"Are you ready to go, kid?"

His voice shattered the reverie that had filled up like tar between the pine trees. It snapped Ira free from the listless mindlessness that came over him as he stood on the beach, listening to the soft chorus of chanting prayers. He always wandered a little too far away in that place, drifting out across the open water like their unanswered songs.

It was as if a part of him had never reemerged from the depths of the lake, as if he was forever living a night that had ended months ago. Even now, as fresh layers of ice formed along the lip of the water and snowflakes tumbled from the gray sky, he still felt the rain soak his skin. In the pink skin of his freshly grown scars he still held the pain of being ripped apart by power.

The beach had been wiped clean. Any evidence of the long-ago-over battle had been discarded. Now, all that remained to remind Ira that it had really happened were his too painful memories and a line of a hundred soldiers submerged up to their knees in the water, chanting hymns, and poems, and things they'd just made up.

Since they'd failed to shut the gate, this had become the alternative. A patrol of fifty knights to keep the lake constantly blessed, and fifty more to slaughter whatever weakened creature came rising from the melting pot. It was in this constant state of peril that they survived day after day.

"I need some more time." Ira answered.

Father Pine nodded, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his winter coat. "Are you nervous?"

Ira glanced at him and shrugged. "For my letter? No, not really." Rushing home to sort through the mail was the least of his worries.

"Well, I am! It's a big deal." Father Pine argued. "Remember, even if they reject you, there's always other schools. You could apply all the way to California. There's no reason for you to stay in New York anymore, kid. You could just live a normal life."

"A normal life?" Ira echoed blankly. Somehow, he felt like he'd had enough of those.

His restless blue eyes returned to the water, they always did. He sunk slowly back beneath the waves, falling into a comfortable place just beyond the surface of his skull. Lulled by the soft white flakes in the air and the music of prayer, it was easier to return to that place than to dig himself out.

"I don't want to leave." Ira said. "You're here."

Father Pine blew a sigh from his nose and shook his head, "Ah, kid."

Ira didn't say that he couldn't leave. Not after all he'd done. Because he didn't like the way Father Pine looked at him when he did. With wide eyes set on determining just went the fire would catch. So he didn't say that it had been his mistakes, his failures, and his ego, that had led them to this devastation. To a constant patrol of a hundred knights, just to keep New York circling the drain for a second longer.

Father Pine shifted on his feet and blew over his pink fingers. Ira laughed like an actor and shook his head. "You can go wait in the car if you're getting cold."

It was mid-January, summer had long ago ended. The bitter sting in the air surely made it obvious.

"No, no!" Father Pine dismissed, "I'm good!"

Ira rolled his eyes and pressed a smile to his lips. Because he knew it was what Father Pine had been waiting for. "I'm okay."

"Ira-"

"I'm okay." He said again, moving into their charade. The one where Ira pretending he wasn't falling apart. "I've even been sleeping."

"Any more dreams?" Father Pine asked, raising his eyebrow.

Ira looked back out across the frozen lake. That part had been new. Since he'd opened that door in the back of his mind--he hadn't dreamed. Not even one single nightmare, or half lucid thought.

"Nothing at all. It's just. . . quiet." He answered.

Father Pine nodded--and then shuddered theatrically as a shiver ran down his spine.

Ira laughed again in a performance even the blank Prince would have admired. "Father, just go to the car. I'll be there soon, I just. . . I just want to talk to him first."

His throat tensed around the words. A spike drove into his heart, twisting it until he thought it might pop. But it never did. Because it never did anything anymore. It had filled with cement, and it hadn't beat since that night Melchior had died.

His wrist, broken during his struggle to escape the Prince from his nightmare, had been mended with time. His ripped stitches had been resewn and eventually removed as his flesh grew around the last remaining traces of Melchior. But his taxidermied heart wasn't a wound any doctor could patch back together.

Father Pine hesitated for a moment before reluctantly nodded. "Okay, kid."

He crossed the sands and ran his fingers through Ira's yellow hair. Ira drank in the warmth of his frozen touch--and then he was gone. He turned and trudged back through the pine trees, retracing his steps to where they'd parked the car.

Ira sunk back into his thoughts. He breathed in the frosty air and exhaled soft white puffs of smoke. Snowflakes floated from the dreary sky, gently landing in Ira's hair and flecking his pale skin with freezing kisses.

