Room 805 felt colder than the rooftop.

Max stepped inside barefoot, the sweat on his skin already cooling. Overhead, the fluorescent lights flickered with a steady, clinical pulse, throwing long shadows that bent across the floor. He paused in the doorway, motionless — a man standing at the threshold of a tomb he had built with his own hands.

Liz hadn't changed.

She lay where she always lay, lost beneath the white weight of hospital sheets, framed by IV poles and silent monitors. Her chest rose and fell in shallow increments. Her lips were cracked. Her skin had drawn tight over her bones, pale enough to seem almost translucent. Even her hair had dulled, as though colour itself had abandoned her.

The machines kept their low, patient hum. No alarms. No flicker of crisis. Just the quiet persistence of systems waiting for permission to stop.

They hadn't expected him to stay this long. They never did.

He crossed the room slowly, each step deliberate, as if a misplaced footfall might wake her. The chair beside the bed creaked when he sat. He reached for her hand — cold, weightless, fragile. The fingers did not close around his.

"Hey," he said. The word was rough in his throat. "It's me."

No answer.

The chart at the bed's foot still read: Elizabeth Jaeger. Female. Sixteen. No change.

A strand of hair had slipped across her temple. He brushed it back. It didn't feel like her hair anymore — no warmth, no hint of life, just the texture of something preserved. She hadn't blinked in seven months.

The ventilator clicked once.

The room smelled faintly of antiseptic and something sweeter, almost floral, that didn't belong — a half-dead bouquet on the windowsill. Somewhere in the hallway, a trolley wheel squeaked, each turn a thin reminder that life moved on outside this door.

Today was meant to be her last.

They'd told him gently, soft voices trying to make mercy sound like a kindness: We'll switch off the support at four p.m., unless there's been a change. But there hadn't been. Not since the first seizure. Not since the coma deepened. Not since the day the world began to loosen its hold on her.

He'd begged for more time.

And when there was nothing left to beg for, he had gone to the hotel. Drawn the circle. Cut his hand. Spoken the words.

Ridiculous. Horrifying. Maybe already too late.

He looked at her again. Still no miracles.

Lifting her hand to his forehead, he pressed it there — felt its weight, and the lack of it. His throat constricted.

"I used to think you were just asleep," he whispered. "That one day you'd stretch, roll over, and give me shit for putting you in a hospital room with no books."

His mouth twisted.

"But that's not how this ends, is it? This isn't some story. This is the part where the machines stop beeping, and everyone pretends it was peaceful."

The crack in his voice broke the quiet. "But it's not. It's not peaceful. It's not fair."

He looked down at their joined hands. One warm, one not.

"Lizzie… I don't know if you're in there anymore."

The rest of the thought died before it reached his lips.

He sat for a long while in the dimness, listening to the filtered air and the muted life of the hospital beyond the door. None of it touched her.

She was here.

But she wasn't.

And Max could not — would not — let that be the end.

***

Max slouched in the visitor's chair, elbows braced on his knees, Liz's hand small and cold in his own. His thumb traced the edge of her knuckle — no pressure back, no hint of life. Just that soft, terrible stillness.

She still looked like April. Sixteen, beautiful in the way teenagers never realise. Same white-blonde hair, same pale skin that never caught the sun, same sharp green eyes — though now they hid behind closed lids. But she was too thin. Hollowed. The hospital gown hung loose, draped over bones that hadn't grown the way they should.

Fresh scratches ran down her forearms, fading red arcs. Angry. Unexplained. They'd earned him suspicious glances from staff, then supervised visits. He hadn't known what to say. Still didn't. Only that they hadn't been there before the seizure. Before the coma. Before something else took hold.

"I wore your hoodie again last night," he murmured. "The one with the skeleton cat. Still smells like you — vanilla shampoo and way too much fabric softener."

His voice caught, but he kept going.

"You wore it every day after school. Even in this heat. I told you you looked like a walking thrift-store fire hazard, and you said—" his throat closed "—you said, 'At least I'm not a fashion zombie like you.'"

A breath escaped him, half-laugh, half-collapse.

"That was the week you made me binge Buffy. You mocked me for crying at the finale, then cried yourself when Anya died and swore you didn't. I still know the theme song by heart, you little gremlin."

He leaned closer.

"You used to snore like a lawnmower when you were seven. I never told you. Thought it would embarrass you." His hand shifted slightly against hers. "You stopped after the fire. After your mum— April—passed away."

