“You’re alive,” Gabriel said. He backed away, his voice strange, his arms still clasped around her as if he was unwilling to let go, and he dragged her away from the corpses of the moths even as Prior Wishart and half the monks of the abbey came at a run, a forest of vengeful swords. There was a long scream from the direction of the cloister.

He was reluctant to let her go. Aware that he had just made a pact with—something—for her life. He could feel it.

He heard the screams. He hauled her into a chair and let her go—one hand lingering on her hair.

It was foolish—stupid—but he had not touched her in so long…

He snapped himself to attention and fell into his own palace.

“There are more of them,” Prudentia said.

He nodded. Having immolated one at point blank range, he had their making in his head, and he knew how to unmake them. More, his rage was such—

“Take a breath,” Prudentia said. “You are badly hurt yourself.”

Instead, he reached out into the darkness, and located them—only three, and those without the ferocity of purpose that had so nearly defeated him.

One was in the town, having killed two women and a child and a cat.

One was in the cloister hunting monks.

One was high in the air overhead, watching. Or rather, monitoring.

Prudentia said, “by offering such a promise you have given something a back door into your soul.”

Gabriel reached out into the night with the same working he had used at the Inn of Dorling. He layered it with a simple working of identity from his intimate contact with the one that had landed on him.

In a flash of golden fire, a low stone house in the town exploded.

To his left, in the cloister, the moth was suddenly outlined in an angry red—and then fell as ash over the rose garden.

High overhead, the largest of all the moths turned away for home.

But Gabriel was sometimes an impatient hunter, and he followed it across the sky with his thought, leaving his wounded body to collapse to the cobbles.

He had never tried this particular form of aethereal movement, and it was terrifying—like being at court while naked. He was bereft of many of his powers—a thing of wind and fancy.

But rage bore him up. Rage cancelled out rational thought and kept him to his mission. He followed the fleeing thing up into the light of the moon, and out, running north to its master.

It didn’t get more than three miles. Gabriel took it in the air and subsumed it, and like a conjuror he caught the single strand of aethereal will by which it was bound to its distant master and he—kept it.

And then he had to find his way back to his body.