Time stopped.
Heartbeats stopped.
Lungs stopped filling, blood stopped moving, clouds stopped passing before the sun.
And in those bleak, brutal moments—far too late, far too feeble—Jaci tried to make her full confession. She told him about her life in hell, how her mother and sister had tortured her, experimented on her, forced her to perform like a circus monkey, beating and starving her when she couldn’t produce the desired results. She told them how, when she turned eighteen and still hadn’t manifested the dark powers her mother had expected, the demon bitch had planned to kill her. She told him how her father had bargained his own soul away to set her free. Told him about how she’d brought his body back from the dead, spent the last seven years searching for a way to save him.
And then she told him the worst of it.
His curse. Her discoveries. The resurrection. The heart.
Vita mutatur, non tollitur.
Life is changed, not taken away. The dead shall rise. The dead shall return.
Three of Knives, Death, Ten of Knives.
Blood and vengeance. A severed heart.
Death. Resurrection.
Blood on the sheets. Betrayal.
The dead shall rise. The dead shall return.
Vita mutatur, non tollitur.
Blood on the roses. Blood on the sheets. Blood on the snow. Blood on the grave.
The dead shall rise. The dead shall return.
All of it spilled from her, a torrent of pain and deception, of fear. Of sorrow. Every word seemed to slice a little deeper into his chest, to put another block of ice around his heart, to drain the new warmth from his eyes until there was nothing left but a barren wasteland.
In the end, drained of all her words, every confession wrung free, every fear laid bare, she waited for her vampire to roar. To lay waste to the bedroom. To kill her.
But in the end, all he said was, “Whatpurpose, witch?”
Witch. Cold as frostbite. Cold as death.
“For what purpose was the hybrid hellspawn bred?” He looked right through her, right past her.
Jaci rubbed the chill from her arms, her heart bleeding, her soul in tatters. “Destroying vampires and ushering in the eternal rule of hell on Earth.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Gabriel’s world had never felt so small. So dark.
A demon.A bloody demon. One who’d lied to him, manipulated him, and used him to summon an even greater danger to their world, setting an ancient succubus loose on a city whose residents had no way to protect themselves and needed very little encouragement toward abject depravity.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Jacinda Colburn, his silver-haired little moonflower, his witch, his partner, the woman who’d set his soul on fire, had been plotting to turn him into an undead ghoul.To carve out his heart and leave his body to waste away, feeling every bit of flesh rotting off the bone, every sunbaked blister, every hollow pang of desperate, unquenchable thirst until the slow march of time finally trampled him into dust.
“It didn’t work, Gabriel,” the witch—rather, thedemon—said now. “I was a complete failure in their eyes, and they almost killed me, but then my father made the deal and sacrificed himself to—”
“Don’t.” He held up a hand, unable to hear another word out of her filthy, lying, conniving mouth. “Don’t speak to me of fathers and sacrifices. Any man foolish enough to bed a demon deserves what he gets.”
Including Gabriel, he realized. And he’d be paying forthatmistake for a long time.