Her name hung in the air like a cut wire.

The hospital faded. For a moment he was back in that motel: the circle scrawled in marker, blood pooling in the grooves of his palm, sigils copied from April's notes, jagged and desperate. The carpet coarse under his knees. The copper taste in his mouth.

He hadn't believed it would work. But he'd done it anyway.

Because he couldn't watch Liz fade the way her mother had.

Because desperation made a better priest than faith ever could.

"I didn't even know what I was calling," he whispered. "I just… couldn't lose you too."

The memory gripped him — the moment the blood caught flame, the silence after. Not holy. Not peaceful. Wrong. Like something behind the world had turned its head to listen.

He swallowed and forced himself back to her face — lashes still, porcelain-perfect. She'd always hated that.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I should've tried sooner."

He squeezed her fingers — gently, so gently.

"I was scared," he breathed. "Terrified I'd kill you trying to save you."

Something inside him stirred.

Low. Hot.

His free hand trembled. A faint glow began to pulse in his palm, gold veins spreading across the back of his wrist like lightning caught beneath the skin.

The fire was listening.

Max stared at it. Then back at her.

Already, the glow was fading. Not resisting — leaving. Moving on.

"I still am," he whispered.

The light pulsed once, low and dangerous, like it had heard more than just his words.

***

The room was too quiet.

Not silent. Machines still whispered – pulses and breaths and electrical hum. But it was the kind of quiet that left nowhere to hide. Max stood beside the bed, every part of him tight, clenched, holding something back. Or maybe holding something in.

He exhaled. Slowly. The kind of breath you take before a fall.

His left hand rose.

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The fire answered.

It didn't roar. Didn't lash out. It uncoiled – elegant, deliberate, a ribbon of light winding up his forearm. Gold at the core, tinged with a flicker of pale blue. It moved like it was breathing. Like it had been waiting for this.

Max watched it curl at his wrist, warm and steady. Not a weapon. Not anger. Something alive. Something listening.

"I don't know what this will do," he said softly. "Or what I've become."

The flame pulsed, just once. Like it heard.

He stared down at Liz.

Sixteen. His daughter. His world. Gaunt and motionless beneath hospital linen. The same hoodie she used to wear every weekend now bunched beneath her neck, like a bad memory. Her hand lay in his – still small, still cold. The monitors hissed beside them, and somewhere behind the numbers, her life hung by threads.

Max swallowed.

What if this was wrong?

What if this wasn't a cure – what if it erased her? Not saved but rewritten. Reforged into something that wasn't Liz at all.

The fire crawled higher, whispering against his pulse.

He'd failed her in the real world. This was all he had left – myth and madness and a miracle he didn't believe only two days ago.

"You're not some experiment," he muttered, voice breaking. "You're not a tool. You're my kid."

He clenched his jaw. Closed his eyes.

And still—

The beep of the ventilator dipped. Just for a moment.

Max looked up. Her chest had paused.

No more waiting.

He stepped closer. Knees weak, throat raw, hands shaking.

Then— he made the choice.

Max turned his palm, brought it down, and pressed the fire into her hand.

There was no explosion. No light-show. The flame moved like water, like breath, like memory – slipping from his skin into hers in one slow, steady current. It spread along her fingers, up her wrist, across the IV lines and scarring. It didn't burn. It settled. It claimed.

Her monitor spasmed. The numbers jumped.

And Max fell to one knee, breath gone, pulse hammering.

He didn't know what he'd unleashed. But something had begun.

***

The moment the fire crossed from his skin into hers, Max felt the change. It didn't just flow — it seized him.

The current hooked deep into his arm and dragged him forward, carrying him through the threads of his own body as if every vein were a river of molten ore. Heat roared through him, but it wasn't surface heat; it was deeper, older, threaded into marrow and memory. He felt his muscles tighten as if the fire were chiselling them from the inside out, carving past sinew and bone, past the places where pain had lived for years, into chambers that had never been touched.

His knees gave way. The tiles hit hard. One hand shot to the floor, the other welded to hers by that ribbon of gold spilling between them.

Breath tore out of him in short, ragged bursts. The room blurred, its edges glowing like metal just before it melts.

And then—

He felt her.

Not the cold skin in his grasp. Not the brittle weight of her hand.

Her.

Her soul.

It was fragile — stretched thin, unravelled in places — but it was still there, flickering like a candle deep in a cave, hidden from wind and light but alive.

"Liz…" His voice fractured under the weight of it, tears streaking his face before he realised they'd fallen. "You're still in there."

