Page 11 of The Damned (Coven of Bones #3)

“It worked. It actually worked,” she said, her breath coming in an easy exhale of wonder.

“What did you do to me?” I asked, releasing her suddenly and stepping back. The scales on my arms began to fade as I put distance between us, my anger abating in the face of my fear over something that should have been impossible.

She took the opportunity to step up to me, cradling my face in her hands. Her perfectly manicured fingers ran over what had to be scales on my temples before they faded entirely, the scratching sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before.

Those scales faded, too, her warmth sinking into my too-cold skin when they left me.

“I made you powerful beyond your wildest dreams,” she said, smiling at me as if I would appreciate the monster she’d turned me into. I shook my head as I stepped back, the faintest indentations at my wrists making me wince. It reminded me of being bound the first time he came to my room…

My thoughts trailed off as I drew the conclusions in my mind.

Binding rituals used the act of tying knots to connect two people together or to bind something to itself.

It was something that few witches knew how to do, the intricacy of the knots needing to be specific to the cause, but they sometimes used them to make a person unable to enjoy a certain bad habit any longer.

“You let Itan bind me?” I asked, but I didn’t need her answer, already connecting the pieces.

But what had he bound me to?

“He bound the piece of the Source within you,” she said, her tone chipper as she returned to her desk, pulling out a notepad and taking down notes of all that she’d seen.

“You cannot pull new magic directly from the Source and you cannot return her magic to her, either. It is merely trapped within you, an endless loop of power that twists and turns within you until it becomes something else entirely. It enables you to access the darkest parts of Red magic by starving you from the light. You cannot feed the Source and can only take from those around you endlessly.”

They’d used me to starve the Source, intending for me to sit on the Tribunal and twist the magic of my house from my seat of power.

The Tribunal members were meant to serve as representatives, but also the key channelers of the Source on earth.

What we had first passed through them before being distributed.

If I could only channel darker magic…

Goddess.

Itan had said they’d fix it after the Vessels were gone. There had to be a way to undo it. I just had to hope that someone else knew how. I took comfort in that knowledge, as I pushed forward to understand the implications on the rest of my childhood.

“Was my rape part of it?” I asked.

“No,” my mother said, her face horrified, as if expecting that of her was beyond the realm of possibility at this point.

“Itan is the only one who understands the nuance of these knots. They have been passed down through the Brays for centuries, from heir to heir as an ancient knowledge. No one before has ever thought to attempt such a thing, so when he went to the Tribunal and said he knew how to do it, there was no one else who could. He offered to do us the favor of binding the next generation of heirs, but there was a price.”

A price.

“We all knew he had certain inclinations, but we didn’t know how deep they ran until it was already done.

The price of his magic was our silence and willingness to turn a blind eye to it.

We swore a blood oath, Margot. We could not intervene,” she said, sighing as if it relieved her to finally have the truth out in the open.

I crossed my arms over my chest, nostrils flaring at her audacity to be relieved in this moment that was so catastrophically horrific for me.

No matter what she claimed, she didn’t fucking care what the cost of this power had been. She’d have paid it one hundred times over, because in her mind the ends would always justify the means.

“You all sold your eldest daughters to him,” I said, realizing that there had been others. More than I’d thought. I’d never heard a whisper of it from them, never seen the signs, and I wondered if they thought of me the same way.

“He gave you a tea that was supposed to help you sleep through the binding,” she said. I’d always suspected my memory of that first time was hazy because of my age, because of the years that had passed since then. “The others never woke until morning.”

“But I did,” I said, turning and making my way toward the door.

I couldn’t bear to look at her any longer, couldn’t stand the knowledge of what she’d allowed to happen to me and to all those other girls.

I needed to bring them together, to tell them what their own parents and elders had knowingly subjected them to.

Did they even know? Did they even remember?

“Your magic was always strong, even before you came of age. You were able to resist the pull of sleep,” she said, the words the most twisted version of an apology that I would ever receive from her.

“I regret that it hurt you so deeply, but what he was able to do is nothing short of miraculous. You have a siren form, something that has been lost to the Reds for centuries!” she said, her voice turning desperate as I moved to leave, smart enough to realize that my knowledge of this would be the end for her.

Willow would not stand for this. I would not stand for this.

“Fuck you,” I spat, the harsh words making her eyes widen as I turned to level her with a glare.

I’d never dared to speak to her that way, never dared to challenge her so directly out of fear of repercussions.

