Chapter 24
Chapter
My house was destroyed. The kitchen table, where just a few weeks ago my friends had gathered and laughed and ate, was tipped on its side, one leg broken off and another bent.
The couch cushions were disemboweled, the X-pen mangled, the drawers of my desk hanging open, mugs shattered in the sink.
I moved through the wreckage like a ghost.
The cellar had not been spared. Fruits and vegetables were strewn across the floor and stomped to pulp.
A full shelf of my canned produce had been tipped, beets and cherries and plums now mixed with broken glass.
The shelf in front of the wooden door had been cleared but not moved, and even empty, I barely had the strength left to push it aside.
I opened the door. The shaft of dim light barely illuminated the fawn, still asleep on my jacket. I scraped a match to life and lit the stub of a candle, then stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
This room was never as silent as it should’ve been.
There was the fawn’s slow, shallow breathing, but if you stayed long enough, you’d become aware of other sounds—soft pings from the glass jars, faint scratches from the boxes, a rustle like spider legs across the pages of a book.
The things in here were restless, eager to be used, but there was nothing in here that would save me.
I slowly paced the room, running my fingertips across every lid and surface, stopping only when I came to the poisons.
The quickest would probably be the oleander or the hemlock, but the lily of the valley would also do the trick.
They all promised the same fate, my last moments spent vomiting and disoriented, but at least it would be by my own hand.
The wolfsbane seemed to gleam at me from its dark bottle, and I picked it up, considering.
It was, perhaps, one of the worst ways to go—every muscle locked, conscious and trapped in my body until the paralysis reached my lungs, drowning me on the floor of my home.
There was a ghost of a whisper over my shoulder, something I sensed more than heard.
I turned, following it, and found myself standing in front of my grandmother’s grimoire.
I picked it up, felt its familiar weight and the rough edges of its pages, let it fall open in my hands even though there was nothing inside that could help.
I’d thought this book was my salvation once, thought it contained all the secrets of the universe, and, after my mother died, ransacked every corner of the house to find where she’d hidden it.
But it had yielded all its secrets, and none of them could save me now.
I flipped to the back cover and ran my hands over it. Familiar as it was, my thumb caught on something new—a thin line, like a seam. It was barely perceptible, so small it could’ve been mistaken for a flaw in the goatskin, but it didn’t align with any of the stitches.
I kept my needles and razors in a leather case, and I snatched out one of the blades now. The ancient skin parted easily beneath the blade, revealing that the cover was indeed two pieces, and I peeled them apart, exposing what lay between them.
The scrap was ancient, not paper but vellum, and I didn’t dare touch it; the edges had begun to curl the moment I lifted the goatskin away. The writing was in a strong, slanted hand, but even so, I could barely make out the letters at the top:
To binde The Devil to thy will
There were only two lines beneath that. Two components. Just two components to gain power over the devil himself, and yet it was out of reach.
The signe of God
The blood of a child moste precious
It gave no incantation to speak, no other ingredients, but I’d done enough spellwork to read between the lines. I knew, for instance, that the crucifix had to be made within a circle, because any time you wanted to summon and bind something, it had to be contained.
I knew that the circle and the crucifix were meant to be dug out or hollowed out of a surface so that the blood could fill them.
I knew that the child had to be precious to the caster of the spell—not biologically related, perhaps, but you couldn’t steal someone else’s beloved child.
Someone else’s pain would not satisfy the requirements of the spell.
The devil was not meant to be easy to bind. The caster was meant to sacrifice—
I froze.
In her sleep, the fawn gave a soft sigh.
The vision from the belladonna came to me again: the terror in the fawn’s eyes, the fountain of blood. What had I said to the devil, just before that vision was granted? I didn’t come for power. I came to learn how to save my sanctuary.
“No,” I said aloud, so harshly that all the dead things in their jars went quiet. “No. Fuck you. I won’t do it.”
But it was only me in that room. My mother was dead, even if I imagined her there. So too was the pastor, the reason this was all happening. There was only me, and the fawn, and the choice.
The belladonna had given me what I’d asked for. The fawn wasn’t a human child, but she was mine all the same. And precious.
