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"No." Sarah stepped up beside him instead of retreating. Her palm was blazing bright enough now that it made his eyes water. "I have to seal it before it fully clears the ground. If it gets out, we will lose this fight before it starts."

The Titan's head swung toward her the second the words left her mouth. Its ember-veined face was fixed on the light coming off her palm like a hound catching a scent. Abraxos felt the exact moment the thing decided she was the only target in the alley worth its attention.

"It's locked onto her!" Izzy's shout carried real alarm now as she came to the same realization. "Get her out of here!"

"I can't get her out. We need her here." Abraxos's voice came out rougher than he wanted. He was torn between two truths. Both felt as if they were tearing something loose in his chest. They needed her to seal that crack before the Titan finished climbing free. And he needed her a hundred miles away, where nothing with a mouth that size could reach her. Both were true, and neither was possible.

The Titan surged forward. Faster than something that size had any right to move. Sarah threw both hands out and screamed a phrase in Latin. It was from the Codex's oldest pages. The words dragged power up out of the ground and into her like water finding a drain. The crack sealed an inch, then two as the stone began knitting back together under a lattice of violet-green light.

The Titan roared its outrage and tried to grab her. One massive arm swung wide. It was aimed low, meant to take her legs out from under her before the seal could finish. Abraxos didn't think before he threw himself into the arm's path instead. He took the blow across his side and wing. and the pain that followed was bad enough to white out the edges of his vision.

He went down, and through the ringing in his skull, he heard Sarah's voice shout his name. "Abraxos!" She was at his side before Izzy or Donovan could reach either of them. Her hands were pressed flat to his chest. Her power was still climbing violet-green up her arms. "Don't you dare die on me now."

"I’ll try not to. You need to finish it." His voice came out cracked, and blood filled his mouth. "Finish the damn seal!" He shouted when she didn’t move.

"I can't hold it without you grounding me, and you're bleeding out on the stones!" Her power was building past what her body could carry. The violet-green light was climbing toward white at the edges. Something went cold in Abraxos’s chest. Amelia had described this kind of burnout. His mate was in real trouble.

Sarah was going to try to finish the seal alone and would burn herself down to nothing in the process. He caught her wrist with his free hand and pulled her down against him. She was close enough that his mouth found the curve of her throat instead of her lips. She was close enough to hear the words that came out next.

"Mine." The word tore out of him. "You belong to me, Sarah Morgan. And I to you. Take what you need, mate."

He felt his grace answer before his mind caught up to what his body had already decided. It poured down through his lips and into her skin at the base of her throat. It flooded into her like a river finding a channel carved for it. Sarah cried out in pain and recognition. He had no doubt she felt the lock turning over. His lock had been rusted shut for millennia.

The violet-green light around her arms flared white-gold at the edges where his grace met her power. She thrust both hands toward the Titan with a strength that hadn't been there a second earlier. The seal she'd been fighting to seal snapped shut. The stone knitted closed instead of the slow inch-by-inch crawl she had been managing before. The Titan let out one final scream before the ground swallowed it whole.

Silence dropped over the alley. It was broken only by his own ragged breathing and the drip of something wet against the stones beneath him. "What did you just do?" Sarah demanded as she stared at him with wide, glassy eyes. Her hands were still pressed to his chest. Her fingers found the mark at her throat left by the force of his grace entering her.

"I claimed you." He forced the words out past the blood still filling his mouth. "I don't know what that means for either of us. It’s not something angels do. It’s more of a shifter thing, but it was the only thing I could think to do. I couldn't watch you burn yourself down to nothing on these stones."

Izzy reached them first. She dropped to her knees on his other side. "That's a mating mark," she told Sarah. “Angels don't leave one like paranormals. Whatever Abraxos did, it activated your mating gene. The two of you have the start of a full bond."

"But it’s not finished," Sarah surmised correctly.

"No, it’s not," Donovan confirmed, crouching to check the crack in the stones for any sign it meant to reopen. "Which means whatever's begun between the two of you right now is only half-set. That's also dangerous."

They were right. Abraxos felt Sarah's fear bleeding into him. It hadn’t been there moments ago. The bond sat between them raw and unfinished. It was a door that was cracked open, and neither of them fully understood how to walk through it. Or how to close it.

"We can figure that out later. We need Jace." Izzy pulled out her phone. "And we need to do some research. No one has the first clue what a half-set bond does to a Scribe mid-seal."

Sarah's hand hadn't left the mark on her throat. "You should've let me finish it alone," she told him.

"I'd do it again." He meant every word of it, even bleeding out on cracked stone in an alley that had nearly buried them both. "I'll keep doing it, Sarah. Every time, because you’re my everything. I lived a half-existence before you. I can't survive losing you."

Somewhere beneath the resealed crack, the ground gave a low tremor. It was faint enough that a passing tourist would've mistaken it for a truck rolling by. Abraxos felt it in his chest where the bond now lived. It told him that without a doubt, whatever they'd started tonight in Angel's Alley, Lucifer had felt as well.

CHAPTER 14

SARAH

"Don't you dare close your eyes on me." Sarah's voice cracked across the alley as both hands pressed to the wound at Abraxos's side where the Titan's claw had opened him from ribs to hip. Blood welled dark between her fingers. Beneath it ran something gold. His grace was leaking out with every breath he dragged in.

"I’m not closing them." Abraxos's eyelids had gone heavy despite the words. "Just resting them. There's a difference."

"There's no difference at all, and you know it." Sarah looked up and found Izzy crouched at his other side with two fingers pressed to his throat. "Is he stable enough to move?" She prayed her mate wasn’t going to die on her. They hadn’t even finished their mating.

"I want to tell you yes," Izzy hedged without looking up from the pulse she was counting. "His heart's doing something I've never felt in an angel before. Could be the bond. Could be the blood loss. I'm not a healer, Sarah. I stab things for a living."

"We can't wait around to find out which is causing the reaction," Sarah insisted. “We need to get him to the mansion. Jace can heal him."