"Here's the thing about the dagger," she went on, her eyes going to a point past my shoulder, which meant the next part was going to be painful. "It works exactly the way Eloise built it. It severs the connection between the demon and your father andpulls them apart. But the break isn't clean. When the connection goes, the demon has to leave the body, and it doesn't leave the way it came in."
"How does it leave?"
"Through you. You become the conduit. The demon leaves through your body, and you will see everything it did while it wore your father. Every manipulation. Every betrayal it orchestrated. And not as information. As experience. You won't see what it did, you'll feel what it felt doing it. The satisfaction of it. The pleasure of breaking things. You carry all of it through you while it leaves, and if you lose yourself in it, the demon gets out and you stay behind, broken into the shape of it."
My hands were shaking. Interesting. I'd thought I was handling this.
"How long?" I asked.
"Depends how much of itself it leaves behind. Minutes. Days. Or the transfer is complete enough that you don't come back in a shape that makes sense." She shrugged in her simplistic way she delivered bad news. "The demon wears you. But there's more to it."
"Say it."
She let the silence sit, which was its own kind of weapon, and when she spoke again it was quieter. "Your father is not entirely your father. The genetic material is his, yes. But the pregnancy that made you wasn't natural. Eloise already knew about the demon. She knew what it was planning. And she built you, deliberately, with her own magic and your father's bloodline and something else I'm not certain of, because she was careful about what she wrote down and what she kept to herself."
The room went very quiet.
"You're saying I'm not." I couldn't finish it.
"I'm saying you're exactly what Eloise intended while also exactly what the ancient demon wanted. She built you to be ableto do what the dagger requires. The reason you can carry what passes through you without breaking is that you're not entirely human, not entirely demon, not entirely witch. You're a thing made to hold a thing. A cage built to process what no ordinary nervous system could survive."
"Eloise built me to pull the demon out of Ro," I said slowly.
"Whether Eloise is still the architect now that she's dead is a question you'll have to answer with the dagger in your hand."
I got up, because my body needed to move. I went to the window and looked down at the compound, at all those people trying to survive something they didn't fully understand. My entire biology was a decision made by a woman who was dead and couldn't explain it. I wasn't conceived. I was built. Designed to be the one thing that could pull a demon out of my father without dying of it. Or to die of it and call it sacrifice.
"How did Eloise even know about the demon?" I asked.
"Because the same person who sent the demon to Ro sent warnings to her. Someone in the inner Division faction wanted both things at once. To follow an order and also thwart it. The math of that is elegant, if you're the kind of person who finds broken families strategically useful."
I turned. "Who."
"That's the question you'll answer after the demon leaves. Whatever Eloise understood about how she made you and the dagger, there's someone on the other side of all of it. Someone who calculated that the collision of those two things would make exactly the chaos they needed."
"And you're telling me now because."
"Because you're going to walk toward him with the dagger, and you need to know what you're walking toward." She stood with the economy only old things have. "You're not walking toward saving your father. You're walking toward becoming the conduit for everything the demon has done, carrying it throughyour own body, and hoping you come out the other side with enough of yourself left to ask why you were built to do it. Or you'll be exactly the weapon they wanted."
I didn't flinch. That was the thing I held onto, refusing to flinch at the thing designed to break me. She was testing me.
"When," I asked.
"When what?"
"When does it happen? The demon. The transfer. When?"
She moved toward the door, not fast, just certain of her right to the space. "That's the right question. The demon doesn't leave until its next vessel becomes available."
"Which is me. This is fucking fantastic."
"Then the transfer happens whether you're ready or not. Either you initiate, or another demon or creature forces you to." She opened the door and paused in the frame. "Ask yourself whether you're still choosing this, once you understand the choice might have been made for you before you were born." She paused at the door, her hand sitting on the frame. "Oh, and you haven't bonded with your mates completely, you don't stand a chance of resisting that demon inside Ro."
And she left, closing the door so quietly it was like she'd never been there, except for the weight she'd set on my shoulders.
I stood in my room and tried to hold what an intentional origin meant. Eloise hadn't given birth to me because she loved the idea of having a daughter. She'd built me, knowing what the demon was planning, and the specification was a person who could hold the demon as it left Ro without coming apart. The mercy of that and the horror of it were the same thing.
And it landed exactly where I was softest. My whole life I'd been braced for the moment somebody finally said the truth I already suspected, that I wasn't wanted.