Chapter 27
Chapter twenty-seven
Delilah
Racing down the street, I moved as quickly as I could, the driving rain cutting into my skin like razor blades.
Archer was a liar. All this time, he’d professed to be working against the Order, but the moment they tracked us down, he revealed the truth.
He knew them. By name. He had history with the witches that had chased me my entire life.
My chest ached, both with the burning pressure of the relic’s desperate plea for release and with sorrow for the revelations I’d just been slapped with.
I couldn’t trust anyone.
But I could trust my knowledge.
It had finally occurred to me, standing in the church and listening to the Storm-bringer prattle on and on. The bulb was yet another blood lock. I could get it open, but only if I had the key.
At first, I couldn’t imagine whose blood it would need. After all, it had stood sentinel in the church spire for almost three hundred years. With Nathaniel gone, was there anyone around whose blood would open it?
I’d considered Persephone, but dismissed it just as quickly. Something about it didn’t feel right. Nathanial had been a Guardian, just like Phips, but my gut was telling me that the blood lock didn’t belong to the Nathaniel’s family line.
My next instinct had been to consider the maker. After all, Phips was the one who had made the golden box where we’d discovered the letter. It made sense that the person who had created this golden orb would be the one whose blood would open the lock.
It was the best option I had, so when the opportunity presented itself, I had fled the church, on a mission to open the orb and retrieve the piece of the Fallen Key that I just knew would belong to me.
Thank goodness for egomaniacal demons who loved listening to the sound of their own voices.
Which led me here, to the gates of Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, searching for a single grave in the middle of a freaking supernatural hurricane. I rushed down the sidewalk, barely pausing, I rushed through the ornate iron gate and up the concrete steps, the stone slick with rain and fallen leaves.
“Where are you?” I whispered, my eyes darting around the cemetery, looking for the headstone I’d seen on the flyer in the church vestibule.
Shem Drowne, the man who had designed the weathervane was buried nearby, and if I could find his grave, perhaps I had a chance of opening the orb and retrieving my piece of the Key.
Following the curving pathways, I frantically searched, the heavy rain hampering my movement as it soaked through my cloak and into the ridiculous dress.
Finally, I found it, just as it has appeared in the photo, two rounded tablets, their words and carvings withered with age.
As I approached, the whipping wind came to a sudden halt, the world seeming to freeze as the storm around me died an immediate death.
“That can’t be good,” I muttered, watching as the steel-gray storm clouds faded before my very eyes, revealing the watery blue sky of autumn in New England.
Dropping to my knees, I ran my fingers over the scalloped edge, the stone rough beneath my fingertips. Grave robbing was not something I took lightly, and as much as the throbbing in my chest was pushing me find any way I could to open the orb, I still felt guilty about it.
“Forgive me for disturbing your rest, my friend.”
I leaned forward, burrowing my fingers into the sodden grass at the base of the stone, but before I could even begin to dig, I felt a presence behind me, and I gasped as a blade was pressed against my throat.
“Don’t move.”
The voice was instantly recognizable, and I shuddered at the idea that the witch, Helena, was the one who had found me.
Of all the members of the Order who could have come to end my life, why did it have to be her?
“I won’t let you do this,” I whispered, my hands held before me as Pandora thrashed in her pouch against my chest. At my throat, the collar began to pulse, the magic it contained sensing the threat.
Tilting my head, I pressed my body forward as far as I could without slicing my own throat, desperate to lay eyes on the weathervane where it lay in the grass beside me.
She was here to take it. Just like Archer, she wanted it for herself.
But it was mine.
“I have been hunting you down for far too long to let you get away now,” she hissed, her hand threading roughly into my hair and yanking my head backward, forcing me to look at her horrifically scarred face.
Panicked, I shifted on my knees, moving until I could feel the weathervane under my knee, needing to know it was still there, still in my possession.
“You are the final piece. Now we can finally destroy the Veil and take our rightful place as rulers on this plane. Belial will be most pleased.”
“Belial?” I asked, my eyes darting around the empty cemetery, looking for something, anything, that could be used to help me escape. In all my years of running, this was the first time a member of the Order had actually gotten their hands on me.
“Your education is so lacking,” she tutted, the blade pressing harder to the underside of my jaw.
Against my chest, Pandora squealed, as though she could feel the same discomfort I felt as the wickedly sharp edge dug into my flesh.
