by Cate Corvin
Tori’s eyebrows rose, but the rest of her features remained frozen in that unreadable expression. “Where- in here? In the chapel?” Surprise, and something else, tinged her voice.
“Yes. Right there, on that altar.”
It was so quiet, I heard her sharp intake of breath like a shout. One of my blurred memories of the wedding was of Tori laying out the Bible and wedding cup for the Dread Mother who’d presided over the ceremony. She’d touched the wood with her own hands.
“Why did Percival-?” She completely dropped her affectation of calling him Dad, staring up at the altar, disgust twisting her pretty features.
“He wasn’t going to tell you or Constance.” Oh, no, he never intended to tell them. He’d had a team go over the chapel with a fine-toothed comb in the month before the Holmwoods were due to arrive, repairing scorched and broken floorboards, installing new pews, sanding the bloodstains off the wooden altar and re-staining it to a deep ebony finish. They’d slapped a fresh coat of white paint over the cleaned walls, covering the last remnants of pink splotches and splatters. “He never had it re-consecrated, either. I was told if I gave any hint that this was where it’d happened or that the ground remained unhallowed, that he’d cut my tongue out.”
Which was an easy enough threat to believe, when you had the blade of a knife pressed so deeply to the corner of your mouth you tasted steel mixed with the blood of the tiniest cut.
“What the fuck,” she whispered to herself. “How- why didn’t you tell someone, Will? You could’ve told me, and I would’ve stopped her!”
I gave her a humorless smile. “Exactly.” I turned and mounted the steps, looking over the broad surface of the altar. My stomach heaved once, twice, then settled. Looking at it was getting easier with time. “I would’ve been punished harshly. Maybe your mother, too, for backing out on him. And possibly you, for getting between him and what he wants.”
Tori followed me up the stairs, her footsteps just audible. “He can’t do these things, Will,” she said quietly. “We have free will. If this is where Michèle died, then… then he infringed on my mother’s right to say no. She never would’ve gone through with the wedding if she’d known Michèle had died here, or that he hadn’t even consecrated it. What kind of man lies about that?”
“He can do those things,” I said, my tone sharper than I’d meant it to be. “He’s done them and gotten away with it. When you are the law, the law bends to you.”
I knew it as well as Father did. Hadn’t I exploited loopholes and banked on the weight of a clan name to stay above it while I dragged Tori through the mud? I was as bad as Father.
That thought was more sickening than anything he’d done.
Tori stared at me, stony-eyed. “What happened here?”
I took a breath, filling my lungs with air that tasted like blood and wedding garlands. Just a memory, I reminded myself.
“A blood sacrifice.” Even in the darkness, I could see her skin blanch. “The consecrations on the chapel were old and weak. I don’t know why she was out here in the first place, but I do know that she put up a goddamn good fight before-” My throat closed on the words, and I had to take a deep breath before I spoke again. Tori didn’t say anything, her gaze fixed on my face.
“It scorched half the chapel, tore the place up. It laid her on this.” I forced myself to lay my palm flat against the altar, fingers flexing outwards. The wood was disconcertingly warm under my touch. “It skinned her, then hung her flesh like a fucking banner of war right over the window.”
Tori’s eyes flicked up to the round stained-glass window twenty feet above our heads. In the sun, the heavenly sigils lit up like liquid gold. They’d been painted crimson that day.
I was pretty sure that she mouthed Jesus fucking Christ before her gaze returned to me. She looked ill now, her throat working.
I peeled my hand from the altar. The air of the chapel was pressing in on me, making it impossible to breathe, impossible to think.
In a way, telling someone else what had happened was like bleeding infection out of a wound, but it still hurt to raise those pictures back to the surface of my mind. It was hard enough having them indelibly imprinted somewhere in the depths of my memories, let alone raw and exposed in the place where it’d happened.
I didn’t realize I’d walked out of the chapel until a cold breeze bit at my bare arms and frosted blades of grass snapped under my steps.