She didn't speak. But something pressed back against him — faint, unsteady, almost lost — trying. For the briefest moment it was her: the spark of her laugh, the taste of a memory half-remembered. Then it slipped beneath the dark again.

Max pushed after it. Past his own fear. Past the bone-deep ache.

The fire guided him, though it spoke without words. It wasn't offering salvation. It wasn't promising destruction. It was opening doors — not to what he wanted, but to what was already there.

Whatever the soul screamed for most.

But what if that need wasn't peace? What if it was hunger? Vengeance? War?

The fire didn't care. It didn't bargain or weigh cost. It simply gave the soul what it was strong enough — or desperate enough — to take.

And now he felt it — the vast, fractured reservoir of power that had once belonged to Aamon, scattered when the demon fell. Pieces of it, sharp and hot, sliding through him on their way into her. Almost all of it went to Liz, threading itself into her soul, filling the hollows with a strength that was not human.

Almost all.

The Hellfire stayed. It burned at his core, steady and alive, as if it had always been part of him and always would be.

He gave more of himself to her. The fire surged, eager, spilling from his chest into hers in arcs that wrapped her ribs like golden armour. His heart hammered. His lungs spasmed. Monitors shrieked.

Her body convulsed. She arched violently, eyes closed, limbs flinging out as if rejecting the frame they were built for.

"Oh God—"

"Liz!"

He tried to pull back.

The fire didn't let him.

It turned on him instead, surging back up his arm with the force of a hammer blow to the ribs. His vision sheared sideways into a storm of black, gold, and blood-red. Warpaint patterns burned across the inside of his mind.

Then came her scream. Not from her throat. From within.

It wasn't pain. It wasn't fear. It was colder — the sound of being refused.

Rejection.

And then—

The light shifted.

Her body slammed flat against the bed. A great breath rushed into her lungs.

Above her brow, something began to bloom.

Not gold. Not fire. Red.

It flared in uneven pulses, jagged at the edges, as though it had been buried in the dark for centuries and was only now clawing its way free.

The room froze.

The world froze.

For one long moment, it felt as if reality itself was watching to see what she would become.

Max fell back, half-crawling until the wall caught him. He slid down its cold surface, vision swimming, every muscle shaking.

The monitor above her bed was screaming. Her chest rose and fell in a new rhythm. Beneath her skin, the faint glow of the halo cast its pulse across the sheets. Not warmth. Not healing.

Power.

He had no name for what he'd awakened. Not resurrection. Not mercy.

Only the part of her soul that refused to die — now bolstered by the strength of a fallen demon. And maybe — maybe that part had no interest in peace.

Power like this never came free. Not from demons. Not from gods. Not even from himself. Sooner or later, someone — or something — would come to balance the books.

A sob broke from him, raw and involuntary. His hands hung empty and scorched, trembling from more than pain.

Whatever had begun here was not finished. It was only the opening move.

***

Liz didn't wake.

But she changed.

Her breathing, once shallow and machine-paced, now came deeper, steadier, like each inhale claimed the air for herself. The grey pallor that had clung to her for months receded, replaced by the faint warmth of returning blood. Her fingers twitched once, a brief, uncertain motion before stillness reclaimed them. Lips that had been cracked and colourless now looked fuller, alive.

And above her brow, the red halo burned on. Uneven, flickering — but real.

Max sat hunched forward, elbows braced on his knees, as if moving would shatter the moment. The halo's light washed across his hands, staining his knuckles the colour of fresh blood. Each pulse was like a heartbeat, steady but unpredictable, as though the soul behind it was still deciding whether to stay.

"That's you, isn't it?" His voice was low, catching halfway out of his throat.

He glanced toward the glass wall separating Room 805 from the dim hospital corridor. His own reflection looked back — a wreck in a ragged gown, arms mottled with scorched skin, hair plastered to his forehead. At his chest, a faint coil of Hellfire still smouldered, a pale ghost of the blaze it had been minutes ago.

It had been brighter once. Stronger. Most of that strength now lived in her.

And yet… the Hellfire remained his, stubborn, steady, unwilling to be given away. Maybe it had always belonged to him.

And with it came a cold truth.

He had put something inside her that he could never take back. It would grow with her, change with her, and one day it might look at him with eyes that were no longer hers at all. Relief twisted in his chest, tangled with the sharp edge of fear, until he couldn't tell them apart.

