Marked By Masks and Secrets (Everlasting Possession #1)

65

EVIE

D ad wasn’t drinking today, which meant things were serious. The entire coven was dressed for Lillian’s honor, preparing for a weekend of rituals and festivities. Some of Lillian’s favorites were gathered in our home, because Mama was now the High Priestess.

Mama said Lillian would reveal to me who my divine match was under the light of the dark moon tomorrow evening. She’d whisper the name of my future husband, who I would spend a blissful forever with, our union blessed by the Dark Mother.

Secretly, I hoped Lillian waited another year. I was supposed to look at vampires and feel their beauty, their holiness. But in truth, all I really felt was fear.

And this other, secret feeling. A spark of fire I held close to my heart, one that had been stoked and nurtured by the whispers that lived down hallways and gathered in dark corners.

“So pretty and pale, like a porcelain doll,” a voice whispered in my ear. “Your blood smells unique. Delicious. Perfect.”

I jumped out of my skin, and the vampire woman at my back laughed. “Don’t be frightened, lamb of Helia.”

“And Selena,” a different vampire added, a tall man with a gentle face, mischievous smile, and spiky brown hair.

“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “What a fascinating gift she is. I would’ve thought being half-witch would ruin the beautiful notes of innocence and purity.”

“Not with her,” the man purred, patting my head.

Don’t move . I wanted to run. I wanted to go out back where the grass was tall and hide until all the vampires had gone home.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother, her hawk-eyes sharpened.

I smiled up at the man. At least if he was paying attention to me, he was leaving Idris alone. I didn’t like him talking to Idris.

I hated the way he laughed when Idris cried.

The sun went down so late during the summer. All the children had been put to bed except for me. The coven gathered in my home, celebrating and dancing and making scary faces when the spirit of Lillian overcame them.

Idris had been crying all night. But I wasn’t allowed to comfort him, or even see him. I had this nagging, sinking feeling in my stomach that wouldn’t go away. Like something bad was going to happen—or had happened—but I didn’t know what it was.

The coven’s faces grew scarier the more they danced, the more the vampires whispered in their ears.

“Should she be here?” one of the elder witches asked, looking at me with a cocked head.

The vampire who loved to tease Idris, Vernon, nodded. “She’s old enough. She’ll be made a wife soon.”

I heard a distant wail, and I stared up at the ceiling.

“Are you looking forward to meeting your husband, Evie?” Vernon asked me.

I nodded. My skin felt hot and scratchy, fear lodged in my throat. My gaze snapped back down to my arm, which now seared with heat as if I’d been burned.

“Apologies, my lord. Between the two of us, this one’s always been terribly bizarre,” the elder witch muttered. “But she’s pretty enough to make up for it.”

“Not all there?” Vernon sneered, poking my forehead.

I recoiled from his burning touch before I could stop myself. “I’m the top student in our lessons, actually.”

The woman glared with her beady eyes. “Watch your tongue, missy. Your mother always warned us about your poor manners.”

Shame rooted in my stomach. “I’m sorry.”

Vernon chuckled softly. “He’ll like that she’s fiery.”

I swallowed. I excused myself, escaping to the back of the house where I fought to catch my breath. In the corner of my eye, I saw smoke, and I heard Idris wail again.

“What happened?” I asked the darkness.

The smoke whispered back. Go to the kitchen. Don’t let them hear you approach.

I crept slowly through the small foyer by the back doors. There was a hallway that led to the kitchen, and I kept my footsteps light as I moved through.

My parents were standing close together, at the outskirts of the gathering as they plated food. They didn’t hear or see me approach behind them. I stood there, as my mother opened her mouth.

“It’s a disaster. He’s no longer pure.”

I stopped breathing.

“Vernon?” Dad asked, shaking his head with a sigh.

“Who else?” Mama muttered. “We need to keep Evelynn away from him, tactfully. We can’t do anything now except protect her blood’s purity.”

As if it was an inconvenience.

Not a tragedy. Not an act of violence. Not the violation of a child.

Their son. My brother.

Hands so small, always reaching.

No longer pure. No longer pure. No longer pure.

The lights in our home went out all at once.

“The hells?” Dad whispered.

No one was coming to save us. No valiant knights from the stories I’d been stealing from village bookstores. No faeries from another world.

No one knew it, but I’d been learning about the world outside of our coven. In stolen bits and pieces, at every opportunity. I stole pamphlets. I spoke to people at the markets when Mama wasn’t watching. I asked them what was normal, what was good. I asked them what the gods meant to them. I learned about firebirds and faraway lands.

I read stories about people defeating monsters.

Monsters who hurt children were the most scorned of all.

I backed away. I slunk through the house, covered by the friendly smoke. No one stopped me when I reached the stairs. They were all confused about the lights, their attention on the opposite side of the house where my mother laughed and said Lillian had blessed our home with darkness.

Except one vampire, cloaked in bright crimson, his eyes locked on me.

Vernon. He smirked, letting go of a human woman he’d pulled close. He wiped his blood-stained lips.

And that small spark of fire became something else. A feeling I’d never truly been allowed to feel, one I was punished for with cruel words and pain until I was meek and small again.

Rage.

I climbed the steps. I didn’t stop until I’d reached Idris’s room. The door had been locked, so the smoke reached under and picked the lock from within.

I entered the room. Idris was curled up in the fetal position on the floor, sobbing so hard his eyes and fair skin were cherry red.

