For the second time, I watch Lucifer walk away from me.

I thought nothing could hurt more than seeing any affection he had for me whither. I was so wrong.

I faintly hear the slam of the main church doors as they close behind him, leaving me alone. I yank on the door handle ineffectually, trying to summon up the strength that threw Michael across a mausoleum and drove Uriel to his knees, but nothing.

Silence.

Every step takes him closer to Uriel. To a fight he already expects to lose. I slap the heel of my hand against the door, barely holding back the urge to sob.

It isn’t going to end like this.

I sit down on the dusty floor, pulling my knees up to my chest as I scan the room, hoping a secret door or an escape hatch might suddenly reveal itself. Instead, it’s still just a room filled with the abandoned church’s leftovers, junk too worthless to bother moving.

Pressing my forehead against my knees, I do something I haven't done since I was a child.

I pray.

“I don’t really know how this goes,” I say, my voice thick with the tears I’ve finally given up holding back. “I’ve never exactly been the praying type, but God or any angels listening that aren’t complete psychos. . . don’t let him die.” My voice sounds so small, my words swallowed up as I sit huddled on the floor. I lift my head, staring at the dirty window and the murky daylight that filters through the dust. “He made mistakes, but I think he paid for them long enough.”

Anger flares in me, and I stand up, taking a step closer to the window. "And what exactly was I paying for? What was my mother paying for?"

“Oh, Gracie.”

I whirl around at the voice, that achingly familiar sound I’ve dreamed of hearing for seven years, but I see nothing.

I shake my head at myself, grabbing the broken candlestick from the desk and turning back to the window and my diatribe. I slam the candlestick against the window, the thick glass splintering under the blow. I don’t harbor any illusions of fitting through the tiny opening, but the destruction brings me the tiniest bit of focus.

“Grace, you’re so strong now. So close to what you need to be.”

I turn quickly enough this time to catch movement in the mirror. I cross the room to stand in front of it within a second, my hands shaking as I brush away a few cobwebs.

It should be a reflection of myself distorted from the cracked glass, but it isn’t. It takes my brain a moment to catch up with what I’m seeing before I can speak.

“Mom?”

She nods, the edges of her body looking hazy like I’m seeing her through a fogged up window.

"We don't have much time, Grace. Neither of you has much time." I press my fingertips against the glass, feeling the fractured edges bite into my skin.

"Mom," I repeat, trying to memorize everything about her – the same messy curls I inherited, the scar across her left eyebrow from falling out of a tree when she was thirteen, the flowered hippie top she'd been wearing the day she died.

She smiles, the sad, wistful smile I remember, frozen in time in the photographs scattered around my house. "Do you know what you did, Grace? You made the Devil feel. You carried the Lightbringer out of darkness." She presses her fingers against mine from the other side of the glass, and I can almost feel her. "And he brought you back too. You just need to remember who you are. Who you came from." My mother stares at me from the other side of the glass and a million miles away, her lips set in a grim line. "This city, this world? It's not theirs anymore. Any parent understands that. One day you have to let your children stand on their own two feet."

“I miss you, Mom,” I whisper. Prophecies and epic battles forgotten, at least for the moment.

"We miss you too, sweetie. But you're needed here." She smiles the same mischievous grin usually reserved for my father. "I like him, by the way." She looks toward the door, and my gaze lands on the walls penning me in here. "You could always open the door, Grace. You just needed to remember how."

When I looked back at the mirror, only my own refection in the dusty glass greets me.

I walk to the door and put my hands on the knob, turning with all my strength.

It doesn’t budge.

“Nothing worth anything ever comes easy,” I mutter.

---

I was twelve or thirteen and sick with the worst case of the flu I'd had in my life, the world burning with the red haze of a fever dream as I drifted in and out of awareness. My mother curled up in bed with me, sponging my forehead with a wet washcloth smelling of peppermint and the soft honey scent of meadowsweet.

"I've never told you the story of our family. Of who the Celestin women are. Of why I kept my name." She tossed the washcloth back into the fragrant water, brushing my sweaty hair away from my forehead.

My eyes slipped shut for a moment before opening again, and my glassy stare saw my mother who always seemed so powerful looking subdued and alone. "Secrets are hard when you can't share them. I know you won't remember hearing this, Grace, but I'll remember telling you." She leaned forward, her lips close to my ear and her arms around me, her presence grounding me. "You're special. You're going to save the world one day, all on your own. I wish I could be there that day to see it."

I coughed, whimpering as the shudders wracked my body, and my Mom squeezed me tighter. "It's going to be hard. It's going to hurt so much you'll want to lock yourself away, but nothing worth anything ever comes easy. You're going to do it, Grace, and wherever I am, I'll be watching."

---

A tear rolls down my cheek, and I wipe it away, wondering where that memory came from and if it’s even real. I'd been wretchedly sick, coming in and out of awareness for a day while my body rode out the worse of the illness, and my mother had sat by my side the entire time, bathing my forehead with one of the many herbal concoctions she had brewed to bring down my fever.

I remember her singing softly, snippets of Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers flowing over me, the constant murmur of her voice comforting me as I rode the waves of the fever.

But I never remembered her words, the halting story staying locked away in the recesses of my mind for a decade. I wonder if Erzulie had handed the story of my future to my mother along with one of her mojo bags or if it was something she had read in the cards she kept hidden in her bedside table.

The hows and the whys don’t matter much anymore. Nothing matters except for that door.

But the women in my family haven’t just been delicate creatures who laid back and let fate take them. They had carved their way with blood and fire and bone. The memories flooding me aren't my own, but they are my legacy.

That fire in 1921? Arelia set it, letting the blaze take her to buy her husband enough time to spirit Genevieve away.

Genevieve drowned because Uriel rammed his sword through the floor of the boat she was escaping in. She dove into the Mississippi, forcing Uriel to follow while her family swam to shore and ran.

Rose wore her heart too open and trusted too easily, but when Erzulie crossed her path, she trusted the right person. Even in the asylum, she never gave up. Even with her dying breath, she wove the protections Erzulie had taught her around Serafine.

Serafine, wild, rambling Serafine who traveled West but still came back when the Crescent City called. She was the first to live long enough to see her granddaughter born. She nearly took Uriel with her that day, binding him with blood magics it took a decade for him to tear through.

And Marianne. Battered and broken with her arterial blood draining away and she still beat back an Archangel with white-hot fire and twisted metal.

The Celestin women? We aren’t cursed.

We’re warriors.

The line stretches back through the centuries, through unnumbered cities and continents, names lost but never forgotten. With the power of every one of them boiling in me, I press my hand against the door.

And I push.