Chapter 17
SEBASTIAN
Even my slumber is not safe from Celine’s reach. One moment, I’m drifting off to the unconscious bliss of being enclosed in the dark comfort of my coffin and the next I’m opening my eyes in a hazy dreamscape.
As a vampire, I don’t dream. But this isn’t a dream—and if it were, it would be a nightmare.
No, this is me being forced to live through my memories. And Celine always shows me the worst ones. To be fair, there is no shortage of horrible experiences in my long existence to choose from.
I look around the bedchamber and take in the haunting allure of the grand canopy bed draped in rich crimson silk. Ah, yes. This is a particularly cutting memory. It’s the night of Manon’s death.
The worst of the worst.
It’s not the first time I’ve revisited this moment. Hell, I relive it every day in my own head. The thing that makes this worse is that Celine has free reign over altering the details, twisting them like she does.
“Sebastian,” Manon’s voice calls. The real Manon, not the version of her that haunts me in the waking world.
When I turn, Manon is naked, as I knew she would be. She’s lounging with a sheet draped over her torso, her ebony hair falling over her breasts as if to offer her some modesty. Not that I don’t have every inch of her body committed to memory.
“Come lie with me, my love.” She smooths the silk sheet she lounges on.
I glance down at myself and find I am naked too. I sigh as her arms wrap around me, cradling me against her chest. Every muscle in my body relaxes, giving in. Even as I let myself be content, I know it won’t last.
It doesn’t matter—I need Manon.
Even if she is just a memory, at least here I get a few moments of bliss.
“Bastian.”
That moment is cut short. Celine hasn’t let me have a moment of rest in twenty-five years. Why start now? I squeeze my eyes shut, not prepared for what comes next. Only it’s not something I can avoid. The brass handle of a knife appears clutched in my grasp, slick with thick, viscous blood that coats my hand and oozes down my forearm.
“Why, Bastian? We were supposed to spend eternity in each other’s arms.”
“It’s a lie,” I tell myself, shouting over Manon’s pained voice. “She never said those things.”
Gentle fingers, cool to the touch, brush my cheek, and I can’t keep my eyes shut. Kneeling in the center of the mattress, the blood pools around me, dyeing everything red. I lift my gaze and meet Manon’s tearful one. The only thing worse than seeing my sire cry is the look of betrayal. “What have you become?”
It’s not real.Manon never looked at me like that. She didn’t say these things. This isn’t how that night went.
“Stop!” I demand, but I can’t escape Celine’s nightmare.
“Are you sure you can trust your memory?”
The scene around me shifts, and suddenly I’m kneeling in the water-logged grass of Jean Lafitte Park. When I look back down, it’s Celine’s body in my arms, not Manon.
Blood drips from her nose and mouth as she clings onto my arm. Her nails carve crescents into my skin, like she’s determined to drag me to the afterlife with her.
“Everything you love gets destroyed by your own hand.” The voice comes from everywhere at once, as if God himself is speaking from the heavens in Celine’s voice.
I stopped believing a long time ago, but that doesn’t mean it’ll save me from Hell.
I blink again and suddenly it’s Josephine’s wild ebony and pink curls cradled in my arms, her dark eyes empty as she stares up at me, her body devoid of her soul. I toss aside the bloody knife, panic making me frantic as I search for a pulse. Even though somewhere in my mind I know this is a nightmare, it doesn’t register.
There’s no pulse. She’s dead. Gone.
The intense pain of losing a unity bond cleaves through me. It’s a roaring fire that blazes in my lungs and singes my will. The agony rips at the last of my hold on reality.
No. Not again. I can’t do this anymore.
I sit up so quickly I smash my forehead against the solid wood lid of my coffin. “Fucking hell.”
Well, that’s a first.
Celine’s nightmares have never roused me from my daysleep before. Is she getting stronger, or am I getting weaker?
I’ve held onto Manon—the crazy, off-kilter ghost version—because some of her is better than none of her, but it’s not the same.
She’s not the same.
As much as I don’t want to sit down with Sloane, I think it’s time I stop putting off my visit to our neighboring horde of the Marigny territory.
