The suffocating heat of Madrid at the tail end of August forgives no one — except, it seems, him.

The palace rooftop still held the day's fever in its stones, a heat that rose from the tiles like breath, thick, almost alive, and yet the air around Julian Pérez trembled with a cold that had nothing to do with the weather. Thirteen women formed a perfect circle, wrists bound with cords woven from hair and salt, their cotton dresses soaked through with sweat and terror in equal measure. Above them, the sky was completing its transformation: the moon slid in front of the sun like a gloved hand closing around a flame, and the solar corona blazed around the edges, a ring of white fire suspended in the sudden three-o'clock darkness.

It was the kind of heat that split your skull open, the kind of August heat that turned asphalt into liquid mirror and drove people to sleep naked under gasping fans — and he wore gloves.

Doeskin leather gloves, the color of aged honey, fitted to his skin like a second nature, climbing to the wrist where they vanished beneath the cuffs of a half-open white shirt. Anyone else, under that black sun and this suffocating swelter, would have looked absurd. Julian looked like a man who simply didn't belong to the same weather as everyone else — as if the heat had stopped, out of respect or fear, touching him at all.

He moved through the center of the circle with the deliberate slowness of a man who knows he's being watched, and likes it. Tall, sharp-featured, the kind of beauty that seemed carved for darkness rather than light — and yet, in this precise moment, he possessed both. Extinguished sunlight, filtered through the ring of fire; cold, silver moonlight sliding over the bones of his face like a caress. He raised his hands, palms open to the sky, and one could have sworn the leather of his gloves drank the light rather than reflecting it.

"Thirteen," he murmured, savoring the word like something rare. "Thirteen witches for a single total eclipse. Some wait an entire lifetime for an omen like this."

His voice had that low, almost tender grain of a man who might be discussing wine or poetry — not the imminent combustion of thirteen human beings. Around the circle, the women had begun to glow, a bluish phosphorescence blooming beneath their skin as though their veins had turned to incandescent filament. One of them screamed a name that belonged to no deity Madrid had ever known. Another had stopped screaming long ago, eyes rolled back, mouth parted on a breath that was no longer quite human.

Julian closed his eyes and tilted his head, like a man listening to an orchestra build toward its crescendo.

"No one ever told you, did they" — he whispered, to no one in particular, or perhaps to all of them — "that the world only ever allowed you, the women, to carry magic? An absurd injustice, when you think about it. Power shouldn't get to choose a sex."

There was, beneath the velvet of his voice, something older than mere doctrine — a fracture, deep, scarred over so long ago it had come to resemble conviction. But only the surface showed: a smile, patient, almost gentle, turned toward the rising flames.

"Fortunately," he went on, lifting his gloved hands toward the ring of fire suspended in the sky, "I found a way to correct that mistake."

The doeskin leather — doe leather, specifically, and nothing else would do — began to shiver against his skin, as if it were breathing. The first of the thirteen women arched backward, a scream tearing through the scorched air, and a thread of golden light left her chest to twist into a spiral, seized, swallowed, absorbed into Julian Pérez's gloves with the silent hunger of a man finally tasting, after a lifetime of deprivation, what had always been denied him.

It was at that exact instant — night in the middle of day, the smell of scorched flesh and ozone, the low, satisfied laugh of a man who had nothing human left but his appearance — that someone stepped through the rooftop door.

The hot Madrid wind rushes through the open stairwell behind you, and ahead: thirteen women burning alive, a ring of fire hanging in a sky that should never have gone dark in the middle of an August afternoon — and a man in now black colored leather gloves slowly turning his head toward you, a smile already forming on his lips, as if he'd been expecting you all along.

Your choice to make : ally ? Enemy ? Who are you to him?