The air tasted like pine and snow and stone. It washed away the reek of drying blood and the suffocating perfume of roses. Clumps of thistles had sprung up around the sides of the chapel, dying away to brown now. I braced my hand on the side of the building. It wasn’t lost on me that this was the exact spot where I’d braced myself and puked my guts out four years ago.
“Where was she buried?” Tori sounded almost gentle. “When you dr… you told me her headstone was ripped out. From where?”
When you drugged me. Remorse wrapped around my heart like barbed wire, stabbing at me. I pointed to a spot only inches from her feet, and she took a quick step back.
There was still a furrow in the ground where Father had hired the clean-up crew to rip out the headstone in preparation for the wedding. Other headstones remained in the chapel yard beyond, but the names on those stones were unfamiliar ones, long-dead clan members that wouldn’t have torn at Constance like Mother’s name would have.
Still, if you knew where to look, the rectangular outline of a man-made resting place was clear. Without me at home to keep up with it, weeds had overtaken my mother’s memory. A few brown, desiccated lily petals from her destroyed memorial crushed into the frozen dirt were all that was left of her.
He’d said it was to save Constance the pain. I thought he just didn’t like seeing a tangible reminder of his dead wife. After all, while I’d been heaving until nothing was left in my stomach, he’d told his major domo that she should’ve been able to handle one demon, like he was discussing the weather, not his wife’s brutalized corpse.
Heartless motherfucker.
Worst of all was feeling impotent and afraid of him, but only a stupid man was unafraid of Percival Godalming. There was no wisdom in pretending otherwise.
I finally straightened up. Tori was shivering a little, looking over Mother’s grave. “Will… I lost someone to a demon, too.”
I nodded, moving next to her. We were only inches apart, but I felt her warmth through the scant space between us. “I know.” My voice came out husky. Another tally at the top of my list of fuckups; if I hadn’t paid Glover to ransack her room, she’d still have her photo of James.
“I’ve spent a lot of time nose-deep in demonology since he died, because someday, I’m going to Hell and taking out the bastard that killed him. I know all about Satan and Lucifer’s courts.” Her breath steamed when she exhaled. Her nose was pink from the cold. “I know their rituals. I know the things they do.”
“What kind of things, Tori?” My heart was clenched in a vise-grip, both a bone-deep longing for the knowledge she might hold, and the burgeoning horror of what that knowledge could mean.
Deep down, in a place I did my best to ignore, I already knew what she was going to say.
“Did… did her skin have any marks on it? Brands, burns, anything like that?” She swallowed, clearly ill at ease with asking about my mother’s flayed body. Hell, I was ill at ease talking about it, despite the relief of unburdening the poison in my heart to my stepsister. I hadn’t earned her empathy or compassion, but I clutched at what I could get.
“Yes,” I said quietly. Demonic sigils and runes, desecrating her remains. A rune that had resembled an infinity loop with branching arms had been branded over her heart.
Tori’s hands clenched convulsively. There was a long, fraught moment before she spoke, my stomach churning the entire time. “Those brands are more than just calling-cards for the demonic kingdoms,” she said tightly. “Sometimes they’re best thought of as a supplication… or an invocation. A specific request.”
“The Sathanas demon that killed James wasn’t invoked. That was just a crime of opportunity.” Her lips twisted and she bit her lower lip. “It followed him home and murdered him because it could, that was all. Just the demon’s thoughtless need to hurt and destroy. They’re creatures predicated entirely on emotion, desire, and unburdened conscience.”
Something touched my sleeve, but when I glanced down, there was nothing there and Tori was pacing away from me. She stopped near the blank patch of ground where Mother’s headstone should’ve been and gazed down at the bramble of weeds.
Her breath came out in puffs, dissipating into the night as she spoke. “I think you need to ask yourself who your enemies are. Who hated your family so much they were willing to break our laws and target her?”
