Twenty-Three

Lala Longstreet was crazy and a distraction I was thankful to have. After two weeks of working with her, I had started to understand her thought process some and calls to Barney for translation were getting fewer and fewer. I was moving out of Duely’s tomorrow and although he didn’t want me to go, I needed to be alone.

No one, not even Duely, knew who I was. I couldn’t tell anyone. Ever.

Diabolus hadn’t been around again but Rathe was also gone. He’d vanished. Taken all his things when no one was at home and left a note that they could keep the rent. He had decided Delvaux wasn’t for him. He was going abroad. Heath had been happy about Rathe’s departure and he hadn’t tried to hide it. He had been trying to get me to move in with them free of rent, but I couldn’t take Rathe’s room.

His memory was too fresh. My emotions too raw. As much as I wanted to hate him, I couldn’t. He had lied to me. What I thought we had was never real. But he hadn’t been the only liar. I had lied to him too.

I didn’t know why he had sought me out other than to see if Diabolus did have a child. I’d lain in bed thinking of reasons he had come here. I had tried to convince myself I should be scared of him. He’d been immune to my sorcery, and not even the Lord of evil had been able to do anything to him. Why was that? Did it have something to do with the holy blood in him? I had so many questions and I didn’t know if I’d ever have any answers. Diabolus wasn’t coming around to answer anything. Not now that Rathe was gone.

I stood outside my mother’s home looking up at it and my chest mourned the loss of a man I believed had been my father. I had believed in my goodness. I had thought I had it in me. None of it was there. My blood hadn’t been what had made me choose good over evil. How was it that the evil inside me was what had made me better?

The woman inside that house had given me life but lived in terror of me and I understood why now. I was the abomination. I should have never been born. She was right. I didn’t hate her for all she’d said to me anymore. She’d known all along who I was. What I was.

A small figure filled the attic window, drawing my gaze toward her. She was the only reason I was here. Annabelle stared back at me. I held up my hand to wave and she did the same. There was nothing left for her here on this earth. She’d died a child and stayed because of her mother’s grief. She’d not known to go on. She’d let the pain hold her here. I understood that now. Diabolus didn’t have to explain that to me. There were things that I just knew now. Since he’d told me who I was and who he was, I had started to have answers to things I hadn’t before. I just wish I had all the answers.

“Hoc est domum tuam. Hoc est tempus de hoc mundo ad mortem ire et liberum esse. Innocentes anima tua, accipe et vade. Soram, Annabelle. Ita summa petunt.”

That was another thing I just knew. It wasn’t always spells I cast. I was learning the difference daily. My sisters had always been taught spells, yet I could speak my own.

I now knew that those that came naturally to me were never spells at all. It was the power of Diabolus. I was speaking it into being and it was. Just like the words I’d said to Annabelle just now. The small girl in the attic was gone. She’d not be back. She was free of a home where sadness had held her. There was no more clinging to this life for her now. The Latin I spoke was simply me drawing on my father’s power and speaking it be.

The front door opened and my mother stepped out, her eyes locked on me.

“Get away from this place!” she yelled out to me.

“Gladly,” I replied. “But, mother, the spell you’ve placed around this house to keep me away,” I said to her, sensing its presence there, then vanishing from her yard and reappearing inches from her on the front porch.

She screamed and began tossing hexes that couldn’t touch me.

“I have no desire to come here or see you. I had some unfinished business. I won’t be back. You were right to send me away. I shouldn’t have been born and I belong nowhere.” Those were words I needed to say to her. Closure for us. Closure for me.

“You’re just like him. I knew you were. I saw it when you were little,” her voice was nervous and accustory as if I had asked for this. She’d wanted the third daughter so badly she made a deal with the Devil. I was the result. I didn’t need to stay and be reminded of the mistake she wished she’d never made.

I could lie to myself but the truth was that it hurt. To have a mother who didn’t just not like you, but hated you. A mother who wished you were never born. She’d done this. I didn’t want to feel anything toward her or the rest of the Kamlocks. She’d allowed me to believe a lie all my life. Now, Lucas Delvaux was just one more loss in this nightmare that was my life.

Turning away from the terror in Peresephone’s eyes, I didn’t let her see the pain in mine. It was my secret. No one had to know the anguish I faced every day when I opened my eyes. I would survive. I wouldn’t be happy, but I’d live.

I took the last steps I would ever take down the porch steps of my former home and didn’t look back. This time I was really leaving. She didn’t have to see me again. I didn’t need that reminder. My life with her would become a closed chapter. Never to be reopened.

When my foot hit the brickpaved sidewalk, I was ready to go. Vanish from sight the way my father always did. Before I could focus on the location to which I wanted to teleport, my eyes locked on a pair of familar steel blue pools. I inhaled sharply, my heart slamming against my chest, but I didn’t blink, afraid that he’d be the one to disappear.

The moss hung from the trees sheltering him from view and, for a moment, the pain I was feeling was gone. Who we were didn’t matter. For a moment, I didn’t feel alone.

Like everything in my life, that moment of peace was then blasted to Hell.