Noah went under.
Azazel felt the silence arrive where the boy usually sat. The door shut and the lights went off, and for the first time since the merge, the house belonged to him alone.
Wings first. They never asked to wait their turn. The horns caught up half a second later, clicking into place.
Cú Chulainn took a step back. It was the first time he had moved away from anything since taking off the mask. Azazel noted it and was pleased. Manners arriving late still counted as manners.
“Well,” Cú Chulainn said. “Look who’s here.”
Azazel rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. The body answered him differently than it answered the boy, looser in some fittings and tighter in others.
“You talk a great deal,” he said. “And you’ve been unpleasant to him from the beginning. I heard every word of it.”
Something crossed the hound’s face then, and it moved slower than Azazel had expected from a name that big.
“You’re not the boy.”
“Correct. He’s unconscious, and you’ve irritated me.” Nadir dropped to his side, black mana curling lazy around the blade. “So you get me instead. Try to feel honored.”
Cú Chulainn smiled slowly. Something behind his eyes began, at last, to pay attention.
“Something old,” he said. “I can feel it in how you’re standing. Whatever you actually are, it’s been giving orders for a very long time.”
“And you’ve been taking them so long you’ve mistaken the leash for a spine. That’s almost endearing.”
He lunged. Fast, for something raised in this world. The spear came for the throat, and Azazel was standing behind him before it finished arriving.
“There it is,” Cú Chulainn said, spinning to track him. “I wondered if that would hit.”
Fast was a generous word. Azazel had watched this world’s proudest metal beasts through the window for years, and not one of them had ever outrun a bad decision either.
The hound swung again, wide and lethal, the kind of arc that had ended a great many arguments.
Azazel stepped inside it and tapped the flat of Nadir against his cheekbone, mostly to find out whether a legend would flinch.
“Too slow.” He kicked out the back of the knee and drove the pommel into the jaw before the buckling finished.
Cú Chulainn staggered, offended by the concept.
“The stories made a great deal more of you than this. You fight like a man whose best afternoon is several centuries behind him.” Azazel gave him no room to find his footing. “Everything goes to rust eventually.”
The hound snarled and closed the gap in a single bound, a thrust with enough weight behind it to shatter stonework. Azazel caught it on the flat and let the excess go where excess always goes when nothing consents to hold it.
“That woke me slightly. You remain considerably beneath me, but I’ll allow that you tried.” He let that stand for a moment. “Most of the people you’ve killed never stood a chance to begin with. That isn’t the same thing as skill.”
“Watch it,” Cú Chulainn said, grinning through the strain. “Almost sounds like a compliment.”
“It isn’t. It means you haven’t fought anyone your own size in a very long time. Rather sad, if I’m honest.”
The spear swept low for the legs. Azazel stepped down on the shaft and pinned it flat against the dirt.
Cú Chulainn tried to wrench it free. It didn’t move an inch. Azazel found he quite enjoyed watching something that confident discover a limit mid-sentence.
He reached out. Dense black mana gathered into a rough hand and closed around the shaft, stopping it dead in the air. The trick was new. He wanted to know how far it could be taken.
Cú Chulainn looked at it, and for the first time something behind his eyes went uncertain rather than amused.
“That’s new,” he said.
“You’re simply out of date.”
A second hand formed beside the first. A third pinned his forearm. For one full second the legend hung caught, and Azazel let him sit with how that felt before Nadir opened him across the ribs.
Cú Chulainn made a sound of honest surprise. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Azazel enjoyed it rather more than a prince ought to admit.
“He has a question,” Azazel said, the hands holding firm. “The boy you put a spear through. He has been carrying it for three years, and I owe him the asking.”
Cú Chulainn stopped struggling. The shift was small, but it was there.
“Three years ago, the Zodiac Gate. A kid was taken out of it. Thirteen or so, dark haired and quiet.” Azazel spoke as if reading from a list he had memorized. “His name was Colt.”
“I don’t know that name.”
“The woman who took him wore a scorpion mask.”
Something moved behind the legend’s eyes then. He didn’t know the name, but he knew the description.
“That one,” Cú Chulainn said. He made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You’re after that one. Good luck. She doesn’t answer to any of us, and she doesn’t leave survivors.”
“A survivor is what I’m asking about.”
“She took him for a reason. That’s all I know.” He tested one of the hands and found no give in it. “Whatever she wanted, she didn’t share it with me. I’m not high enough in the Order for her to bother.”
That was more than Noah had managed in his years of searching. Azazel filed it where the boy would find it when he woke.
“Oh,” Cú Chulainn said quietly. “There it is.”
He tore free with one brutal wrench. The spear caught fire, the robe tore further, and whatever restraint he had been bothering with stopped being worth his time.
“There!” he roared, grinning with teeth he hadn’t needed until now. “Now we’re both being honest!”
“As you like,” Azazel said. “It’s your funeral. Possibly in the literal sense. We shall see how the afternoon develops.”
