The priest detonated. The blast wave picked Derek up, every hair on his body igniting at the same time, and tossed him like a rag doll.

The metal scream erupted again. I clamped my hands over my ears. To the right, another head melted from the bull’s shoulders. He was down to two horns now.

Derek staggered upright, swaying, stunned. Burns smoked all over his body. His skin crawled, sprouting fur, as Lyc-V tried to repair its host.

The bull sighted him.

“Hey! Here! Look at me!”

He didn’t see me. I was off to the side and Derek was directly in his line of sight, still dazed.

No.

I sprinted to the bull, melting the armor over my thigh, pulling blood onto my hands in twin ribbons.

The bull spun toward me.

You can’t have him.

The Bull of Tophet charged, but I was too close. He didn’t have time to build up speed. I twisted to the side, rammed Dakkan between the metal scales over its shoulder, and thrust my hands into bovine fireblood.

“Hesaad.” Mine.

Magic tore out of me. The pain shook me to my core. It felt like my bones cracked open and the marrow was sucked out into the void. The threshold for taking the bull over was too high…

The bull brayed. On top of his pillar, the remaining ma’avir screeched in agony. Our magic collided, wrestling for control of the beast. Pressure clamped me, the power inside the bull a dense knot.

Derek would live. No matter what it cost me, he would walk away from this.

Blood drenched my lips. My eyes and nose bled, and I fed every drop of it into the creature. The Bull of Tophet had been crafted from Molokh’s divine power. I was trying to rip a god’s beast away from him.

“Amehe, amehe, amehe…” Obey, obey, obey.

My whole body went numb. Tears drenched my eyes, making it hard to see. I couldn’t feel my hands. I was teetering on the edge of a chasm, about to plunge to my death.

“Amehe.”

The cocoon of magic within the bull burst. My magic flooded through it. A malevolent primitive intelligence that was the creature’s consciousness connected with mine, accepting the bridle of my will. I felt the overwhelming strength of the bull’s body, its weight, its power. I jerked my hands out and shoved the bull’s mind at the last ma’avir’s pillar.

The creature charged and smashed into the metal column. The pillar quaked. The bull bounced back and struck again, like a battering ram. The priest above ripped his robes and fell to his knees, wrapped in flames.

The air shimmered and split, and through the gap a giant reached out with a perfect hand. He stood eighty feet tall, his face heartbreaking in its beauty. A mane of blond hair fell onto wide shoulders covered in ancient armor that glowed like a golden mirror. To look into his emerald eyes was to lose yourself. Moloch had come to see me.

He had to be burning through his magic at a crazy rate to manifest here and in the giant form. He couldn’t possibly keep this up. I had to outlast him.

Moloch’s fingers closed around the priest, lifting him in the air. He opened his perfect mouth. “YOU STILL RESIST.”

I hurled the bull at him. It charged the avatar, thousands of pounds of fury and flame.

Moloch reached out with his other hand. The bull connected and melted into his palm. The loss of magic brought me to my knees.

“YOU BELONG TO ME. COME TO ME, PRINCESS OF SHINAR, AND KNOW PARADISE.”

“Go fuck yourself.” Moving my tongue was a colossal effort. I had lost so much magic…

“YOU CAN’T DEFY ME. MY WILL IS ABSOLUTE. YOUR MOTHER WILL DIE, YOUR GRANDMOTHER WILL BE MY SLAVE, AND YOU WILL SIT BESIDE ME.”

“I’ll kill you and obliterate your name. Nobody will remember you, and you will pass into nothingness.”

He smiled, magic radiating from him, warm and brilliant. It pulled me like a magnet. It made me want to weep.

Moloch leaned forward, reaching for me.

I could do nothing. I was spent.

A silver werewolf thrust himself between us. Power boiled out of him, hungry and ancient, so potent it took my breath away.

Moloch stared at him. His eyes widened.

Derek raised his head and howled. It sounded like a vicious battle prayer.

The child-eating god took a step back. The rip in reality collapsed, the final echoes of his voice dancing on the wind.

“UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN.”

I fell on my back, my arms wide, and stared at the blue sky. The air tasted so sweet. Everything hurt.

Derek howled again, singing a song of triumph and blood.

In the distance wolves howled, answering him.

18

The old ruin around me lay silent. I had no idea what it had been in its past life. A hotel, a concert hall, a school? Two stories tall, it was perfectly round, and rose fifty feet above us in a dome punctured by rectangular windows, their glass long gone. The center of it lay open. Dust stained the once polished marble floor. Along the walls, columns supported a narrow balcony. Somewhere within the ruin, there were probably stairs that led up there, but neither Derek nor I looked for them.

He lay next to me in the dirt. He hadn’t bothered changing shapes to ease the strain on Lyc-V, and right now he was shockingly large, a true monster sheathed in silver fur.

The box sat between us on a dusty step. Moonlight shone through the windows above, and it set the enchanted bone aglow.

I stirred the coals in the metal pot in front of me with a long stick and tossed another handful of dried herbs into it.

I had fallen asleep on that battlefield, right in the ashes. Derek had moved me to the grass. When I woke up, hours later, he was the first thing I saw, still in his wolf form, sitting next to me, silhouetted against the setting sun. Soot and blood stained his silver fur. Bald patches marked his right arm, some still blistered and oozing fluid, where the heat had cooked him. I asked him if it hurt, like an idiot. Of course it hurt. He lied and said no.

The box waited next to him.

I had insisted on confirming that Saiman was still alive. Once I saw him with my own eyes, the lot of us walked out of the portal, and now we were here, in a ruin on the edge of Unicorn Lane, waiting to settle Derek’s debt to a kind priest. The wolves had spread out and hid, forming a perimeter around the ruin. Derek told them to not interfere unless Unicorn Lane spat something particularly nasty in our direction.

I had been sitting here for hours, and we hadn’t said a single word to each other.