AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Broken skin I did not feel on my way to the destruction of the demon and his altar now burns the bottoms of my feet as I tread over sharp stones and sticks. I don’t go to the main part of the house though. Instead, I carry her to the dark wing, through the door I use to get in and out when I don’t want anyone to know where I am.
She clings to me, her hands on either side of my face caressing me, whispering words I can’t make out, just like Elizabeth’s lips moving in that dream.
Only when we get into the piano room do I set her down, kissing her as I back her onto the pink velvet couch Mom loved, where I sometimes let myself drift off, weary after the music from all the emotions that inevitably surface and exhaust me.
“Benedict wouldn’t stop whining,” she tells me between kisses as she pulls my shirt over my head, and I strip her of the slip she’s wearing. “You’re so cold,” she says once we’re naked, her hands flat on my face, my shoulders, my chest.
I don’t feel cold. I feel vibrant. Alive. Energized.
I draw back to look at her in the shadows of the room, then kiss her again, unable to get close enough.
“You’re mine. Not his,” I tell her, hearing how I sound as I push into her.
She gasps and I lay my weight on her to hear her moan as I penetrate fully, deeply, her passage warm and welcoming, my cock so fucking hard it hurts.
“Willow,” I kiss her lips again, bite them as she greedily takes my lower lip between her teeth.
Drawing out, I stand up, lift her so she wraps her legs around me, cupping her ass as I press her back to the wall. She cries out with each thrust, and when I pull out once more and spin her around, I wrap one hand around her front, spanning her belly, my fingers coming to her clit. Bending my knees because she’s so much smaller than me, I thrust into her and fuck her from behind as she moans, hands clinging to the back of the sofa as I lean over her. She flips her hair off one shoulder and looks back at me, and I kiss her cheek, the corner of her mouth. When I see her eyes grow glassy and feel her walls begin to throb, I close my teeth over the curve of her neck and listen to her call my name as her body releases, and I throb inside her, claiming what is mine, only mine… what will only ever be mine.
Afterward, both of us spent, we fall asleep on the narrow velvet couch, Willow wrapped in my arms, our legs entwined, clinging to each other. I have the dream again. I’m standing on Proctor’s Ledge, the breaking of the sky so much like it was tonight, behind Shemhazai as I smashed away the likeness of him. Isaiah is there and gone, no longer laughing but insignificant, a small presence, a small man.
Elizabeth, though… she’ll still hang, and I must watch, must bear witness in the chaos of this terrible morning that determined our fates centuries before we were even born. When I push my hand into my pocket, I feel soft hair, warm, wet blood. A cross is carved into Elizabeth’s forehead now to match Willow’s. The curse is upon her lips.
Whispers.
Mutterings.
Her damnation of my family, and ultimately, of her own.
It’s then I understand it. I understand the crack in the carving over the bed, the splitting of Shemhazai’s altar, the failure of Louis and Solange.
I understand it all.
As my eyelids fly open and I see Willow’s own eyes staring at me, I wrap my hand around the back of her head and grip that silky hair I love so much as I finally grasp the impossibility of it. Of us. Of this curse. Of the final Sacrifice that must be made to break it once and for all.
“Azrael?” She’s crying. She senses it. She knows that every other pairing ended in tragedy but I can’t allow her to know that she’s right. That we are hopeless. “Azrael?” she says on a sob.
Because to end this, there must be a final Sacrifice. A life given to save the other. Testament of a love powerful enough to end centuries of madness.
It is Elizabeth’s decree.
The Sacrifice will be made. Blood will be shed.
But it won’t be Willow’s.
It will be my own.
21
WILLOW
The next few days pass in a fog. Azrael and I get on with our lives, going through the motions of normal human existence. Ignoring the elephant in the room seems to be our chosen path, but it’s impossible to miss the tension crackling in the air.
Everywhere I turn, there’s a Society guard watching over me. If Azrael isn’t with me, the guards are. At first, it was just one, but with each new day, they seem to multiply.
