I found Addie and Haley with Verona and the other witches in the common room, all of them sitting around the fireplace, chatting and laughing over tea and cookies as if the last twenty minutes hadn’t even happened.
“Deirdre’s here,” I said to my sisters, deciding to leave the Sebastian stuff for later. “She needs to talk to us. Says it’s urgent.”
Haley and Addie headed back to the kitchen with me, Addie smoothing her hair on the way. She’d yet to meet our grandmother, and I had no idea how she’d feel when she finally did, but I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be a happy reunion. Not for any of us.
We found Deirdre sitting alone at the table, exactly where I’d left her. She spared a brief glance for Addie as we approached, her eyes misting at the sight, but then it was like a wall slammed down over her emotions, locking the rest of us out.
Immediately, she warded the kitchen, making sure no one would disturb us.
“There is no easy way to say this, girls, so I’m just going to come out with it,” Deirdre said. “I’ll fill in the details after. Okay?”
She didn’t give any of us a chance to disagree, or even wait until my sisters and I had gotten settled in our chairs. She just plowed on with the words that seemed to be tearing her up from the inside.
The ones I’d been afraid to hear since she’d first appeared in the kitchen, announcing that the story of my contract was hers to tell.
“Gray.” She took a steadying breath, then met my gaze, her face a mask of control.
It was inevitable, what she said next, and I couldn’t say it came as a surprise. All the clues had been there, and now that I looked backward, I could see them all line up neatly, waiting for me to solve the mystery on my own.
But I hadn’t, and hearing it said aloud rattled me to the core.
“I’m the one who sold your soul to Sebastian,” she said.
Ignoring my sisters’ gasps, I closed my eyes and let the confession wash over me. Word by word, it sank into my skin, winding its way around my heart and squeezing tight.
It was one more betrayal in a long line of broken promises and shattered trusts. So why the hell did it hurt so bad?
The table cracked before me.
I hadn’t even realized I’d been gripping it.
“Gray?” Haley touched my arm, gentle and kind, and I focused my energy on it, coming back into myself. Slowly, the anger receded, settling into a cold stone at the pit of my gut.
I released my death grip on the table and rose to put on the kettle, grabbing a bag of blood and some crushed hawthorn for myself. Something told me this fucked-up fairy tale was just beginning, and I was going to need a lot more than Haley’s touch on my arm to keep from tearing Deirdre’s head clear from her body.
Fourteen
GRAY
When the tea was ready and I felt like I could rejoin everyone at the table without destroying anything, I wrapped my hands around the mug and settled back into my chair, barely meeting my grandmother’s eyes.
“Talk,” I said, staring at a point just above her left shoulder.
“Sebastian and I go back a long time,” Deirdre began. “Before any of you were even born, when I was still young and beautiful.”
Is that atwinklein her voice?
“Save us the trip down memory lane,” I snapped. “Get to the point.”
“Oh, but this is the point, Gray. Every step, every decision led to the ultimate one. I could no more unravel this thread from the story than I could undo the outcome.”
I brought the mug to my mouth, biting back another nasty retort. For so long, all I’d wanted to know was who signed my contract—who sold my soul into demonic slavery, condemning me before I was even old enough to know what hell even was. But now that I had my answer, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to understand the hows and whys of it.
But Deirdre didn’t give me a choice then, and she sure as hell wasn’t giving me one now.
“I was fairly powerful in my own right,” she continued, “but hungry. Hungry to prove myself to my parents, who were well-regarded in our community but cruel and cold to their children. Hungry for bigger, more expansive magic, which always seemed to elude me. And most of all, hungry to make a name for myself. One night, after a particularly brutal fight with my parents, I was just angry and volatile enough to do the one thing I’d always known was absolutely forbidden—call upon the demon at the crossroads.”
A chill went through the room, and both my sisters shivered. I wrapped my hands around my mug, willing myself to sit still. To not leap across the table and throttle her.
