In fact, the ruination was key.
“Who’da thought,” the demon murmured as she opened the casket’s lid.
Reunions with the dead were always sloppy affairs, assuming they were your dead, and as her eyes teared up, she hated the weakness. The resurrection was stinky, too, the scent of the burned leather making her nose wrinkle. Yet she clasped the purse with gentle hands, as if it were pristine, as if it were alive.
Planting her stilettos, she held the Birkin out in front of her. The spell was so simple, so obvious, that she might have been able to guess it herself—or ignored it for being so uncomplicated. But she had seen firsthand the power of the Book’s commands.
And she was choosing this totem wisely.
According to the words meant for her, she was to take a precious object, something that was personal to her, something that had great meaning, and behold it as if she were the lover she sought and the object was her. As she trained all of her adoration and her attention on what she picked, all her wants and desires, her hopes and dreams, her love was the summoning agent, and she would, in the words of the spell, get as she regarded.
The more she projected love, the more love she would receive.
So she decided that, among all her beautiful things, she needed to choose the one that was most like her… and that was the burned shell of the most expensive handbag in the world. Beautiful and ugly by turns, functional and broken at the same time, engendering sorrow for what had been lost and joy for what had once been, it was a contradiction that challenged standards and tested love and loyalty.
Yes, it was hard to admit that she was ugly, but goddamn it, she had value—and parts of her were fucking pristine.
Bottom line, she was done with males flaking off because they saw something in her they didn’t like. Full disclosure was here in her palms, the stand-in for her exactly what she was—and yet she could, she would, love the ruined purse as she had never loved anything else.
And thereby be loved like she deserved.
See? She had made progress. That therapist had once told her she needed to be accurate in her “personal inventory.” Fucking fine. She was being super accurate now—and she could fit a cell phone and a wallet into her fucking effigy to boot.
Oh, and who the hell would have thought that that idiot female who had burned the Birkin had done her a roundabout favor. She’d have kissed that Mae if she could have.
Taking a deep breath, Devina cradled the bag to her breasts. The smell of the singed hide was strong in her nose, but she told herself it was perfume, it was the very best fucking perfume she had ever smelled. Then she unfurled her arms and stared at the bag.
“You are beautiful,” she said, “in every way. You are everything I’ve ever wanted or needed. I will never, ever leave you. Ever…”
As she repeated the words over and over again, a little audible she was adding to the spell, she traced the scales that were still in good condition with her fingertips, feeling the gentle undulations of the texture, noting the subtle changes in coloring. Moving up to the spangle, she turned the touret and pulled free the blackened diamond plates. Even through the soot, the fine gems gleamed, and she cleared some of the residue off with her thumb. It was a struggle to free the flap, one side of the twin handles especially compromised. But then the inside was exposed.
“Yes…”
The inside was positively immaculate. Fresh as the day it had left the workstation of its craftsman. Resplendent.
Just like her. Sure, there were some superficial issues, but under the bullshit, she was perfection.
Sheer fucking perfection.
Devina remembered everything about buying the Birkin, how she’d felt as it had come out of its herringboned bag in the private room at the store. How her whole body had tingled with orgasmic joy, how the rush at seeing it and knowing it was hers had made her head spin, how her heart had pounded and she’d let out a giddy sound. She was careful to recall how the S.A., who she’d worked with for a couple of years, had stood back and watched in total approval.
Devina had taken herself out to dinner at Astrance that night because she’d wanted others to see what she had—
It was as she pictured herself walking into the tiny, then three-star Michelin restaurant that it happened.
The bag became a window she could look through, the precise line of its form containing a bottom-out that revealed…
An unearthly landscape. Which was not gruesome or particularly unearthly. She just knew within her being that what she was shown was not upon the earth: White marble floors and white walls with candles on stanchions throwing yellow light that did not move in any drafts.