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Luke didn’t say anything. Lilith, however, demanded answers of him. “How long!?” she asked. “How long have you been hiding this from me?”
“Trust me, Lilith, I never meant for it to go this far,” he said, but those words meant nothing.
The witch remained silent, her inscrutable expression hinting at the depth of her own involvement in this intricate scheme. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to her than met the eye, and that she had orchestrated this meeting for her own mysterious purposes.
“You were toying with my sister’s emotions?” Lilith demanded to know. At one point, she was shouting, at another, her voice was down to a barely audible whisper, almost as if two sides of her personality were fighting for supremacy, and she didn’t know whether to cry or to breathe fire.
“No, no,” Luke shook his head, but again, that meant nothing. His actions spoke louder than his words ever could. “It’s not like that. I had to.”
“You had to what?” Lilith scoffed angrily. I could see all the hurt and pain in her eyes and it made me want to kill him. At the same time, it made me rage with jealousy, because I could see how much he meant to her. “To sleep with my sister? To tell her you loved her? To do what, Luke!?”
“Enough!” the witch suddenly shouted so loudly that it felt as if thunder roared right between the confines of this very cottage.
Lilith hid behind me, and I stepped in front of her, ready to die for her.
“I’ve had enough of these sappy stories,” the witch said exasperatedly. “None of that matters. The only thing thatmatters is that you are all here. And I can finally do what I intended to do when I started with this whole thing.”
“What do you plan on doing?” I asked, realizing that she and Luke were in this together. One look was enough. No words were necessary.
Obviously, they were in cahoots the whole time, working together. I couldn’t imagine anyone betraying their own family in such a way. There was a special place in hell for people like Luke. I was sure of that.
The witch looked at me with an evil grin. I had no idea how I didn’t notice it before. Everything about her seemed malicious now. How could we have been so blind to everything? We came here for protection, and it turned out that we were lured here like lambs to the slaughter.
I slid my arm behind me, feeling Lilith’s waist. I wanted to reassure her that I would do my best to protect her, to keep her safe and alive, even if that meant dying myself. I was more than prepared to give my life so that she could live.
“I plan on taking sweet Lilith’s head to Constantine, of course,” the witch laughed so wickedly that it made my blood turn cold.
“Over my dead body!” I squeezed angrily through clenched teeth, to which she laughed even more.
“Why, gladly!” she exclaimed loudly. “I’ve been itching for some action. Nothing has been happening lately. It seems that everyone is too afraid to come to me. I guess with good reason!” She continued to laugh, as I tried to come up with a plan to save Lilith.
I knew that we needed to keep her talking for as long as possible. That would buy us some time. Maybe something would pop up, or maybe I would be able to come up with something in the meantime. But she had to talk, to focus on her own story and not on us.
“It’s because of my father, isn’t it?” Lilith suddenly asked her, as if able to read my mind.
Good girl, I thought to myself. She figured it out.
At the mention of the king, the witch’s face didn’t seem so optimistic regarding her victory. She seemed as if there was a cloud over her head about to erupt into a full-blown storm.
“That smug arrogant bastard!” the witch shouted, and I had no idea what she was talking about. “Sending soldiers to slaughter an entire village, just because they wouldn’t succumb to his will! He deserves an even worse fate, which is what I vowed to deal him!”
Slowly, I was starting to put two and two together. Obviously, she had some unresolved business with the king, something stemming from her past. Now, she wanted revenge.
“I could have killed him so easily, numerous times. But that would have been too easy. I wanted him to suffer, like I did. Even worse! I wanted to take both of his girls away from him,” the witch continued. “That is the worst pain for a parent, taking away his children. Nothing could ever compare with that. I was there when the older one died. It was I!”
“You… monster!” Lilith screamed, pushing me aside and wanting to claw the witch’s eyes out, but I stopped her in time, before she could approach her.
We didn’t stand a chance against them like this. No. We needed a plan. A good plan. The witch could use her magic against us, which I was sure she was planning on doing. She was merely toying with us. The real deal was just around the corner.
“No,” the witch shook her head. “It wasn’t me who was the monster. It was your cruel father who didn’t care about the innocent people who would die at the hands of his soldiers. All he cared about was expanding his kingdom. Why did he need to do that anyway?”
I didn’t know any of this, and from the look on Lilith’s face, I could tell she didn’t know anything about this either.
“I have been waiting for this moment for years,” Evangeline continued, relishing the chance to tell her story.
I looked around, trying to see what we could use to defend ourselves, but there was nothing that resembled a weapon. To be honest, I had no idea what kind of a weapon we would need against her magic. Nothing human would work.
“I offered Luke the chance to become a powerful king, but for that to happen, the old king needed to be overthrown first!”
