Page 35 of Ballad of Nightmares

She wondered how many she had truly met over the years. It made her question every ranking soldier she’d put her claw through and which had been responsible for cleaning up her messes in shadows of their own.

“When you were there, did you ever have to worry about being killed by any of them?” Cordelia asked.

Ana thought back to solstice nights when the feral demons were more violent than usual. She thought of how she’d been trapped in a cave by one and had to slice her way through its flesh while singing one of the texts she’d learned not a week earlier. But even that demon had managed to walk away from her assault and heal itself soon after.

The next solstice night, the witches had held a ritual around her naked body.

“And how would you kill a demon?” Ana asked, apprehensive of whatever the witch had in her backroom.

Cordelia threw back the curtain in the back and pulled a box from a shadowed compartment on the wall. Keys jangled when she fetched them off her wrist, and when she opened the dark wood box, Ana stilled.

“With this,” Cordelia said.

It was a dark, silver-bladed dagger with a hilt of jagged bone. The blade curved just slightly, and on the very edge, she noted a neon green glint flickering off of it when it caught the light.

Ana recognized the glow from her time in the glacial crystal caves, from the fires the witches would sometimes burn on solstice nights.

She reached out, and Cordelia placed it in her open palms. The neon green flared with every turn, and suddenly Ana was back in the middle of that ritual. She remembered the bright green crystals placed all around her, two in her open, bleeding palms on her knees, a glittering of the crushed stones decorating her naked body and face. More of the crushed powder in two lines they had carved in the bottom of her feet, like they were merging that stone with her own blood. She had sat in the middle of that fire and felt its cold wrap over her flesh the entire night while the coven spoke in words around her. She hadn’t been told what the ritual was, only that if she was to succeed in her duty, she needed to do it.

So Ana hadn’t argued.

She could still smell it all around her. The sulfur and smoke that nearly made her vomit. How after, the demons hadn’t fucked with her.

Ana considered the knife in her hands. It might be useful to have a backup plan should she ever have her tongue cut out, or be in a predicament that meant she couldn’t use her voice. And considering she was currently dating a demon, it might not be such a bad thing to have on hand.

No matter how sexy he was.

“Where did you get this?” Ana asked.

Cordelia smiled and turned her back, heading over to another table. “Don’t ask questions you cannot handle the answer to,” she replied.

The coy remark sent Ana fuming. Ana lunged, her hand around the witch’s throat as she shoved her into the dresser. “Sell me a knockoff, witch, and it will be your ashes scattered on this rug, not the incense,” she hissed. “I was not raised by the ancient witches to be treated like some idiot girl by a new age nymph.”

Cordelia raised a hand, a whisper of an energy Ana could only feel wrapping around the witch’s fingers, and Ana released her like fire. She knew that wave of wrist, that feeling pulsing off Cordelia’s hand. She’d felt it more times than she could count.

Cordelia smiled slyly as she gathered her wits and straightened her dress.

“You don’t want it?” Cordelia asked, picking up the blade.

Ana eyed the witch, then eyed the knife. “How much?”

“For you?” Cordelia seemed to calculate her, gaze darting wholly over Ana’s figure to the point that Ana resisted shifting on her feet.

“For you, I’ll take one vial of your blood. Just one, and in exchange, you can have the only knife capable of killing an actual demon.”

“I don’t do blood deals,” Ana countered.

Cordelia shrugged. “Fine.” The witch started musing around the shop again in such a nonchalant way that Ana nearly threw the nearby table over. She shifted, hands stretching at her side as she resisted taking that blade and cutting this woman’s throat.

“Why do you want my blood?” Ana finally asked.

“Call it mild curiosity,” Cordelia said. “Besides, what is one tiny little vial of your blood compared to having this?” Her smile widened. “Tick-tock, girl. Don’t let the clock catch you.”

Ana considered it. She did genuinely want the knife. She hadn’t known how badly she wanted it until that moment. She imagined all the times she could have used such a blade in the past. All the times she might need it in the future if she was to become Queen of the Dead.

She wondered if it might debilitate Death himself.

Ana slowly met the witch’s eyes and uncurled her fist. “One vial.”