The collar, however, ceased its pulsing, going eerily still, and I frowned at the loss.
I wanted to reach up and touch it, reassure myself that it was still there, still a part of me, even if I didn’t understand why.
“I will never understand his obsession with you. A failed witch with a demon for an owner. Pathetic.”
“No one owns me,” I protested, unsure why that was the part of her statement that stuck out to me.
“That collar at your throat says otherwise.”
Her words stopped me cold.
What that what the collar was? Ownership? I understood why Archer had placed it there when we’d first met; he’d thought I was a witch of the Order, and didn’t want me fleeing from him.
But now that he knew the truth about me? Why hadn’t he removed it? He had told me he was working against the Order, then how come he seemed to know their members by name?
And why, if the collar was a mark of my imprisonment as Helena was implying, did it feel like it belonged around my throat like a badge of honor?
Confusion swirled in my mind, my thoughts jumbled and tossed like leaves in an autumn gale. I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions, and the only person I might have asked was unlikely to tell me the truth after I’d run from him.
Again.
“Now,” Helena said, oblivious to the chaos in my head. She pulled back on the blade, forcing me to either follow her movement or slit my own throat. “You’re going to open that little trinket and give me what’s inside or else I’ll paint these hallowed grounds with your blood.”
“I can’t.”
“Liar,” she shrieked, the fist my hair giving a painful yank.
The blade against my throat quivered as she shook with anger, and I could feel the shadow collar stirring again, like a tiger restlessly pacing its cage, waiting to pounce and my body nearly sagged with relief, grateful to have its steady presence restored. “Give it to me!”
She was unhinged, her grip on my hair bringing tears to my eyes and the blade at my throat a dangerous brand against my skin.
But still, even with all that...all I could think about was the pulsing magic from within the golden bulb on the ground before me, begging to be let out.
“If you can’t open it,” she hissed, her lips at my ear, her foul breath hot against my skin. “Then I guess you’re of no use to me. After all, it’s your blood they want, and I can take that with me.”
The pressure from the knife increased, and I could fee the burn as the wickedly sharp blade sliced through the tender skin under my jaw.
I tried to pull away, to wrench myself out of her grip, but with her fist at my hair and her body against my back, I was trapped, stuck fast like a butterfly in a jar.
“Back away from my witch!”
Archer’s voice boomed across the cemetery, his words sending a shiver down my spine beneath the soaked material of my dress.
My witch.
I should have hated it. I should have hated his possession, the claim he had made on me the moment we met.
I should have hated his words and his kisses and his collar around my neck.
But I didn’t, and I hated that, too.
“She didn’t seem like your witch when she was running from you as fast as she could, demon.” Helena’s taunting words filled me with a bizarre sense of guilt, and as I stared at Archer where he was cresting the hill before me, I could see that I probably should have been feeling fear.
Because Archer was pissed.
And not just a little. He glared at me, his dark eyes narrowed on the place where Helena’s knife rested under my chin, and the longer he stared, the angrier he appeared to get.
His demon was riding close to the surface, his eyes nearly completely black, his fingertips darkening as they lengthened into the claws I was now very familiar with.
Behind his lips—the lips that had kissed me with such rough passion only hours ago—I could see a row of teeth, their sharpened points now residing where his straight, white teeth had been before.
In his hand he held a silver knife, the ornately carved handle decorated with jewels, and the blade flashed dully in gray afternoon.
Archer was huge and hulking and more dangerous than I could have ever imagined.
And that did something to me on a visceral level. Something about knowing he was coming for me—feeling such passion for me—it changed me.
My thoughts had been careening from one extreme to the other for the past hour, my emotions completely out of my control in a way that I couldn’t explain.
But suddenly, none of those early thoughts of betrayal seemed to matter in the least when I looked at his hauntingly beautiful face, so stern and angry.
He was coming for me, and I was so ready for whatever he had to offer.
“She is a slippery little witch,” he acknowledged, his narrowed eyes telling me that he would be punishing me for my little stunt, and I shivered in anticipation. “But she is my slippery witch.”
As he stalked my way, his confident strides eating up the ground between us, I came to the conclusion that I was desperate for much more than a single kiss.
I wanted him. All of him.
But first, I had to stop a crazy witch from slitting my throat.
Sure. No problem.