Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
The hex wound its way through Charlotte’s mind, eclipsing the fringes of her every thought as she walked toward Katherine’s room.
The shadowy corridors closed in around her, the air thickening with each hurried step. Her breath fogged in front of her, her fingers turning to ice.
A waft of sulfur lingered when she turned left, expecting to find the corridor to Katherine’s room, but instead found a steep stairway descending into darkness.
Wide-eyed, Charlotte stumbled back, shaking her head when she saw something moving in the black depths.
Join us. Death is easier. You will see.
She stepped back, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment before slowly peeling back her eyelids to discover the corridor was back to normal, gas lamps flickering light over portraits that watched her with sentience behind their eyes.
The demon was playing tricks on her, and she wondered if that’s who she had been hearing in her mind that whole time. The one she’d mistaken for an inner monologue.
A chill passed deep into the marrow of her bones.
Swallowing hard to remove the lump that formed in her throat, she picked up her pace and ran to Katherine’s door, pushing it open before tumbling into the heavily jasmine-fragranced bedroom.
With her hands on her knees, she bent over, catching her breath before glancing up at the window.
“Christ!”
Her palm slapped to her mouth when she saw the demon watching her in the reflections, its grin wide, but eyes darkening.
She quickly closed the drapes. Was that also what her father had ensured in his last days? Being stalked by the Smiling Woman in every reflective surface, taunting him in his mind until he went mad.
With shaky lips, she forced back the sob quaking her chest. Her father had never said that’s what was happening, but no one could understand much of what was happening in the end.
He suffered greatly.
The demon’s voice screeched in her mind, the words wrapped in a building headache.
“Get out of my head!”
You can always be with him. The demon responded. You fight to survive, yet there is nothing left for you here. Everyone you love is dead.
“Go away!” she hissed, trying to keep her voice low so not to alert anyone to her whereabouts.
She had to get rid of that hex once and for all.
If only she could focus.
Unclenching her jaw, she steadied her breathing until her heart rate slowed, ignoring the brush of cold whisking over her neck.
With a glance around, Charlotte noted how neat everything was. The bed was made, linens crisp, fresh flowers were in a glass vase on her dresser, and her herbs and tonics were lined up. Nothing was out of place. Which should have made it easier to find her grimoires, in theory.
After rummaging through the bedside tables and dressers and finding nothing, Charlotte looked under the four-post bed and in the writing desk where she found a hand mirror inside one drawer.
She knew better than to turn it over, aware of what she would see behind her in the reflection, so left it in its place and turned her attention to the wardrobe.
Behind it, she spotted the leather-bound grimoires stuffed between the wooden back and the paneled wall.
“There you are,” she whispered and wrenched them from their hiding spot.
A gnawing sense of urgency stayed with Charlotte as she retreated with the oldest of her family’s grimoires in her hands, the heavy books weighing desperately against her aching forearms.
She hurried back to her bedroom, ignoring the shadows that moved in her periphery vision on her way back, or the voice that desperately tried to crack back into her mind.
Once she’d returned, she shoved a wooden chair under the door handle. Not that it would stop a vampire from getting in, but it would give her enough warning to hide the grimoires.
Duke mewled softly from her bed.
“I found them, Duke, but the demon is closer. My father lost time in the end. He was incoherent and couldn’t talk. I fear I am close to that fate and don’t want to hurt anyone, especially you.”
He meowed in response, nestling up next to her when she heaved the massive books onto the bed.
“Will you help me?”
He blinked softly and slowly, and her heart ballooned.
After she climbed onto the bed, he nudged his mouth to her chin.
Crossing her legs, she pushed back a black coil of hair that had fallen loose. She opened the front cover, the dust and sharp parchment smell hitting her nose. With watering eyes, she flicked through the brittle, yellowing pages filled with symbols, rituals, practices, family history, and spells.
Her fingertips dragged over inked comments in the margins.
Every page was a labor of devotion to the craft, and there were at least a thousand of them.
