“I didn’t?—”
“Don’t lie to me,” Circe said. “You’re blood sworn to the coven and to the MC. Your colors come first. Remember that.”
“We were stuck in the liminal,” I explained. “Our bond was gone.”
Circe raised an eyebrow in a simple gesture for me to go on.
“I didn’t know how to get out,” I said, wondering how much I should say. Between the three of us, we hadn’t come up with a cover story, but I also didn’t see the point in lying. Lilith had looked me in the eye, and whatever she’d seen prompted her to demand we be kept in quarantine…and separated from each other. I put a hand over my heart as it clenched. I needed to be with them. I needed to be surrounded by their energy.
In the end, I told her as much as I could. I explained how we’d found Constance’s book and the rituals inside. We’d researched for weeks before we tried the first one, but when all of our roads turned to dead ends, we didn’t think we had another choice.
“We had to get the bond back,” I explained. “We had to figure out how to get out of there.”
I divulged all of it, down to the flesh-binding ritual and the demolition of the estate. The demon had been watching us the whole time, nudging us in ways we didn’t anticipate. When I got to St. Michaels and what had happened to Wes, I paused. If she knew he’d been possessed, if she knew what I’d done to get us home, I wasn’t sure how she’d react. I trusted my sisters, but like she said, the coven always came first. Would she expel me? Would she banish all three of us?
Atlas and Wes would be fine. They’d lived their whole lives on the fringes of the Harlots. But me…this was my world. My family. My sisters.
“Go on,” Circe said. “How did you finally get rid of the demon?”
“We banished it,” I stated. “But that destroyed the liminal.”
“You banished it?” Circe raised her eyebrows. “You used a forbidden ritual to toss a demon back into hell.”
“Yes,” I said, squaring my jaw, tilting my head up higher to meet her stare. “I’m not ashamed of it. Not even guilty. I knew the price, and I paid it willingly. I did what I had to do to get us home.” I paused to swallow down the heat rising in my cheeks. “I’d do it again if it got us the same result.”
“Why?” Circe pursed her lips and shook her head. “Why banish it? Why not go through with the soul-binding and use all that residual magic to open the veil?”
“That was the plan,” I explained. “Until…”
I was terrified of what it meant. The memories of what happened after were hazy. I remembered the pain. I remembered bleeding from my ears and nose. I remembered clawing my way to Wes and clinging to Atlas and then…something shifted inside me. If I had to guess, I’d say it was my soul being cleaved into pieces. It was the sacrifice demanded of a witch that dabbled in banishment.
Nothing comes without a price.
Sacrifice is always painful.
To send a soul to hell, the practitioner must give a piece of herself to go with it.
Except…
I’d expected hollowness. I’d expected emptiness and apathy. Instead, something else squirmed around inside me like a parasite, like a cancer. I could sense its presence but didn’t know exactly what it meant or what it would do.
“Until?” Circe said, bringing me back from my thoughts.
“What will Lilith do with us?” I asked instead of answering. “I botched the liminal ritual. I used old magic to create something unknowable between me and my warriors. I banished a demon to hell, knowing it was forbidden. Will she kick me out? Strip my patch from my cut and forbid me from the estate?”
Circe took a deep breath and grabbed her pack of cigarettes, pinching one between her teeth before using magic to light it with her hand.
“Don’t know,” she replied. “It depends on how honest you are.”
“Do you think I’m lying?” I hadn’t been, not about the things I actually told her.
Circe’s assessing gaze narrowed, and I sensed Wes start to wake up. He was looking for me, looking for Atlas, panic squeezing his chest when he realized he was alone.
“No,” she finally said. “But I think there’s something you’re not saying, something you want to keep hidden.”
“I spent two months in the liminal,” I said. “There are a lot of things I want to keep hidden. Lots of things I wish I could forget.”
“Hmm,” Circe hummed a gentle agreement.
