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Lowly, Ambrose told him, “Hold still and this won’t harm you.”

Windsor froze, trembling in fear as he regarded Ambrose’s spell-stained hands. The knot in his throat bobbed, but he didn’t struggle.

Ambrose’s magic came to him stickily, like dried spit in a parched mouth. Rather than slavering for blood, it sniffed weakly, so weakly that when Ambrose first placed his hand against Windsor’s chest, it felt as solid and impermeable as stone.

He gritted his teeth.

The witch king’s laconic tone held a hidden edge. “Shall we do this the old-fashioned way?”

A bolt of fear made Ambrose’s heart trip. No, he could do this bloodlessly. He had to. He didn’t wish to contemplate Emery bound behind him, or what could happen tonight if he failed, but the image came to him unbidden anyway.

Morcant inscribing a new collar around Emery’s neck, subjugating him to an eternity as his loyal lackey.

The witch king cutting Emery open to wear his body like an expensive coat.

It struck him, then. Why Emery?

There were other witches he could have bid Ambrose to sacrifice in his quest for true resurrection. Valenti had, inadvertently, served just as well. Yet the witch king still wanted Emery. Still looked at him with venomous intent.

Your hold on your daughter cannot compare to what Ambrose and I have.

But that was no longer true. Not since Ambrose had discovered all the ways he’d been betrayed.

He recalled something else. When Morcant had tried to ensorcel Emery with the collar, he’d put a third rune on Ambrose. Somehow, Ambrose had been an additional, necessary ingredient.

It was starting to come together, but not quickly enough. If he didn’t figure this out, if he couldn’t even retrieve this phylactery, they were doomed. He and Emery would never share more dinners, more nights spent reading, more lazy mornings tangled in bedsheets.

The magic’s quiet appetite seemed to catch the scent of his fear. It snarled awake, growing hungrier, until finally Ambrose’s fist sank through Windsor’s chest.

He let out a whimper, but otherwise held still. Ambrose searched past the thundering beat of the boy’s heart to the phylactery lodged within.

It took less time than with Saoirse’s. He extracted the sliver of crimson, and when it was finally out, Windsor went so green he fainted.

Ambrose showed the witch king, then placed the quartz on the sarcophagus. He took up the enchanted axe.

“Stop,” Morcant said hoarsely. “There is more power I can barter with. There is more to this world than the one you came from. I can teach you.”

“You know nothing of true power,” said the witch king.

Ambrose tightened his grip on the axe’s haft. In the depths of his heart, he yearned to swing it toward the neck of the witch king, but he could feel the collar forbidding it.

The pact had to be destroyed first.

What had kept his magic alive all this time?

Hunger.

That’s what the grimoire claimed, that’s how the magic felt .

But what fed it?

He swung the axe down on the phylactery. Morcant’s scream echoed into the tomb, over and over, finding its own immortality in the cavernous chambers and adjoining tunnels.

Ambrose said, “All of them need to be destroyed to kill him.”

The witch king tipped his head. “Then you best move quickly.”

There were hidden depths to his words. Ambrose knew that, once he’d successfully removed all of the witch king’s obstacles, the only obstacle left would be himself. He’d betrayed him. He’d fallen in love with someone else. That meant he’d ceased to be useful.

Or had he? He still bore the collar. He still caved to the compulsion.

But it felt weaker.

One by one, he extracted the phylacteries from each terrified initiate.

One by one, he lay them on the sarcophagus and sundered Morcant’s power one glittering shard at a time.

Morcant waned with each loss of his soul, his screams becoming nought more than anguished mewls, the once powerful necromancer brought low by his ancient idol.

All the while, Ambrose tried to put his finger on the true source of the witch king’s power. Not phylacteries, not grimoires, not runes carved into bones—there was a deeper, older magic.

Somehow, he’d turned hunger into a tithe.

There isn’t much a man won’t do when he is hungry.

Only Hellebore’s phylactery remained.

Ambrose knelt in front of her. She looked exhausted, barely returned from consciousness, but her gaze was intense. She wet her lips and tried to speak, but her voice had gone hoarse from fighting Morcant’s orders.

“Hunger,” she whispered.

Yes. Hunger. That was the tithe. He knew that. But—

“What feeds it?” he whispered.

But the witch king did not suffer their conversation. His clawed grip dug into the meat of Ambrose’s injured shoulder.

