Silariathas. Horns curled from his scalp, white as porcelain, their spirals ending in wicked points. The angles of his face had grown unsettling and cruel, their delicate beauty filed to inhuman sharpness. His ears were pointed; his claws had lengthened, thin and razor sharp.
He did not seem to have noticed the Archon. He was staring down at Nathaniel, black-eyed and starving. “You dare address me so?” he hissed. With a contemptuous jerk of his arm, he flung the Archon’s hand away. Then he rounded on Nathaniel, bending over him. He was shaking; his hair trembled. He said in a horrible rasping whisper, “Are you aware of what I am—what I will do to your world, as its people flee screaming across the broken earth?”
Nathaniel didn’t look afraid. Perhaps he was too insensible to feel fear, which would explain what he did next: he took Silariathas’s clawed hand and stroked it clumsily, as though Silariathas were the one in need of comfort, in all his immortal glory, and not the other way around. “It’s all right, Silas,” he said.
“Do not speak to me, insect,” Silariathas spat, wrenching free of Nathaniel’s touch. His fingers snapped around Nathaniel’s neck, his claws pricking the tender skin as they squeezed. When a bead of blood appeared, he was the one who reacted, not Nathaniel—a shudder ran through him, all the way down his spine. Nathaniel weakly attempted a smile.
“If you kill me, it’s all right.”
Silariathas froze. His fingers slackened. “You are a fool,” he grated, through lips that barely moved.
Nathaniel didn’t seem to have heard. He was losing consciousness too rapidly. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “I know it hurts. I know.” And as he slipped away, he mumbled, “I forgive you.”
The silence afterward was so profound that Elisabeth heard nothing but the silvery lament of the grimoires, rising above them in streams. Even the Archon had gone still; it gazed down, head tilted, as though this was something even it had never seen before.
Silariathas looked up. Elisabeth followed his gaze and saw a grimoire she recognized passing over them, a withered face, the glint of a needle. They watched without speaking as it ascended to burn itself to ashes—a gruesome, tortured, deadly thing, monstrous but not beyond love, capable in the end of this final act of redemption. What Silariathas thought of it, Elisabeth could not tell. There was nothing in his devouring black eyes that she recognized. It wasn’t until he looked back to Nathaniel that she glimpsed a hint of his other self: the being who had watched over Nathaniel as he grew from a boy to a young man, who had put him to bed and tended his wounds and made him tea, fixed his cravat, held his hand through every nightmare. Silas shone through the cold, cruel mask like light flaring behind a glass.
He bent over Nathaniel. Elisabeth swallowed. But he only brought Nathaniel’s hand to his lips and kissed it, just as he had done after his summoning, even though agony wracked his face to do so, the hunger struggling every second for control. Then he put Nathaniel’s hand down. He stood and faced the Archon.
“Silas,” Elisabeth whispered.
Pain rippled across his features at the sound of her voice. He closed his eyes, driving the hunger away. “I am not its equal,” he rasped. “I cannot fight it and win.” Every word seemed to strain him. “But I have strength enough to end the ritual, and force it back to the Otherworld.”
She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs felt tight as a drum, locked around an unvoiced cry. She saw again the sword through Silas’s heart. Demons could not die in the human realm. But if he went into the circle, and left them—
“What will Nathaniel do?” she choked.
Silas paused even longer. Finally he said, in a voice almost like his own, “I fear he must learn to put his clothes on the right side out. He will have twenty more years now to master the art. Let us hope that time is sufficient.” He took a step forward. “Take care of him, Elisabeth.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She jerked her chin in a nod. Somehow, Silas looked calm now, his face transformed by relief. Faintly, he was smiling. She remembered what she had thought upon seeing Silas smile for the first time: she had never seen anyone so beautiful. She had never known such beauty was possible.
Understanding at last what Silas meant to do, the Archon blazed to greater heights, sweeping