“That spoiled my plans,” Dagon said disgustedly. “I was going to kill him after you agreed, then laugh at you while I reneged. Ah, well.” His hands clamped around Ian’s head. “At least he’s still good for something else.”

He sealed his mouth over the back of Ian’s head and inhaled deeply. Something bright flashed for an instant before a glow appeared in Dagon’s throat. He dropped Ian’s head, swallowed that glow, then belched as if he’d just shotgunned a beer.

“Mmmm. His soul was taste-eee.”

Something broke inside me. Not grief; that waited beneath my pain and rage, patient and far deadlier than both. No, it wasn’t that. All but one of the chains that held down the thing Tenoch warned me about for thousands of years had just snapped.

You cannot control the full power of your other nature, Veritas. It’s too strong. Siphon away bits of it if you must, but always, always keep the rest of it chained. Promise me.

Several of those chains had snapped when Tenoch died. Only my promise had kept me from breaking the last few. Now, only one strained against the force surging beneath it. I might have thrown more chains over it. I’d promised Tenoch I always would. But Dagon kept smacking his lips, mocking my pain with the same malevolent joy he’d shown me and countless others.

And at the same time, I realized what Ian had been trying to tell me when he’d said “. . . ud’ve . . .’uv’d . . .’oo.”

I hadn’t understood the garbled words at first, but now, they blazed across my mind with crystalline clarity.

Could have loved you.

Ian had fought to get those words out. He’d fought again when he denied Dagon the final taunt the demon had intended. Ian must have known Dagon’s offer to spare him was no more than a cruel trick, despite my being too desperate to see that.

Given the choice, I’d always rather go down fighting, he’d said mere minutes ago. From the moment I’d met him to his very last moment, he’d proven that.

Now he was gone. Murdered by the same demon who’d stolen far, far too much from me. A demon who was still smacking his lips as if trying to draw out the very last drops of my pain for his delight. Could have loved you . . .

“I could have loved you, too,” I said out loud, ignoring Dagon’s surprised “Huh?” in response.

Then I snapped that last chain myself.

Power crashed into every part of me. It gushed until my skin split, healed, then split again, as if my body was too small to contain it. My vision went black, but it didn’t matter. All at once, I could feel everything around me. More than that, I could feel the thrum of water from numerous sources, some very near, some several kilometers away. The energy in the water called to me, twining around that ever-growing force as if begging to be a part of it.

I didn’t attempt to fly, but I was suddenly in the air. Dagon grabbed me, trying to pull me back down. My eyes opened, bathing him in brilliant beams of silver. He let me go, dropping to the ground. Then he began to back away, slowly.

“Girl,” he said in a lower, almost cautious tone.

I concentrated on the water closest to me, marveling that I had never considered using it from these sources before. Why hadn’t I? It had been right within my grasp this whole time.

“That’s not my name,” I growled.

Then I ripped out all the water from Dagon’s body. It came out bloody, but so much more powerful than what I’d find in an ordinary pond or stream. I stripped the considerable energy from it, ignoring the way Dagon’s scream turned hoarse as his throat and the rest of him instantly desiccated. Then I kept the bloody water floating around me without needing a second thought to do so.

That had been easy. What else could I do?

The demons. Their screams choked off into odd, hissing sounds as their bodies abruptly went dry. Now I had a lot of water at my disposal. I pulled the energy out of it and played with the remainder. Some I turned into steam and scalded the dry flesh off Dagon and the other demons. Others parts I kept swirling in the air around me.

But the steam rehydrated Dagon and the other demons more than I preferred. I stopped scalding them to rip out both the old and the new water they’d healed enough to regenerate. I was focused on pulling all the energy from it when I sensed something hurtling toward my eye.

I froze it into place without thinking about whether I could. I just . . . did. Then I looked at the bone knife I’d just encased in ice. It floated mere centimeters from my eye, its sharp point still red. A glance down confirmed it was one of the same knives that had killed Ian. Dagon had ripped them from Ian’s head, keeping one while throwing the other at me.

I stared at Ian’s remains through the force that had overtaken me. It registered my grief, but in an insulated way, filtering the facts through while leaving emotions behind. Dagon had murdered the man I considered mine. He had also tried to murder me. I would punish him for that. I would also punish all who’d helped him do it. It was what they deserved.

I started with the demons, sending the water hovering near me down in a rush that coated the ground around them. Then I pulled it back up, making sure the demons saw the new articles it contained. They tried to run when they saw the pieces of bone from the skeletons of their slain, but their bodies were too dry, so they could only shuffle. A few tried to teleport out. If they weren’t so weak, it would have worked. Ian was dead, so every part of the spell fused in his magic would have died, too. But I’d ripped too much water and energy from them to teleport.

I turned the water containing demon bone into jagged bits of ice. Then I rammed that into their eyes. Their screams reached a near-simultaneous crescendo before silencing with a finality that gave me a sense of resolution versus satisfaction. After they were dead, I pulled all those bits of bones out of their eyes and covered them with more ice. Then I aimed those new pieces at Dagon, who was trying to fly and couldn’t.

“I don’t know how many extra souls you have in you to burn through before you stay dead,” I told him in a calm voice, “but I’m going to find out.”

Dagon spun around, holding both hands over his eyes to protect them. “If you kill me, you’ll never see Ian again!”

I yanked the last bits of water out of the dead demons and used it to form an ice shield that knocked Dagon down when it hit him. I piled more ice on top of him, skipping only the parts that contained demon bone shards. Those I poised over him in every direction he might attempt to escape. After all that, I floated down to him.

His hands were still over his eyes. That was fine. I didn’t mind stabbing the ice weapons through them. “You already made sure I’d never see Ian again when you killed him and swallowed his soul. You have nothing left to threaten me with or bargain with me for, demon.”

The ice I’d piled over him kept Dagon from moving his arms, but his fingers flicked in the general direction of Ian’s corpse. “If a harvested soul has the power to bring me back from the dead, it can bring him back, too.”

He was attempting to bargain. How interesting. “You’re saying you’d harvest someone else’s soul to resurrect Ian?”

His tone grew crafty. “Demons like me have the power to transfer souls from one place to another. Why couldn’t I resurrect Ian by harvesting the power from someone else’s soul, then put Ian’s soul back in his body and use another one to heal him good as new? But kill me, and you kill Ian’s last chance to be alive again.”