“Is there a problem with hers?”

“No,” Ambrose said, and prepared to dig it out.

Her breath came in ragged huffs as he hunted for the phylactery. Hers was so enmeshed, it felt like it had grown its own veins, embedded itself into the blood and muscle of her. She coughed, and the spit that landed on Ambrose’s wrist was pink.

“Stop it, you’re hurting her!” Saoirse screamed.

“Don’t—you almost—have it,” Hellebore said.

The phylactery tore from her, laced with blood. Saoirse begged for either of them to heal her friend. Hellebore told her it was fine, but it wasn’t. She needed urgent medical attention. She wouldn’t receive any until the witch king was slain.

Ambrose held the bloody shard in his palm and tried to think what to do with the things he now knew, with the time they had left.

Emery could heal her. Emery could fix all of this.

Ambrose got up and roughly slapped the last phylactery onto the sarcophagus. He took up the axe. He was so close to understanding. He could taste the iron of the final key to his salvation.

He raised the axe above his head.

He looked at the witch king, and the magic simmered but did not come to boil.

Then he looked at Emery, watching him with guarded, fragile hope, and the hunger flared so monstrously it left Ambrose hollow.

He understood. He knew with sudden, immaculate clarity what the hex on his soul truly hungered for, and what would feed it.

He would perhaps have the hair of a second once the phylactery shattered and the witch king was distracted. He had to get to Emery. Would Emery know what to do? What was needed?

The witch king said, “Is he distracting you, sweet wolf?”

Ambrose’s heart stuttered mid-beat.

“Perhaps we should have dealt with him first, then.”

No.

“Ambrose, kill Emery .”

The collar jerked. Ambrose’s strike went askew. The axe’s edge sparked off the stone face of the sarcophagus. The compulsion righted him like a puppet, dragging him toward Emery, the magic so ravenous Ambrose thought he’d succumb to famine before he reached the other side of the tomb.

“Ambrose!”

Emery slammed his hand against the wall behind him, leaving a bloody print. His bindings evaporated. He fell to the ground. On the stone behind him were runes, drawn in blood from his cut palm. He must have broken the skin against the shale and prepared the spell for the right moment.

He righted himself in time to cast something else, but the witch king still had blood on his hands from Ambrose’s injury, and in a spray of magic he eviscerated Emery’s hex before it landed.

Ambrose tried to fight the collar, but it made him raise the axe.

“Not with a weapon, with your bare hands ,” the witch king ordered.

The axe clattered to the floor.

Ambrose understood now. Why it had to be Emery. Why he had to use the magic to kill him.

Emery had the power to break the curse, or to keep it alive.

Ambrose struggled with all his strength. The collar choked the air out of his lungs, but he managed to strike the stone behind Emery rather than Emery himself. Shaking with the effort, Ambrose raised his head to look at him.

Emery’s wide eyes drank him in, searching for the man Ambrose had been the night before. Not the monster the witch king made of him.

“Are you going to rip my heart out now, Ambrose?” he said.

Ambrose shuddered. A little of his will was restored. Something in the depths of Emery’s words weakened the magic. Fed the hunger.

Compassion. Trust. Intimacy.

Love.

Not a feast for the belly, but food for the heart.

This was the reason the witch king sought to inhabit Emery’s body, the reason he insisted on using his hands, his magic rather than a weapon that could irreparably mangle Emery as a vessel.

All his life, Ambrose had hungered for the witch king’s approval, his high regard, his heart. He’d adored him. He’d worked hard to earn every scrap of reciprocation.

It was a yearning hunger. One the witch king never rewarded with more than scraps.

And so long as Ambrose had hungered for it, the witch king’s magic, his immortality, sustained itself from that hunger. Ambrose’s spirit had yearned long into the afterlife, keeping the spell alive, perpetual and renewed unlike any common tithe.

Then Emery had come along, and Ambrose had started to yearn for another.

The threats of this evening had starved Ambrose anew, forcing him to reckon with the fact one night might be all they’d ever have. But it didn’t have to be.

With every ounce of power left to him, Ambrose said through the collar’s choke, “I would never take your heart from you, but you can have mine. And if you gave me yours, I would protect it for all my living days.”

Emery gazed into his eyes, scared and hopeful and trusting. “You know I already have.”

The witch king advanced upon them. “Kill him now!”

The last winking remains of the compulsion charm slammed Ambrose’s hand against Emery’s chest.