He stopped rocking, stopped pulling at his hair. He looked up at me.

I rushed to him. He sat up, and I wrapped him in a hug.

“You’re bleeding nighttime, Evie,” he said through sobs.

I pulled back, and my eyes immediately went to his arm. In the same place where my own arm had burned, I saw the unmistakable mark of fangs and teeth.

I helped Idris to his feet. My voice shook with every word I spoke.

“Hide under the bed and don’t come out until I come back for you,” I whispered.

His wide, frightened brown eyes stared up at me with a buried strength.

He believed in me. I was his guardian angel, the only source of light in a world of darkness.

But it was the darkness that I stepped into when I turned my back on him and descended the stairs.

The dim lights were on again. Vernon’s fangs were buried in the human woman.

“Oh fuck, I think she’s dead,” he said with a laugh.

“She was a whore, anyway,” one of our male witch elders said.

A man in the back of the room noticed me, and a shout broke from his lips. All eyes went to me.

“Evelynn Lockwood,” my mother bellowed, aghast when she caught sight of me and my bleeding, blooming darkness.

“Shadows,” someone whispered in a shocked horror.

“Parents are supposed to protect their children,” I said, my voice too small.

I was always too small—too puny and weak, just how they wanted me. Tiny enough to be trampled over and fed to fanged monsters.

I looked at my human father, and he didn’t look back. He stared at the floor instead.

Someone chanted, and a ball of crackling, paralytic magick flew at my head.

With a huff I deflected it, sending the beam crashing through a window and shattering the glass.

It had been my mother’s magick, of course.

Vernon let the human woman fall to the floor. He regarded me with humor, like I was a party trick.

“You hurt my brother!” I screamed.

“ Evelynn Lockwood you shut your fucking mouth! ” my mother yelled back.

Vernon dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief. “He wanted it, little girl. Lillian has blessed our union.”

The last image I saw was Vernon smiling. My dad studying the floor. And my mother looking at me like she wished I was dead so that I never disappointed her or spoke or breathed ever again.

I screamed, and I let my friends feast. Smoke shot from my palms like extra limbs, tearing my coven apart at the seams. Two elders choked on black goo, falling in a puddle of rot on the floor. A shadow sharpened into a weapon, slicing through three more witches. They ate up the walls in black flames, destroying my mother’s precious ugly wallpaper.

I walked closer to the fray. I deflected hexes. I continued to scream, half inside my body and half somewhere else, unable to fully comprehend what I was doing.

Only that it felt fucking good.

Like all this rage had been gathering, the longer I’d suppressed it, and now it was releasing in a flood until my muscles were relaxed and I could finally breathe again.

I watched as shadows consumed Vernon from within, reducing him to a hollow husk.

Witches tried to escape, but I destroyed them too, barricading everyone inside the home as I ensured not a single person survived.

Not even my parents, frozen and rooted to the floor by dark phantom limbs.

“You are not our family,” I said.

It was hard to see anything anymore through the haze of thick smoke.

The smell of char and death assailed my nostrils, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop until everyone who’d allowed a vampire to assault my brother was wiped from the earth.

My mother’s eyes were gray like mine. But they were empty. Soulless. Dad’s eyes were brown like Idris’s, empty in a different way—a cowardly way.

“Idris and I are family. You are nothing ,” I whispered.

A sob escaped my lips as I let the shadows crawl up their bodies as my parents writhed and yelled. My mother cursed my existence.

“You’re a poison! You’re a plague on this world!”

Those were Mama’s last words before her body crumpled on itself and a shadow pierced through her heart.

The words horrified me, yet I still couldn’t stop, my mouth open and my feet lifting off the floor. My arms spread wide. Heat curved up and down my spine like a hissing snake. Power was a violent storm, one I could no longer see through.

I was untethered, unwound, disconnected from my body and soul.

That was until, I heard a voice.

“Evie!”

My feet slammed back down to the earth. My eyes rolled back into place. My vision returned. The scorched house was utterly still, the only sound and movement coming from falling bits of ceiling and furniture.

Through the darkness, I saw Idris.

He gripped the railing. He was terrified, but he didn’t run from me.

He ran toward me, narrowly avoiding being crushed by debris.

I sucked in breath after breath. I caught him in my arms. Idris coughed and wheezed. I lifted him into my arms, and I ran.

I prayed to every god listening that he hadn’t seen anything through the haze of smoke and darkness.

When he told me the next day that he couldn’t remember what happened, a weight had lifted from my shoulders.

I decided that I would choose to forget that night too.

We would go to Etherdale, the city of mortals. We would find someone there who would help us—someone who might see two children dressed in black, a seven-year-old boy with fang marks on his small arm, and take pity.

Idris and I would start over, and we would never look back.

And under no circumstances would I use that wrathful violence ever again. I wasn’t a plague. I wasn’t a poison.

I’m good. I’m good. I’m good, I repeated, over and over, until it felt truer than my mother’s last words. I would say them in the mirror, when I put on the pretty pink dresses I’d always secretly wanted to wear. I would say them when I was picking flowers or helping Mena in the kitchen.

Please, just see that I’m good!

I’d accidentally said my compulsive mantra aloud one time, and Mena had stopped peeling potatoes to crouch down in front of me. She’d pulled my hands into hers.

“You’re better than good,” Mena said, her red lips in a gentle smile as her amber eyes sparkled. “You’re my favorite girl in the world.”

Idris bounced into the room, carrying a toy knight. “Mine too.”