Chapter 4 #2
Nothing good, or so it was said. Terrigana’s punishments beyond the grave were the subjects of stories told to keep children in line.
I took another sip of my tea and nodded.
“That’s acceptable. My plans require her identity, and if her soul experiences a fraction of the pain she’s inflicted, all the better. ”
“How swift the young are to condemn.” The witch’s judgment was delivered under her breath.
She probably didn’t expect me to have hearing enhanced to dhampir levels, somewhere between human and vampire.
She said in a louder tone, “Well, all I require from here for this spell and its upkeep is your story. Stay a while; tell me of your many plans. I would love to hear if Nemea Redgrove squealed like a pig when you stuck her.”
Any of my lingering irritation dissolved as the witch made for an attentive audience, her keen eyes gleaming over the rim of her cup.
I recounted my tale between slow sips of tea, and with each revelation, she leaned in, savoring every detail of my revenge like a fine brew.
And at last, she gifted me something else: a name.
“Call me Adelaide,” she said, a satisfied smile curling at the edges of her lips. “Go bring me Ilyana Krudelbach’s corpse. It’s time that we worked some magic.”
A chill breeze smacked me in the face as soon as I left the sanctuary under the willow tree.
I shivered from the sudden change in temperature, a reminder of reality after a surreal couple hours talking over my revenge with an immortal witch and drinking her favorite eyeball tea.
Her plants clung to every inch of my exposed skin, their dampness turned icy.
The coachman hadn’t abandoned me. I retrieved Ilyana’s body from the carriage and went back to Adelaide with it thrown over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
I hadn’t been gone long, yet I returned to find the witch standing before an open grave.
She was marked with viridian lines over her temple, cheeks, and lower lip, which transformed her face into one big occult rune.
She held a chipped earthenware bowl in one hand. In the other, a ritualistic knife made of ivory and carved with more runes.
“Lay her in the grass.” She pointed with the knife’s tip to a patch of rucked-up ground. The greenery was fluffed into an inviting bed.
“I’m going to need her dress, like we discussed.”
“Of course. It’s not like she cares about it anymore. Take the jewelry too.” She eyed me for a moment before adding, “My magic won’t hide your engagement ring. You’ll want to take that off.”
I adjusted it with my thumb. It was the last thing I had of Zane, before he was…
I’m going to save him. Then we’ll get married in the temple, just like we planned.
Slipping it off my ring finger felt like a betrayal.
Like he was truly dead to me, not just temporarily one of them.
It left behind a pale circle of skin. I hadn’t taken it off since the moment he’d slid it on my finger.
The embedded gemstones in the gold band winked as I rested it on my palm, giving it one last, reverent glance.
“Vampires don’t get married, after all,” I said mostly to myself before I slipped it into my breast band.
I began the grim work of removing Ilyana’s last possessions. We traded: her dress and finery for the plain leather armor I was wearing.
Hopefully the witch’s magic would give me slimmer shoulders and a smaller waistline. Ilyana and I were mostly the same size, but she’d had the trim figure of someone who only drank blood to survive. Once I was clothed as the vampiress, I nodded to Adelaide and stepped back.
“Bring the puppet,” she ordered Cris. The upright hare wobbled as it dragged another overstuffed woodland creature over to Ilyana’s side and dropped it in the grass. “Her soul is going into my favorite puppet, the raccoon. Look at its little hands!”
“Great,” I said through my teeth. “Will it be able to talk?”
She didn’t answer as she knelt in the grass by the corpse.
After dipping her fingers in the earthenware bowl, Adelaide’s fingertips came away with a green paste that she used to paint Ilyana’s forehead and the backs of her arms. She outlined the fatal wound through her chest. The paste turned brown as it mixed with the gore already caking the vampiress’s skin.
Adelaide muttered in a foreign tongue as she took up her knife and began to carve markings in the corpse’s flesh.
She bowed her head with the bone hilt pressed against her forehead, beseeching Terrigana’s name three times.
The earth shook in a violent heave, and I cried out in alarm as darkness reached out from the grave.
Dozens of spectral hands outlined in shadow and soil reached up from the black pit.
“She gives her blessing!” Adelaide cried out.
“She accepts the soul of Ilyana Krudelbach!” When she turned her face up at me, it took every ounce of my self-control not to recoil.
Magic illuminated the witch’s skull, glowing ivory through the thin coat of her skin.
“Keep a bone that once belonged to her against your skin, and you will have her identity. But what bone do you want, half-breed child?”
Her grin was all teeth, impossibly wide in the set of her jaw. I looked into the empty black holes where Adelaide’s sparkling green eyes hid. I’d looked death in its sockets since I was a child. I’d felt the brush of the reaper’s cold hand on my shoulder before. This trick would not scare me.
“I will wear her fangs,” I answered.
Adelaide gestured with the bone knife. Ilyana’s fangs detached from her skull, perfect needle points with roots still stained by her blood.
They floated, carried by the hands of an invisible artisan that spun the fangs until one sharp triangle nestled under the other.
A spark of magic fused the teeth together, forming a rectangle with the roots pointing outward.
The witch reached into the ground and came away with a woven strap of braided grass.
She stood and attached it to the roots of Ilyana’s fangs to form the kind of bracelet that wouldn’t look amiss on her wrist. As soon as she took a few steps away from the corpse, the spectral hands swarmed from the grave.
They lifted the body almost delicately and lowered it into the waiting earth.
“Your disguise,” Adelaide said, offering the bracelet to me.
I slipped it on, and goosebumps rolled over my skin as its magic changed me.
My body shifted into another form. For a split second, it was agony over every nerve of my body, but that sensation was gone so swiftly I told myself I was imagining it.
I was taller, slimmer. Full-length fangs brushed my bottom lip as my mouth opened in a gasp. I closed my lips over my sharpened teeth. An uneasy feeling curled in my belly from having such a prominent vampiric feature in my mouth, even temporarily.
The ground closed up, sealing the body in its grave.
At the same time, the raccoon creature twitched and rose to its back paws with an unsteady totter.
It looked down at its little hand-like paws, then craned its one glowing red eye up at me, the other still dim.
Its jaws, permanently set in a gaping grin, parted in a soundless scream of rage.
“That’s right, bloodsucker,” I said to it in Ilyana’s aristocratic voice. “I’m you.”