Chapter 29
twenty-nine
MERRICK
High up in the tower of House Bonnivarde, Elizabeth runs her hands along a broad stretch of wall, searching for a false panel, a secret door, a hidden window to a world I can only guess at.
“There’s something about this wall,” she says, knocking. “It’s warmer here. Sort of… fizzy. Like it’s calling to me.” She turns to face me, her cheeks still flush from our earlier encounter. I imagine mine are as well; I can still taste her on my lips. “My mother hid something here.”
I press a kiss to her forehead, savoring the rose and vanilla scent of her hair, but only for a moment. “Then we’d best keep looking. Though, short of taking a sledgehammer to the place, I’m out of ideas. Plus, it would ruin the lovely wallpaper.”
She laughs. The wallpaper—faded blue with gold velvet roses—is quite heinous.
Then, suddenly, her eyes widen. “Merrick, that’s it! The freaking wallpaper!”
She turns back to the wall, attacking a loose seam. “Here. Help me.”
Picking a few sections loose, we tear away a great swath, then another, as if unwrapping a gift. The paper comes away easily.
“What in the fiery lakes…” I stand back, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. The wall is gray and bare, down to drywall and plaster… but it’s covered in several dozen pages of spellwork.
“Holy shit, I knew it!” Elizabeth grins and leans in closer, fingers gliding over the pages. They come loose at her touch, curling away like autumn leaves, falling neatly into her hands.
“Magic,” I whisper, once more itching for my field journal.
“She hid these here for me to find. I know it, Merrick.” She flips through the pages.
“I have no idea what it all means, but… wow. The power in this spell is immense. Like, I can literally feel the magic moving through me. My fingers are hot, and I’m getting kind of woozy.
Not in a bad way, just… it’s intense.” She glances up at me, eyes bright.
“Merrick, could this be the transference spell?”
“What makes you say that?”
“These pages weren’t loose— they were torn out of something.
Probably the grimoire. It’s about the same size, right?
And look—see the tattered edges?” She hands over the pages.
“In the vision, my mother was pacing around like a trapped animal. Like she knew someone was about to bust in, and she wanted to hide this stuff before they found her. Helena said she was being tracked… Maybe she foresaw the hunters trying to take control of the portal. Maybe this was her insurance policy.”
I glance through the pages with great care, taking in the neat writing, the fine drawings of symbols and plants.
The language is ancient—demonic in source, from one of the earliest known written languages of Hell—but the writing itself is recent.
There are four pages of ingredients and ideal conditions—moon phases, times of day, seasonal aspects, astrological alignments.
Subsequent pages detail the ritual magic in elegant symbols and layers upon layers of carefully-crafted spell weaving, not a breath or gesture left to chance.
It’s delicate and complex work, likely years in the making, and more advanced than that of any human witch I’ve ever encountered.
But it’s not the spell of transference. Not even close.
I read through it one more time. There’s no mistaking it. If Elizabeth feels the pull of this dark magic, I am utterly drowning in it.
My knees give out, and I fall to the bench at the foot of the bed. My world shrinks to this room, this moment, a pinpoint in a vast universe of realms and possibilities, all of them collapsing at once.
“What is it?” Elizabeth kneels on the carpet before me, her hands curling on my knees. “Merrick? What was she hiding?”
I meet her eyes, unable to keep the emotion at bay. “Something for which I’ve been searching for well over a century.”
She waits for me to explain, concern darkening her features.
I close my eyes, unable to bear the sincerity in hers. My heart has cracked open, exposing the darkest rooms within. Rooms that were never meant to see the light. Especially not hers.
For a fleeting moment, I think to deny her entry. To shut it all down and say I was mistaken and pretend the pages are nothing but a witch’s ramblings.
But I promised her honesty tonight. I promised her trust.
I promised her love.
“I need to tell you a story,” I say, my voice thin. “It’s long, it’s unpleasant, and I’ve never uttered a word of it to another soul, living or dead or in between. But it’s the only way I can make sense of this—the only way you will ever understand what it means. What your mother has created.”
“Merrick,” she whispers. Then, louder, “Merrick.”
I open my eyes. Meet her tender gaze. Fall into it, headlong, over and over again.
