The Coven (Coven of Bones, #1)(79)

“I can’t,” I whispered.

Charlotte rose in front of me, taking my face in her hands and brushing her thumb through the tears that had gathered beneath my eyes. “You’ve not yet fulfilled your destiny, my darling. It is not safe for him here until you do.”

I closed my eyes, turning my face down to press my lips into the top of Ash’s head.

“No, Low,” he begged, pleading as Juliet took his hand and tugged him gently away.

“I love you,” I said, my nostrils flaring as I tried to fight the sob rising in my throat. As I tried to control the endless flood of tears that came with the overwhelming emotions. “I will always protect you, even if I’m the one that you need to be protected from.”

“Low!” he screamed, latching on to my hand as Juliet pulled him into her arms.

She was gentle with him, wrapping him up as if he were as precious to her as he was to me. We shared a look, and she nodded her understanding as if she’d heard my words.

If anything happened to him, I would Unmake her Vessel and trap her demon in a circle to play with for weeks.

Ash’s fingers slipped through mine when I didn’t hold on to him the same way, and I felt every bit of his skin slide against mine.

“I assumed I’d already played my part in bringing you back,” I said, the melancholy of my voice sounding odd even to me. It wasn’t natural for me to feel so hollow, for the emptiness that I kept trapped within the well inside me to rise up and swallow me whole.

But what had been the point?

My entire life had been to find the bones, and I didn’t even know why.

“I am not your destiny,” she said, taking my hand in hers. She guided me back to the mirror on the ground, and we stared down at our reflections in the glass. “I am merely a gift from your husband so that you can survive what comes next.”

She touched her free hand to the top of my shoulder, pushing me to my knees in front of the mirror as I blinked at her reflection in confusion.

“I-I don’t have a husband,” I said, trying to ignore the way her responding smile raised all the hair on the back of my neck.

She slipped her fingers beneath the edge of my sweater, tugging the fabric to the side so that the devil’s eye was visible. She pressed her finger into the center of the mark pointedly, leaning forward to meet my stare in the mirror. “This mark would say otherwise.”

I swallowed, following her path as she came around to the opposite side of the mirror and kneeling to face me. “I have so many questions. I don’t understand any of this. That bone wasn’t mine. How did it—”

“I put it there on the night you were born,” Gray answered, coming to stand behind me. He touched his finger to the devil’s eye, bringing that sharp sting of pain to the surface. “A long time ago, Charlotte asked me to make sure she would always be with you.”

“I—but why? None of this makes any sense,” I asked as Charlotte took my hands in hers from across the mirror.

“You were the price of my bargain, Willow,” she said, rubbing her thumbs over the back of my hands.

“The Vessels were the price of the bargain,” I argued.

“The Vessels were a distraction. They were my way of trying to limit the ability the demons had to hurt people by forcing them to stay local to the Coven. They were never the price the devil demanded for the magic he gave me. That was always you,” Charlotte said, shaking her head sadly. “Only the daughter of two bloodlines, of two magics, can open the seal.”

I stared down at the mirror, at the face of the woman carved into the stone surrounding the glass. “Why is your face on the mirror?” I asked, and something in my own words was doubtful. Something in me had started trying to connect the dots and put the pieces together.

“Look again. That is not my face, my love,” she said, confirming my rising horror. Gray came up to stand behind me, a solid presence at my spine as Charlotte guided my hands to linger just above the glass.

The woman in the stone stared back at me, the features of her face so familiar that I’d seen them every day. The dress and crown she wore were like nothing I’d ever seen, and I hadn’t made the connection in the context.

But she was me, carved into stone—Devil only knew how many years before I’d been born.

Charlotte pressed my hand into the glass, following it with the second as I tried to understand what was happening. Pain exploded through the ends of my fingers, burning as if I’d stuck my hands into the flames of Hell itself. My tentative touch straightened, the glass pulling me from the other side as Charlotte covered my hands with hers.

“Whatever you do, do not let go until I tell you,” she said, her face twisted with the same pain that consumed me. Flames spread up my arms, leaving my skin unmarked, but the pain that twisted my body was no different. “You’ll die if you do.”

The mirror shattered beneath my hands, glass falling into an endless pit below us. It went on for eternity, fading into darkness as it dropped. A single light shone through, spreading through the chasm as magic spread. A spiral set of stairs appeared slowly, step by step, as it lowered into that growing pit. Only when the light of them touched the bottom did my horror at what I was looking at truly hit.

“Then let me die,” I said, pulling on my hands. Even though the glass was gone, it wouldn’t release me.