Chapter 159: Chosen child 2
VIVIANNE
I sat with the journal heavy in my lap, struggling to gather my thoughts through the fog of everything I had just learned.
In hindsight, the signs glimmered in my memory, sharp and undeniable now that I finally understood what I had been seeing. The real Vivianne had faded in those last months, her silence deepening in a way I had blamed on exhaustion, on the relentless pressure Lucian piled onto her shoulders, never seeming to care how much a person could bear before the burden reshaped them forever.
I had thought it was Lucian.
Blaming Lucian for every shadow in our lives had always been the path of least resistance, and with good reason—he truly was the source of so much darkness that it hardly ever felt unjust.
But this had not been Lucian.
She had borne a secret I never glimpsed, a burden she never shared, and as I read her confession now, anger felt impossible—understanding eclipsed it. She had used me, made a choice for me without my consent, shifting a demon’s claim from herself onto the child I carried and me. She did it out of terror, out of a desperate need to protect something precious, even if that protection was built on ground that was mine, claimed without my knowing.
I wanted to be furious.
I was mostly just exhausted.
Yet beneath the exhaustion, something restless was gathering strength. It had begun the instant I read about the claim passing through the twin bond, indifferent to which body bore the child, and it had only grown since.
I turned the page.
It was empty.
I frowned, tracing the edge with my thumb. The page felt oddly weighty, resisting my touch in a way the others hadn’t. Pressing gently, I found what I suspected: two pages fused together, as if some old sorrow had soaked them and left them clinging, dried and inseparable until now.
I thought about Lucian, about whether he had read this far.
The dried tracks of tears on the previous page had warped the paper, sealing the next two pages together at their edges. If Lucian had been skimming, searching for answers instead of reading every line, he might have missed them entirely, mistaking two pages for one and moving on.
He might not know what came next.
I pulled the pages apart carefully, working at the sealed edge with my thumbnail until they separated without tearing.
There was text on both inner faces.
I smoothed them flat and read.
The child, my sister had written, had presented a complication the demon had not fully anticipated. She described this pure energy she had noticed around Margaux from the earliest months of her life, a quality she struggled to name precisely but kept returning to in different framings. A flood. A light. Something the demon wanted, she theorized, which was perhaps why the claim existed in the first place, why a high demon had bothered with the transaction at all when the return could have been anything.
She had done research. She had, somehow, deceived the demon long enough to make another deal, this one with a superior spirit, and what she had wanted from that deal was protection for the child.
In her journal, my sister wrote that the rules governing what spirits and demons could impose on the living were more rigid than most people understood. They could not simply take. There were frameworks, hierarchies of consent, and at the time of Margaux’s birth and early childhood, the girl had not been of age to consent her own life away, and since Vivianne had not been the one to give birth to the child, she could not hand over the child either. Neither would she have. But I, as her mother, could make decisions on her behalf.
So Vivianne had sealed her.
I read that twice.
She had woven a protection around Margaux, meant to render her ordinary, to hide whatever it was that drew the demon’s gaze, so the girl could grow up blissfully unaware of any of this. The deal was meant to last forever, she wrote, with only one loophole: the seal would break when Margaux died, after a long, uneventful life, at which point the debt would vanish because there would be nothing left to claim.
Foolproof, she had called it.
I turned to the final entry, the one that explained everything I had already known the ending of.
"There is only one way to stop this demon and protect everyone. I have to do it."
She wrote about the demon plotting. About sensing its patience running out, its interest in the child becoming something more active and less dormant. She had calculated, in the logical and terrible way she had always calculated things when the situation demanded it, that removing herself from the equation might dissolve the original deal entirely.
For that little girl, she wrote. And anyone else.
I closed the journal.
For a long moment I simply sat there, my hands flat on the cover, staring at the bathroom tiles.
The seal had broken.
It was the only explanation. Margaux was seeing threads. Dead people. Invisible entities moving through rooms and maybe already asking her for favors. Everything the seal had been designed to prevent from surfacing was surfacing, which meant the protection had failed, which meant the original deal had not dissolved the way my sister had believed it would.
Which meant the demon’s claim was still active.
I acted before the thought could fully form, crossing the room to the bathtub and plunging my hand in for the phone.
The screen was dark. Not the dark of a phone that needed charging. The absolute dark of a device that had been submerged long enough for the water to find everything important inside it. I pressed the button anyway. Nothing. I pressed it again. Nothing.
I let the phone fall to the tiles and stood suspended in that single heartbeat between panic and action, then lunged for the landline on the bedside table, dialing Margaux’s number from memory.
It rang.
And rang.
And rang.
Voicemail.
I hung up and dialed again immediately, because sometimes people did not hear the first call and heard the second, and I needed to believe that was what was happening right now rather than any of the alternatives my mind was trying to present me with.
Voicemail again.
I pressed my free hand flat against the wall and made myself breathe at a controlled pace while I thought about who else I had a number for in that estate, who else might be able to reach her, who else was close enough to find her quickly.
Shanelle.
I had her number from our earlier conversations, and though my phone was gone, I had dialed it so often in recent days that it lived in my muscle memory, as familiar as my own name.
I picked up the handset again and dialed.
It rang three times, and then Shanelle’s voice came through, slightly breathless, like someone who had been moving quickly when the call arrived.
"Hello?"
"Shanelle." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was its own kind of muscle memory. "I need you to find Margaux right now. Wherever she is in that estate, I need you to find her and stay with her and do not let her out of your sight."
"Luna Vivianne?" A pause. "Is everything alright? What is—"
"Please," I said, and the word came out differently from how I usually said words. Stripped of the performance that lived in everything I said to most people. "Please just find her. Right now. And call me back the moment you have eyes on her."