Page 12 of Claimed By Fangs and Darkness

This time when Hekate appeared to me, she was unhooded. Her striking dark hair and deep brown eyes were sharp contrasts to her fair skin.

She held a large, golden snake draped across her shoulders. Her smile was soft.Proud.

Something about the show of maternal approval sent a stab of pain into my heart. I’d finally received something I’d been starved of since birth, my once-parched tongue now supple and satisfied.

“Your friends were right,” Hekate said. “This is not the way to turn a human into an immortal. You are not a goddess, my child.”

My throat tightened, tears pricking my eyes. “That’s not fair,” I said, anger sliding into my tone. “The ritual is already unnatural—already an act of the gods, a cheat of death.”

Hekate didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. She knew I could tell the difference, that my arguments weren’t rooted in truth. They were rooted in desperation.

“I know this isn’t how it’s supposed to go,” I whispered. “I willneverdo this again. I’ll do it the right way next time, and all times after.”

Earlier today, I thought I was escaping the clan forever. And now I was offering my soul on a silver platter. My wooziness returned, and I ran a hand across my warm forehead.

“You have given menothing,” Hekate said.

The firmness in her tone triggered my mother wound, and I had to take a steadying inhale. This wasn’t the same—she wasn’t my mother. No one was disappointed in me. I was safe.

“I will,” I vowed, holding her sharp gaze even as I trembled. “I will give as much as I take. You have my devotion. I’m not afraid anymore.”

“Bear witness,” Hekate said, her voice a resonant thunder. Heavy clouds collected overhead. Fat rain drops poured from the sky like tears.

“You cannot do this for him. You must do this for the realm or not at all.”

Her snake hissed, and my knees buckled. My hands dug into the soil, and roots closed around my wrists.

My eyes rolled back.

5

EVIE

At first, I thought I really had died and ended up in one of Lillian’s hells to suffer for an eternity.

Because I wasn’t back in my childhood bedroom. I was in another little girl’s bedroom, watching a woman in all black punish her in the name of the Dark Mother.

“Recite your prayers. May Lillian have mercy on your soul.”

The girl’s dark brown skin was wet with tears as she said, “I wish I was a witch like you. I wish I was full of witch blood so I don’t have to get married.”

My heart dropped. The girl transformed into another child, and then another, and on it went.

Of course, I knew I wasn’t the only child born to a cult. I’d wondered where the other children from our coven had gone after I’d killed their parents with my plague of shadows. It was yet another thought I’d become proficient in banishing.

Was I being punished for my selfishness? For focusing on my and Idris’s survival and no one else’s?

You are not being punished,Hekate whispered, her voice a soothing balm.You must choose this foryou. You must choose this for therealm.Or this magick is not yours to wield.

It could’ve been me standing before an altar of Lillian, dressed in white for the first time, my small palms resting in the hands of a monster. I watched the human boy’s eyes brim with tears—no older than fifteen—as he stared into some wealthy born woman’s soulless voids.

The scenery shifted again, this time to a feeding club, where mortal women appeared drugged as they were passed from born to born. The demons laughed, their tongues circling wounds or bathing in elixir. Mortal lives meant nothing to them.

What did they even live for? What was the point of an immortality devoid of meaning? Devoid of love? What was thepoint?

Why were they the ones ruling the realm? Why must we mortals bow before creatures that chased pleasure for the sake of pleasure, power that was unearned, undeserved?

Shouldn’t the realm be ruled by those who were in love with life instead of removed from it entirely?