Move—get out of my way!"
The woman's voice cracked like a whip across the moonlit ruin. She barreled through the press of bodies, elbows carving space where none existed. Torches hissed; shadows leapt. Tayo's mind lagged behind the scene, still trying to stitch the night together—bound girl, curse, mob—when the woman was suddenly *there*, eclipsing the moon.
Darkness swallowed his face. He smelled her first: sweat, grief, the copper tang of a mother's sleepless terror. Then her fist arrived.
*Crack.*
"Why!" The word tore out of her, raw as a fresh wound. "Why would you do this—what the hell *are* you?"
Another blow. Then another. Tayo's vision strobed red. He tasted iron that wasn't there. His arms rose on instinct, catching the next punch on a forearm that felt suddenly brittle.
"I don't understand what is going on," he rasped, voice thick behind swollen lips.
Strong hands hooked the woman around the middle, hauling her back. She kicked, screamed, clawed at empty air. Tayo lurched—*move, move*—but his legs were stone. Panic flared hot in his chest.
"You wondering why you can't move, right?" Lieutenant Damascus Vanhelsin stepped from the gloom, moonlight carving his smile into something sharp. "Simple. While my curse lingers, no creature I tourch can take a single step."
Tayo's stomach dropped through the floorboards. For the first time the night felt real—the dust in his throat, the girl's muffled sobbing behind him, the lieutenant's breath sour with cheap wine.
"Now, everyone—*listen*." Damascus spread his arms like a priest at altar having the same menacing tone as the third figure in the alley . "Right here stands the cause of every candle night in Godfall. Four girls snatched under our noses. Look at it. Our sister struck its skull fifty times; not one drop of blood. Skin black as the pit. Speech like gravel in a coffin. Tell me that is not the devil wearing a boy's face."
Murmurs rippled outward, swelling into a tide.
"The lieutenant's right—listen how it *talks*."
"I'm not worried about talk. I'm worried what it *did* to those girls before it killed them."
"She can't even let go of the body. Look at her. That thing deserves to die."
Damascus lifted his chin. "What punishment fits a thing like this? Remember—mercy is a luxury it never offered our daughters."
The mob answered with one throat:
"**BURN ALIVE.**"
Outside, the night became a forge.
Torches bobbed like fireflies as men tore shutters from abandoned houses, splintered desks, dragged withered vines from the schoolyard. Wood rose in a ragged ziggurat. At its heart: a tall stake crossed by another, forming a crude *x*. The air thickened with pine resin and the bittersweet stink of lamp oil.
Tayo watched from the doorway, six pairs of hands clamped on his arms, his hair, his throat. When Damascus released the curse, the sudden rush of blood to his legs felt like betrayal. They lifted him—light as kindling—and carried him into the torchlight.
Ropes bit wrists already raw. The crossbeam scraped his spine. Below, faces blurred into a single mask of hatred. A child handed his father a twist of straw; the father tucked it tenderly at Tayo's feet, as if tucking in a sleeping son.
Tayo looked down. Every eye reflected the same small, hungry flame.
"Why," he whispered, the word cracking like green wood. "Why do this?"
Damascus stepped close enough for Tayo to smell the lie on his breath.
"You want truth?" A shrug. "Your skin is black."
Tayo's swollen tongue shaped the impossible. "So you'll do all this… because my skin is black."
"I'll do this," Damascus said, "and more."
He turned to the crowd. "Hand me the burner."
A branch—thick as a man's wrist, wrapped in oil-soaked rag—was pressed into his palm. The lieutenant touched it to a torch. Flame *whooshed* up, blue at the heart, hungry orange at the edges.
"All your sins and transgressions shall not go unpunished, demon."
He drew back his arm.
The fire *died*.
One heartbeat—two. The branch vanished, smoked, went dark as a snuffed candle. A collective inhale sucked the oxygen from the yard.
"What the hell is going on here?"
Captain Rosewalt stood at the gate, cloak half-fastened, sword naked in his fist. Moonlight slid along the blade like frost. Behind him, the night held its breath.