Chapter 19
Iwas face down on my bed with my boots still on when my room reorganized itself around her.
That was how Zandia moved through a space, not entering so much as redefining it, making the walls apologize for trying to contain her.
I didn't lift my head. I was too hollowed out from days of watching Trux come apart on a clock somebody else was setting, from holding Kearan while he absorbed things he wasn't supposed to survive, and from learning everything else systematically destroying my life.
The mattress shifted under her weight. Not gentle, not a request. She settled on the edge of my bed like she'd been invited.
I turned my head so I could see her. "Breaking into people's rooms is a weird flex for someone who claims to care about your own privacy."
"I care about efficiency," she corrected, her mild accent making even that sound like a lesson. "Your bedroom is where you keep the part of yourself that lets information land. In public you're too guarded. Here you're honest."
I pushed up onto my elbows. My body was heavy in the way it gets when you've run a crisis too long and finally stopped. "So you broke in for a heart-to-heart."
"I broke in to tell you what the demon wearing your father actually is. Because you're going to try to pull him out, and if you don't understand what you're pulling out of him, the dagger will tear you apart instead."
"Of course it will. Just charming." I sat up. "Okay. Tell me."
"Your father's demon is not one of the scouts," she said, watching for a reaction she clearly didn't expect to get.
"Not one of the ones moving through bodies like temporary tenants.
This is older. It predates the current hierarchy.
It was placed in your father's body deliberately, by someone who understood exactly what they were doing. "
"Placed. So he didn't just get possessed at random."
"He was targeted. Someone understood what he was, what his reach was, and decided breaking him had strategic value. So they sent something very specific into his body, with instructions to do exactly what it's been doing."
"Which is to destroy everything he touches."
"While wearing his face," she corrected. "Using his relationships as weapons. Corrupting every system he can reach and making it look like it came from him. The cruelty, Parker. That viciousness isn't hunger. It's a choice. Deliberate sabotage dressed up as demonic impulse."
I got there before she finished. Every cruelty I'd ever pinned on my father's nature might have been the demon's decision. Every betrayal strategic. Every manipulation aimed. Or none of it. That was the other possibility.
"Here's the thing about the dagger," she went on, her eyes going to a point past my shoulder, which meant the next part was going to be painful.
"It works exactly the way Eloise built it.
It severs the connection between the demon and your father and pulls them apart.
But the break isn't clean. When the connection goes, the demon has to leave the body, and it doesn't leave the way it came in. "
"How does it leave?"
"Through you. You become the conduit. The demon leaves through your body, and you will see everything it did while it wore your father.
Every manipulation. Every betrayal it orchestrated.
And not as information. As experience. You won't see what it did, you'll feel what it felt doing it.
The satisfaction of it. The pleasure of breaking things.
You carry all of it through you while it leaves, and if you lose yourself in it, the demon gets out and you stay behind, broken into the shape of it. "
My hands were shaking. Interesting. I'd thought I was handling this.
"How long?" I asked.
"Depends how much of itself it leaves behind. Minutes. Days. Or the transfer is complete enough that you don't come back in a shape that makes sense." She shrugged in her simplistic way she delivered bad news. "The demon wears you. But there's more to it."
"Say it."
She let the silence sit, which was its own kind of weapon, and when she spoke again it was quieter.
"Your father is not entirely your father.
The genetic material is his, yes. But the pregnancy that made you wasn't natural.
Eloise already knew about the demon. She knew what it was planning.
And she built you, deliberately, with her own magic and your father's bloodline and something else I'm not certain of, because she was careful about what she wrote down and what she kept to herself. "
The room went very quiet.
"You're saying I'm not." I couldn't finish it.
"I'm saying you're exactly what Eloise intended while also exactly what the ancient demon wanted.
She built you to be able to do what the dagger requires.
The reason you can carry what passes through you without breaking is that you're not entirely human, not entirely demon, not entirely witch.
You're a thing made to hold a thing. A cage built to process what no ordinary nervous system could survive. "
"Eloise built me to pull the demon out of Ro," I said slowly.
"Whether Eloise is still the architect now that she's dead is a question you'll have to answer with the dagger in your hand."
