Chapter 25 Julia
Julia
Alone in the sanctum, I seize the grimoire Elizabeth left behind and drop to my knees, flipping feverishly through the pages. I’m willing to try anything at this point—blood magic, necromancy, nothing is off limits.
I’ve scanned a few pages when an explosion rattles the stairwell, and I gasp, leaping to my feet. Wood splinters and books tumble down the stone steps in a cloud of dust.
“You just couldn’t wait to take another innocent life.” Rebecca stalks into the chamber, her hands glowing with white-hot magic. “Is that all you know how to do? Take and take until there’s nothing left?”
I raise my hands defensively. “She volunteered—”
Rebecca’s hand cuts through the air, and an invisible force slams into my chest, the full weight of a century of grief behind it. I fly backward into the wooden shelves with a thud that rattles my bones. Wood cracks and jars shatter, raining glass across the floor.
Coughing, I push myself up, tasting blood where I’ve bitten my tongue. “She offered herself to break your damned spell,” I grit out.
“Liar,” Rebecca snarls. “Riley would never submit herself to a sanguine witch. She knows what you are.”
I wipe blood from my lips, grinning through the pain. “You underestimated how far she would go to protect the love of her life. When you cursed me, I suppose you didn’t consider how your curse would affect your own descendant.”
In Rebecca’s moment of shock, I lash out with my own power, sending the surrounding glass shards at her like bullets.
She raises her hands and deflects most of them, but hisses as red cuts open in her palms. “Just because someone offers themselves to you doesn’t give you the right to kill them!”
My hair lifts as magic fills the sanctum, trapped and amplified by the stone walls and runes. The air crackles with our combined fury, stinging my skin like biting insects.
“Charlotte knew the risks—”
“Don’t you dare speak her name!” Rebecca’s voice breaks as she summons the sand from the scattered pentagram. “You don’t get to justify what you did to her.”
She hurls the sand at me. It stings my face and burns my eyes, filling my mouth until I cough and splutter.
“I should have killed you,” Rebecca hisses, just a voice now. “I should’ve burned you to ash instead of trapping you in that journal.”
I force my eyes open and send the wooden table at her, the memory of Charlotte throwing me off balance and making my attack clumsy. She swipes it aside, and it shatters against the wall.
Everything is blurry. My skin stings and my eyes are streaming. I can see enough to know that every flaming candle, jagged bone, and glass shard has lifted into the air at her command.
“But you didn’t kill me,” I say, my voice rough from sand and something else I will not acknowledge. I hold up one hand, not to retaliate, but as a plea for her to stop. “You gave me a chance. Let me prove to you that I deserve it.”
There’s a pause. Everything in the room hangs suspended.
“Bullshit,” Rebecca snarls. “You proved what you are the night you killed Charlotte, and now you’re going to do the same thing to Hannah.”
The binding spell cinches around my chest in Hannah’s absence, and suddenly it’s hard to breathe. Rebecca’s right. History is repeating itself, and I am letting it happen.
My vision blurs—from the sand or something else, I cannot say. “You think I don’t know that? You think I didn’t spend years grieving her, waking up in a sweat, seeing her every time I closed my eyes?”
Rebecca stands frozen, hands up, chest heaving. Everything around us trembles in the air, magic sparking between the debris like lightning.
I raise my hands, ready for the attack. God, this is going to hurt. But I deserve every cut and bruise coming my way.
“Stop!” Elizabeth’s voice cuts through the chaos.
Green light explodes between us, forcing us apart with such violence that I slam into the wall. The impact knocks the wind from my lungs. Rebecca hits the opposite wall with equal force, and all her suspended weapons clatter to the floor.
“Enough!” Elizabeth stands on the last stone step, her silver hair wild, magic radiating from her in waves. “Rebecca, return to Riley’s bedside, for fuck’s sake. Julia, a word.”
I labor to my feet, trying to steady my ragged breathing. My magic sparks erratically around me, uncontrolled.
Rebecca glares at me as she climbs the steps, and I return it, wiping blood from my nose.
Once she’s gone, Elizabeth rounds on me, nostrils flaring. “Have you lost your mind?”
“She came after me!”
“After watching you nearly drain another person she cares about!” Elizabeth’s eyes flash dangerously. “Is that your grand plan? Kill everyone Rebecca loves?”
I pace a small circle through the debris, my fingers crackling with unspent magic.
“Nothing is working. We’ve tried everything, and the binding spell is ironclad.
The moon will set soon, and then—” I swipe my hand, and a crystal slams into the wall, where it explodes in a shower of glittering purple fragments.
“Then I’m trapped forever with someone who despises me. ”
“Hannah doesn’t despise you.”
I laugh bitterly. “Rebecca told her about Charlotte. Of course she does.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.”
My throat is so tight it hurts. I grind my teeth, looking down at the shattered glass, wood shards, and herbs scattered around me.
Elizabeth sighs. “Julia, you’re so determined to be the monster that you can’t see what’s right in front of you.”
I clench my fists, and the debris trembles. “I killed Charlotte, I tried to kill Riley, and I would have killed Hannah long ago if not for this damned binding spell. That is my nature—I destroy everything I touch.”
Elizabeth crosses her arms and taps her fingers. “You stopped feeding on Riley tonight.”
“What of it?”
“Do you wish you hadn’t stopped? Do you wish Hannah had let you drain her?”
