IX

Aunt Sarah sat beside me in the car, her blond hair piled into a messy bun and her bright blue eyes, nearly identical to my mother's, hollow from lack of sleep. Between running from demons, monsters, and demigods and having sleepless nights the past few weeks, I imagined I looked the worse for wear too.

When the SUV rolled forward, we didn't talk at first.

"You lied to me," I said. "My whole life, you lied to me."

"I know." She took a deep breath. "I've been lying to my sister too, but it's what I've had to do."

"That's not a good enough answer."

"It's the only answer I've got, Faith," she said. "I wish it wasn't, but it is, and I hate myself for it more than you know. But the Guild has rules. Rules that I swore to follow. One of them is that no outsiders are allowed in. The fewer people who know, the better. The safer."

"Yeah, because I've been kept real safe. Great job."

"That is not fair," Aunt Sarah said, emotion thickening her voice. "I wanted to tell you, give you a chance to join the Guild, but I also wanted you to live a normal life. When I found out David Star had taken an interest in you, I informed the Guild, and they told me to stay out of it until they had more answers. Like I said, rules. But I was so worried about you that I had to get involved to find out why Death was pursuing you. Then the hayride and the corn maze happened. Everything just went to shit. I had no idea what had happened to you, Faith. That Death—that he'd spared your soul."

"What about Devin Star? How am I supposed to trust you when you had a relationship with the Devil himself?"

"It wasn't a relationship, it was—" She cast a look at Leo in the driver's seat and lowered her voice. "It was a mistake, and we can't talk about it here."

"Oh my God," I groaned, pushing my hair away from my face. "I'm going to have the spawn of Satan as my little cousin."

" Faith ," she warned.

"What does Devin even want from you?"

"All you can know is he's keeping me at D&S Tower. Indefinitely."

As my mind raced with dark assumptions as to what that could entail, Aunt Sarah patted my hand to bring me back to the present. "I'm proud of you, you know that? I don't know another eighteen-year-old who could go through what you have and then reject Lucifer on top of it."

I forced a sheepish smile. "You're the one who taught me to stick to my guns."

And I couldn't tell if Lucifer had respected that or if it had pissed him off. Honestly, I was surprised that he had let me go, and I couldn't shake the disturbing feeling that he had only let me go because he felt confident I'd come crawling back.

"On your mother's side," Aunt Sarah began, "your great-great-great- exponentially great -grandfather was an original member of the Guild. Your mother has no idea that I'm a hunter, or anything about our family history in that sense, and she never will. The Guild runs by a code. We recruit only descendants of Guild members. One child per family. Once that child is eighteen, they're educated in our ways and the ways of the supernatural. Our family has yet to skip a generation."

"Are you planning on having a child?"

"I was. With Michael."

My heart sank. Michael was Aunt Sarah's ex-husband, whom she'd married in her mid-twenties. Aunt Sarah swallowed hard and looked down at her lap. "Michael and I tried for four years with no luck, and then he got sick . . . Then I was confirmed infertile, and everything fell apart. The Guild has never pressured me to have a child, but it is considered an honor to pass down the knowledge of the Guild from one member to another."

"This whole Guild thing sounds like a twisted cult."

"It's not," Aunt Sarah said with a shake of her head. "We keep things within the family of hunters to protect our own."

I followed her gaze out the window and watched the world race by us in a blur. Keeping secrets to protect her own. That was something I could definitely relate to. "It must be hard. Keeping this secret life from my mom."

"You have no idea. Lisa and I have always been so close."

I pointed toward Leo in the driver's seat in front of me. So far, he hadn't said a single word. "You know this guy?"

Aunt Sarah shifted in her seat. "He's a reaper."

"I know that, but is he like Death?"

"No, not like Death. Not exactly." Aunt Sarah seemed uneasy. "He's one of the Seven, basically the embodiments of the Seven Deadly Sins. Their origin is unclear, but the Guild believes they were damned souls that were created by Death and Lucifer centuries ago to alleviate Death's Seven Deadly Sins curse."

