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“I found an inscription in Old Sang up here," Yves said, drawing my attention away from the table and up to where he was pointing.

“It’s The Devouring’s motto,” he said, translating it for me.

Death is an illusion. Just like peace.

Hartley had used those words to turn a blank wall into a door, even though he was magickless. One of the witches who’d attacked me at Widow Martell’s had said it just before I killed him. I’d spoken those same words outside the mausoleum. And then again, here.

Just before giving the door my blood.

What in Damien’s name was going on here?

I returned my attention to the active spell, checking the lines, and I realized the table fed into this one. Only, the table spell hadn’t been activated.

This was why Lou needed my relics. He wanted to connect the power of the relics to the spell that was already at work. But why? What would it gain him?

I glanced back up at The Devouring motto.

Death is an illusion.

All of a sudden, an idea came to me. “What if their motto isn’t just a saying? What if they really believe death is an illusion? And this spell is to bring the dead back to life?”

I pressed my hand to the floor beside the red spell line, as if it could verify my theory.

“What do you think?” I asked Yves, who had gone quiet.

When I turned to look at him, I saw that he was staring at the drain in the center of the table.

“It took the elders a very long time to craft the spell to create vampires. Twelve of us drank from one cup, six friend and six foe. But when we made the Blood Oath, we were all brothers, bound by blood.”

I didn’t know much about how the vampires were created, besides the spell had been based on blood magick. It was the most powerful kind of magick a witch could use, because both types of witches drew power from the magick in our blood. It was the reason why witches were marked by appearance-red or white hair-because the magick left a mark inside every cell in our body.

“Do you recognize the markings?” I asked. “Is this the same spell?"

His eyes moved over the walls, the ceiling, the crystals burning in their sockets. Yves shook his head. “No, this is not the same spell. This working is purely dark magick. There is no counterbalance of light magick.”

He was right. There wasn’t a whiff of balance in here.

“Which tells us what they intend.” Yves turned to face me fully. “If The Devouring is planning on making death an illusion, I don’t think they’d curry the gods’ blessing or accept any conditions on the power it gave them. There would be nothing to temper it. No mate. No oath. No limit of any kind.” He gave a disgusted shake of his head. “It would just be a blood drinker fueled by want.”

It was a chilling declaration. And it forced me to think about what happened earlier tonight inside the mausoleum.

“You’re describing a demon,” I said. “A demon who doesn’t need to abide by demonic law.”

I wondered if that was why Honora Kemp returned the relics to Kemp Manor. If she learned what they intended and somehow stopped the spell, then escaped with the relics.

Yves glanced around the room. “Do you hear that? The knocking of the pumps has changed.”

I couldn’t hear what he heard, but all of a sudden the pipes running inside the room began shaking, banging hard against their iron brackets.

Yves tilted his head toward the ceiling, listening. “It’s the mains. They’ve opened them to combat the fire. I don’t know how long these old pipes hold under the pressure.”

“How long do we have until that happens?” I asked.

“Not long enough to search this place properly.” He looked down at the water already seeping in a dark line along the base of the far wall. “Cora, if this room flooded, would it extinguish the spell?”

“Likely. But it wouldn’t matter. They’d just recast it. Every line in this room is cut into the stone. Water won’t wash away a carving.”

“Not if the flood was bad enough that this place was totally submerged,” he said. “That would take weeks to drain.”