I pause. How did I want that to end? Surely not with another dead woman, especially with Hannah watching. “No.”
Elizabeth opens her hands. “There you go. Monsters don’t feel grateful when their prey escapes.”
I huff out a humorless laugh.
“You know I’m right,” she says. “You didn’t want to kill Riley, and you didn’t want to kill Charlotte. There are two halves of you, Julia.”
I blink away the burning in my eyes. “Every time I fed from Charlotte, part of me wanted to stop, but…the power was too intoxicating. It was in her final moment, when I killed a woman I cared about, that I realized killing is in my nature. That I have no choice.”
“But tonight you had a choice, and you chose to let Riley live.”
“I stopped out of self-preservation. If I’d killed Riley, Hannah would never…” I wave a hand, unsure how to finish that sentence.
“Never trust you? Never surrender to you?” Elizabeth steps closer, her voice softening. “Or never look at you again the way she does when your back is turned?”
Heat floods my face. “The way she looks at me is just intoxication. Feedings and the binding spell and—”
“Don’t be a fool. You know as well as I do that the binding spell doesn’t create affection, and feedings are no more than physical pleasure. No magic made her throw herself between you and Riley to save you both.”
I scoff. When Hannah broke into the pentagram, she had eyes only for Riley, and I was nothing but the devil who hurt her. “She was saving Riley, not me.”
“She was saving you from becoming the monster you’re so convinced you are.
” Elizabeth sweeps her hand, and the fragments around the room begin to drift into a pile like a gust of wind is pushing them together.
“That girl sees something in you worth saving, Julia. The question is whether you’ll let her. ”
“There is nothing to see. I am what I am.”
“Your nature is not your destiny.”
“Words easily spoken by a green witch. Your magic doesn’t require you to hurt people.
” My hands are shaking. I clench my fists, fighting the urge to sink to the floor and close my eyes.
“You don’t have to live each day knowing that someone has to suffer for you to survive until the next lunar cycle. ”
“No, but I’ve lived long enough to know that what we are and who we choose to be are two different things.”
“And if choosing isn’t enough? If I lose control again?”
“Then at least you’ll have tried to be something more than what you believe yourself to be.”
I stare at my hands, which have taken so many lives. I want to agree with her, but I don’t know if I can. “It doesn’t matter. Hannah will never trust me now. Rebecca made sure of that.”
“Rebecca told her the truth. What Hannah does with it is her choice.”
“Her choice will be to stay as far from me as the binding spell allows.”
Elizabeth sighs, moving toward the door. “Perhaps. Or perhaps she’ll surprise you.”
I shake my head.
“Julia… Hannah has affected you more than anyone has since Charlotte, and you’re determined not to see it. Charlotte loved and trusted you, and—”
“Don’t,” I say, the word barely coming out.
“Do you think she was wrong to love you?”
“Of course I do.”
Elizabeth’s brow furrows. “That’s too bad. Because I think she saw a part of you that even you don’t know exists. And I think Hannah might be willing to see that part of you, too.”
There’s a pause. Somewhere beyond the stone passageway, the grandfather clock ticks on.
“It’s a quarter to six,” Elizabeth says. “If you want to break this spell before your time runs out, you’re going to have to convince a woman who’s currently terrified of you that she can trust you. It’s the only way.”
I stare at her. Does she realize how impossible that sounds?
Knowing Rebecca must be checking the time and smiling makes me flex my fingers, itching to blast something to dust.
Elizabeth turns to leave.
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” I blurt, and there’s no masking the panic in my tone. How can I convince Hannah to trust me when I cannot even trust myself?
She looks back over her shoulder, a crease between her eyebrows as she studies me. “Surrender requires vulnerability. If you want Hannah to surrender her heart, you might need to surrender yours first.”
I scoff. That advice is about the furthest from useful she could get. I never asked for Hannah’s heart.
“And clean this room up,” she says as she climbs the stone steps. “I want everything back in its place.”
I scowl after her.
Elizabeth has always been fair and trusting toward all witches who join our coven.
She tries to find goodness in everyone, even the cruelest among us.
But she does not understand what it’s like to have darkness written into your soul.
To know that every relationship, every connection, every moment of tenderness is a prelude to destruction.
Soon, Hannah will be trapped with me forever—a slow death sentence for a girl whose only crime was burning the wrong book.
Rebecca has created the perfect prison, one where I’m forced to watch another woman I…yes, a woman I care about…waste away, knowing I’m the cause but powerless to stop it.
I try to imagine a future where Hannah and I could coexist. Is it possible? Is there a way she could remain in my life without wasting away?
But all I see is Charlotte’s corpse, and suddenly it’s Hannah’s empty eyes and gray skin in her place. The vision is so vivid I can feel it—Hannah going cold beneath my lips, her pulse weakening until it stops, that terrible moment of realization that comes too late.
My insides lurch. I splay my hand against the wall to steady myself.
I cannot survive watching another woman die because she was foolish enough to trust me.
Maybe that is my real curse. Not the binding spell, but the certainty that I will destroy anyone who gets too close. And maybe Rebecca understood that all along.
I seize the grimoire once more, determined to find a way out. I have to keep trying until our time is up. Not because I believe Elizabeth’s platitudes about choice and destiny, but because watching another woman waste away at my hands is a torment I will not survive twice.