Page 118 of Legendary

So, now you have no more choices.

My eyes flashed open and all I saw was nothing but a void, but I’d heard what she’d said. I may not have had any choice left, but I didn’t want one. I knew what I wanted to do andwhoI wanted to make do it.

NICK

We sat around the dining room table while Elise had her arms crossed over her chest, staring daggers at me. I tried to ignore her, but it was hard to do when her eye contact cut so deep you felt it in your bones. One of Beetee’s moms sat at the head of the table and the other was on her left. The red head with the pixie cut was Louise and the one with white hair was named Willa. Beetee sat next to Elise while Reese leaned back in his chair to my right. Garrett leaned against the wall, holding Leah to his front with her back facing him. I tapped my fingers on the table, feeling the uncomfortable silence nearly swallow the room whole. I bounced my eyes from Reese, to Beetee, to the wall behind Elise’s head and then back to Elise herself. Her gray eyes were still burning into me.

“Can you stop staring at me?” I asked, raising one of my eyebrows.

Elise tilted her head to the side, tapping her finger on her chin in thought. “How about no.”

“It’s not like I made her leave and do this shit on her own.” I couldn’t believe this was an argument Iwas having.

“This could have been prevented if you would have just thought for one second that you may not be what she needs all the fucking time. Maybe she would still be right here if you would have woken me up since I’m literally the only person who would understand that little nightmare she had, I might have known what to say to her to perhaps dissuade her from gallivanting off like some sacrificial idiot…”

Reese cleared his throat, causing her to meticulously move her eyes towards him. Her head followed suit. “Something to say?”

My best friend shrugged. “Sounds a lot like you give more than a few shits about her. It kind of sounds like you’re worried.”

Elise growled at him. “How about you keep your opinions to yourself. I would hate to have to castrate you in front of them.” She nodded her head towards Beetee’s parents. “And we both know I’m not afraid to separate you from your most precious appendage.”

Beetee’s golden brown skin turned a bright shade of red as she rubbed behind her neck. “Ellie!” Reese shifted uncomfortably in his seat, while I heard Garrett and Leah snickering over to the side. Elise rolled her eyes and waved her hand towards the older demons at the table. “I’m sorry or whatever.” They didn’t acknowledge her half-assed apology, but just continued to survey their surroundings, looking nervous.

Beetee reached for Louise’s hand and squeezed it. She nodded, encouragingly. “Go ahead, mom.” Louise looked over at her wife and took in an unsteady breath. “Willa and I used to work with Lilith ages ago, well I guess I should really say we workedforLilith because at the end of the day there is no sharing with her.”

We all started to lean in as if she hadn’t been saying much but her voice was haunting enough to draw us in. In a matter of seconds, she had our attention even though you could tell she would rather be anywhere else but at the center of our little situation. Louise pulled her bottom lip into her mouth and mulled over her thoughts before she spoke again. “In our younger years we would bring her souls from the human world, ones to torture or ones to discard and leave for Lucifer. She trusted us and held us close, well, as close as someone like Lilith can. That went on for quite some time and we started getting older and it was just starting to wane on us.”

Willa rubbed her wife’s shoulder, adding, “We had paid our dues, so we wanted to reap the benefits of that. There were so many demons worthy of what we had been doing. We knew all the secret ways in and out of that castle and we were willing to pass down all that knowledge if we could just continue on our way in peace.”

Louise scoffed. “By time Lilith had Cullen following her every whimand this one,” she pointed to Elise who just narrowed her eyes at the older woman. “We just didn’t understand why she was holding onto us, and we couldn’t just leave her. As bad as things are now, everything wasn’t as high stakes back then.”

Willa finger-combed her all white hair. I wondered if it had always been that color, or did it gradually become that way courtesy of the life they’d lived—pre-anti-aging curse. “We were going to tell her we wanted to leave and that if she didn’t take it well, then we would leave out the underground passageways. It comes out right at the edge of the woods, towards one of the more docile parts of Purgatory. We, of course, didn’t know when we had initially discovered the pathway but the more on edge Lilith became the more demons wanted out. They wanted to do their own thing, seek their own pleasures in life instead of catering to hers.

“There are multiple ways to enter the passageway if you know what you’re looking for, and if you want to take her on, I suggest using it. Flying there, especially with your angel wings on display so openly would get you killed in an instant. You wouldn’t even know what hit you.” She wagged her finger at Reese and me. We both nodded obediently.

“You can take Axel to whichever spot you deem fit and then follow it from there. I’ll glamour it over so no one tries to follow you through it,” Leah offered.

Beetee smiled. “That’s perfect.” She looked over to Garrett. “Are you staying behind or fighting?”

Garrett rolled his shoulders and smirked at her. “I’m fighting. I was always going to fight.”

Leah lightly punched his stomach. “We both are.”

Willa placed her tiny elbows on the table. “The path is quite easy to follow, so no detours along the way. You’ll know when you’re close and when you’re there. It leads to an empty spider infested room on the bottom floor. I’d keep my wits about yourselves while you’re there, it may seem empty and unassuming, but she’ll likely know you’re coming since that Soul Seether is there. Hell only knows what’s happening to her now that she’s back in Lilith’s hands.”

I nearly flinched at that thought, but I shook my head, continuing to try to picture the moments before she made this monumental decision to try to go at it alone. Maybe if she had just let me say what I wanted to say, then she would have had something else holding her here. Something that would have allowed her to stay right next to me in bed and not have me waking up without her.

Reese cleared his throat. “So, we are legitimately sneak attacking theQueen of Darkness. I’m actually pretty in love with this idea, I’m not gonna lie.”

Beetee giggled, still holding onto her mom’s hand. I hummed. “Um, how did that conversation with Lilith go? You said you wanted to talk to her about leaving and well, from what Beetee told us you both clearly don’t want to be found by anyone except your daughter, so I assume the talk didn’t go well all those years ago.” It was a legitimate question to a part of their story they never concluded.

Louise quickly looked over at Willa in a way that told me she didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t trying to make things awkward for them, but my thoughts were valid. Willa furrowed her brow at her wife, and I felt a wave of deja vu wash over me as I watched them. The look they exchanged was one I’d seen before. My father had that same look in his eyes whenever I asked him a question he never answered, or if he did answer, it always seemed incomplete or skewed. They were hiding something.

“Mom?” Beetee said, making me blink and bring myself back into the moment.

Louise ran her hand through her short hair and rubbed her lips together, as if she was trying to keep the words in. Her wife pulled her glasses off, folded them and placed them on the table. “She said she had something to do and needed us to wait for her in her chambers and that she would be back. Only then would we be free to leave without issue.”

I nodded slowly, the visuals casually playing out in my head. She continued, “Around this time there had been a lot of chatter about one of her own demons and an angel creating a baby. Everyone knew all the stories about those kinds of hybrid children, so even though there was no strict law about fornicating with another entity, you just made sure not to procreate with one.”

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