He leaned forward, brushing a strand of hair from Liz's face with a care born of fear — not of hurting her, but of breaking the illusion that she might, somehow, feel it.

"I gave you everything I could," he murmured. "Now you just have to find your way home."

When he finally rose, it was slow, deliberate. His spine felt ironed straight by grief. Joints ached. Muscles trembled, empty of strength.

He didn't look back.

The hallway outside was colder. The fluorescent buzz overhead seemed louder than it should, a thin electrical whine cutting through the hush. The world felt thinner, stretched taut, as if the walls might peel back to reveal something worse behind them.

Halfway to the lift, he stopped.

The prickle started at the base of his skull and crawled down his spine — the ancient instinct that said you're not alone. It wasn't the idle paranoia of a tired mind. This was sharper. Older.

He looked up. Just ceiling tiles, vents, light.

The sensation didn't fade.

He turned, scanning the corridor. Empty.

Still it lingered.

Eyes. Somewhere above. Somewhere beneath. Watching from a place the building didn't have.

His gaze caught on the glass door at the far end of the hall. The reflection staring back at him blinked — even though he hadn't.

The breath left his chest in a slow, deliberate exhale. He shook it off. Forced his legs to move. Just exhaustion. Just nerves. Just—

But he knew it wasn't.

Something had seen. The fire had heard him. And something else… had started to move.

Far above the hospital, past glass and steel, past cloud and sky, something shuddered in the dark between worlds. The echo of what Max had done rolled outward like a silent detonation, and somewhere in that darkness, gold began to stir.

***

The temple breathed. Not with life, but with pressure — the slow, constant settling of wealth upon itself. The air was thick with the scent of hot metal, and the faint hiss of gold shifting under its own weight. Shadows clung to the vaulted ceiling, broken only by the cold shimmer of heatless flames.

Mammon sat on a throne of fused idols and melted crowns. His fingers, long as poured gold, rested lightly on the armrests, flexing once as if testing their strength. The white fire in his eyes burned lower than usual, the light tightening to thin, watchful points.

Something had gone missing.

He had felt it hours ago — a flare of presence, old and unmistakable. Aamon. The signature had risen from the mortal realm like a coin dropped into still water, rippling through the ledgers of the Pit. Then, without warning, it had vanished. Not closed. Not paid. Simply… absent.

The King of Greed did not like absences.

Gold rippled across the floor as Kimaris approached. He knelt on one knee, a perfect line in black, his shadow stretching far behind him, curling into shapes that made the air feel heavier.

"You felt it," Mammon said, his voice low and measured.

Kimaris inclined his head. "Yes. The gate opened briefly. The signature was pure Aamon — and then nothing. No return to the Pit."

Mammon's gaze drifted to a frieze of ancient contracts on the far wall. His fingers tapped once on the armrest, a sound like a coin striking glass. "Is he loose in the mortal world… or gone entirely?" The question hung in the gold-lit air, heavier than the words themselves.

"I will find out," Kimaris said.

"Do so. If Aamon moves freely, I want his chains restored. If he is gone…" Mammon's voice thinned, almost to a whisper, "…I want to know who paid for the knife that cut him away."

He paused. The fire in his eyes sharpened. "I felt something else. Fragments of his essence scattered — fine as dust, tasting of burnt iron — clinging to a mortal. Bound, but not to us. A Contractor with no place in my ledger."

Kimaris's shadow stirred like a net drawing closed.

Mammon leaned forward, the throne creaking faintly beneath him. "If you find this human, learn how he holds that power. And if the rumours of Moloch's interest reach him before you…" He let the sentence trail away, its weight understood without being spoken.

"Then I will have to move quickly," Kimaris said. "A fragment of Aamon will draw every scavenger in the Pit — and there are many who would rather devour him than let you weigh him."

His tone carried no urgency, but there was a faint hunger beneath it, as though the hunt itself was a kind of payment he meant to collect.

Mammon's gaze narrowed by a fraction, the white fire in his eyes brightening just enough to catch the edges of the gold around him. "Let them starve." The words carried no heat — only the certainty of someone who had never been denied what he claimed.

Kimaris rose without a bow. "I will bring you truth."

"Bring me more than truth," Mammon murmured, his voice soft as a coin sliding into a purse. "Bring me the account settled."

The golden light swelled, then dulled, and Kimaris was gone. The weight of the room resettled, but not evenly. Somewhere across the mortal world, the missing balance still waited to be claimed — and debts, Mammon knew, could only go unpaid for so long.

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