Page 135 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland
She needed the dust.
Moving as fast as she could, she scraped her palm underneath the marble bench to her right until she had a handful of dust and dirt.Grandmother Rosalind. Great-grandmother Anna. I need you now.She plunged the pen’s nib into the dust.I am the lost twin. Baby Louise, wherever you are. Help me. All of you, please help me now.
Then, Beatrice became the padlock.
She drove the nib into the flesh of her thigh, shoving the dust into her skin with it. She drew the cursed sigil into her own skin, claiming it. She wouldn’tletMinna have it. It was hers. Beatrice was the one who’d unsealed the page—she owned it.
The lines Minna had drawn on her own skin were thin. Beatrice’s lines, on the other hand, were thick and sure. Her blood didn’t pool, it poured. It surged.
And she felt them—Anna and Rosalind Holland—she felt their power enter her with the ash of their long-crumbled bones.Be brave, daughter.
She pushed the pen harder with more assurance. It hurt like hellfire, but she’d endure it for eternity if it meant Minna would catch her breath again.
Then Louise was with her, too, a soft petal of touch on her cheek.Move faster. Do it for your twin. For her daughter.
Taurus’s voice was deafening. “Stop.”
“Fuck!” She paused briefly to look up toward the ceiling, where the sound came from. “You!”
The broken scale was complete—now she needed the other lines. She’d gone so deep, her flesh tearing, that it would be difficult for anyone to understand the sigil’s lines because of the blood, but it didn’t matter.
It was her sigil.
Hers.
Not Minna’s.
She was taking it back.
Taurus was screaming then, threatening her, but somehow, as she pushed the metal nib through her skin, she was able to tune him out.
You will die for love.
Oh, shit—oh, shit! Through the pain, through the noise, through the fear that was so strong, she didn’t how she’d live through it, Beatrice realized what the curse actually meant.
She’d gotten it wrong.
It wasn’tYOU WILL DIE for love.She’d focused on the wrong thing, the death part.
It wasYou will die FOR LOVE.She’d almost missed the deeper meaning—the curse was about making a trade. Death, traded for love.
She could tradeherlife for Minna’s.
This was how she would spend her seventh miracle.
Perhaps, if she’d puzzled over the sigil with Cordelia and Astrid for months, they would have figured out what it meant. They could have conjectured and wondered and studied for as long as it took.
But by acting, by just doing the thing, the answer had been revealed.
The pain was past anything she’d ever felt. Every muscle shook as she got ready to connect the very last line, and every fiber in herbody shrieked with agony as the sigil took hold. Even feeling her ancestors moving through her blood didn’t help. But it didn’t matter.
It was all for Minna.
“Give her back to me,now.”
A growl echoed throughout the chamber, and she saw him then, a ragged black shape in the candlelight that widened and thinned as it breathed, its lungs sounding like flapping wings, its form composed of ropes of smoke. Taurus was gaining power, sucking it from Minna, leaching the last strength from her dying body.
Something smashed outside the tomb, as if someone was trying to break their way in.