And no further.

Emery gasped around the impact. Winded, he collapsed to the ground.

“No! No, you wretch, you spoiled wretch. Kill him!”

The collar gave barely a tug. The hunger, sated, drained out of Ambrose like a retreating tide. His fingers paled to the color of skin as he wrapped them around the haft of the axe on the floor beside Emery.

He spun on his heel and swung the blade in a horizontal arc. It split the witch king’s head from his shoulders before he could utter another word.

Hot blood sprayed Ambrose’s face, then evaporated. The air tasted of thunder in the collapse of the witch king’s magic. His body hit the floor like ink hitting water, consumed in curls of smoke, leaving behind only empty clothes.

Ambrose stared at his hands. They were flesh-colored, drained of the magic which had sustained the witch king all this time, but the scars of countless tithes remained.

It had not been a rune on his bones, it had not been his own mortality tethering the king to this life. It had been hunger. Yearning. Ambrose had never tasted love that wasn’t fed to him in tiny, poisoned doses, and so he’d gone hungry. Always hungry.

And so long as he was hungry, the witch king lived.

Emery had fed him.

Now the witch king was dead.

A razor of peculiar grief cut through Ambrose at the thought. Not for the witch king, whose demise brought nothing but relief. The grief was for himself. The lost time, the life he’d lived, the person he’d been. All sacrificed on the altar of the witch king’s pride.

Now he had to find out who he was when no one held his leash.

It was something to reckon with later.

The spell binding the initiates died with the witch king. They dropped to the floor, wobbly on their feet but taking to them quickly. Without a backward glance, Dalton ran. The others followed. Save for one.

Saoirse rushed to Hellebore’s side, pouring petals out from the pouch at her waist, pushing magic into her until color returned to her cheeks.

Ambrose held out a hand to Emery, still slumped against the wall, chest rising and falling in staggered breaths. He took it, allowing himself to be helped to his feet.

Ambrose silently offered him the axe. It was just an axe now. Its enchantment had died with the witch who cast it, the blade still slicked with his blood.

Emery curiously took Ambrose by the hand. He held Ambrose’s index finger and drew it gently across the axe’s crimson edge, muttering an incantation. Light poured from the steel, following the path of his touch, igniting the enchantment anew.

“How do you know this spell?” Ambrose asked, awed.

“I didn’t. But if the blood of a beheaded, immortal necromancer and the touch of a man who broke a centuries-long spell weren’t powerful enough tithes, I’m not sure what would be.”

Saoirse helped Hellebore to her feet. Emery turned to face her. “It’s your phylactery.”

“It won’t work.”

Morcant’s voice was hardly recognizable, its rich tenor reduced to a wheezing rasp.

“Not just … protected by the phylacteries … anymore. The hex for hunger—”

“Is broken,” Hellebore spat. “Go on. Command me.”

He stared at her, comprehension dawning. He still said, “ Kill them. ”

The collar’s light was a dull thing. It pulsed faintly, and only a vein throbbing in Hellebore’s temple belied any effort on her part.

Morcant’s expression twisted, pale eyes flicking from her to the other witnesses of his fall from power. “Kill them!”

“Don’t you understand?” Hellebore said through gritted teeth. “It’s over. I’m done.”

Saoirse silently took her hand and squeezed.

The last phylactery still glimmered like a bloodstain on the sarcophagus. Ambrose offered Hellebore the axe.

Morcant went pale as the grave. “You can’t do this. I’m your father!”

Hellebore paused. “I wish you were. But if today taught me anything, it’s that you’ll never be. That’s why the hex didn’t last. But—” She turned to Emery, voice strained around a pit of emotion. “I don’t want to be the one to do it.”

“Stop!” Morcant pleaded, but Hellebore’s heart was cold to it. She’d suffered too much. Forgiveness was a distant impossibility.

Emery took the axe. “If you’re sure.”

She nodded.

He looked at Morcant, who’d begun to beg in earnest, all pride forgotten in the seconds before execution. He found no mercy from those he’d sought to subjugate completely.

Emery brought the axe down like a guillotine.

The last shard of Morcant’s soul burst apart like a collapsing star.

His head wrenched back with an earsplitting, unearthly scream as icy light crept like cracks up the veins in his neck and through his face.

His body burned up, consumed in a wisp of pale smoke, leaving nothing behind to bury or resurrect.