I got up, because my body needed to move.
I went to the window and looked down at the compound, at all those people trying to survive something they didn't fully understand.
My entire biology was a decision made by a woman who was dead and couldn't explain it.
I wasn't conceived. I was built. Designed to be the one thing that could pull a demon out of my father without dying of it. Or to die of it and call it sacrifice.
"How did Eloise even know about the demon?" I asked.
"Because the same person who sent the demon to Ro sent warnings to her. Someone in the inner Division faction wanted both things at once. To follow an order and also thwart it. The math of that is elegant, if you're the kind of person who finds broken families strategically useful."
I turned. "Who."
"That's the question you'll answer after the demon leaves. Whatever Eloise understood about how she made you and the dagger, there's someone on the other side of all of it. Someone who calculated that the collision of those two things would make exactly the chaos they needed."
"And you're telling me now because."
"Because you're going to walk toward him with the dagger, and you need to know what you're walking toward.
" She stood with the economy only old things have.
"You're not walking toward saving your father.
You're walking toward becoming the conduit for everything the demon has done, carrying it through your own body, and hoping you come out the other side with enough of yourself left to ask why you were built to do it.
Or you'll be exactly the weapon they wanted. "
I didn't flinch. That was the thing I held onto, refusing to flinch at the thing designed to break me. She was testing me.
"When," I asked.
"When what?"
"When does it happen? The demon. The transfer. When?"
She moved toward the door, not fast, just certain of her right to the space. "That's the right question. The demon doesn't leave until its next vessel becomes available."
"Which is me. This is fucking fantastic."
"Then the transfer happens whether you're ready or not.
Either you initiate, or another demon or creature forces you to.
" She opened the door and paused in the frame.
"Ask yourself whether you're still choosing this, once you understand the choice might have been made for you before you were born.
" She paused at the door, her hand sitting on the frame.
"Oh, and you haven't bonded with your mates completely, you don't stand a chance of resisting that demon inside Ro. "
And she left, closing the door so quietly it was like she'd never been there, except for the weight she'd set on my shoulders.
I stood in my room and tried to hold what an intentional origin meant.
Eloise hadn't given birth to me because she loved the idea of having a daughter.
She'd built me, knowing what the demon was planning, and the specification was a person who could hold the demon as it left Ro without coming apart.
The mercy of that and the horror of it were the same thing.
And it landed exactly where I was softest. My whole life I'd been braced for the moment somebody finally said the truth I already suspected, that I wasn't wanted.
Except the truth was so much worse. I was wanted for what I could do and not for who I was, that nobody stays out of the kindness of their heart.
Turned out it went deeper than I'd guessed.
I hadn't just been used for a function. I'd been made for one.
Built to a spec, by the one person who was supposed to want me for no reason at all.
It made me wonder about the bonds. About Trux, Seph, Rhiot, Grayson, Kearan, and Ryker choosing me. Whether any of it was real, or whether I'd been engineered to draw exactly the plan had called for.
I went to the mirror. Same face. Same body. Same person who'd learned early that the world would break her if she let it.
I should have been angrier at her than I was.
Part of me was. She'd made me for a job and then died before she could say so, left me to hear it from Zandia of all people.
But under the anger was something quieter and worse, the understanding that she'd done it because she loved Ro enough to spend her own daughter on saving him.
I didn't know yet whether that made it better or worse. I hated all of it.
My hands were still shaking, and I watched them do it with the detachment of someone observing her own body react.
It didn't mean I was going to break. It meant I understood what I was agreeing to.
And underneath all of it sat the question I couldn't answer yet, whether my willingness to pull the demon out of Ro was love or just the design switching on.
I was going to do it, anyway. Walk toward him with the dagger, sever the connection, become the conduit, carry it through me, and hope I came out the far side with enough of myself left to ask who had arranged all of this and why they'd needed me to be the one to fix it.
Because the alternative was leaving my father trapped in his own body while a demon wore him.
Because saving people was the thing I did, even when it cost me everything. Apparently.
I just hadn't known, until tonight, that I'd been created to make the choice.