I gaped as I stared at the woman, as the remnants of the Covenant’s blood dripped from the silk of her gown. She touched Gray’s arm as
she passed, squeezing him with a familiarity that made everything in me freeze solid. She didn’t linger as she passed him, her slow, steady strides crossing the distance between us until she stopped just in front of me.
A single youthful hand raised to my face, cupping my cheek as she stared down at me and smiled.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered, glancing over her shoulder to where Gray watched our interaction intently.
“But I think you do,” the woman said, dropping her hand from my face and stroking a finger over the necklace of bones as she lowered it to take my hands in hers.
I paused, staring into those ageless eyes that seemed to see inside of me
—that seemed to understand me in ways no one else did or would. I couldn’t explain the connection, or the way the weight of that stare made something inside me rattle.
“Charlotte?” I asked, my gaze dropping to her teeth as her smile broadened.
She nodded, squeezing my hands as I gaped at her. I didn’t understand what resurrecting Charlotte Hecate meant or why it was so important, but she turned to face my father with a glare before I could ask any further questions.
“You swore you’d bring back my sister!” he shouted, his face mottled and angry as he leveled that glare at Gray. The Vessel was unimpressed,
cleaning beneath his nails with the dagger he’d since picked up from the floor as if he feared I may try to stick him with the pointy end.
I would, determined to repay that favor.
Charlotte advanced on my father, that slow gait of hers eerie and terrifying as she raised a single hand. My father gasped for breath, releasing the knife he’d held to Ash’s throat and grasping his own as he clawed at his skin. As he tried to free himself from the witch who was suffocating him without ever laying a hand upon him.
“Only the worst kind of man would harm his own daughter,” Charlotte said.
Ash bolted from my father’s side, running into the center of the Tribunal circle. I dropped to my knees on the tile as he slammed into my chest, knocking me back onto the balls of my feet as I curled him into my arms.
“Low,” he murmured, loud sobs wracking his little body.
“Shhh,” I whispered, forcing a fake smile to my face. Even knowing he couldn’t see it, that he’d buried himself in my chest too fiercely, it felt like an important act. “It’s going to be all right. I promise you’ll be all right.”
I squeezed him tightly as I watched Charlotte approach my father. She stomped her foot on the floor of the Tribunal room, and the stones and tiles separated beneath her. The pit that opened between her and my father was small and cramped, and she stepped around it to grab him by the back of his shirt.
“Let us see how you like living in the darkness,” she growled and tossed him into the hole.
He screamed as she waved her hand over the pit, clawing at the dirt that fell back in and slid to surround him. The stone and tiles repaired themselves in a slow wave, spreading across the top of the hole until there were no signs of damage.
Charlotte had buried my father in the ground beneath the school, and as her gaze came to mine and she raised her chin, I understood.
She knew. She knew what I had suffered when I disappointed him. Knew of the little coffin-shaped alcove he kept off the corner of his basement, where the only way out was through a locked door at my feet.
She knew the way dirt trickled through the cracks in the wood to touch my face, knew the way the darkness had settled itself inside my soul.
I swallowed, standing as she approached. Ash fastened himself to my legs, wrapping his arms around them tightly and refusing to let go. I didn’t
speak a word of what Charlotte knew as she approached, that understanding arching between us as she rested a gentle hand atop my brother’s head and lowered herself in front of him.
“Juliet will take you back to your father now, Bug,” she said.
I shook my head, wrapping my arm more tightly over his shoulder and pressing him into me. Charlotte’s gaze was sympathetic and sad as she looked up at me.
“Don’t make me say goodbye again,” I begged.
“This goodbye is not forever, just for the moment,” she said, looking at the Vessel over my shoulder. Juliet stepped up, holding out a hand for Ash as I looked down at him and shook my head again.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
Charlotte rose in front of me, taking my face in her hands and brushing her thumb through the tears that had gathered beneath my eyes. “You’ve not yet fulfilled your destiny, my darling. It is not safe for him here until you do.”
I closed my eyes, turning my face down to press my lips into the top of Ash’s head.
“No, Low,” he begged, pleading as Juliet took his hand and tugged him gently away.
“I love you,” I said, my nostrils flaring as I tried to fight the sob rising in my throat. As I tried to control the endless flood of tears that came with the overwhelming emotions. “I will always protect you, even if I’m the one that you need to be protected from.”
“Low!” he screamed, latching on to my hand as Juliet pulled him into her arms.
She was gentle with him, wrapping him up as if he were as precious to her as he was to me. We shared a look, and she nodded her understanding as if she’d heard my words.
If anything happened to him, I would Unmake her Vessel and trap her demon in a circle to play with for weeks.
Ash’s fingers slipped through mine when I didn’t hold on to him the same way, and I felt every bit of his skin slide against mine.
“I assumed I’d already played my part in bringing you back,” I said, the melancholy of my voice sounding odd even to me. It wasn’t natural for me to feel so hollow, for the emptiness that I kept trapped within the well inside me to rise up and swallow me whole.
But what had been the point?
My entire life had been to find the bones, and I didn’t even know why.