I knew the destruction of the sanctuary was coming. That was not a far-off possibility but a certainty, and yet if I lost the sanctuary, it would be because I did nothing.
If I lost the fawn, it would be because I cut her throat.
It would be so easy to do nothing. It would be so easy to dose myself with wolfsbane, to curl my body around hers on the dirt floor and let the poison take me while she slept.
The vellum blurred before my eyes. I staggered back against the opposite counter and sank to the ground, biting down on my fist to hold back the sob unfurling in my chest.
It made no sense. Why would she have come to me? Why would she have fought so hard to live? Why would I have shielded her with my reputation and my magic and my body if I were going to kill her myself?
Why give her teeth if she was meant to be slaughtered like a lamb?
And even as I thought it, railed against the madness of it, it made perfect sense. These were the things that made her precious. These were the things that made her mine.
The candle burned out after a few hours, leaving me in total darkness, but I still didn’t move. I’d been staring at her so long, the curled, spotted shape of her was burned into my retinas.
The unbroken sleep spell was leeching my already feeble strength, and I kept thinking I should break it, that the very least I could do was feed her and take her out to feel the sun and the grass and the wind one last time, but every time I thought it, my mind simply…
left me. I would come to a moment later, my eyes frozen open, my lips raw and swollen where I’d bitten them, and start it all again.
It was my ringing phone that moved me. The sound shocked me to my feet, and as I stood there swaying, my vision blurring and clearing, Georgie called, and then Christine, and then Paul, and then silence. A moment later, a text from Christine came through:
Tess, please tell me you had nothing to do with this.
The clock read ten at night. The day was gone already. I was running out of time.
I gathered the fawn up, her sleeping body dead weight in my arms, and staggered through the ruined cellar back to the main floor.
I gathered what I needed—the spade, and the knife, made so sharp it hurt to look at, and the bolt cutters, for later.
I went out into the dark and saw a great, golden harvest moon hanging just over the tops of the trees.
All I needed was a patch of clear ground, somewhere the circle would not be marred by four-wheeler or truck tracks, and in the end I found it among the apple trees. I gently laid the fawn in the cool, damp grass. I picked up the spade and began to dig.
I realized I was weeping as I finished digging the sigil. My eyes were dry, but there was a terrible ripping, keening sound working its way out of my mouth from my heart. I realized in the same moment that the last of my magic was gone, and the sleep spell had broken. The fawn was awake.
She watched me warily from the edge of the circle, her ears flicking at the sounds I made. I wished she would run and leave me to the fate I’d wrought for myself; I didn’t have the strength left to chase her.
But why would she run? I had always fed and protected her, kissed her little head and inhaled her old rot stench like some cherub’s hair. She had no reason not to trust me.
I dropped the spade and picked up the knife. The burned spots in the blade were like dark eyes in the moonlight. After making the runes, I had sharpened it until it could part hair, but perhaps she could still smell my blood on the metal, because she stepped forward eagerly.
“No,” I whispered brokenly. “Don’t you understand? You’re supposed to run.”
But she didn’t run. She stretched her neck out toward me, nostrils quivering. It was only when her eyes went flat and black that I understood what she was about to do.
She seized my hand with a coyote’s darting quickness. She caught just the edge of my palm at first, and then, when she realized she’d found her mark, bit down again, harder and more fully. Her teeth were sharp now, jagged edges ground in from having gnawed on bones, and they pierced my skin easily.
I sobbed a laugh—a shattered, mad sound. “Good girl,” I told her. “That’s the way.”
I swung my leg over her, trapping her body between my knees. I wrenched her head up and she bit down harder, my blood running over her lips and down my arm. I kissed her head.
I cut.
The last of the blood dripped into the sigil, shining briefly. The orchard was silent, not a night bird or insect stirring. The moon was so bright overhead that the apple trees cast gnarled shadows over the sigil.
My teeth were in my lower lip. I opened my mouth, my jaw creaking like a rusty machine, and probed the loose flap of flesh with my tongue.
My scalp ached, and when I lifted my hand, there were long strands of flaxen hair wrapped around my fingers, stuck in the drying blood that covered my skin.
I pulled them free, let them drift into the grass.