"The Seven Deadly Sins curse. That's the one Heaven gave him that forces him to distribute souls to Heaven and Hell, right?"

"That's part of it," Aunt Sarah said. "The other part is that Death experiences the actual Seven Deadly Sins. Pride, avarice, envy, gluttony, sloth, wrath . . . "

"And lust," I added quietly, the memory of Death pressing me up against my bedroom wall replaying in my brain.

"From what I've gathered, the Seven Deadly Sins is an incapacitating curse, meant to hinder his free will and make him more compliant. In case he decided to go off the rails and kill everything in sight."

I only eat the parts of a mortal's soul I'm supposed to have , Death had told me. Unless, of course, a poor soul meets me on a bad day . . .

I shivered in my seat, wrapping my sweatshirt tightly around me.

"We don't know exactly what Death did to deserve such a harsh penalty," Aunt Sarah continued. "All we know is he aided in Lucifer's rebellion by freeing him from Heaven's realm. Both of those evil fucks were cast down together and turned into Fallen. Death suffers from the sins, and Lucifer can't walk the mortal realm for long lengths of time."

"That explains why Death does all of Lucifer's dirty work," I said.

"The Seven all have a connection to Death, a shared power for collecting souls in the mortal realm. They determine whether the soul goes to Heaven or Hell. But they don't eat parts of the soul like he does. They don't need mortal energy to survive and motivate them to get the job done. They just follow Death's orders, I think."

Leo caught my eye in the rearview mirror and then made a left turn.

"Do you feel like you made the right choice today?" Aunt Sarah asked.

It was the last thing I'd expected her to ask. "Why would you say that? Of course, I do."

"I want you to have a normal life, and I never, ever wanted you to enter this world." She took a deep breath. "I feel like I've led you astray."

Emotion tightened my throat. "At the end of the day, I made my own decision."

If that screws with fate, then so be it . If I risk losing who I'm supposed to be, then so be it .

By the time we entered Pleasant Valley, I was unbelievably tired. As soon as we arrived at my house, I popped open my door and got out.

Aunt Sarah had stayed in her seat, and an awful sensation churned my stomach.

"You're staying with him," I said.

"I could only come with you if I promised to come back."

I felt like I would be sick.

"You have one minute to say your goodbyes," Leo interjected.

" Goodbye? What do you mean, goodbye?" I leaned back into the car, clutching my aunt's hand. "I'll see you again, won't I?"

"I called your mom earlier," Aunt Sarah said softly, "and she thinks you went to D&S Tower for the Halloween ball and are staying the night at my place, since I'm closer to the city. I'm supposed to drive you to school, so you're going to have to come up with something clever if she wakes up before you do."

"You didn't answer my question!" I was on the verge of tears now, my throat closing. "When will I see you again—?"

Aunt Sarah just gripped my hand tighter, her eyes glistening. "I need to follow Lucifer's orders and stay at the tower. Be strong, Faith. I love you." Quickly, she added, "Whatever happens, don't you dare—"

A gust of wind picked up, and I jumped back before the car door slammed shut. Icy tendrils prickled my arms as I turned, glaring accusingly into Leo's otherworldly gold eyes.

"Seriously?"

"Have a good night, Ms. Williams," Leo said.

My chest felt heavy as I watched the car drive away.

Walking on autopilot to my front door, I found the spare house key under a rock in its usual hiding place and quietly unlocked the door. Creeping down the hallway to my room, my legs ached with every careful, tiptoed step.

All I wanted to do was dive onto my bed and fall asleep forever, but if my parents knew I'd gotten home this late, they'd think Aunt Sarah had lied to them and ground me for an eternity. Which meant I had to be a little ridiculous and hide until they left for work.

Taking one of my smaller decorative pillows and the blanket off my ottoman, I went into my walk-in closet and made the worst excuse for a bed with a heavy quilt and a pillow on my wooden floor.

Life could have been worse.

I could have sold my soul to Satan.