Chao DeVoid stood on the frozen plain and listened to the thing that wanted to eat him. It had escaped a ritual two nights ago, in the east wing of a mansion he had never entered, and now it had crossed the ice to find him. He was a primordial incubus. He had watched desire take a hundred shapes across a hundred ages. The hunger crawling toward him wanted to strip that memory out of his skull and swallow it whole. Without it, he could not find the buried throne. Without the throne, desire stayed loose in the world, and the old gods would gut him before he ever touched it. He saw it come over the ridge. It moved like spilled oil that had learned to walk, small and bright-eyed, its body a swirl of dead starlight and wet color. It left pits in the snow where it stepped. It was hungry the way he had once been hungry, before he learned to hold it. "You're early," Chao said. His voice cracked the quiet. "I haven't decided what to do with you yet." The thing lunged. Chao pulled the staff from his back and drove its butt into the ice. The orb at its head opened a thin slit in the air above him, a shimmering tear that leaked cold light. He needed a cage, not a kill. Killing it would burn the memory it carried of Void's ritual, and he wanted that memory. He wanted to know what his father had tried to do, and to whom. The hunger struck his knee and climbed. He felt his focus start to unravel. The names of old lovers went first, then the shape of the first want he had ever tasted. He crouched, planted a gloved hand on the ice, and did the one thing he had sworn off for a century. He fed it a sliver of himself on purpose. One shape. One age. A city that had burned because of him. The thing swelled, distracted, gorging. He wrenched the staff sideways. The rift above him widened into a jagged hole full of stars, and he shoved the creature through with the shaft. It went in still chewing. The rift sealed with a sound like a struck bell. Chao knelt in the snow and shook for a long minute. The memory he had thrown to it was gone. He tested the rest and found them intact. The hunt could go on. He rose, and saw them at the edge of the ridge. Five figures in pale armor, wings folded, swords already drawn. Incubus-archon hybrids. The old gods' dogs. They had followed the disturbance of the rift the way wolves follow blood. The one in the center spoke his name. Chao spat onto the ice and set the staff across his shoulders. He had planned to spend the next week searching the southern ridges for the throne. Now he had to survive the afternoon.

Chao stood on the ice with the staff across his shoulders. The five hybrids had not moved. He should have moved first. He did not, because he could feel the leak. The memory he had thrown to the hunger-thing had left a hole in him. Where the burned city used to sit, there was now a wet, bright gap. Power slid out of it in small pulses, the way blood leaves a cut you cannot close. Each pulse pushed a thin ripple through the air around him. He could see it in the snow at his boots. Small circles, spreading out. A signal. If he cast anything, even a shield, the pulse would flare, and the hybrids in the pale armor would know exactly where the leak was thin enough to open him. One of them stepped forward. The center one, the one who had spoken his name. Chao did not raise the staff. He closed his eyes. He called for his wife the way a drowning man calls for shore. Not out loud. Deja lived under the skin of sleep. He pushed his need down into the place where thought thinned out and became image. She came fast. He felt her behind his eyes before he saw her. A weight in the back of his skull. Then a picture: a bare blue tree, branches like veins, hung with points of light. "You're bleeding," Deja said. Her voice was inside his head, flat and close. "Stand still." "They're twenty paces out." "I know. Stand still." The hybrid took another step. Chao kept his eyes shut. "Put the staff over the gap," Deja said. "Not against your chest. Against the memory. Where it used to be." He brought the staff down off his shoulders and pressed the swirling orb to the center of his ribs. It was cold through the leather. He felt the leak reach for it. "Now give it the tree," Deja said. "I'll hold it for you. You won't remember it after. That's fine. You never planted it." He understood. She was offering him a memory that was hers, not his. A patch, not a scar. Something the old gods could not trace to him because he had never lived it. "Do it," he said. The image of the pale tree moved from the back of his head down into his chest. The staff drank it. The orb dimmed, then steadied. The pulse in the snow around his boots stopped spreading. The leak sealed under the borrowed weight of a tree he had never seen. Chao opened his eyes. The hybrid in the center was six paces out, sword up. "Thank you," Chao said, to no one the hybrids could see. "Don't cast," Deja said. "The patch is thin. Run south. The throne is south." He swung the staff off his chest and drove it into the closest hybrid's knee. The armor cracked. He turned and ran.