Claimed by the scarred Alpha

SÉVERINE

"I’m just telling you what the threads show."

"You’re being useless." I rolled my neck, feeling the tension that had been building for hours crack and shift. "Just tell me what the ghost meant. What is that girl, exactly? Is she really strong enough to break my marks?"

He stepped over and reached for the hem of my shirt, moving with the same matter-of-factness he always had when helping me out of ruined clothes before.

"You’re covered in blood," he said. "You need to change."

"Stop." I pulled away. "Stop acting like you’re my lover. You’re my servant. Servants obey." I held his gaze. Unless that other demon was right. I could not help how bad I was tempted to say it. "Maybe you act this way not just because it’s your job, but because you—"

His eyes widened, just a little. Like he wanted to understand what I was getting at.

I leaned in, closing the gap between us.

"Do you love me? And I do not mean familiar to witch. Are you in love with me?"

He gave a practiced little laugh. "Don’t be ridiculous, Mistress."

"Then say it," I pressed.

He looked at me for a moment and then settled into the chair across from the bed with the posture of someone who had decided the fastest way through this was the most direct one.

"If she is a whisperer," he said, "it would explain things about her that have not made sense to me since the first attack. Her sight developing the way it did, the strength of her spirit energy, especially the way she affected me in the corridor when she touched me." He paused. "Though it is confusing, because when I first encountered her, she was entirely clueless. No awareness whatsoever."

"Right.... But that was not quite what I was asking. What is a whisperer?"

"The name is recent. In the old days, before they largely ceased to exist, they were called true psychics." He folded his hands. "They are the precursor of what a witch is. What had to exist, and what had to change, for the witch bloodline to come into being."

I stared at him. "She is a precursor of a witch?"

"One of your earliest ancestors was a whisperer," he said. "Before the pact. Before any of this existed." He met my eyes carefully. "A witch is born when a whisperer makes a deal with the shadow. By shadow, I mean a primordial demon. When that deal is made, every bloodline that follows is bound to the original pact. And every familiar tied to that primordial demon is bound in turn to the witches of that line."

"What are you saying?"

"I am saying that I am a subject of the primordial demon of corruption," he said. "Who made his original pact with your first ancestor, a soldier named Igor. Your ancestor was a whisperer, a sensitive, someone who could hear and see what others could not. My primordial found him and made the deal." Something moved in his expression that I could not quite read. "The arrangement freed my kind from Gehenna. This realm is considerably more interesting and considerably less plagued than what we came from. We bound ourselves to the Igor’s descendants to stay here."

I absorbed this slowly.

"So if Margaux is a true psychic," I said, "she is what my ancestor was. Before he made his deal."

"One of the very last of her kind, if she is genuine." He leaned back slightly. "True psychics are sensitive to what most living people cannot perceive. They can communicate with spirits. The stronger ones can negotiate with them, make deals, help them move on or move through. Helping a spirit strengthens their own spiritual energy, which is why her power seems to be growing." He paused. "They are also capable of foiling wraiths."

"But she cannot break my witch marks?" I said. "That should not be possible, right?"

"She cannot," he confirmed. "Not as she is currently. At least, with the knowledge that I have, that is how it is supposed to be. A whisperer is only as strong as their source. To break a magical seal of the kind you have placed, she would need to be something more than what she is. The power to break those marks belongs to witches, because witches carry the shadow pact. Or in very rare cases, to saints, which is what you get when a whisperer binds themselves to a higher spirit rather than a primordial demon."

"A saint," I said.

"Fae. Sprites. Spirits of sufficient power and purity , and sometimes ghosts, but the mechanics for that are highly impossible." He held my gaze. "If someone bound her to something like that, her spiritual energy would transform entirely. She could break anything a witch has sealed."

I sat with that for a long moment.

The dried blood on my hands. My grandfather’s bedroom floor. The wraith that had worn that dead Omega bitch face and told me I did not love him.

"If she made a deal with Prim? Could she do it?" I said slowly.

He did not answer, which somehow felt like its own answer.

I stood up and crossed to the window and looked out at the parking structure with its neat rows of ordinary human vehicles, and I thought about Margaux in Valcourt with a ghost’s favor in her pocket and a whisperer’s untrained power in her hands, and I thought about what it would mean if someone found her before I could do anything about it.

That creature that seemed interested in her was a demon and he seemed so much stronger than my familiar.

I had to wonder. Was that why he was interested in her?

But the spell he thought me would give me the power to steal her body? Would I have that too? The whisperer nonsense? And would he try to get under my skin then?

I turned back to my familiar.

"What exactly is a primordial?"