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She nodded. “All things have energy and life, so I took from whatever I could, either to heal myself or travel.”
“What does that mean?” Arsiein asked her. “If you had to run, you wouldn’t have been able to get documents to fly here. How did you leave America and enter so close to our lands undetected?”
She bent over to eat, not answering his question. But we all just stared at her.
“You do realize we can outwait you, correct?” Arsiein replied.
“I answered your question. I took energy from nature to cast spells or heal myself until I got here. Though holding on to Jason is weighing most of everything else down.”
“Yes, I heard you, but you didn’t say when? You felt her magic, but she hasn’t used magic in days. So were you hiding here for days? Or did you arrive only yesterday?” I wouldn’t have thought Arsiein would be the interrogator.
Adelaide licked the syrup from the corner of her lip and shrugged. “I am injured and frantically using magic. I don’t know what date it is or when I arrived here exactly.”
That was a lie. Her heart rate had shifted slightly, and if I heard it, so had Arsiein.
“Strange,” Atarah mused and clapped her hands together before her mate could say anything more. “Oh, well, you are here. Now, what to do about your Jason. Druella, what do you think?”
I looked at her, and I wanted to shrug. I felt nothing more than a bystander in a story that supposedly was about me. Everyone was talking about things and revealing things that were apparently worth war or torturing people over. Meanwhile, I just wanted to get this all over with so I could lay next to Theseus.
This was a mystery I didn’t want to solve, but I knew I had to because I wouldn’t be able to escape it. I felt that itch within me again, the one
that wanted to pick up and run.
“Druella?” Atarah asked, worried. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I said quickly, pushing the curls from my face. “You all decide what you want me to do. I’ll do whatever.”
“Is it the vampire in you that makes you selfish, or is this who you really are?” Adelaide questioned.
I turned back to her, my eyes narrowing as I was now pissed. “I notice you keep talking to me as if I’m below you in some way? Or I owe you something.”
“Jason’s life—”
“I don’t owe you that!” I interrupted as I stood up. “Binding your magic? Attacking your coven? I don’t remember, so I will not feel guilty. We are not friends—”
“But we are,” she cut me off as she put down the food that was in her hands. “I do not remember, either. But we are friends. Sisters by coven, bound in the same circle.”
“Just because your cat tells you that doesn’t mean it’s true! If you don’t remember, and I don’t remember, then none of it counts. Especially now that I am a vampire and no longer a witch.”
She shook her head. “To me, and even to Shadow, you still feel like a witch. That’s why she directed me to come to you. She trusts you. That’s why I’m talking to you like I would to any other witch.”
“Please stop!”
“No. What are you going to do? Kill me? Don’t you have to ask your vampire leader first?”
Atarah giggled, and I glared over at her. She held her hands up. “Sorry, it’s just that I remember fighting like this with my older sisters.”
“Ugh! I am starting to hate witches! You guys do whatever you want with her,” I hollered and moved to leave.
“Our circle hasn’t felt right!” Adelaide called out to me before I exited. I stopped at the door. “Me, Simone Ward, Jericho Dupree, Faye Whitmore, Tate Blackwood, Tala Blackwood, Fiona Stone, Rue Umbra…I know and remember everyone. But I can’t really remember the ninth. Her name is Laurel Dormoen, in my mind, and Axel said she died during the attack that bound our powers. But none of us could really remember her clearly. Conversations we had, yes. But what she looked like? We didn’t know. We have no photos with or of her. It was as if she were a ghost. But we all simply assumed that we had gotten so hurt that, somehow, it had messed with our minds. It was easier to accept and move on. But then I remembered something, a magic trick for erasure spells. Since it is hard to erase the truth from someone’s mind, the trick is to disguise false information with true. If you rearrange the letters, what do you think Laurel Dormoen spells out?”
Druella Omeron.
Just like Monroe had shifted into Omeron. Apparently, I was very good with anagrams.
“It feels similar enough, but it is different. A lie within a truth,” she said behind me. “I wouldn’t have even thought of it if not for Shadow saying your name over and over again. I was lying in the grass crying, covered in blood, trying to hold Jason, scared the coven would find me, and at that moment, it all made sense to me.”
Slowly, I turned back to her. She was out of bed, holding the bedpost, looking at me again with those mortal tears of her. “I was scared and alone. A witch without a coven, a spellbound witch at that. In love with a vampire who was taken from me, and I didn’t know how to get him back. Then this crazy thought came to me. What if…what if another witch fell in love with a vampire and knew the only way she could escape with him was to erase herself from the coven? Cover it up with an attack and become a vampire to be with him. If she did all of that for one man, she would surely understand me and why I need Jason back. Please!”
