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Glass cabinets that encased more treasure than I had ever seen in my life entombed the walls. Golden coins and jewels, gleaming weapons of war, beautiful trinkets and slips of fabric. All buzzing with dark curses within.
A puff of air escaped as I shook with familiar rage.
Alistair Vasyliev’s stolen trove was a link to my ancestors and the terrible bloodshed they had suffered, like many witches of the past, yet he hoarded them like a dragon, tinkering with the magick as if he owned them.
I considered my options. Without a talisman powerful enough to overcome Alistair, Silas, and potentially Mariana and Mira, there was no way I was escaping this castle unharmed. But if I could get my hands on the staff and use the curse to command Alistair to free me and never harm another witch again, it would solve my problems.
Knowing Alistair, he would guard the staff viciously, only allowing me time to work on it while in his presence. I needed a talisman stronger than the staff, but I feared this outing was a bust.
My fingers reached into one of the open cabinets and pulled loose a string of soft pink pearls. It felt wrong to break the magick of the Bled witches, but I had to know if I could do it.
Like the night at the café, I let that practiced calm come over me as I sensed the magick within. Crushing the pearls tighter in my grip, I breathed through my nose and thought of my happy memories, though thoughts of my parents’ deaths played in my mind. For years, I tried not to think of them—to banish the last memory I had of their broken bodies and the unthinkable realization that I would never hear my mother’s laugh again or smell my father’s cooking.
I had forced myself to feel numb to my grief.
As the eldest sister, I had to be strong for the girls. Their rock. But with the gruesome reminder of death hanging around me, my walls crumbled down. That wounded, vulnerable part of myself reached out, and with it, I felt my spirit magick alive and pulsing within me like never before.
The pearls gave a warning zap, but my magick was quicker.
In a snap, my power tethered to the necklace and the curse within it revealed itself to me. The spell was innocuous—the pearls possessed the ability to sense another’s emotions—and it was far too easy to see the golden threads of magick sinking into the string. Easier still to unravel it.
My lips cracked into a lopsided grin. I had finally accessed that elusive magick inside me with no outside forces emboldening my magick and managed to break the magick within without the Amulet of Davorina. But as I felt the warmth of pride unspool within my heart, it dropped away just as swiftly.
I couldn’t give Alistair the means to possess the talismans for himself.
As I retraced my steps towards the staircase with a last glance around the vault, I noticed a leather journal sat in a display case, and my intuition sparked within me. There was no curse upon it, but something gave me pause.
Reaching inside, I pulled it free and cracked open the weathered spine. Most of the text was written with blurred ink, the Slovenian scribbles indecipherable. Though my magick still felt weakened from the last few days, I muttered a translation spell.
The markings slowly shifted and instead of an ancient spell book or history of the vampire rule, I was shocked to realize this was Alistair’s personal journal spanning from two hundred years before Alexei’s birth through the early nineteen hundreds.
I flipped through his descriptions of the uneasy relationship between him and his wife with revulsion. Suddenly, every unkind thought I had towards Alexei’s mother withered away. Torn between her true love and the safety of her firstborn, she had allowed herself to break, molding herself into the wife Alistair needed, all to protect Alexei.
Time blurred as I worked my way through the pages, becoming more distraught and disgusted with the Vampire King as I went.
When I reached his recollection of encounters with the witches of Bled, I feared I would lose the empty contents of my stomach. Like Alexei said, his father caught wind of his eldest son’s adventures and tracked him to the town where he spied the unthinkable—the heir to the Vasyliev throne consorting with the enemy.
Alistair learned the witches’ weaknesses and secret power, the spirit magick they used to imbue innocuous objects with powerful spells. He pretended to make nice with the Coven, promising safety from the ignorant mortals and their suspicions for one talisman: a daywalking ring.
Once the ring was in his possession, he no longer needed the Coven. He ordered Alexei to kill them, knowing his son was too innocent for such a task. Alistair brutalized the entire town as a cruel punishment, before capturing Vera, Alexei’s closest friend from the Coven and torturing her for days until her death.
It was gruesome. Horrifying.
It made my heart ache for Alexei, and the Bled witches, even more.
Goddess, the guilt he must feel. A possession living inside him like a living beast until he had no other choice but to expel it in his destructive way. He said he spent most of his life warring and whoring, but until now I couldn’t understand why he took that dark path.
A part of me despised him for not being the arrogant sycophant I initially thought. It would be so much easier to leave him if he was.
Grandmother loved to say that witches were above a predestined mate, but I wanted to claim Alexei as my own, just as Ember had claimed Killian. I didn’t want to wallow in my loneliness or fears any longer. For the first time in a long time, I wanted to be brave and push past the walls I had protectively fortified around my heart.
But then, it hit me.A daywalking ring.
Since the moment I’d stepped into the Vasyliev castle, I had felt the dark magick emanating from the vampire. At first, I had assumed the disturbing presence to be the staff, but now I feared the strangely ornate old ring was to blame. But why wasn’t it corrupted like the other talismans?
Filled with a fluttering sense of dread, I ran up to the false door, desperate to return to the safety of Alexei’s bedroom to think. Shutting the bookcase closed behind me. I let out a relieved breath when a thudding sound skittered down my spine.
Someone was inside the library.