Ira walked. He moved down the beach, tracing the edge of the lake. He followed the curve of the water until the chanting began to fade away on the breeze. Because not even a hundred soldiers were really enough to cover every inch of the waterfront. Or maybe they'd cleared the spot for him. Ira didn't know. He didn't care much either. He soaked in the silence and inhaled the snow-laced air. His boots crunched against the sand, until he left it. He stepped out onto the water's edge, listening to the soft groan of the thin ice over the shallows.

He inhaled again and let his eyes drift slowly shut. For some reason, it was easier that way. When he shut his eyes, he could still see him. Not the way he had been that night--although the image had been burned into the back of his eyelids, too--but the way he had been when he'd just been Melchior Brisbane, when he hadn't been the Progeny's cursed boy.

"It's been overcast since last week." Ira said to no one. Or to someone who did not exist anymore. Not even in a lifeless husk. "It's terrible weather, and I wish it would warm up soon."

But Melchior would have enjoyed the snow. He would have sat perched in the windowsill, watching with childlike wonder as the quarter-sized flakes drifted through the chilled air. Ira's voice caught in his throat, cracking like the ice beneath his boots. He pressed his palms to his face and whispered into the space between his fingers.

"Your brother got married three weeks ago, to the girl you told me about." Ira told him. "I went. Well, he invited me. He said you would have begged him to if you were there."

The tears filled his eyes--but he didn't stop.

"He told me that it was your birthday--december twelfth. And I missed it-"

And I miss you.

"And-"

It's my fault that you aren't here.

"I-"

I'm not okay--not even a little. I'm breaking apart.

"would do anything to see you again."

And I'm so sorry.

Ira sunk down. He had no choice. He was powerless against the weight of the world as it pressed him into sawdust. He crouched on his boots, atop the ice, and laid his face against the surface of his knees. He didn't know for how long he stayed like that, motionless and cowering. His mind raced ahead of him, but produced nothing except static. Ira inhaled deep lungfuls of the frigid air, trying desperately to keep the tears from spilling over. If Father Pine saw his red rimmed eyes--he'd just worry more.

With numb blue fingers, he slipped past the lining of his coat and seized the small silver chain hanging from his throat. He pulled on the necklace, dragging it up from the warmth of his chest. Exposing it to the snow.

The keys clinked softly as they knocked against each other. Three of them, mashed together onto the same line. Two were identical, and the third vastly different. The largest of the keys was a bronze skeleton. It was his only way in and out of the Cardinal's Court. And despite awaiting his letters, his ticket into the normal life, he couldn't disregard it. Just as he couldn't bare to part with the smaller twin keys.

Silver house keys to an apartment in the Morningside Heights, one that had surely already grown cold and dusty from the lack of guests. But those too, Ira couldn't bring himself to retire. They lived on a chain around his throat, resting against his unbeating heart.

Ira gazed down at the small metal artifacts, day-dreaming of a time when they hadn't been pointless. He remained that way until his ears began to grow numb, and his shoulders began to shake. He might have stayed that way for many more years to come, but in the end, it was the sound of the approaching footsteps that shook him from his daze. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes and pushed himself to his full height, as stiff as the corpse of an old tree.

"I'm okay, Father. I jus-"

"You look taller, kid."

Ira froze, as still as a deer beneath headlights. His mind did flip-flops inside his skull, trying to make sense of the voice coming from behind him. A voice he didn't think he'd ever hear again.

"Have you done some growing up since we met?"

He forced his body to twist, and absorbed with his wide eyes the sight of the figure on the beach. A girl of about his age with tea-dark eyes, just a half shade deeper than her bark-toned skin. Ira, if he'd been one to label her, would have thought her to be descended in some ways from India. But the antlers poking from her pink hair pointed to different origins.

"Me?" Ira asked, forcing a shaking laugh from his lips. "Your antlers are at least five inches bigger."

They towered from her peach hair in spreading spires, her days of hiding beneath her curls must have been quickly coming to an end. Her antlers didn't glow like pearlescent Ossein, likely due to the layer of velvet wrapped around them, containing the raw bone. Instead, all the shimmer came from a shining golden cuff on the base of her left antler.

"Aw, thanks for noticing." Mayvalt smirked. "May I join you?"

Ira squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. "Why are you here? This place is crawling with knights."

"Yeah, I know." She agreed. "I come by pretty often. To check on the gate-"

"The gate?" Ira scoffed. "The gate doesn't matter anymore. We failed."

"The gate." She repeated. "And you."

Ira grit his teeth together and furrowed his brows into a glare.

"Me?" He snapped incredulously. "You don't even know me. We hardly even had an alliance. So why? Because I'm so fragile? Because I'm just on the verge of exploding?"

