Page 223 of The Devil May Care

She presses two fingers just below my collarbone, drawing a line from left to right. A second line traces across my forehead, light and firm. Her hands are steady, reverent. The mark tingles faintly, like it knows what’s coming—even if I don’t. There’s a quiet moment where we just breathe. I shift awkwardly.

“You still haven’t told me where we’re going. No one has.”

“It’s not my place,” she says. “But I think you’ll understand when you get there.”

The silence stretches again, but it’s a soft one. I sit while she braids my hair—not tight like for battle, but loose and low, like the women I saw in the murals on the Emberwatch walls. Like someone being honored, not tested.

“You’re different,” Sarai murmurs. “Not just because you’re human. Because you feel it all. You let yourself.”

I shrug. “Doesn’t make it easy.”

“No. But it makes you strong.”

I meet her eyes in the mirror.

“Are you sure you want to help me? This isn’t… this can’t be what anyone expected.”

Sarai grins. “Good. We needed a little unexpected.”

The door creaks open behind us. I turn—and there he is. Caziel stands in the doorway, framed by warm stone and the dull glow of flame behind him. His gaze lands on me and freezes, unreadable for a second too long. Then he breathes out, like the sight of me knocked something loose in his chest.

His voice is low. “You’re ready.”

I nod. But I don’t move. My pulse stutters. My chest feels too small for the moment stretching between us. Whatever this is… it isn’t just a date. It isn’t just a trial. It’s something fated. Ancient.

Sarai gives my hand a squeeze and leans in. “Go.”

So I do. I step toward him, toward the unknown, and I don’t look back.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

KAY

The Wastes feel different tonight.

Not harsher, but quieter than my first visit. Like the land itself is listening.

Caziel doesn’t say a word as we walk, and I don’t ask where we’re going. I could. He’d probably tell me, but something about the set of his shoulders, the deliberate silence between our steps, makes me feel like I shouldn’t break the moment. The world beyond the arena falls away behind us, swallowed by the scorched horizon.

The wind here doesn’t whistle. It sighs. Dry and warm, edged with the scent of iron and smoke. My ceremonial cloak flutters against my legs, the hem skimming over ash and stone. Every so often, the ground beneath our boots glows faintly—threads of crimson light that pulse like veins just beneath the skin of the earth.

I wonder if it hurts. This land. If it remembers the wars that scorched it. The rulers crowned and broken. The contenders who bled into the rock, whose marks were never etched into history. Do they whisper in the cracks beneath my feet? Would I, if I failed here? I shake the thought off like dust, even as it clings.

Caz is half a pace ahead of me, enough that I can watch him without being watched. His glamor is faint in this light—his silhouette too sharp, too real, to be entirely mortal. There’s something about the way he moves when he thinks no one’s looking. As if the weight of his bodydoesn’t settle into the world the way mine does. Like he’s caught between gravity and something older.

I hug my cloak tighter around me, trying to still the tremor in my fingers. I’m not cold. That’s not it. There’s just a pull. Between each step, each breath. A tension building—not the kind that snaps, but the kind that changes you. Like water boiling. Like metal being tempered. I don’t know what’s waiting ahead, but it feels like something sacred. Something secret.

I should ask. But the words stay lodged behind my teeth. Instead, I watch the landscape shift.

Obsidian pillars jut from the cracked ground like the ribs of a fallen god. Pools of molten rock pulse red and gold in the distance. But we’re not heading toward the lava fields. We’re going higher—climbing a ridge of blackened stone that curves like a spine, winding toward a place that smells less like ash and more like heat. Ember. Sweet, and strange. Like the air after lightning.

Caziel finally stops when the ridge begins to narrow. Below us, carved into the earth like a wound, is a basin of stone. No lava. No death. Just steam—rising in thick, shimmering waves from a glowing spring fed by something deep within the earth. It’s a strange kind of light. Not fire. Not water. Something between.

I draw in a breath—and exhale just as slowly.

“This isn’t part of the Rite.”

“No,” he says. His voice is low, almost reverent. “It’s older.”