With any luck, enough time has passed that Sloane has forgotten about her promise to disembowel and dismember me.
I need a stiff drink—about a dozen of them. The thought makes my stomach lurch and I bolt from my coffin at top speed.
JOSIE
I fall into a deep, exhausted sleep in the car on the way home from the masquerade ball. I gave the battle everything I had and am wrung out. Two days…I have two days before I have to pull it together and face them all again.
My eyes crack open for a moment while Finn carries me to my suite. I vaguely remember him peeling off the tatters of my dress to lay me into my bed and tuck me in.
Such a gem, my Celt.
And then I’m sucked deep into the oblivion of a body that has nothing left to give. I’m not sure how long I’m lost to exhaustion before images of blood and death anchor themselves in my mind.
It must be the aftereffects of the trial that have my dreams so twisted up.
Foreign images tumble in a bizarre and muddy kaleidoscope in my mind. At first, I’m in an ornate bedchamber. I’ve never seen it before, but it has a haunting allure that my dream self recognizes immediately…and with a roiling sense of dread.
Deep, velvety shadows cling to the walls like a tangible secret and in the center, a grand canopy bed draped in rich, crimson silk. The bedding stands as a stark contrast to the otherwise muted tones, its posts carved from dark, ancient wood that whispers of centuries passed.
The peaked Gothic windows are open, and the air is heavy with the intoxicating blend of night-blooming jasmine and the faint metallic tang of blood. Somewhere in a distant part of the manse, a melancholic melody weaves its way through the corridors to us.
Us?
I see her then. The woman of the house is lounging in the bed, her flowing black hair tinged with a subtle shimmer of red. It cascades down her naked body like a dark waterfall, catching the dim light with every sinuous move. Her skin, pale and luminous as the moon, contrasts starkly with her deep, mesmerizing, icy blue eyes.
“Sebastian.”
I startle at the name, confused.
“Come lie with me, my love.” She smooths the silk sheet she lounges on and gives it a gentle pat.
I move to her without question, even as the dread within me builds. As I climb into the bed, my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall startles me even more.
I am Sebastian—a very naked Sebastian.
Why am I dreaming I’m him?
Am I dreaming? It feels so incredibly real…like a memory more than a dream.
I sigh as her arms wrap around me, cradling me against her chest. Every muscle in my body relaxes, giving in even knowing that it won’t last.
“Bastian.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, not prepared for what comes next, but knowing it can’t be avoided. The brass handle of a knife appears clutched in my grasp, slick with thick, viscous blood that coats my hand and oozes down my forearm.
The woman looks up at me, betrayal piercing me from her gaze. “Why, Bastian? We were supposed to spend eternity in each other’s arms.”
It’s a lie.I close my eyes and hear Sabastian’s voice in my head. She never said those things.
Gentle fingers brush my cheek, and I’m forced to open my eyes. I’m kneeling in the center of the mattress, blood pooling around me, the woman—a woman I love—staring at me with horror in her gaze. “What have you become?”
It’s not real. Manon never looked at me like that. She didn’t say these things. This isn’t how that night went. “Stop!” I demand, but I can’t escape the nightmare.
“Are you sure you can trust your memory?”
I freeze as the woman’s voice chills me to my core. That’s my mother. I may have been young when she was murdered, but I could never forget. And on top of that, I’ve watched so many family movies and videos that I know I’m right.
The scene around me shifts, and suddenly I’m kneeling in the water-logged grass of Jean Lafitte Park. When I look back down, it’s my mother’s body in my arms, not the ebony-haired vampire.
Blood drips from her nose and mouth as she clings onto my arm. Her nails carve crescents into my skin, like she’s determined to drag me to the afterlife with her.
“Everything you love gets destroyed by your own hand.” My mother’s words bombard, filling me with hopelessness and dread.
I blink again and suddenly it’s me cradled in my arms, my dark eyes empty. I toss aside the bloody knife, panic making me frantic as I search for a pulse. Even though somewhere in my mind I know this is a nightmare, it doesn’t register.
There’s no pulse. I’m dead.