“I am not your destiny,” she said, taking my hand in hers. She guided me back to the mirror on the ground, and we stared down at our reflections in the glass. “I am merely a gift from your husband so that you can survive what comes next.”
She touched her free hand to the top of my shoulder, pushing me to my knees in front of the mirror as I blinked at her reflection in confusion.
“I-I don’t have a husband,” I said, trying to ignore the way her responding smile raised all the hair on the back of my neck.
She slipped her fingers beneath the edge of my sweater, tugging the fabric to the side so that the devil’s eye was visible. She pressed her finger into the center of the mark pointedly, leaning forward to meet my stare in the mirror. “This mark would say otherwise.”
I swallowed, following her path as she came around to the opposite side of the mirror and kneeling to face me. “I have so many questions. I don’t understand any of this. That bone wasn’t mine. How did it—”
“I put it there on the night you were born,” Gray answered, coming to stand behind me. He touched his finger to the devil’s eye, bringing that sharp sting of pain to the surface. “A long time ago, Charlotte asked me to make sure she would always be with you.”
“I—but why? None of this makes any sense,” I asked as Charlotte took my hands in hers from across the mirror.
“You were the price of my bargain, Willow,” she said, rubbing her thumbs over the back of my hands.
“The Vessels were the price of the bargain,” I argued.
“The Vessels were a distraction. They were my way of trying to limit the ability the demons had to hurt people by forcing them to stay local to the Coven. They were never the price the devil demanded for the magic he gave me. That was always you,” Charlotte said, shaking her head sadly. “Only the daughter of two bloodlines, of two magics, can open the seal.”
I stared down at the mirror, at the face of the woman carved into the stone surrounding the glass. “Why is your face on the mirror?” I asked, and something in my own words was doubtful. Something in me had started trying to connect the dots and put the pieces together.
“Look again. That is not my face, my love,” she said, confirming my rising horror. Gray came up to stand behind me, a solid presence at my
spine as Charlotte guided my hands to linger just above the glass.
The woman in the stone stared back at me, the features of her face so familiar that I’d seen them every day. The dress and crown she wore were like nothing I’d ever seen, and I hadn’t made the connection in the context.
But she was me, carved into stone—Devil only knew how many years before I’d been born.
Charlotte pressed my hand into the glass, following it with the second as I tried to understand what was happening. Pain exploded through the ends of my fingers, burning as if I’d stuck my hands into the flames of Hell itself. My tentative touch straightened, the glass pulling me from the other side as Charlotte covered my hands with hers.
“Whatever you do, do not let go until I tell you,” she said, her face twisted with the same pain that consumed me. Flames spread up my arms, leaving my skin unmarked, but the pain that twisted my body was no different. “You’ll die if you do.”
The mirror shattered beneath my hands, glass falling into an endless pit below us. It went on for eternity, fading into darkness as it dropped. A single light shone through, spreading through the chasm as magic spread. A spiral set of stairs appeared slowly, step by step, as it lowered into that growing pit. Only when the light of them touched the bottom did my horror at what I was looking at truly hit.
“Then let me die,” I said, pulling on my hands. Even though the glass was gone, it wouldn’t release me.
“You must live. You must live because you are the only hope of fixing what I have done,” Charlotte said, her voice horrified as the first of the creatures placed his foot on the bottom step. “I’m so sorry.”
He was almost human-like as he turned his shocking red eyes up to me, ascending the stairs slowly. The wings of a bat curved around his shoulders, draping and nearly dragging against the ground as he climbed. I didn’t know why he didn’t just fly, but I swallowed as I tried yet again to let go of the magic opening the pits of Hell to earth.
Beelzebub crested the top of the stairs, thrusting a hand up onto the floor of the Tribunal room and pulling himself out with a roll of his neck. The leathery texture of his wing brushed against my cheek as he emerged, stepping forward so that the one who followed on his heel had room to move.
Satanus followed behind him, his body larger than the winged being who had come before. His chest was broader than two men combined, his body taller than any I’d seen. He shrank slightly as he pulled himself up from the pits, but the horns atop his head set him apart, anyway.
Leviathan came next, carrying the end of some kind of cot behind him. The fingers he’d wrapped around the post he carried were long, spindly things with too much webbing between the fingers. The talons there were monstrous, like something pulled from the depths. But it was the sleeping figure upon the cot that stole the breath from my lungs.
Facedown upon it, the open, weeping wounds where wings should have been were an identical match for the portrait in Gray’s office. He didn’t move, his chest didn’t rise or fall, even as Belphegor carried the other end of the cot. They maneuvered Lucifer up and out of the pits. The male form lying sprawled on the cot in front of me was dead, entirely devoid of life.
But the devil couldn’t die.
“Why is he like that? Why isn’t he moving?” I asked Charlotte, refusing to look into the pits and watch as the remaining of the seven archdemons of Hell made their way for the hole between realms.
The one I’d opened when I broke the seal.
She smiled sadly, holding my horrified stare with a soft expression. “Oh, sweetheart, because His soul is already here.”
