“Who kidnaps innocent souls just to get the attention of her sister? Please. You’re as dependent as they come.”
“If you’re talking about my little non-consensual road trip with Aiden Donovan, I wasn’t trying to get your attention. I simply wanted you to come back home so we could figure this thing out together. And look!” She beamed, spreading her hands before her. “Here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“Sisters, reunited. So… Let’s say we put all this nastiness behind us and start fresh. Water under the bridge, right?”
Jaci stared at her, incredulous.
Water under the bridge?
Viansa had colluded with their mother, helping the woman drug and rape Jaci’s father just so they could conceive their own little hybrid hellbeast. After Jaci was born, Viansa appointed herself tormentor-in-chief, abusing her—literally torturing her—for eighteen years. She’d crashed back into her life a couple of months ago, wreaking havoc on the city where Jaci had made her life, threatening everyone Jaci had come to care about. She’d imprisoned Zachary’s soul. Stolen Aiden’s.
And now she wanted to shove it all under the bridge?
Jaci circled her, the heat of the cavern mingling with her anger, making her blood simmer.
On some level, Jaci would always be terrified of Viansa. But now, here, after everything she’d endured, she realized her final reckoning—the most terrifying fear she had to face and accept—wasn’t about Viansa at all.
It was about her own darkness. Her own capacity for violence and rage.
During the slaughter at Shimmer and again at Renault’s warehouse, it was the death energy of the murdered mages that’d fueled Jaci’s most destructive powers. She’d always assumed it was the magic itself that’d connected her to them—after all, the same dark magic that ran through their blood also ran through hers.
But now, glaring at the succubus who’d made her life a literal hell, Jaci realized her powers had nothing to do with the mages and everything to do with the darkness itself.
Withher.
It wasn’t some external power, but a thing that existed inside her—a living, breathing entity that was just as much a part of her as her blue eyes and silvery hair. And here, in the darkest, most malicious realm of the universe—the place of her creation, her birth, and her entire childhood—she finally understood what she had to do.
Embrace it.
Claim herself.
Fuckingownit—no apologies, no excuses.
With a calmness that belied the new flutter in her heart, Jaci smiled and lifted her hands, calling another Tarot card to her mind.
Temperance—an ethereal queen of the night in a black lace dress, black wings unfurling behind her. In one hand, she clutched a bloody arrow, and in the other, a chalice of blood tipping into a flaming cauldron. Roses bloomed at its base.
It was a card of alchemy and self-acceptance, a melding of the light and the dark, of earth and hell, of angels and demons, of all the things that made Jaci who she was.
And she was done trying to choose between them. Done pretending she even wanted to.
“What… what are you doing?” Viansa asked, a hint of fear cracking her voice.
In response, Jaci grinned, and the spell came to her at once, flowing from the very center of her being, up through her heart and lungs, out through her lips and into the air around her, filling hell’s Heart of Flames with her magic. Her essence.
Blood and fire, breath and blade
Broken fragments now remade
Light to darkness, dark to light
Bow before the queen of night
A hot wind blew through the cavern, and the magic surged inside her, hollowing her out, chipping and scraping and sucking until she felt like an empty vessel waiting to receive. And then, in a sudden rush of pure, white-hot energy, it filled her all over again.
Her body buzzed like a live wire, every cell vibrating, tiny arcs of lightning zig-zagging across her skin. It was like that night in the warehouse, only bigger, vaster, her whole being full of potential so awesome and terrifying, it brought tears to her eyes.
