My tendrils waver. A shudder that passes through me as I push to contain my brothers.
I steel myself to her pleas, her broken sobs, and focus on the human, face stark of all color, except her blood smeared across his hands and up his arms.
“Watch over them.”
A muscle tightens in his jaw, but I know he understands and will not argue. Unlike Lenora who is trying to push herself off the table. Possibly to get to me.
“Take her. Go through the mirror,” I tell Marcus. “Now!”
I appreciate that he doesn’t hesitate.
He pulls her off the dais, kicking and screaming, and bolts up towards my mirror. I use what’s left of the shield to pull open a window and I watch them disappear.
Then it’s just me and my mistakes.
Chapter Forty-Three
Veyn
Mypowerdissipates.
It dissolves in a shower of glittery mist that settles around me. Beads of sweat drip off my brow and darken the stone beneath my splayed hands.
“You should have fed,” Dain taunts. “Seeing you this weak and pathetic would hurt my heart … if you hadn’t burned it.”
I shut my eyes for only a moment to bring forth Lenora’s face before pushing to my feet.
“I’m still waiting to be ended.” Rase snickers. “Or has that human woman made you weak?”
Perhaps she has.
Drinking Marcus Usher dry would never have fazed me before her. Scooping out his insides and chewing on them to free myself would have never even been a thought. But I refrained because she asked. I kept my brothers from torturing him because I hadn’t wanted her upset.
I suppose she has made me weak.
I just can’t find it in me to be furious about it.
“You will never find them,” I say instead. “They are safe. She will have our child, and it will continue the Usher line.”
“All that to keep alive the family who imprisoned you?” Dain cocks his head, looking comical with half of Duval still plastered over his face. “Why?”
I shake my head. “To give her hope. A purpose to keep going.”
“She will never understand what you did,” Rase mutters. “Would she be grateful if she ever learned what you sacrificed for her … hope?”
“It doesn’t matter. I would do it again.”
Both seem confused and I don’t blame them. My actions to give Lenora a child may defy all the laws in every book, but it’s a punishment I will accept happily to give her peace. To make her smile. It may have come to fruition in a manner that isn’t by any means ethical, but why does that matter if it gives her closure?
“What does it matter now?” I ask instead. “The child will be born, and it will make her happy.”
“It’s not a child though,” Dain points out. “When she’s eventually learns of what you did…”
“You don’t know her. She will love it unconditionally.”
Their doubt irritates me more than their disobedience. Partly because I know Lenora will not care that I stole the seed from her dead lovers, bound it with living cells from her human and gave it my blood to give it life. She will not care that our baby has a piece of each of us.
But also, I wonder if she would be upset. She had wanted it to be the product of her dead humans — and it is — but perhaps she hadn’t wanted demon blood mixed in there.
