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"Save her without killing anyone because you don’t want to hurt anyone else anymore... but you can do this... can’t you?"

Heila’s simple, pleading words fell on Ignatious with the weight of an avalanche, knocking aside his defenses and excuses until the only thing he could accept was the truth he’d been avoiding.

"I’ve hurt innocents before," he said, reaching out hesitantly with his charred, blackened hands. Each movement caused new cracks in his burned flesh to form and a small rain of ash fell to the white snow beneath him with each movement until he very gently brushed the surface of Heila’s hands. "How can you trust me now?"

"Because when you joined us, you came to me and asked if the Tuscans would be willing to provide your meals," Heila said softly.

"You said that you needed to feed on the strongest prey available. You sounded like Sir Savis, like you were borrowing his words. But, you weren’t satisfied when I brought you to them the way that Sir Savis was when we let him fight his prey. You were relieved."

"The Tuscans are very large," Ignatious explained almost absentmindedly as he stared into Heila’s soft, grass-green eyes. "I think it’s impossible, even for me, to accidentally kill one of them while feeding. But Lady Heila, you’re very small.

It takes so much restraint to feed on the Horned Clan that, before Mistress Nyrielle exiled me, she never allowed me to try.

One last time," he said, glancing at the trembling walls of the icy prison that held Ashlynn hostage.

"Are you certain that you wish to do this? "

"You’re restraining yourself now, aren’t you?

" Heila asked gently. It took all of her will to keep her eyes on the trembling, injured vampire instead of looking anxiously in Ashlynn’s direction, but right now, the only thing that would help her lady was helping Ignatious and so she would not look away from him.

"Please," she said, extending her wrist. "Take what you need, and rescue Lady Ashlynn before it’s too late," she said, unable to keep a tremble of urgency out of her voice.

With a stiff nod, Ignatious pulled her wrist to his lips, opening his mout wide to reveal loing, sharp fangs.

In his burned and blackened hands, her wrist looked as pure and white as the snow on the ground and smaller and more delicate than the neck of a swan.

Yet beneath that soft, pale flesh, he could see the powerful pulse of a woman whose heart quickened with a mix of anxiety and fear as he prepared to strike.

"This will hurt," he whispered. "But only for a moment," he said, giving her a final warning before sinking his fangs into her soft, tender flesh.

Heila thought she knew what to expect when she offered her wrist. She had never been selected as an offering for Lady Nyrielle, but once on the journey, before she became a witch, she’d offered herself to Madame Zedya as a gesture of thanks for all that the older woman had taught her.

When Zedya fed, her amethyst eyes glowed with power, pulling Heila into a world that was peaceful and calm.

She only felt the slightest prick before it was over.

When she finally woke, several hours had passed, and she felt weak and ravenous, but there was nothing else to remember about the process, only a brief prick and then nothing.

Ignatious’s bite was nothing like Zedya’s. The pain that surged in her wrist felt like someone had taken an axe to a tree, chopping into her flesh as if to sever her hand from her wrist. For a moment, her eyes opened wide in panic, afraid that she’d made a terrible mistake.

Then, she felt a warmth flow through her body as the vampire took his first swallow of her blood and the pain she felt vanished, consumed by a feeling so warm and cozy that she reached out with her other arm to wrap herself around him, pulling their bodies closer together as if she was seeking shelter from the cold and snow.

In life, Ignatious had been a terrifying, raging inferno. His flames consumed the lives of countless Eldritch people as though they were kindling for a pyre whose flames would reach the sky. Even in death, as a newly made vampire, his flames had consumed anything they could reach.

But the heat that Heila felt from Ignatious was different from those flames of righteousness and fury. It wrapped around her like a warm blanket on a cold day, burning dimly like a hearth choked with soot and filled with nothing but the last embers of a fire that had exhausted its fuel long ago.

Connected to Ignatious in a way she had never before imagined, her healer’s heart ached at the realization of how years of wielding the cruel, punishing flames of a zealout had choked out the gentle warmth at the core of a man who always struck her as gentle and kind, weighed down by tragedies she was too young to understand.

But even if she was too young or too inexperienced to understand his anguish, that didn’t mean she couldn’t do anything to soothe it.

Gently, with each swallow of her blood, Heila drew on the water trapped in ice and snow around her, warming it in the embers of Ignatious’s flames before guiding it over the soot and ash that buried his heart.

She had to work carefully, and no matter how much her body wanted to surrender to the faint warmth that Ignatious offered and drift off to sleep, she couldn’t let herself be passive while he fed.

If she let water pour over him freely, she might extinguish the embers that still burned within, but if she surrendered to his feeble warmth, while he might feed from her, he would never heal.

And so, even though it was difficult, she clung tightly to the fallen Inquisitor and did her best to wash away the years of pain, doubt, and self-loathing that had all but extinguished the gentle flames that were his true source of power.

And underneath all of that, she hoped that there was still enough of him left to heal, or else, washing away all that soot and ash would reveal that there was nothing of the original Ignatious left to save.