Chapter 23
I sheathed my sword without another word, the blade sliding home with nothing more than a whisper of steel as War’s body hit the floor behind me.
I barely registered the sound as my attention already fixed itself on the bassinet in front of me.
On the baby who was staring up at me with those gray eyes that mirrored my own so perfectly it was like looking into a reflection of myself.
A strange feeling swelled in my chest. At first, I couldn’t quite make sense of it.
It pressed up against my ribs like something half-remembered, reaching for me from a place that hadn’t been touched by the Horsemen’s call.
Recognition. Or maybe even kinship. The pull of shared blood that ran deeper than magic or prophecy or the will of ancient beings who thought they could bend me to their purpose.
He was…family.
The realization crashed over me like a wave, dragging me under and pulling me back to myself all at once.
The fog that had wrapped around my thoughts began to lift, thinning at the edges until I could see clearly again.
Until I could feel again. And what I felt was a fierce, bone-deep need to protect him.
I leaned down slowly, my hands reaching for the baby even as my mind struggled to catch up with what was happening.
With the fact that I was standing in a cabin surrounded by the ash of dead demons and fallen Horsemen, the acrid smell of extinguished flames still thick in the air, and all I could think about was getting this child somewhere safe.
“If you hurt him, I promise you won’t make it out of here alive.”
The threat came from one of the sisters.
Annabelle, I thought, though it was hard to tell through the haze of smoke still rising from the scorched floorboards where the fire had been.
Her voice carried an edge despite the small trace of fear bleeding through, the air still crackling faintly with residual heat as steam hissed from the dampened wood where their counter-spell had snuffed out the flames.
“She’s not going to hurt him,” answered Arianna, as though she’d already seen how this would play out and knew there was no point in wasting breath on empty threats.
She was right.
I wasn’t going to hurt him.
I…I couldn’t.
The very idea of it felt wrong on a level I couldn’t put words to.
As though someone had asked me to cut off a piece of myself and hand it over with a smile.
This baby. This tiny, helpless thing that had every right to a life he hadn’t asked to be born into.
He was mine to protect now. I could feel it threading through every cell of my body, taking root with a permanence I knew I would never be able to shake.
I picked him up carefully, cradling him against my chest with the blanket still wrapped around his small body. He was warm. Solid. Real in a way that cut through the last of the haze still clinging to my thoughts.
“Help…me.”
The voice was barely more than a whisper, but it pierced me like an arrow.
My gaze snapped to Nikki. She was watching me from the bed, her aquamarine eyes fixed on me with a desperate burn that didn’t match the rest of her failing body.
The sheets beneath her were soaked through with blood.
So much blood that no one could have survived losing it.
Her skin had gone ashen, as though every drop of color had been drained out of her along with any hope of recovery.
She was dying.
For one fleeting, vindictive moment, the thought crossed my mind to walk over to her and ask her how it felt.
How it felt to be the one bleeding out and helpless for once.
How it felt to know she was going to die here in this cabin while I walked away with everything she had ever tried to cheat her way into having.
I could have even asked her how her karma tasted.
If it was as bitter going down as the lies she had fed me over the years.
The setups. The manipulations. The memory spell she’d cast to erase me from Trace’s mind entirely, as if I were nothing more than an inconvenience that could be wiped away from his life.
The lengths she’d gone to keep him under her thumb, even after he had remembered me, even after he had chosen me.
The ways she had spent the better part of a year promising me my reckoning would come, when all the while it was hers that had been waiting for her at the end of the road.
She had done everything in her power to destroy me, and now here she was, dying in a musty cabin in the middle of the woods, while I was the one still standing with her son in my arms and the man she had tried to steal from me—my soulmate—waiting for me back home.
It felt a whole lot like justice. The poetic kind. The kind I would have once fantasized about rubbing in her face.
But I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t stand there and gloat while she bled out on the sheets in front of me.
I couldn’t let vindication feel like victory.
