Page 144

“But… but…” he stuttered. “But there’s a woman. Behind you.”

Della squawked, “Another round!”

Had she meant… turn around? My stomach dropped as I turned and found Mama’s ghost an arm’s length away.

“Who is she?” Adrien asked.

Smiling at him, Mama raised her hands and opened her palms.

“My mother,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “She’s a ghost. Remember?”

But what was she doing inside my warding circle?

“Miss Ravenwood,” Adrien said. “Papa told me that vampires can’t see ghosts.”

Chapter 46

Liée

CORA

“What do you mean, vampires can’t see ghosts?”

Adrien was still staring at the apparition. “He told me—Papa said that’s why I can’t see my mother. Because vampires don’t see the dead. Then I looked it up, just to be sure.”

Yves could’ve been lying to his son, I reasoned, to make him feel better about not seeing his mother’s ghost. I’d considered doing the same thing. But Adrien’s certainty made me look at the apparition again.

Mama’s ghost drifted closer, and I recalled the first time her ghost appeared to me after her death. I was sitting cross-legged beside a dying fire, sewing a pocket into my bodice. I had nowhere safe to keep them, and I didn’t trust them loose inside my traveling bag, so I improvised.

As I worked, the needle kept jabbing into my numb fingers until they were bloody. Once I was finished and the relics were safely tucked away, I sealed the seam with a spell.

When I looked up, Mama had appeared on the other side of the fire.

She watched me as I put the bodice on and laced it up. The relics hummed from inside their new home, right against my ribs. I laid my hand over them and thought, ‘They feel her too.’ Grief answering grief.

It seemed right to me that the Twisted Sisters would mourn a witch like Hera Kemp.

After that night, Mama rarely left my side. And neither did the relics.

The ghost was still holding out her hands, showing me her wounds. I’d always thought she was showing me her burns, but now that I was looking at her properly, I realized the skin wasn’t blistered.

In fact, they were the same injuries Duval had treated with yarrow while I lied about tripping over a loose garden stone.

Gran’s voice returned, an echo of the lesson she’d repeated my whole life. “Witches of the Darkness draw their power from the deepest desires of their heart. We draw our magick from demonic relics, after all.”

She’d never told me it worked in both directions.

I pointed my wand at what I’d thought was my mother’s ghost. “Reveal yourself.”

Her mouth curved into a knowing grin. “Figured it out, have you?”

I knew that voice, and it wasn’t my mother’s.

Two black points sprouted at the top of her forehead, growing into long, twisted horns.

“Miss Ravenwood,” Adrien whispered. “What’s happening?”

Della spread her wings protectively and let out a shrill cry. I tried to run to Adrien, but the moment I hit the outer boundary, my own ward flung me backward onto the floorboards hard enough to rattle my teeth.