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Anger like I’d never felt before rose inside of me, hot and untethered. How dare she wear my mother’s face. How dare she use me. I pushed myself off the ground and stood directly in front of her. Dominique’s black eyes glinted.

I wasn’t helpless, even now. I was a witch.

“All that hard work, weeks of pretending to be my mother, and you’re still in a cage,” I said. “The wards face inward. Nothing crosses that boundary. Which means all I need to do is put you back in the Underworld.”

I grabbed my grimoire from the floor and flipped through the pages, looking for a banishment spell.

“I don’t suggest you do that,” Dominique teased. “Not unless you’re in a hurry to meet Damien.”

I ignored her.

“You and I are tethered together by something much stronger than a spell,” she continued. “But by blood. Your family’s blood, and your own, which you’ve given to me so freely.”

“You’re bluffing,” I said, still searching for the damned spell.

“Honora said the same thing,” she countered.

I stopped flipping pages abruptly.

Lou had called Honora Kemp’s work the greatest achievement in The Devouring’s history. He had said Honora performed it using all four of my family’s relics. And she’d done it after arriving with a dying child with black ink running through her veins.

When I looked back at Dominique, she was walking slowly along the inside edge of my circle, trailing one pointed black fingernail against the invisible barrier above the burning salt.

I noticed that even though she no longer looked like my mother, she was still transparent. Nothing more than a manifestation of demonic energy.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Adrien and Della crouched beside his desk, half hidden behind the tripod of his telescope, a star chart spread across his knees. His eyes went from the chart to the reversed sigil burning above the balcony doors, then back to the chart, and he had that look. The one he got when he was connecting dots nobody wanted him to connect.

This time, he had a stick of his warding chalk in his fist.

I just needed to hold on. Whatever my clever boy was working out, Dominique couldn’t know. So I did the most dangerous thing I could think of. I dragged my eyes away from them, forced myself to my feet, and gave the demon exactly what she wanted.

“If you came here to make a bargain with me, ask for something."

The demon snarled at me. “I’ve been trying for three weeks.”

She was right. All she wanted was for me to summon her. I was starting to believe the summoning wouldn’t have brought her from the Underworld, but from somewhere else.

“You wanted me to summon you. Well, here you are.”

“I want a body.”

I noticed that the light had gone out of the salt ring closest to her feet. I heard the familiar scrape of warding chalk on floorboards, and the light reappeared.

Adrien was trying to figure out how to open the door.

I kept my eyes fixed on Dominique. I had to give him more time.

“You don’t just wan a body. You want my body,” I said. Chin lifting. “That’s what this has been about.”

She let her gaze travel down my figure and back up again, then rolled her eyes. “Want is a strong word. But I suppose you’ll make do, all things considered.”

I brushed off the slight. I just needed to keep her talking. “You said we were tethered by blood. Does it have something to do with Honora’s spell?”

For several breaths, the demon said nothing. I had to resist the urge to ask my question again. She seemed to be considering something, though I couldn’t tell whether it was her answer or how much of it she intended to give me.

“Ever since Honora cast her spell, every Kemp woman has carried a stitch of me in her, whether she knew it or not. And now you’re all that’s left of the bloodline,” she revealed. “There is nowhere left for me to go.”

I’d hoped some of my family had escaped, but Dominique’s confession told me they hadn’t. The realization nearly brought me to my knees, but I held my composure for Adrien’s sake.