Because somewhere beneath all the darkness that had been carved into me, beneath every betrayal and manipulation and attempt on my life, there was still something untouched.
Something that had refused to let cruelty become comfortable.
Something that wouldn’t let me become the kind of person who could watch another woman die and feel nothing but satisfaction.
That part of me—the part that still flinched at suffering, that still reached for mercy even when vengeance would taste sweeter—that was mine. It was the only thing they hadn’t been able to take from me. The only thing that proved I was still me. Thomas’s daughter through and through.
And I would never let anything destroy that.
I turned back to the Roderick sisters, the baby still cradled protectively in my arms. “Can you stop her bleeding?”
Annabelle’s eyebrows briefly jumped up into her hairline as though she hadn’t expected me to spare Nikki a second thought. “We already tried everything. Nothing’s working.”
“Then she needs to see a doctor,” I answered evenly. “Take her to the hospital.”
“We can’t do that either.”
“Why not?” The question came out harder than I’d intended, frustration bleeding into my voice.
Annabelle’s gaze moved to Nikki, then back to me. “Because this isn’t a wound that modern medicine can fix. She isn’t bleeding from trauma. She’s bleeding because her body is rejecting what it was never meant to carry.”
I frowned, not understanding her in the slightest. “What are you talking about? What does that mean?”
Anita glanced at her sisters, then gestured toward the doorway. “Perhaps we should discuss this elsewhere.”
Stepping over Death’s motionless body, I followed them out of the bedroom and into the main room, still cradling the baby against my chest. The smell of demon ash and burnt wood hung heavy in the air, but I tried not to focus on it, or on the countless number of bodies scattered around the room like rat droppings.
Once we were far enough away that Nikki wouldn’t overhear us, Annabelle turned to face me.
“She’s dying because she was never supposed to be the one to birth the Son of Perdition,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact despite the gravity of what she was saying.
“The prophecy called for a vessel strong enough to contain his power. Nikki wasn’t it.
But she saw an opportunity and took it anyway.
Seduced her way into a destiny she had no right to claim, and now she’s paying the price for it. ”
The words hit me like a backhand to the face. “Do I even want to know who was meant to birth him?” I asked, already feeling sick as several different possibilities flashed through my head at once.
“I doubt it,” she answered bluntly.
“The baby’s magic sustained her during the pregnancy,” continued Anita, her expression grim.
“It was the only thing keeping her alive. His power acting like a life support system, feeding her just enough to survive carrying him to term. But now that he’s been born, now that he’s no longer inside her…
” She trailed off, the implication clear.
There was nothing keeping her alive anymore. Nothing left to sustain her. The very thing that had kept her heart beating for the last nine months was now cradled in my arms, and without him, her body was failing one piece at a time.
“How long does she have?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Anita hesitated. “Minutes. Maybe less.” Her gaze softened a fraction. “All we can do now is make her comfortable.”
I looked back toward the bedroom. Through the doorway, I could just make out Nikki’s form on the bed, still and pallid against the blood-soaked sheets.
“I’ll stay with her,” I heard myself say before I’d even made the decision to.
The sisters exchanged glances but didn’t object.
Anita nodded once. “We’ll start cleaning up in here and give you some privacy.”
Pulling in a slow breath, I turned around and walked back into the bedroom with the baby still warm and secure in my arms. Nikki’s eyes tracked my every movement, the same desperate burn still flickering in them despite everything else fading from her face.
I crossed to the bed and lowered myself onto the edge beside her.
For a moment, I just looked at her. At the girl who had tried so hard to destroy me.
Who had lied and manipulated and stolen and cast spells to erase me from the only mind that had ever fully seen me.
Who had sworn for over a year that one day she would deliver a reckoning to my doorstep, and somehow, in the end, ended up delivering one to her own.
She looked so small now. So vulnerable.
“Do you want to hold him?” I asked gently.
Her eyes widened slightly, then filled with tears. She managed the barest nod.