Page 25 of Death is My Ride or Die

IX

Aunt Sarah sat beside me in the car, her blond hair piled into a messy bun and her bright blue eyes, nearly identical to my mother’s, hollow from lack of sleep. Between running from demons, monsters, and demigods and having sleepless nights the past few weeks, I imagined I looked the worse for wear too.

When the SUV rolled forward, we didn’t talk at first.

“You lied to me,” I said. “My whole life, you lied to me.”

“I know.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve been lying to my sister too, but it’s what I’ve had to do.”

“That’s not a good enough answer.”

“It’s the only answer I’ve got, Faith,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t, but it is, and I hate myself for it more than you know. But the Guild has rules. Rules that I swore to follow. One of them is that no outsiders are allowed in. The fewer people who know, the better. The safer.”

“Yeah, because I’ve been kept real safe. Great job.”

“That isnotfair,” Aunt Sarah said, emotion thickening her voice. “I wanted to tell you, give you a chance to join the Guild, but I also wanted you to live a normal life. When I found out David Star had taken an interest in you, I informed the Guild, and they told me to stay out of it until they had more answers. Like I said, rules. But I was so worried about you that I had to get involved to find out why Death was pursuing you. Then the hayride and the corn maze happened. Everything just went to shit. I had no idea what had happened to you, Faith. That Death—that he’dsparedyour soul.”

“What about Devin Star? How am I supposed to trust you when you had a relationship withthe Devilhimself?”

“It wasn’t a relationship, it was—” She cast a look at Leo in the driver’s seat and lowered her voice. “It was a mistake, and we can’t talk about it here.”

“Oh my God,” I groaned, pushing my hair away from my face. “I’m going to have the spawn of Satan as my little cousin.”

“Faith,” she warned.

“What does Devin even want from you?”

“All you can know is he’s keeping me at D&S Tower. Indefinitely.”

As my mind raced with dark assumptions as to what that could entail, Aunt Sarah patted my hand to bring me back to the present. “I’m proud of you, you know that? I don’t know another eighteen-year-old who could go through what you have and then reject Lucifer on top of it.”

I forced a sheepish smile. “You’re the one who taught me to stick to my guns.”

And I couldn’t tell if Lucifer had respected that or if it had pissed him off. Honestly, I was surprised that he had let me go, and I couldn’t shake the disturbing feeling that he had only let me go because he felt confident I’d come crawling back.

“On your mother’s side,” Aunt Sarah began, “your great-great-great-exponentiallygreat-grandfather was an original member of the Guild. Your mother has no idea that I’m a hunter, or anything about our family history inthatsense, and she never will. The Guild runs by a code. We recruit only descendants of Guild members. One child per family. Once that child is eighteen, they’re educated in our ways and the ways of the supernatural. Our family has yet to skip a generation.”

“Are you planning on having a child?”

“I was. With Michael.”

My heart sank. Michael was Aunt Sarah’s ex-husband, whom she’d married in her mid-twenties. Aunt Sarah swallowed hard and looked down at her lap. “Michael and I tried for four years with no luck, and then he got sick . . . Then I was confirmed infertile, and everything fell apart. The Guild has never pressured me to have a child, but it is considered an honor to pass down the knowledge of the Guild from one member to another.”

“This whole Guild thing sounds like a twisted cult.”

“It’s not,” Aunt Sarah said with a shake of her head. “We keep things within the family of hunters to protect our own.”

I followed her gaze out the window and watched the world race by us in a blur. Keeping secrets to protect her own. That was something I could definitely relate to. “It must be hard. Keeping this secret life from my mom.”

“You have no idea. Lisa and I have always been so close.”

I pointed toward Leo in the driver’s seat in front of me. So far, he hadn’t said a single word. “You know this guy?”

Aunt Sarah shifted in her seat. “He’s a reaper.”

“I know that, but is he like Death?”

“No, not like Death. Not exactly.” Aunt Sarah seemed uneasy. “He’s one of the Seven, basically the embodiments of the Seven Deadly Sins. Their origin is unclear, but the Guild believes they were damned souls that were created by Death and Lucifer centuries ago to alleviate Death’s Seven Deadly Sins curse.”

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