There was a body at my feet, small and spotted. I sensed it, felt the leaden weight over my bare foot. I could not look.
The blood sank into the dirt.
A hand burst through the center of the crucifix, six fingers reaching toward the sky.
I strode into the circle and caught it, pulling the devil up out of the earth as he had once pulled me from the water.
He gave a sawing gasp as his head broke the surface, gagging up mud and blood.
His silver eyes gleamed wildly from a face dark with gore, all his salt-white skin streaked with evidence of my sacrifice.
“Tess.” His gaze was focused beyond me, at the edge of the circle. “Oh, Tess, what did you do?”
I seized him by the throat, and he followed the pressure of my hand, getting to his feet. “I did what I had to do,” I gritted out. “I couldn’t let you take the sanctuary. I couldn’t let you loose in the world.”
He sucked in a breath, as if I’d hurt him. Beneath my fingers, his pulse beat like a butterfly’s wings. How human he seemed like this.
“I would’ve taken care of it,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t have hurt it. I would’ve kept it, just like you did.”
“Don’t.” My voice cracked over the word, my fingers tightening convulsively. “Don’t lie to me.”
His eyes searched my face for a long moment, and for the first time, I realized it was sticky with blood—blood drying in the creases of my forehead, blood clotted in my eyelashes, blood crusted in rivulets down my neck.
He raised his hand, and I thought he would wrest my grip from his throat, but instead he cupped my cheek softly, his thumb stroking my ruined lower lip.
“I knew I would see you like this someday,” he said. “From the moment I laid eyes on you, the moment I learned your name, I knew you were an animal. You just had to shed your skin, didn’t you?”
I released him at last, my fingers instead finding the buttons on my shirt, then my jeans.
I threw them off piece by piece until I was as naked as him, revealing the knife-sharpness of my body, the long weals left by the buck’s antlers.
My left hand was stiff and swollen, puncture wounds dotted across the tendons.
“Down,” I said, “on your back.”
He obeyed, lowering himself onto the bloody earth, white as a statue fallen in the garden.
I sank to my knees beside him, hearing the scream inside my head that had not stopped since the moment I picked up the knife, but he was right; all I needed was to shed my skin.
All I needed was to take what was in front of me.
In the moonlight, the shadows of his hips and ribs and collarbone were crater black.
I went to each place, dipping my mouth into the hollows as if to drink the darkness, and I tasted the dirt of my orchard, the blood of my sacrifice, the salt of his skin in one.
When I came to his neck, I felt the throb of his pulse and, resisting no urge now, bit down.
He moaned, his entire body surging like a wave, muscles flexing and shuddering with sensation.
I hummed, satisfied, and swung astride him, pinning his hips with my own; dirt turned to bloody mud swelled on either side of my knees, the iron scent all around us.
He reacted again when I took him inside, his head rolling back, the tendons in his neck as taut as harp strings.
When he moved to grab me, I seized his hands, slamming them to the ground above his head. He went still, freezing like prey.
“You told me there was power to save my sanctuary.”
“Yes.”
“I bind you to that.”
Magic thrummed beneath us, through the blood and the sigil. A ghost of pain flitted across his face. He arched beneath me, but he couldn’t escape the binding.
“Yes,” he grunted again.
“But more than that, you said there was power to let it grow. Power for it to flourish, not just survive.”
“Yes.”
“I bind you to that.”
Another tremble through the earth. He gasped out a laugh, his six fingers flexing spasmodically. “Yes.”
“This is my power. It belongs to me, to replace what I lost, to make me new.”
“Yes.”
“I bind you to that.”
The ground shook. His eyelids, which had been half-closed in agony or ecstasy, snapped open.
“I would’ve given it to you,” he snarled, blood slicking the cracks between his teeth. “You didn’t have to kill her. I would’ve just given it to you.”
I leaned down, releasing his hands to gently trace the plane of his cheek. I kissed him, mingling the taste of my blood with his.
“Power can only be taken,” I said. “You, of all people, should know that.”
There was neither breath nor energy to talk after that. We were driven by need, all of existence winnowed down to sex. I did not feel the moment when his power became mine; it was suddenly there, simmering beneath my skin as I came, and I lost myself in the roar.