Mayvalt shook her head, lifting her palms in meek surrender. Her cowish brown eyes flickered to Ira beneath the soft gray sky. "No, it's not like that." She sighed. "You're. . .you're him. You're him, aren't you? I've been thinking about it. What that Cardinal said about this being your punishment. And. . .it's you."

Ira's heart shuddered in his ribs. He pressed his flattened palm against the wild beating bursting like fireworks behind his bones. The first time it had beat since that summer night.

"It doesn't matter." Ira said. "I'm not anyone anymore."

She pressed her lips together against her teeth and sucked in a sharp breath through her nose. "Do you. . . remember me?"

"I don't see that life." Ira scoffed. "Just the others."

"You do?" She gasped. "You remember?"

"The others." Ira grit between his clenched jaws. It was becoming more and more obvious to him, as everyone dug deeper and deeper into his flesh for those secrets, that he didn't want to remember. He didn't want to see through His eyes. Or feel His thoughts.

He never should have opened that door.

"If you're here to drag me back to the Prince-"

"No!" She quickly snapped, shaking her head. "No, I swear I won't tell him."

Ira's heart lurched into his throat. "You. . . won't?" He repeated slowly.

"It's your life." She sighed. "If you want to go to the Prince, you will."

"He's your boss."

"As much as I owe him," she said, "I have an even greater debt to someone else."

"I'm not that person." He said. "I can't clear your conscious, I can't offer you any apologies."

"I know." Mayvalt agreed solemnly. "I just. . . I've never gotten the chance to apologize to you. I couldn't. It goes against the rules. You'd never remember anyways."

"The. . . rules?" Ira muttered.

"Against interfering with the Heimrian's gift, against influencing souls." Mayvalt answered wearily, "why are you pretending not to know?"

"Know what?" Ira demanded.

"The weight of a Heimrian soul." She answered. "The gift given to the Heimrians."

Thump-thump.

His pitiful heart panged in its' confinement.

He didn't want to know. He didn't want to have the last of his anger stripped away from him. The last key to believing that any of the chaos came with reason. But he already knew. Or suspected. Maybe he had all along. Why, of any life, only now could he remember his pasts.

As if the only oddity, the only flaw in the system, were his nightmares.

Why Melchior seemed so perfectly meant to suit him, how he seemed so familiar. Like they'd met before.

"Life after death." Mayvalt said. "The True-Immortals."

"Rebirth." Ira whispered.

He pressed his palms to his ears to contain the dizziness boiling up to consume him. The last fragment of what made him Ira Rule slipped away, shattering when it met the ice beneath his boots.

"The angels. . . they didn't put me here?"

Mayvalt furrowed her brows in confusion. "They definitely did. And your spotty memory is suspicious, too. Heimrians aren't meant to remember their previous lives at all, but this is worse. Knowing everything but the one most entangled is just too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence."

He squeezed his eyes shut. Did any of it matter anymore? Without him--his thoughts hit a wall and turned into stone. Without him. His eyes snapped open, freezing Mayvalt into place.

"Mel-"

She flinched in the lines of her pressed lips. Ira stammered into silence, too scared to have his most dreaded thought confirmed. She turned her eyes away and looked down at the tops of her glossy black boots.

"Kid, he's not. . . a Heimrian."

Ira's stomach flipped, sending a wave of nausea up into his throat. "He is! H-he was. He was born-"

"-and then made into something else." Mayvalt said, shaking her head.

"Then what about Ze'ev souls?" Ira asked, or begged. "Where do they go?"

Mayvalt sighed, squeezing her eyes shut. "I'm sorry--it was selfish of me to come here and dredge this all back-"

"No!" Ira snapped, channeling all his strength into those words. "You said you owed Him. Then tell me. Tell me what happens to a demon when they die."

Ira knew it was a mistake to invoke his past life at his own will. He knew he was driving unforseen daggers into vulnerable targets, but none of that mattered. Not to him. Not then.

Mayvalt jolted and turned pale. Her eyes fluttered away. Thin streaming lines of sunlight pierced through the gray blanketing clouds and caught in the golden cuff against her hair.

"Nothing." She whispered. "Demons, angels. They just. . . they just fade away."

Ira shook his head. His claws dug into the slight chance. He needed that fading hope bursting in his chest cavity. It was the last life vest. The only rope to keep him from plummeting. "And Melchior is neither."

"He isn't-"

"He isn't a Heimrian." Ira agreed. "But he isn't a demon."

Thump-thump-thump. . .

"He's something else. Something in-between."

Mayvalt turned her eyes away. Her cheeks flushed pale pink and then drained back to paper white. Her lips trembled until she caught them between her teeth.