“I’m right here with you.” She joins me on the bench, taking my hand in hers. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I nod and breathe in the scent of her again. The promise of what it means to love someone, the simultaneous terror and sanctuary.
“You asked me once,” I begin, “what happened to me. Why I don’t like to be touched.”
I feel her stiffen beside me, but she holds fast to my hand, giving me strength.
“I’ve never spoken of my family—my human family.
I feigned poor memory, but the truth is, my childhood is seared into my heart like a brand.
” I shudder as the bitter wind of those memories blows through me anew, but I force myself to continue.
“My parents were indifferent in the best of times, and those were the days and nights I most craved. To be left alone with my books, tucked under the blanket with a torch and a good story and a sweet I’d stolen from my mother’s stash in the kitchen.
“I know you don’t have the same connection to books, but for me…
to say they saved my life is no exaggeration.
Those stories, whether fictional adventures or real accounts of bravery and heroism, allowed me to both lose myself and feel seen.
They gave me hope, purpose, a light on my darkest nights. ”
My skin begins to hum with remembered pain. I inhale deeply, attempting to summon more courage.
“But mostly,” I continue, “my parents weren’t indifferent. They were horribly cruel in ways on par with the worst demon torturers in the deepest, darkest prisons of Hell. They didn’t beat me, no. Quite the opposite, really. They merely… removed me.”
“What do you mean?” she whispers.
“For no reason that I could ever discern, nothing but a bout of boredom or a mean streak, they would lock me away, shut me up in the attic for weeks at a time with nothing but some water and a few rations of food, no light but the pale sunlight that came in through the uneven slats of the roof by day. No books, even. I’d only the rodents to keep me company, of which there were plenty.
At night, if I dared nod off, I’d awaken to their scampering and scuttling, claws and teeth scratching and nibbling my flesh. ”
I shudder again. Elizabeth holds tighter, and I focus on her touch, the solidity of it. The warmth.
“Eventually, my parents would grow tired of the game and set me free. And there was my mother, standing at the bottom of the stairs with a smile and open arms, cooing for me, knowing I would run to her, so starved was I for touch. She hugged me, stroked my hair, and I lapped it up like a starved thing. For that’s what I was, what they made me.
Twisting my desperation into adoration and I…
I couldn’t…” My voice breaks, the memories stabbing me anew.
“My mother lived for those moments. Lived to see me weeping in her arms, begging her not to send me to the attic again. ‘Never,’ she would say. ‘Never again, my pet.’ Weeks would pass. And then, once I became sure she’d meant it that time, she would upend my world all over again. ”
“What about your father?” she asks.
“His silence was complacence. He allowed her to manipulate and torture me under his very nose, and said nothing. Did nothing. Acknowledged nothing.” I clench my jaw against the familiar rage.
“Asking for his intervention only resulted in prolonged punishment. It was a vicious cycle with no end. Over time I learned to loathe the touch of another human, for it would only remind me of my mother’s cruelty.
My desperation for any scrap of affection.
” I shake my head, still at a loss, even now.
“What a twisted game she played, and I let her win every single time. Until I finally figured out my escape plan.”
“What did you do?”
“Homework.” A thin laugh escapes. “For all their efforts to keep me out of school, they couldn’t stop me from pursuing my love of knowledge.
When I became old enough—big enough, I suppose—to stand up to them, I enrolled in school myself, relying on the kindness of friends’ parents for school supplies, a borrowed coat in the winter, a couch to sleep on during exams. My parents found out, of course.
They accused me of thinking I was better than them, of not appreciating all they sacrificed for me.
But I was beyond caring at that point. I’d stopped believing their lies, stopped needing their twisted form of love.
The day I received my acceptance letter for University, they burned all of my books.
It was the very last time I ever saw my parents.
The very last time I ever allowed them to remind me I was a weak and broken and useless boy. ”
“No, Merrick.” Elizabeth touches my face, turning me toward her. “Look at me. Please look at me.”
I lift my gaze to hers, steeling myself for pity, but finding only determination. And there, in that fathomless fiery green, I see my salvation.
“You were never weak and broken and useless,” she says. “You were strong enough to survive the monsters. To survive Hell on earth, and find a way out.”