Chapter 34
Adieu
CLAIRE
Gorrath suddenly shoved me behind him.
Weak from channeling so much power, I nearly lost my footing on the uneven stones. “What are you doing?”
“Protecting you.”
Footsteps raced up the stairs, and that familiar sense of dread sat in my stomach. The one that I couldn’t seem to release. After staring into Mellie’s eyes, into Devlinn’s eyes, there was nothing left that could break me. I’d seen the worst—smelled death—and I was not going to crumble now.
“I protect myself,” I told the demon.
He smirked. “Of course you do.”
A face appeared in the doorway that I’d known as well as my own, but I couldn’t believe it. She shouldn’t be here. She couldn’t. But… she was. Mama looked exactly as I remembered. Except everything had changed.
Her long white hair was braided tightly against her scalp, woven with thin leather cords. Runes were painted in ash across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. The symbols I recognized. They were protection symbols. Against demonic influence. Against disease.
Against… me.
“You—” The word broke apart in my mouth.
I was five years old again, huddled on the kitchen floor with my back pressed against the cupboard, cradling my right eye while spilled potion ate through the hem of my only skirt.
The air had smelled like fresh lemongrass and thyme and the salty tang of my tears.
By the age of five, I knew I was wrong. Not just for making mistakes, but because I wasn’t the daughter she’d been promised.
Gorrath moved before I understood what was happening. One moment, he stood at my shoulder; the next, his arm was around her throat and his fist was buried in her braids, wrenching her head back so hard I heard the leather cords strain. His body pressed against her spine, all heat and fury.
I had spent years hoping to see warmth in her eyes.
A shred of softness. A glimmer of something that might have meant love.
But there was no warmth then, and there certainly wasn’t any now.
It was just unyielding hate. Now that I’d opened my heart to love, I could see what it had done to her. The way it had twisted her.
I hated—hated—that a small part of me wanted to save her.
Even now. Even after everything that had happened.
But I was experienced enough now to know Mama couldn’t be saved.
I remembered the look in Mellie’s eyes, the one that felt so familiar to me, just before she killed Devlinn.
Where her eyes held fear, Mama’s held only disdain.
“Now is the time for Bastien’s dagger,” Gorrath growled over her shoulder. “End her.”
The dagger? He wanted me to cut my own mother’s throat? To coat my hands in her blood? It was one thing to know she was guilty of more than cruelty toward me, and another thing to carry out her punishment.
Everything I couldn’t say stuck in my throat and hardened there. My body refused to move. I was five again. Ten. Fifteen. My whole childhood replaying at once. Standing in doorways like a ghost, hoping to be invited into the living world.
“Go on,” Mama taunted. “Do as your demon master says. You filthy, evil little girl.”
The world narrowed to the space between us. My fingers twitched around the dagger. And a voice pushed back against her accusations. I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t evil. And I wasn’t a girl. I was a woman wed with magick of my own. I knew things she’d never know.
If I didn’t end this now, she would keep infecting the world with her evil. My heart pounded so hard I thought it might split my ribs. I tried to step forward, but my feet would not obey. Some invisible tether wrapped around my spine and yanked me back into place.
“Do it,” Gorrath urged.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t.
The truth bloomed in my chest like its own kind of rot. Not because I loved her. Not because she deserved mercy. But because she’d ensured I wouldn’t be able to hurt her. The barbs on my choker pierced my skin, and blinding pain turned everything around me white.
The only thing I could hear was Mama’s cackle as I crumpled to my knees.
Drops of blood leaked between my fingers.
My fingers slid through the mess until I found the thin chain at my throat—the only proof I could offer.
I couldn’t tell Bastien the truth about Mama, but at least now he could see it for himself.
He might disown our child or me once he found out the depths of my betrayal, but there was no one else I wanted at this moment but him.
“Bastien,” I said meekly, calling him to me.
Soon, he’d realize I was no orphan from the Nightfall Convent. I was not a Donadieu, but a Prideaux. I sat in my shame, wondering if it might kill me before the choker did.
“Claire!” Gorrath’s voice drew my attention back up. “If you want me to kill her, I need a sacrifice. Demon law.”
Gorrath was offering me another way. Where I couldn’t strike against her, not with the choker’s curse still activated, he could. But he needed a sacrifice, and I had nothing left to give. Bastien had told me Gorrath loved blood. So I lifted my husband’s blood-covered dagger weakly.
Gorrath’s mouth curved into a grim smile. He winked once. “That’ll do nicely.”
But before he could take it, Mama’s eyes shone with the light of the moon. She seized the dagger from my shaking hand and, with a scream of triumph, drove it into Gorrath’s belly.
The wet sound it made was sickening.
He staggered, looking more confused than hurt, as if pain was not something he was accustomed to. Then he fell to the ground beside me like a marionette whose strings had been cut. His demon blood mixed with mine on the stone floor.
His fingers searched blindly until they found mine. “Ah,” he breathed, a weak huff of laughter slipping past his teeth. “That… was not the plan.”
Tears leaked down my cheeks. Demons couldn’t die. Could they? No, it was impossible. They were immortal. A bubble of blood formed at the corner of his mouth, proving otherwise.
With trembling hands, I took his horn out of my pocket and pressed it against his chest. The barbs made the pain nearly unbearable, but I couldn’t let him die. Not like this. But nothing was happening.
“When it moves to you,” he said weakly, “don’t fight it.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. Until I felt the heat. It cascaded through my body in hot pulses, just like it had when I’d been unconscious, and he’d recharged my power.
The dagger, now coated in my blood and his, flared red. And so did his horn. And so did the air between us.
Fire licked up my ribs, down my spine, into my palms.
“I want,” Gorrath rasped, “I want to talk to the girl who called me disgusting. Is she here now?”
Tears flooded my eyes. “Yes. She’s here.”
“Good.”
The red light dimmed, then extinguished, and his fingers went slack. Gorrath, a demon and my friend, was gone.