“I need to tell you,” he whispered, “about the time I killed the witch.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“After my family and I were turned into vampires,” Gabriel said, “we were forced to live at the estate of House Kendrick—the old royal family. It was part of the deal my father made with the vampire king, long before he slaughtered him and usurped the throne: ten years of servitude to earn our immortal freedom.”
Jacinda nodded. Gabriel suspected she’d picked up bits and pieces of their history from her time with Duchanes, perhaps from Chernikov or the other demons Duchanes liked to surround himself with. The rise and fall of Augustus Redthorne had always been a juicy topic among the supernatural elite.
“In a cottage in the woods bordering the estate, there lived an old witch,” Gabriel continued, “just like in the stories my mother had read to me when I was a child.”
“This witch… Was she dark? Light?”
“She was… determined. Clever. Utterly without morals, good or bad, though it took me far too long to see it.” He took another sip of the coffee. “Anyway, she found me wandering the woods one day, then the next, and another still. She was kind to me, and a good listener. Before I knew it, I was visiting her nearly every day, just for the company. Just to escape the cruelties of House Kendrick for a bit.
“She knew I hated being a vampire, and I knew she hated being alone, cast aside by her coven because she wasn’t powerful enough. So one day, after a lengthy exchange of miseries, we struck a bargain: she’d find a way to cure my vampirism and return me to the humanity I so desperately missed, and in exchange, I would grant her the rights to… well, all of it, I suppose.”
“All of what?”
“Me.” Gabriel turned back toward the fire. The blood on the child’s face had dried into two black rivers that sliced down her cheeks. “From that moment forward, the kind witch I’d known and even liked was gone.”
He closed his eyes, the remembered pain arcing through his body as if it’d happened only yesterday.
“Every night I would go to her, as agreed, lying on a stone altar in the woods in mute horror as she carved into my flesh, drained my blood until I was nearly desiccated, injected me with one potion after another, forced me to…” He shifted on the couch, shame pooling in his gut. “I suppose she wasn’t unlike a succubus in some ways, though it wasn’t pleasure or pregnancy she sought. She said it was all for her magic—that she needed to practice, to gain strength and skill in order to perform the ritual to cure me, or it would never work.”
When Gabriel met Jacinda’s gaze, he saw the fury in her eyes, the same that’d burned through him all those nights, all those months the witch had defiled him in the woods.
“Eventually,” he continued, “she admitted that she couldn’t help me. That her magic wasn’t strong enough to counter vampirism, that I needed to accept my fate and embrace immortality. It was at the end of a particularly torturous night of experimentation, and in that moment, lying on her work table beneath the trees, watching her pour a bottle of my blood onto the ground, I’d never felt so helpless and broken. Not when I found my father out in the barn with Nuisance. Not even on the night I was turned into a vampire against my will, forced to watch my mother and youngest siblings die.”
A log shifted on the fire, unleashing a cascade of sparks and pops that made him flinch.
“She looked at me with pity, Jacinda. Like I should’ve known better. And in that instant, I remembered my father’s words about mercy and vowed I would never let her—or anyone else—make me feel helpless again.
“I feigned weakness, waiting for her to draw close to collect her tools. As soon as she was within my grasp, I tore the heart from her chest, sank my fangs into her neck, and drained every last drop of blood from her body. Repayment for the blood she’d stolen from me.” He turned to look at Jacinda once more, a tear slipping down his cheek. “I murdered her, Jacinda, because she betrayed me. Lied to me. Tortured me for months and I just… I couldn’t let it stand.”
“The witch’s death was a far kinder end than she deserved,” Jacinda said, sitting up so she could touch his face, soft and gentle and heartbreaking. That such a beautiful thing could exist in the same realm as this brutal story was a paradox he couldn’t comprehend.
“There’s more.” He turned away again, unable to accept the kindness of her touch. “There was a… child. A little girl. Four, maybe five years of age. The witch’s daughter. I hadn’t known she was there. Hadn’t known she’d evenexisteduntil the moment I tossed her mother’s limp body to the ground, and she darted out from behind the trees.”
Jacinda gasped, and Gabriel simply nodded, continuing his abhorrent confession. “There was no questioning her identity. She was the spitting image of the witch. She glanced down at the body, then at me, the silence deafening. For a moment she just watched me, frozen, a tiny furrow appearing between her eyebrows. I didn’t know what to say to her. What to do. I was equally frozen. Equally lost.
“Finally, she knelt by the body and reached for the woman’s hand. Tried to shake her awake, urgently, desperately, and I…” Every word sliced through his throat like a razor blade, making it harder to breathe. To speak. “It was a long time before she stopped. She looked up at me once more, and she just… The child knew her mother was dead. It was in her eyes—that acceptance. A realization that the woman had fallen by my hand. By my fangs.”
Now, the ghost-child approached him, so close he could’ve touched her if he’d dared. She stood at his feet, her eyes sinking into deep pits inside her skull, as black as the dried blood on her porcelain-pale cheeks.
“I dropped to my knees and took her hands,” he said, more to the child than to Jacinda. “I told her my name. I told her my father’s name. What we were. I told her that when she came of age and came into her power, if she still remembered me, she was welcome to hunt me down and take her revenge in whatever way she saw fit. I promised I wouldn’t fight her. That I’d submit to her willingly.”
“Did she come for you?” Jacinda asked, her voice a ragged whisper, her eyes boring deep as if she, too, could see through his soul, right down to the guilt that still burned as hot as an ember inside. “Did she get her revenge?”
A broken smile touched his lips as the child’s face continued to blacken before his eyes. “She never left me, Jacinda. Perhapsthat’sher revenge.”
He told her about the ghost-girl, about how she’d watched him at different times throughout his life. How she’d come to him again tonight, this time covered in fresh blood, warning about the wolf at the door.
Gabriel didn’t even know if the child had ever come of age in life. In his visions, she was always young. Always dressed as she had been on that day, just as he’d left her, too cowardly to do anything else.
Perhaps she’d died that day too, just like her mother.
He’d abandoned her. A child, alone in the woods. It was a sin more grievous than the murder that’d made her an orphan. A sin more grievous than all the monsters he’d slaughtered, all the souls he’d sent to hell.
“You did what you had to do to survive,” Jacinda said.