Obedience was pivotal to the Red houses, something so deeply ingrained within us that I didn’t have a single memory of one of my peers cursing at their parents.

“I hope you get everything you deserve for what you and the rest of them did to this Coven.”

I retreated from the room, immediately moving to seek out Willow and share the information that she needed to know.

Hoping like Hell that she knew how to untie the knots of a binding spell, so that she could free me from this twisted reality of what my magic could have been, what it should have been.

Hoping she’d be able to help me help the others, because I didn’t know how to give them clarity if they didn’t even remember their assaults.

Did I let them live in peace to save them from this pain that throbbed within me, or did I tell them the truth that had been kept from them for years?

I made my way through the halls that were largely empty as the rest of the school had already settled into their next period, leaving me alone in my reflections.

Even as I tried to rationalize it in my mind, clinging to the possibility that it wasn’t true, I knew it was.

The reality of what she’d done, what she’d knowingly subjected me to, felt like thorns shredding my heart open.

I hadn’t thought much of my relationship with my mother, knowing it was strained at best, but I’d thought it was better than this .

What she had agreed to was unforgivable, and I found myself gazing down at my hands as I trailed them over the dark, solid wood railing on the stairs.

My nails were back to the flawless red manicure that was expected of my kind, my skin soft and supple in the way that only care and dedication could maintain.

There was no trace remaining of the monstrous form that had shown itself in my anger toward my mother, and if it hadn’t been for her reaction to it, I might have thought it to be a figment of my own imagination.

The sirens were something that only existed in legends and myths, so far removed from the witches of this Coven and how I knew them to be.

Lucifer had gifted the siren form to others throughout history, to women who had been wronged by men who were all too willing to abuse their power. He’d gifted it to the original Erotes and Peabody witches, but that form had simply ceased to exist within the Reds by the second generation.

The last Erotes witch to have the form I now held within me was Amelia, the same witch who had asked Lucifer to gift her a magic that would allow her to take her power in the same form men had tried to use against her.

They wanted to condemn her for her actions out of wedlock?

She’d make that in itself her power and use it against them instead.

If Itan had unlocked my siren form by performing a binding ritual and cutting me off from the Source, he had to have utilized very dark magic to do it. It went against everything the witches were supposed to be.

The Source existed in two halves, polar opposites mirrored back at each other: the light and the dark, the Earth and the underworld. But for all those differences, we were the same at our core.

As above, so below .

We were meant to be the light to the demons’ darkness. We were supposed to be the life to their death. Monstrous forms were part of their magic, not ours. So how had he been able to twist my magic into the darkness?

I was so focused on my own thoughts as I made my way down the stairs, so fixated on the color and shape of my fingernails and trying to get to Willow as quickly as possible all while dreading it, that I never noticed the shadow that appeared on the landing below me.

I rounded the corner, descending the last step before the landing just above the main level. The grand entryway below was oddly quiet as I glanced over the stairs, keeping my head down to move past the male figure I thought nothing of.

The shadow of wings played in the light streaming through the stained-glass window, casting an enormous figure on the stone below me. “I’m not in the mood, Beelzebub.” I sighed, striding forward to walk past him.

He didn’t respond, and I hoped the absolute exhaustion in my voice was enough to dissuade him from fucking with me. I didn’t have the energy to deal with his persistence or bizarre combination of contempt and fascination.

He stretched out a hand, grasping me by the elbow and forcibly pulling me to a stop.

My book bag slid off my shoulders, crashing to the ground at my side as I spun to glare at him.

The face that stared down at me wasn’t Beelzebub’s, the leaner frame clothed in a suit that the archdemon would have refused to wear with his seeming aversion to shirts.

The angel’s face was so like Lucifer’s that I did a double take in confusion; the only indication that there was something different about him was the sprawling white feathered wings that fanned out behind him dramatically.

His face was carefully blank, an expressionless mask as he studied me for the briefest of moments.

My mouth opened, my lips parting in a shrill scream as realization dawned.

He lunged forward, wrapping his wings around me and trapping the sound in the cocoon he made.

My own voice was too loud in my ears, the grimace on his face the only confirmation that he was even remotely affected by the magic that I poured into that sound.

Time seemed to slow as he moved, his body primed and functioning in a single smooth movement as it caught up with his wingspan.

His fist connected with my temple, the blow knocking me sideways and into his wings. I felt myself fall, felt the moment he flinched back from the contact when I touched him and he let me fall to the floor, carelessly forgotten.

Then there was only black.