Iniquitous (The Marked #3)(91)
“Somnium!” Annabelle flicked her wrists at them and they collapsed to the ground like fainting sheep.
A strangled gasp sliced out of me as I called out their names, but there was no response. I didn’t know how to help them—how to help myself.
I was in way over my head and completely on my own.
“Aren’t you always?” asked Arianna and I wanted to lunge forward and claw her deceiving eyes out of her head. That lying bitch was playing me from kickoff.
“Watch your mouth," she sniped, her eyes engulfed with devil-magic and power.
“Don’t you know it’s rude to snoop on people’s private thoughts?” I spat back. “Or did your demon mommy forget to teach you that?”
Annabelle’s lips curled over her teeth as she punched the air in front of her and then twisted her fist in a circle.
Searing pain shot through me as the blade mimicked her hand gesture. I bit down on my lip to keep from screaming, from giving her the satisfaction. I immediately tasted blood in my mouth from the bite, but it paled in comparison to the agony in my stomach.
I had to get the knife out of my stomach before she carved out my entails with a nail-flick.
Without pausing to think it over, I clutched the handle with my trembling hand and yanked the blade from my abdomen as a soul-crushing scream tore from my body. I quickly pressed my hand against the wound to keep myself from bleeding out, but it did nothing to stop the blood that was already seeping through my shirt.
My body was shaking so hard I thought the ground was quaking beneath my feet.
“It is,” answered Arianna with a smile.
Her words didn’t fully register. “What the hell do you want from me? You already know you can’t kill me so what is it that you want? The Amulet? My blood? My boyfriend?” Heck, it wasn’t that far of a stretch. It was reason enough for the last psychotic witch who tried to take me out.
“What do you think we want?” snapped Annabelle. “The same thing everyone wants. To open the damn Gates!”
“But you said—”
“We lied,” she said plainly.
Blood poured out of me like water, mixing with the rain as it pooled on the ground before me. The earth jolted me as it rumbled under my feet again, shaking as though it were coming apart from the inside out.
“Look!” shouted Arianna, pointing towards my feet. But she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to her sisters.
Their eyes were wild with madness, with conspiracy, as they looked down at my feet and rejoiced.
“It’s happening,” whispered Anita, her voice a petrifying murmur.
I followed their stares to the pool of crimson below me, and my heart stopped cold. The wind picked up around us, whipping my hair into a funnel beside me as flickering rays of orange began to fall down from the sky.
It took me a second to realize it was actual fire.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered, shaking my head, still clutching my wound, trying to keep my hell-blood from gushing out of me. It couldn’t be this easy. There had to be more. I was missing something. “What did you do?”
“We opened the Gates, silly.” The look of innocence was back on Arianna’s face, but I knew better this time. She wasn’t innocent. She was just as evil as her sisters. Probably more.
“Then again, we can’t take all the credit,” said Annabelle as though they had won first prize in the demonic grand-slam and were pretending to be all modest about it. “We needed you to perform a few small, but very necessary Rites of Passage before we could do it.”
“Rites? What Rites? What are you talking about?’
I was certain I didn’t have a guilty finger in this thing apart from the blood that I was cursed enough to be born with, which I couldn’t change, but I definitely didn’t perform any freaking rites of anything!
“Oh, but you did,” assured Anita. “It’s just as the prophecy foretold. ‘And behold, she will turn from the body of light that governs her people and go forth to open the heavens. The sun shall be turned into darkness, And the moon into blood. For there, under the tarpaulin of a crimson dawn, she will carve out the heart of her mother…’”
Annabelle stood in solidarity beside her sister, her smile widening into a crooked slant as I realized my mother had nothing to do with this. She didn’t turn on me at all. She was just an innocent bystander and I staked her in the freaking heart. My stomach churned as the image of her frozen face invaded my thoughts.
“…‘And it shall come to pass that when she pours her blood unto the consecrated earth, so too does she declare the end of the beginning.’” Anita pointed her knobby finger to the puddle of blood at my feet like evidence to her incriminating testimony. “And by her, we mean you, Daughter of Hades.”
“Checkmate,” smiled Annabelle.
42. THE BEGINNING OF THE END
The sisters had been playing me right from the start, working me like clay and twisting the truth to bring us exactly to this moment in time, to this page from a book that was my Destiny. They had forced my hand to do the unthinkable; to open the Gates of Hell and release Lucifer from his cage. Everything I’d worked for—everything I’d been running from and running too—had gone up in flames and the embers of it were now raining back down on me like rain.