"Tell me." Ira demanded. "You know something."

"The rules-"

"Have been broken!" Ira snapped. "Someone already violated them by giving me my memories back, by handing me over to the Progeny. It's too late. So tell me. Please, Mayvalt. I have to know. If there's any chance, no matter how slight, I will take it."

She brushed away her collecting tears with the sleeve of her leather jacket and sighed. Once dried, her fingers returned to the golden bracelet in her hair. Tracing the carved metal with trembling touches. It was a longing that Ira recognized. She had the same sort of lost look in her eyes as he did each time he turned over an empty ebony-stained pine hilt, knowing that once upon a time a single jagged tooth had been there.

"The sword," she whispered, softer than all the snowflakes fluttering over the beach, "the Vestige. It could fix this. It could kill Mammon."

"The Vestige?" Ira scowled, shaking his head in hollow disgust. "Everything always comes back to that in the end. What do you expect me to do about it? It wasn't me, Mayvalt. It was never me. It was him--everything special about me was just him. His sword, his power, his sacrifice. It's over."

"It's not over."

Thump-thump-thump. . .

"That sword." Mayvalt hesitated. She shook her head and pressed forward. "I could feel it. I could feel it as you swung at Belial, after he'd gone."

"Feel what?"

"It's a Vestige."

"Yes, yes. It was. It was his Vestige." Ira sighed, scrunching up his eyebrows. "We can't use it."

Mayvalt groaned and pressed her fingertips into her temples. "Listen to me, kid. That sword, even as you swung at Belial, had power in it. It is a Vestige."

Thump-thump-thump. . .

"The Progeny lost all their Vestiges." Ira murmured. "They lost them when the wielder died. The power always went with them."

"Angels are fickle." Mayvalt nodded. "They believe their blessings need to be earned in the moment. They wouldn't allow a soul to keep it past death, not if it meant a child would be born with a blessing waiting for them."

"If it's still a Vestige-" Ira couldn't breath. His heart pulsed under the thin skin of his throat, choking his words. "If it's still a Vestige--then Melchior is still wielding it."

"Neither a Heimrian rebirth, nor the void of a demonic death." Mayvalt proposed. "Something. . . in-between."

Ira pressed his white knuckles against his teeth. "Where is he?"

Mayvalt looked at him with her wide brown eyes and shook her head. "I could only guess. I've been pondering it for months--but I just can't be sure. I didn't want to seek you out until I was sure, but I don't think I ever will be."

"Mayvalt."

"Going to get him might be something you never return home from." She warned. "It might even be for nothing. No one could ever say for sure what would happen to someone who is so completely of both worlds."

"If there's any chance, I'd do anything." Ira swore. "Just tell me what I have to do."

"Well," Mayvalt sighed, "there is a place that all wolves go."

"Where is that?" Ira demanded. "What is that?"

She met his eye and raised her chin in offered challenge. "The Deireadh--but that's a Faunish word. The wolves call it something else. Tachtadh. And it's in the deepest parts of Hell, ruled by a creature so twisted he devoured his own father for a taste of power. And then his siblings just to keep it."

"Who is he?" Ira asked.

"Mammon's flesh and blood." Mayvalt answered. "The Wolfking."

Ira squeezed his fists at his sides. "Going to Hell. . . is that even possible?"

"It's possible." Mayvalt nodded. "It's leaving that I can't guarantee."

He didn't hesitate. Not even for a moment. If there was a chance.

"Well," Ira sighed, and it seemed his first breath in months. "I have to go speak to my father."

"What for?" Mayvalt asked.

"I'm going to take a gap year."

"What?" She balked.

Ira didn't have the patience to explain. He turned on his heels and marched away from the lake. His steps felt as light as the falling snow as he climbed up the sandy bank. He paused at the ridge of the forest and glanced over his shoulder at her. She tilted her head, looking up at him with curious brown eyes.

"Thank you." He whispered.

She shook her head, casting beams of light from her golden cuff. "I'm not doing it for you. A Vestige remains our only hope at stopping Mammon--and that scum took someone precious from me. For the chance to avenge her, I would do anything."

That was something Ira could completely understand.

"I'll find you." He swore, wincing at how familiar the words seemed. As if he'd made this same promise centuries ago. "I'm going to come back. I'm going to come find you--and we'll go. We're going to Hell, we're going to find Mel. We're going to fix this. Because you're right, Mayvalt."

"About?" She asked.

"It's not over." Ira answered.

PART ONE : THE SNAKE

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END