"Burn this one too," the man with the ugly teeth said. "He's Taken already. Same as the rest."
"Then tie him to the pole and light it."
The man in the black coat and tall hat didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. Whatever he said, the others did.
So they did.
They bound Ethan to the post before the corruption could take the rest of him, and they burned him, because that was the only way anyone knew to kill a Taken cleanly—to cleanse whatever had gotten inside before it finished getting in all the way.
It was mercy, the way they understood mercy.
It didn't feel like mercy to Ethan.
He screamed.
For a while, that was the only thing left of him that anyone standing outside the fire could see.
Inside, where none of them could follow, he was still fighting.
The green light came first.
Brilliant. Wrong. Thick with a feeling like standing too close to something that hated being looked at.
Then the shape resolved out of it.
A head too large for its thin, corpse-pale body. Three eyes set wrong across its face. Two arms built for nothing but tearing. Its mouth was a shark's mouth, serrated and grinning without meaning to.
It didn't need to try to be horrifying.
It simply was, the way a wound is.
It wanted him to break.
It had expected him to break already. He'd been Taken at the worst possible moment—exhausted, alone, and half-convinced there was nothing left worth holding onto.
That was supposed to be enough.
It was always enough.
It wasn't working.
And the fact that it wasn't working confused the creature more than it frightened him.
"Wrong," it said, in a voice like a throat full of ash. "Wrong. Wrong. Wrong."
It dragged its claws down the side of its own skull, an animal gesture, something closer to instinct than thought.
"How are you doing this? You are not meant to be awake. Tell me how."
Ethan didn't answer.
He was on both knees, head bowed, and the only thing moving through him that still felt like his was three words, over and over, the way his mother used to say them when he came home from a bad day and his father used to say them before every hard thing that came after.
I am Ethan.
I am Ethan.
I am Ethan.
He held onto the words.
At first, it wasn't defiance.
It was simply the one thing he had left that the fire outside and the thing inside hadn't managed to take from him.
He held it the way you hold anything you're afraid of dropping.
Then, slowly, it became something else.
Ethan lifted his head.
His eyes were bloodshot. His voice was raw from the screaming his body was still doing somewhere beyond his awareness.
But when he spoke, it came out steady.
"I'll make you regret this."
The creature stared at him.
"Your whole kind. Anyone standing with you."
Ethan said it the way you say something you intend to still mean ten years from now.
"I promise you that."
The creature took an involuntary step back.
A strange thing for something that shouldn't have needed a floor to stand on.
Ethan wasn't finished.
He looked at it, hatred and something calmer beneath the hatred both true at once, and let a grin cross his face that had no business being there.
"Starting with you."
The creature recoiled.
"What have you done?"
Ethan felt the pull before he understood it.
Suddenly, the creature was being dragged—deep and total—as though the vortex had been there the entire time, simply waiting for a reason to open.
It threw itself away from him.
There was nowhere to go.
"You can't be—you're not thinking of spending your own Mastery level on this, are you? That's—that won't—"
It didn't finish the sentence.
Ethan wasn't sure, later, whether it had meant to warn him or plead with him.
He didn't care.
The creature came apart the way ice comes apart under extreme heat.
Not all at once.
It fought for every inch of itself until there was nothing left to fight with except one final, desperate lash of green plasma straight at Ethan's head.
The blast threw him backward.
For a moment, the pull faltered.
Some small, terrified part of him thought:
This is where I lose it.
He leaned into the current instead of away from it.
He gave it more of himself rather than less.
And he dragged what was left of the creature, screaming, into the only place left for it to go.
Outside, the fire flared white for a heartbeat.
Then it died all at once.
Not burned out.
Snuffed.
When the smoke cleared, Ethan was standing at the post, whole and unmarked, his clothes reduced to ash while little else around him had been touched.
His eyes flashed a color that didn't belong in a human face—the same green the fire had just swallowed.
The crowd took a step back as if they'd practiced it beforehand.
Except for a handful who didn't move at all.
Ethan took a step of his own.
Then another.
Then stopped.
His gaze found a man near the front of the crowd.
Brown coat.
Black wool lining.
Plain trousers.
Entirely unbothered by what he was looking at.
The man met Ethan's eyes and smiled, like he'd been waiting for exactly this.
Ethan's legs gave out before he could ask him why.
He woke hours later to the same face.
Still smiling.
Still watching him the way you'd watch something you'd already decided was worth the trouble.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," the man said.
"Taken."