She stopped quarter of the way through when she spotted a hauntingly familiar sketch.
A shiver ran through her body as she dragged her thumb over the charcoal drawing.
The mark on her hip pulsed with its own heartbeat as she devoured the text.
Among the demonic beings trapped on Earth, the Smiling Woman, is the most ruthless. Once a powerful witch who became a demon after her death, she was imprisoned for centuries in a cursed object.
“Oh my gosh. Duke, I think she was imprisoned in the mirror.”
Her lips parted. Had she let her out?
Was this her fault?
No, her father was hexed before she even touched that mirror. She dragged her finger down the page until she found confirmation.
For those who bear her hex, she can temporarily leave and attach herself to the victim, slowly oppressing them until they are consumed with darkness, often manipulating their reality until they either die or abandon their bodies, so she may take over their flesh.
An icy dread ran through her, and she closed her eyes, temporarily muting the uncanny sketch of the demon that she had seen stalking her in Sallow Manor.
Hours passed, the clock ticking mercilessly as she hurried through the pages of blood magic, a branch of sacrificial power, when she found the familiar ritual she had spotted before.
The spell to break generational curses, which would potentially help her family, except it required a sacrifice from the bloodline and the caster of the curse.
Meaning, she would have to die along with Gertrude.
She wished she was selfless enough to perform it, but every nerve in her body screamed at her to live.
As the night swallowed what was left of the sun, Charlotte devoured every incarnation that might help, and the instructions on the ritual to break the curse.
There wasn’t any information about breaking the hex, but there was one about trapping a demon.
Shifting her position on the bed, she turned on her side, stretching out her aching limbs.
With fatigued fingers, she aimlessly sifted through the remaining pages to ensure she hadn’t missed anything, struggling to pay attention when Duke’s paw stopped her from turning the page.
A second paw landed on the page, his yellow eyes bright when he looked at her.
“What is it?”
She stroked him under his chin and brushed her gaze over the family tree.
She pulled Duke closer, squeezing him gently. “You are brilliant. You know that,” she said into his fur, punctuated with a kiss.
The thirteen witch bloodlines covered each page. A large amount of magic was infused into the family line, spreading evenly across every witch. When a witch in the family died, that magic passed onto their closest female relative.
Her eyes glazed over eerie portraits drawn on an expired family tree. The Serea family. Each of them had a cross marked over their faces, their eyes crossed out.
They were all murdered.
She’d heard the story of Penelope Serea, the witch who had killed everyone in her family to gain more power and then killed herself.
It was a myth, a story to warn against seeking power, according to Charlotte’s mother, but it was true. Penelope’s portrait was the last one at the bottom of her family tree, and while she was deceased now, there was a note at the bottom.
That much power was not meant for one person. For when she died, it was taken from her.
Which meant, if she was the last of her bloodline, then all the magic meant for the Lysanmore’s was hers. No wonder she could overpower Gertrude that night.
Charlotte’s stomach hollowed. Her mother had read those grimoires, and her grandmother had warned her too.
They didn’t practice magic because they believed it wicked, but because they were afraid.
Every witch had to unlock her power through her first spell.
By warning her and Alice away from magic, she could stop them from activating the magic within their veins.
Their mother knew what would happen if they did.
There was so few of them left in the bloodline, that she didn’t want either of her daughters ending up like Penelope Serea.
Wait a minute.
She glanced back up at the words under her portrait.
It was taken from her.
Someone stole all the magic from the Serea bloodline, which meant someone could take hers too.
She was, after all, the last in her line.
Which was likely why Gertrude hadn’t outright killed her and hexed her.
She didn’t want Charlotte’s soul, but her body, so she could sacrifice her in a ritual to take it all from her, to make herself even more powerful.
A wave of nausea washed over her.
“Katherine channeled me,” Charlotte told Duke, who jerked at her unexpected conversation. “When we entered the Realm of the Dead. She gave me a load of twaddle, saying it’s because I had been close to death, but it’s because I’m powerful, Duke.”