Page 78 of The Devil Knows Her Name

It would be so easy to do nothing. It would be so easy to dose myself with wolfsbane, to curl my body around hers on the dirt floor and let the poison take me while she slept.

The vellum blurred before my eyes. I staggered back against the opposite counter and sank to the ground, biting down on my fist to hold back the sob unfurling in my chest.

It made no sense. Why would she have come to me? Why would she have fought so hard to live? Why would I have shielded her with my reputation and my magic and my body if I were going to kill her myself?

Why give her teeth if she was meant to be slaughtered like a lamb?

And even as I thought it, railed against the madness of it, it made perfect sense. These were the things that made her precious. These were the things that made her mine.

The candle burned out after a few hours, leaving me in total darkness, but I still didn’t move. I’d been staring at her so long, the curled, spotted shape of her was burned into my retinas.

The unbroken sleep spell was leeching my already feeble strength, and I kept thinking I should break it, that the very least I could do was feed her and take her out to feel the sun and the grass and the wind one last time, but every time I thought it, my mind simply…left me. I would come to a moment later, my eyes frozen open, my lips raw and swollen where I’d bitten them, and start it all again.

It was my ringing phone that moved me. The sound shocked me to my feet, and as I stood there swaying, my vision blurring and clearing, Georgie called, and then Christine, and then Paul, and then silence. A moment later, a text from Christine came through:

Tess, please tell me you had nothing to do with this.

The clock read ten at night. The day was gone already. I was running out of time.

I gathered the fawn up, her sleeping body dead weight in my arms, and staggered through the ruined cellar back to the main floor. I gathered what I needed—the spade, and the knife, made so sharp it hurt to look at, and the bolt cutters, for later. I went out into the dark and saw a great, golden harvest moon hanging just over the tops of the trees.

All I needed was a patch of clear ground, somewhere the circle would not be marred by four-wheeler or truck tracks, and in the end I found it among the apple trees. I gently laid the fawn in the cool, damp grass. I picked up the spade and began to dig.

I realized I was weeping as I finished digging the sigil. My eyes were dry, but there was a terrible ripping, keening sound working its way out of my mouth from my heart. I realized in the same moment that the last of my magic was gone, and the sleep spell had broken. The fawn was awake.

She watched me warily from the edge of the circle, her ears flicking at the sounds I made. I wished she would run and leave me to the fate I’d wrought for myself; I didn’t have the strength left to chase her.

But why would she run? I had always fed and protected her, kissed her little head and inhaled her old rot stench like some cherub’s hair. She had no reason not to trust me.

I dropped the spade and picked up the knife. The burned spots in the blade were like dark eyes in the moonlight. After making the runes, I had sharpened it until it could part hair, but perhaps she could still smell my blood on the metal, because she stepped forward eagerly.

“No,” I whispered brokenly. “Don’t you understand? You’re supposed to run.”

But she didn’t run. She stretched her neck out toward me, nostrils quivering. It was only when her eyes went flat and black that I understood what she was about to do.

She seized my hand with a coyote’s darting quickness. She caught just the edge of my palm at first, and then, when she realized she’d found her mark, bit down again, harder and more fully. Her teeth were sharp now, jagged edges ground in from having gnawed on bones, and they pierced my skin easily.

I sobbed a laugh—a shattered, mad sound. “Good girl,” I told her. “That’s the way.”

I swung my leg over her, trapping her body between my knees. I wrenched her head up and she bit down harder, my blood running over her lips and down my arm. I kissed her head.

I cut.

The last of the blood dripped into the sigil, shining briefly. The orchard was silent, not a night bird or insect stirring. The moon was so bright overhead that the apple trees cast gnarled shadows over the sigil.

My teeth were in my lower lip. I opened my mouth, my jaw creaking like a rusty machine, and probed the loose flap of flesh with my tongue. My scalp ached, and when I lifted my hand, there were long strands of flaxen hair wrapped around my fingers, stuck in the drying blood that covered my skin. I pulled them free, let them drift into the grass.

There was a body at my feet, small and spotted. I sensed it, felt the leaden weight over my bare foot. I could not look.

The blood sank into the dirt.

A hand burst through the center of the crucifix, six fingers reaching toward the sky.

I strode into the circle and caught it, pulling the devil up out of the earth as he had once pulled me from the water. He gave a sawing gasp as his head broke the surface, gagging up mud and blood. His silver eyes gleamed wildly from a face dark with gore, all his salt-white skin streaked with evidence of my sacrifice.

“Tess.” His gaze was focused beyond me, at the edge of the circle. “Oh, Tess, what did you do?”

I seized him by the throat, and he followed the pressure of my hand, getting to his feet. “I did what I had to do,” I gritted out. “I couldn’t let you take the sanctuary. I couldn’t let you loose in the world.”