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The back of my neck prickled. Ways that involved sidestepping oaths and a formal plea for mercy.

What he was proposing, if I understood him correctly, was dishonorable. It was so veryhuman.

I eyed him suspiciously. “Clades...”

The Infernarus dropped his palm and stood. He grabbed the hilts of his two sabers and unsheathed them, his expression grim. “I will make this as painless as possible. When you wake, we will be back.”

Ihadunderstood him correctly. He was going to incapacitate me. And while I was unconscious, he would execute Asher.

I rose to my feet, my hair beginning to snap around me. “Brother,no.”

“The primus dominus will spare you when he hears your story.” Clades began stalking toward me then.

“Don’t make me fight you,” I said softly. “I won’t let you kill him.”

Clades raised his sabers.

The gun blast took me by surprise.

The sound shattered the silence, and I screamed as the tan skin of Clades’ torso exploded open like overripe fruit.

Asher stepped through the rapidly thinning swarm of bugs, his gun smoking. “Like I said before, demons are going to keep dying unless they learn.”

I could only spare a moment to stare at Asher in horror before I lunged for my friend, falling to my knees. I pulled his upper body onto me and cradled his head in my arms.

I could hear his wheezy breaths.

“Take the blood, Lana,” Clades breathed, his body twitching in pain.

Blood for magic.

I needed it. Desperately so. I could use it to heal him.

“It’ll curse you,” I argued weakly.

“Take it,” he repeated.

I could sense Asher approaching, gun still raised, the end of it trained on Clades. I ignored him long enough to move my hand over the Infernarus’s stomach. He winced as his blood began to sizzle on his skin, going up into luminous flames that flickered in every shade of the spectrum. My veins filled with the magic. I sighed as I felt it collect within me.

And then, pressing my hand to Clades’ stomach and murmuring in the old tongue, I began to heal him.

Asher stepped up to us.

“Move aside, Lana,” he commanded.

My spine stiffened. I shook my head, continuing to chant.

“Last time, Lana—move.”

I heard a click, the sound of metal rubbing against metal.

“No.” I spread my body over Clades. I couldn’t let Asher die, but I couldn’t let my people die either. “If you’re going to kill him,” I said, “you’ll have to kill us both.”

Asher grabbed my upper arm and yanked me up enough to aim. I made a desperate attempt to dive back down, but the hunter had been prepared for that. The second deafening shot hit Clades in the heart.

And now I fought like a mad woman.

Squaring his jaw, Asher began to drag me back to the car, even as I scratched up his arms and kicked at his ankles, feral in my attempt to get back to Clades.