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Mom’s being nice? Why?

Her gaze drops to my neck and wrists, where the angel-blessed metal still wraps around me. “So it’s true, then. You can’t cast magic anymore?”

My back stiffens. “I’ve chosen not to take the metal off,” I tell her. “If I can’t cast magic, Salios can’t use the bond to spy on me. When I find a way to stop him, I’ll remove it.”

“Hmm…” Frowning, she pauses to consider this. “If I asked you to take it off long enough to cast a single spell, could you? Would it risk him finding out?”

“Yes, and yes,” I tell her, and then I narrow my gaze at her. “Why?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead, she withdraws a pair of car keys from her pantsuit. Attached to the keychain is a pocketknife, which she flicks open. Without preamble or warning, Mom digs the blade into her palm until crimson beads the surface. As the blood drips between her fingers, she presses her hand against the front door and traces something there.

A symbol?

A glyph?

It looks like some unholy combination of Infernal and the Angelic tongue.

Unlike the paintings, it also looks like something the new owners won’t find charming. I cringe at them finding it here. “Mom—”

“A’kiron tae amissa,” she says. “Someone with Septem blood has to say the words.”

For a long moment, all I can do is stare at the metal cuffs that have been protecting me all this time. It’s a short spell. Removing them may not be necessary. And then I remember Daemon when he summoned that portal and shudder.

“I need time,” I tell her. “Taking them off is complicated.”

“You have five minutes,” she says. “Be ready when I return.”

And with that, she exits the room, leaving me more confused than ever.

Next to my box of mementos sits my gleaming stack of angel-blessed metal. My skin feels naked without it. Free. Already, the hum of magic fills my veins once again, promising danger if Salios realizes what I’m doing. But I have to believe it’s worth it. My mom wouldn’t come here—wouldn’t ask this of me—unless it was absolutely vital.

When she returns, it’s with a box of pink pastries. Plucking a bear claw from it, she sets the rest next to everything else on the countertop and taps her foot, waiting impatiently for me to say the words and cast the spell already.

Christ, she’s unbearable.

Cracking my knuckles, I force my magic into the incantation, directing it into Mom’s glyph with no idea as to why. My wrist pulses. Unbidden, Salios’s lust magic combines with mine, and flushes my cheeks, the warmth spreading lower, then lower still. I suck in a breath. But the archdemon doesn’t whisper in my ear. He’s as silent as always on the other end of our bond.

For a moment, the glyph glows bright-hot, my ears pop, and then… nothing. Besides the light show, I’m not exactly sure what the spell is doing.

“We only have a few minutes,” Mom says, dropping the half-eaten bear claw.

“For what?”

I arch a brow as she digs through my memento box, removing items until they’re a sprawling mess on the countertop. Old scrapbooks. My high school yearbook. The t-shirt Dad got me from my first—and last—baseball game. I tear up when I see it because, like Mom, he hasn’t talked to me in seventeen months either, making good on his promise that if I chose Daemon, he would cut me off indefinitely.

She grabs something I don’t recognize. A locket that isn’t mine. It’s red and looks like it’s coated in sand. “That glyph will stop the angels from listening in or seeing this conversation,” she says, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s the only way to guarantee us privacy. But they’ll sense the spell soon, and I need to be gone before they do.”

Why do we need privacy?

“Mom, what are you holding?”

She swallows. “I did some digging after I banished you. Quietly. I couldn’t let anyone in the coven catch me. You were investigating the witches and incubi for Martha’s murder, but you weren’t looking in the right place. There was someone else—something else—who had access to the rotunda, who didn’t need to worry about the glyphs stopping them.”

What she’s implying is heresy.

“Are you saying the angels killed her?” I ask. “How? Why?”

Mom dangles the necklace in front of me. “This is a demon artifact. It can store infernal magic inside it, even a spell strong enough to kill. I stole it from Raphael.”