Page 95 of Which Witch is Willing?
With that, the wards that had let them through the door snapped tight.
They hadn’t even been meant to keep them out, Aerin realized with dawning horror. But to cut them off from the horsemen, and to lock them inside.
45
Claire was the first to speak out, kicking her hip to the side and crossing her arms. “You can’t kill us, you idiot, we’re immortal.”
Lucifer’s eyes glittered with malevolence as an unhurried smile spread like bitter honey across her lips. “Gwen hates you most of all, Claire” she sneered, apropos of nothing. “She wants to fuck Drustan. She can experience my memories of doing so.”
Claire ripped her jacket off her shoulders, ready to throw down. “Bitch, I will slap you into the next apocalypse—”
Tierra held her back as the devil continued, drifting across the black and white checkered marble floors with an ethereal grace. Her skirts drew a line of darkness behind her, something inky like pitch or tar, cutting them off from the other witches as she spoke.
“Immortal?”She cackled. “Youinfantscannot even begin to fathom the word. I am a being of true immortality. My genesis was so long-ago eventimecannot remember it.”
“’Cept here we are,” Moira chimed in. “Consistently whoopin’ your ass.”
“Shit.” Aerin raked the devil with a scathing glare. “How long do you think it will take your decrepit soul to rot this body, too?”
It was happening already, Aerin could smell the decay in the air. The more powerful Lucifer became, the weaker the mortal shell would be.
Lucifer leered at her, sliding an almost sensual leer down her long black slacks and shock white blouse. “I’m trying on a few, to see what fits until I can decide. You’re not off the table, you know. And maybe after you’re dead, I’ll do things to Julian that will make him loathe the very sight of you before moving on.”
Though she’d die before admitting it, a part of Aerin trembled in the presence of such a threat. She remembered the absolute helplessness of being banished into the murkiest corners of her own mind while Lucifer possessed her body.
It was a violation she’d never thought to fear before then, and would never forget so long as she lived.
Also, she was keenly aware in this tenuous moment that she was the only one of her sistersnotimmortal at the moment, and fuck if she didn’t feel that mortality in every single one of her breakable bones.
Tierra turned to the coven, hurt and disbelief glimmering in her emerald eyes. “This is what it’s come to? Why are you constantly taken in by her? Why can you not see that she’s destroying you from the inside and driving you to do heinous things?”
Melody stepped forward to answer, flipping her violet hair from her shoulders. “She’s powerful. And she says she can not only stop the apocalypse, but save those we love. Every time she speaks prophecy, it comes true.”
Aerin gestured to Grim. “Because she’s prophesying from our own book! It’s all in there, if she’ll let you read it. And you’ll see how she bastardizes it. How she twists it to control you.”
Several doubtful gazes swung over to the devil; whose knuckles tightened on the book. “Of course, I’ll allow it,” she crooned. “I wouldn’t dream of keeping anything from any of you.”
“Except the truth,” Aerin spat. “And Gwen.”
“I told you at the battle in the stones!” Lucy exploded. “She allows me this coil. She gifted me use of it.”
Tierra pounced on that. “So, you admit you were in the stones. That you attacked us."
The coven, rapt now, swung their eyes to Lucy in search of an answer.
The shadow gathered around the devil intensified. She boiled with evil, with malice and contempt. “I will do whatever it takes to vanquish you from this earth.” A disturbance in the air riffled the tresses at her temples. “Though you consider yourself immortal, there are ways ofunmakingyou. Of dismantling your physical bodies so absolutely that your soul can no longer be considered cohesive. You will exist, and you will rue that existence. You will wish for the oblivion of death. So, help me, I’ll—”
“Listen,” Moira stepped forward, resting a hand on her alarmingly large belly. “Whatever Cunty McSkinsack has told you about our prophecy and our children are rank lies. Y’all witnessed Tierra’s winged angelic miracle and I think you are powerful enough to sense that she’s nothing but a beam of light in this world. And this little’un is fixin’ to replace this Mephi-syphilis asCeannDorcha, The Dark One. Not dark like this satanic taint stain, but dark like the night. Like death and shadow and repose and renewal. Her purpose is balance, but in the way of nature, not the way of power. Read the book. Learn the truth. Summon the specters of the past to bear witness.”
Aerin started as Claire nudged her from her place at her right side, gesturing to something behind the devil. Threads, it seemed. Little dark spools, almost too faint for the eyes to see, wending their way to her from each of the gathered witches.
The coven saw it too. Their reactions vast and varied as they realized what Lucy was taking from them.
“Better women than you have sought to replace me,” Lucifer vowed, “Your spawn will never get the chance.” A miasma of black overtook her pupils, her irises, and then the whites of her eyes until her gaze was nothing but unfathomable evil. “I will imprison you here, Moira de Moray with the same chains I used to geld Conquest. I will suck the power from the unborn, and then it’s life. I am theCeannDorchaand will forever be.”
The threads tying the coven to her became stronger, more corporeal and she undulated like a woman in the throes of ecstasy. Grim dropped to her feet as a black swirling cloud levitated her above the ground. Dark tendrils streamed from her hands, lashing toward Moira.
Without a second thought, Aerin dove in front of her sister, allowing the tendrils to encircle her own wrists.
