demon wounds should, which meant whatever blade had made it had been blessed, or worse, and meant she had perhaps minutes before terms became academic.
"Why would the Devil's son want anything from me?"
His mouth curved, finally, fully — and it was not a kind expression, not exactly, but it wasn't nothing either. It was a man recognizing something he hadn't expected to find tonight.
"Because you're not just a half-blood, sweetheart." His hand stayed extended, steady, the firelight from somewhere behind her catching the gold in his eyes for just a moment before the purple swallowed it again. "You're a question I've been waiting a very long time to ask."
The world tilted. She took his hand because the alternative was the ground, and because — some small, exhausted, traitor voice in her noted — some part of her had wanted to from the second he'd crouched close enough to touch.
Her fingers closed around his. Heat shot up her arm like she'd grabbed a coal, except it didn't hurt. It recognized her. Behind her closed eyes, something old and golden stirred awake for the first time in longer than she had years to count, and for one disorienting heartbeat she swore she heard a voice that wasn't her own whisper a name that wasn't Hazel.
Then the dark took her, and she didn't hear anything at all.
---
Damon
She went limp before he finished the sentence, which Damon supposed was fair. Most people didn't manage a witty rejoinder while bleeding out from a blessed-iron wound.
He caught her before she hit the ground — easily, the way he caught most things that fell near him, a reflex left over from a war he didn't remember fighting — and the moment her skin met his palm, something in his chest lurched.
Not metaphor. Lurched, like a missed stair. Like his body had been walking toward this exact collision his entire life and had only just now noticed the ground.
He went very still.
Behind him, Mordrek shifted his weight, claws gouging fresh furrows into wet earth, and exhaled a low rumble of smoke that meant well, that's new. The dragon had centuries on Damon and had learned to read him in ways Damon hadn't fully forgiven him for.
"Don't," Damon said, without turning around.
I said nothing, Mordrek replied, the words arriving the way they always did, directly into the space behind his thoughts rather than through any ear. Though you're holding her like she might combust.
"She might."
Interesting.
"Don't," Damon said again, sharper.
He looked down at her instead of answering the thing curling low and unfamiliar in his chest. Blood-streaked, soaked through, hair plastered dark gold to her throat, and even unconscious her jaw was set like she intended to keep arguing the second she woke. There was a brand on the back of her hand he didn't recognize — old work, old enough that the skin around it had given up trying to heal smooth, a mark shaped like nothing he'd ever cataloged in four centuries of cataloging things.
It was warm. Warmer than the rest of her, warmer than blood loss and shock should have left any part of a dying girl. He felt that warmth in his own palm like an answer to a question he hadn't known he'd been asking his whole life.
Curse-bound and you're already certain, Mordrek observed. You haven't even learned her name.
"I'm not certain of anything."
Liar. The dragon's eye, slitted and ancient, found him in the dark with something that might have been pity, on a creature that large, or might have been amusement; with Mordrek it was rarely possible to tell the two apart. You went still the moment you touched her. I've watched you for three hundred years, hatchling. You don't go still.
He didn't have an answer for that, which irritated him more than the wound on her side did, more than the eleven dead demons he'd have to explain to nobody because nobody who mattered would ask, more than the King's spies he could already feel withdrawing into the tree line, satisfied their work tonight had been witnessed by exactly the right person.
The King wanted this seen, Mordrek said, following the thought without being invited, which was the dragon's most consistent and least endearing trait. He wanted you to find her like this. Question is why.
"I know why." Damon's jaw tightened. The same reason the man always did anything — to put a knife somewhere it would do the most damage later, and call the throw an accident. "He wants her somewhere he can find her again when it's convenient. And he's betting I'll keep her too well-guarded to need watching myself."
Will you?
Damon looked down at her face — slack now, unguarded in a way he suspected she'd hate him for witnessing — and felt that lurch again, lower this time, more dangerous, an old and patient ache finding, after centuries of silence, something shaped enough like home to answer to.
"I haven't decided what I'll do with her yet," he said, which was not the same as no, and they both knew it.
He gathered her up properly, one arm beneath her knees, the brand on her hand pressed flush against his collarbone where his own skin still carried — faint, raised, easy to forget about until moments like this — the twin scar he'd had since before he could remember and had never once been able to explain.
The two marks sat warm against each other in the rain. Almost, if he let himself imagine it, like recognition.
A mate bond, Mordrek said, quiet now, none of the earlier needling in it. After all this time.
"I don't believe in fate," Damon said, and started walking, the girl who was either a weapon or a question or both cradled against a chest that had not, in four hundred years, ached like this for anything.
No, the dragon agreed, unfolding wings the color of a closing door and falling into step beside him through the dark. But fate, hatchling, has never required your belief to be true.