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 Iwanted 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’tfight 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.
Chapter 35
Le Dévoilement
CLAIRE
The barbs retracted, and I didn’t know whether it was Gorrath’s power or Mama’s. The uncertainty made me furious.
“Why are you here?” I asked, smoothing back Gorrath’s dark hair, unable to look at her.
Pain ripped through my scalp when Mama grabbed me by the root of my hair and hauled me upright. My knees scraped stone slick with Gorrath’s blood, the warmth of it saturating my skirt.
“I sent you on a mission to locate demonic relics so we could destroy them. Not to make friends with demons.”
She kicked Gorrath’s horn off the balcony, where it clattered to the floor below. Then, with a violent jerk, she wrenched Bastien’s dagger from his chest and wiped the flat end of the dagger across my cheek, smearing Gorrath’s blood across my face.
“Come, Claire,” Mama hissed in my ear. “We’re going home.”
Home.