The hound came apart into pure violence, with no gaps between one strike and the next. Azazel matched him blow for blow, and the two of them tore through what was left of the clearing like the ground had personally offended them both.
“Shadow Sword, First Form: Eclipse.”
Three crescents came off one cut, and none of them curved. They folded, hinging in the air at angles nothing thrown by a hand should be able to take, and the one Cú Chulainn slipped came back for him from behind.
He got the spear up in time. It was the first thing all afternoon he had needed to be in time for.
“That’s the same technique,” he said, delighted and bleeding. “That’s the boy’s technique.”
“It’s my technique. He borrows it.”
“Second Form: Nightfall.”
The blade didn’t gather weight this time. It reached up instead, took hold of the hound where he stood, and hauled him off the ground into the descending edge.
The third pass was the hound’s mistake. A small one, the kind his instructors should have beaten out of him centuries ago. Azazel drove Nadir up under the guard and opened a second wound. He hadn’t seen that one coming either.
Twice more after that: the jaw, then the shoulder. Cú Chulainn managed one shallow line along Azazel’s arm, which Azazel decided not to be impressed by.
On the very next exchange, the spear came in low and two hands that did not belong to the body reached out and caught it. Black and violet, grown straight out of the air at the elbow, they held the shaft while Nadir struck somewhere the hound was no longer defending.
“That’s cheating.”
“You brought two arms,” Azazel replied.
By the sixth exchange, real effort had arrived on the legend’s face. Azazel allowed himself to be almost proud of it.
“Fourth Form: Black Storm.”
He turned once on the spot and the clearing filled.
Crescents came off the blade and didn’t leave. They stayed, orbiting outward in a widening spiral, black through the middle and violet at every thin end. The ones at the outside were already coming back around while the ones at the center were still being born.
Cú Chulainn stood in the middle of it and did what he had done all afternoon: sidestepping. He took four steps. The fifth cost him a strip of his side, and the sixth put him on one knee for the first time in the fight.
When it thinned out, the trees for thirty meters in every direction had been reduced to standing splinters, and the hound was still there in the middle of them, breathing hard.
“You stopped smiling,” Cú Chulainn said.
“Did I?”
That was when the body finally said what it had been trying to say since the third exchange.
Not a shortage of power, but the vessel tapping out.
[ Warning: host integrity critical. Sustained output exceeds safe threshold. ]
[ Not the fun kind of serious this time. Ease off, or you will break the body. I went to a great deal of trouble over that body. ]
He heard it. He ignored it. There was no room left for caution with the hound still standing.
A tremor started in the shoulder and reached both hands inside three breaths. The frame had never once been asked to carry this much of him for this long, and he was spending it like a currency he didn’t have and hadn’t planned on repaying.
“Careful,” Cú Chulainn said, watching the shake with genuine interest now instead of amusement. “That isn’t a fighting stance. That’s a body handing you an invoice.”
He closed the distance and swung with everything he had left. Azazel’s arms answered a fraction too late. Something crossed that shouldn’t have, and the spear found the gap that should have been closed.
The ribs cracked from the last exchange gave out.
Azazel went down to one knee and coughed something dark onto the dirt.
Cú Chulainn walked over steadily, blood soaking through his ruined robe, breathing hard enough at last that the effort could be believed. Small victories.
“What’s the matter?” he said, the spear tip resting an inch from Azazel’s face. “Where did that attitude go?”
“That’s a great deal of arrogance from a man bleeding at this rate.”
Azazel got Nadir back under him and stood up on a leg that had stopped agreeing to the arrangement.
He pulled. Everything the frame had left came up through the arms and didn’t go out anywhere, and the clearing began to lean toward the blade.
Loose bone, splintered wood, and the last of the residue in the dead grass all slid across the ground toward him, and the light went with them.
For a second, there was nothing in that clearing but Nadir and the dark packed hard around it, with a hound standing on ground that had been scraped down to the roots.
Cú Chulainn went very still.
“Fifth Form,” Azazel said. “Dying Star.”
He let go.
It didn’t go out in a line. It went out in every direction at once, as hundreds of crescents, black through the middle and violet along every thin edge, unfolded out of the blade in layers faster than anything could count them.
They filled the clearing to the treeline and past it, overlapping, coming back through their own paths to cut a second time on the way in. There was no gap anywhere in it wide enough to put a hand through.
Azazel stood at the center of the whole thing and didn't move.
Everything went white.
When it settled, the hound was still standing. Burns ran down his entire right side, and his robe was gone to ash. Dozens of open wounds covered his body. Catastrophic, yet not remotely fatal, which Azazel had expected and disliked all the same.
“Nice try,” Cú Chulainn wheezed. Against every expectation, he sounded fond.
There was nothing left. The wings folded first, and the horns a moment behind. The body clocked out without asking anyone’s permission.
The dark closed in on him.
Someone hit the ground before consciousness fully faded. He recognized the boots from somewhere, and then it clicked.
They were Doyle’s.