I swallowed against the knot in my throat. Even with Mother’s grave between us and the silence of the night pressing in, I didn’t feel like I was standing across from an enemy now, even though she’d given me no reason to believe otherwise.
Maybe it just didn’t matter to her anymore, since she’d taken everything I had left.
“Could be a thousand people.” I scuffed the ground, more goosebumps rising on my skin as the cold ate at me. “When your clan’s name is as famous as ours… well, Father didn’t necessarily leave a trail of friends in his wake. But summoning a demon to murder her? No slayer would be that mad.”
She gazed at me levelly. “People do all sorts of terrible things you wouldn’t expect.”
My mouth twisted, but I refused to look away. If she wanted to remind me every day of my life that I was just as much of a piece of shit as my father, I’d take it standing up because I deserved it. “They do.”
She didn’t rub it in. “So, you can’t discount someone’s desperation. And since your clan is so filthy rich, it’s not surprising that someone would want to remove what they saw as an obstacle to their success.” Tori scowled and circled Mother’s grave until she’d walked past me. I found myself following her, drifting away from the chapel on her heels. “Before she got eaten by kelpies, Beatrice Glover told me her mother was trying to get Percival to put a ring on it.”
“Yeah, she was.” In the case of the Glovers, it was like mother, like daughter. From the moment I’d decided to try and get rid of Tori, I’d known exactly how to exploit Beatrice to my advantage. Shame burned in my gut. “But Dana Glover isn’t exactly a shining example of competence in a slayer. She could barely hold a sword right-side-up, let alone summon a demon capable of killing my mother and get away with it.”
“Well, Glover is one slayer in a sea of thousands.” Tori shoved her hands in her pockets as we slowly walked back to Godalming Manor. “For every moron, there’s someone with years of experience under their belt and the smarts to back it up.”
It was painful how easy it was to talk to her about the worst thing that’d ever happened to me. A year ago? I would’ve been tearing up the chapel with my bare hands. Now I could look at it with a clearer mind. I could consider more than just what my mother’s final moments alive had been like.
Like who might’ve wanted her dead, and why.
When the white marble of the manor came back into view, I stopped in my tracks. Surprisingly, Tori stopped too, looking back at me. The moonlight painted her in silver, an angel I couldn’t touch. She’d climbed out of the hole I’d cast her into, and somehow she was now high above me, unreachable and remote.
“I wish you’d told me, Will,” she said. “I wish I’d been more understanding towards you, too. Maybe we could’ve leaned on each other instead of ripping each other down, but…” Tori shrugged.
“But I was a selfish, spoiled twat.” I used her favorite word, and the tiniest hint of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. I allowed myself the most minuscule shred of hope that now that she’d proved she was the better person, that maybe, just maybe, we could form a tenuous bridge of friendship again.
Or acquaintanceship. Or anything that involved just being around her would be good. I couldn’t really afford to be picky.
“The biggest twat of all.” She rolled her eyes. “Well, besides Sura. You two would break even in a twat-off.”
Even with the burden of being home, in close proximity to my father and surrounded by shit memories, I felt lighter. It was all because she was near me. Weird, considering she was calling me a twat, but even verbal abuse from Tori was better than no Tori at all.
“Congratulations on becoming a prefect. I don’t think I told you that at the Gala.” I took a deep breath and exhaled steam. “You deserve it more than anyone.”
Her faint smile faded entirely. “I didn’t know that was part of the midterm exams. Lucky break, I guess. I think Aislin’s actually relieved to be done with it.”
“Yeah. So… it’ll me against you for the rest of the year.”
A tiny line appeared between her brows. “Was it ever not you against me?”
This conversation wasn’t turning the way I’d hoped, but then, it’d been a stupid hope to begin with. Of course I’d said something dumb to ruin the tiny ground she’d given to me. “I suppose not.”
Tori shivered, but I didn’t dare wrap my arms around her and take a deep breath of her coconut-scented hair like I wanted to. Every curve and dip of her body was imprinted in my mind, so intense and perfect I could almost feel her under my palms now.
I banished the insane urge and started to speak, but she was already walking away, back towards the manor. Her voice drifted back over her shoulder, cutting through the night.
“Then… may the best slayer win.”
16
Tori
A few months ago, I would’ve been happy for a break from the rigorous classes and training of Libra Academy, but now all I wanted was to go back to New York.
After all, my vampire waited for me there. I’d kissed just about every inch of him the night before Will and I had taken one of Libra’s liminal doors to the outskirts of the Allegheny Mountains, where a driver had picked us up from a slayer bastion.
I didn’t much like the idea of leaving Càel for two weeks, and it didn’t help that I had to keep applying makeup to my neck to hide the scars of his bites, but if I was going to be with him (for eternity? a voice whispered in the back of my head), we’d have to get used to it, anyways. Slayers tended to live nomadic lives, always hunting the Shadowed Worlders who’d broken the tentative peace between themselves and humanity.
It wasn’t like I could chain myself to Club Bathory just because I loved Càel. Even if the idea sounded far more appealing than it should. And I was sure he could find some creative uses for those chains…
I sighed, prowling through one of the endless, cavernous hallways of Godalming Manor. Who needed this much space? They could’ve housed twenty clans in this place without cramping their style.
And it was all so white. Even the stuffed animal heads were white. I was about ninety percent sure one of a stuffed swan’s wings in the East Foyer was actually an angel wing, but so far, none of the staff had confirmed it for me.
If I was back in New York, I’d be walking the city with Càel, not wandering the lonely halls, wishing I was anywhere but here.
I hadn’t even seen much of Will after the night I’d followed him to the chapel. I wasn’t sure why I’d followed him; maybe so I could rub my victory in his face in private, away from prying eyes?
But when I’d seen his morose form in the chapel, all my planned cruel cuts and jibes had evaporated. For a moment, it was like everything that had happened between us faded away. All I saw was someone like me, someone harboring a festering wound deep in their soul that wouldn’t be clean until it’d been paid for with blood.
His confession of Percival’s treachery rocked me harder than I wanted to admit. I could never tell Mom she’d been married to a man in a desecrated chapel, with the stains of his dead wife’s blood still soaked into the
wood beneath her feet.
Mom was already in such a precarious place. I’d surreptitiously checked her prescription bottles and found at least two that were almost empty, weeks before they were due for a refill.
If I told her that her predecessor had been slaughtered like a pig where she’d said her second set of wedding vows… well, I didn’t think Mom would be balancing on that cliff edge of stability for much longer.
As though my thoughts had conjured them from midair, all three Godalmings appeared at the other end of the hall.
Mom smiled vacantly, cradling two bottles of wine, and Percival raised a hand with the sort of smug grin he’d given me since the Gala. Now that the luster of annihilating Will in a contest for Best Godalming Student had worn off, I found Percival’s strange attitude of ownership towards me incredibly grating.
Adding his clan name to mine had been a mistake.
Will was trailing behind them. His gaze flickered over me, searching and hopeful, and I repressed the tiny fraction of myself that wanted to reach out to him in solidarity.
He’d driven that point home the other night, too. Everything had faded away as we began tentatively joking around… and then he’d reminded me of where we stood with each other.
Light against dark.
Lux against Tenebris.
You against me.
“We were just thinking of making some mulled wine,” Percival said, extending an arm like he wanted me to step into it. Will’s frown grew grimmer, if that was even possible.
I kept my distance, trying to plaster a smile on my face in direct opposition to his crankiness. Something had been eating at my conscience, and I needed to handle it before it got out of control. “Wow, yeah, that sounds awesome, but I was really hoping I could talk to you, Dad.”
Ugh. That name for him felt like a blasphemy every time I used it.
My stepbrother ran a hand through his chestnut hair, sending into a wild disarray that just looked like sexy bedhead. If there was one thing about the universe that was unfair, it was how awful people could look so damn good.