No. Not again. I can’t do this anymore.
The intense pain of losing a unity bond again cleaves through me. It rends my heart in two and feels like my soul is being seared by a fiery hell from my body.
I gasp and sit up, clutching my chest. Panting, I hold my arms out to ensure I’m me again. I am. My hands may be trembling, but they are mine.
What kind of dream was that?
I flip the sheets off me and run for the door.
It wasn’t a dream. It was real.
Driven by a force I don’t understand, I fling open my door and run to close the distance. My bare footsteps make no sound on the carpeted floor as I race to the end of the hall and climb the stairs to the penthouse.
Access to Sebastian’s royal suite can only be gained by the biometrically programmed elevator or from the floor of his most trusted enforcers.
Without hesitation, I throw open Sebastian’s door and race into the darkness of a suite that takes up the entire top floor of the hotel.
The leaded blinds are down to block the daylight, but I call a ball of flame to my palm to find my way to his bedroom.
On instinct more than anything else, I open that door and make my way inside. An old-fashioned oil lantern glows dimly beside his empty coffin and my heart hammers.
Where are you?
Muffled sounds off to my right draw me across the room. I listen at the door and still.
Is he sick?
Another throaty retch rips out of him, and I open the door.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he asks, his voice echoing in the porcelain bowl. “Did you come to stake me in my sleep?”
I rush to the vanity and grab a facecloth. “You can be angry I invaded your space later. Right now, I need to make sure you’re all right.”
I run the velvety cloth under cool water and then ring it out.
“I don’t want you here.”
“And yet, here I am.” I kneel beside him and lift his ebony hair to place the cloth on the back of his neck. Shit. Even for a vampire, his skin is cold and clammy. Deciding cool isn’t what he needs, I run the water warm and try again.
“You need to leave.”
“When you finish throwing up, you can make me.” I gather the dark lengths of his hair and place the damp cloth across his nape.
I don’t miss the quiet groan he lets off or the way his muscles relax. It’s the same sensation I felt when we sank into the embrace of the vampire woman in the memory.
But how do I bring that up?
Maybe I should get Finn or Rune? A shiver wracks Sebastian, and he rests his head on his arm. “This is your fault.”
Of course he’d say that.
“I had things locked down until you showed up and stirred up the fucking unity bond bullshit again. Now look at me.”
“You know I wanted none of this.”
He grunts and I accept the invitation to truly look at him. Yes, he’s ruggedly beautiful in a French aristocrat kind of way, and he’s powerfully lethal, but more than those things—he’s broken.
Somehow, I know the searing pain I felt in that dream when he thought I was dead wasn’t something he made up in a nightmare.
That’s how it felt to have his Unity Witch torn from him. He’s barely surviving it and now here I am—the daughter of the woman he blames for that pain—and he’s facing the idea of history repeating.
Is that what brought him to this state?
I press a gentle hand on his bare back and release healing warmth through his system. “You and I are going to work past the hatred we’ve both been holding for the past twenty-five years. I know you’re not the monster I was taught you were. It wasn’t fair what happened to you, but I didn’t do it. I won’t pretend to understand the hell my mother and grandmother put you through, but that wasn’t me. Let me help.”
In the blink of an eye, he’s off the floor and standing with his back against the wall. “I don’t need your help.” His gaze sweeps over me as I stand and he curses. “And why the fuck don’t you have any clothes on?”
“I’m not naked.” I have my bra and panties on. “Yes, now that we’re standing here, I wish I’d grabbed a robe or something before racing up here, but honestly, when I woke from your nightmare, the only thing I could think of was?—”
“—When you what?”
I swallow and meet his fury. “I’m not sure if it’s our bond or my growing powers, but for some reason, I was dragged into your dream just now. I saw the vampire woman in the red sheets, my mother, and then me.”
That last image, the one of me dead on the watery grass of the park, makes me want to take a turn kneeling in front of the toilet, but I force the bile back down my throat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snaps. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I leave the bathroom, click on the lights in his bedroom and grab the button-down dress shirt from the floor. Shrugging it on, I do up enough buttons that I don’t feel so vulnerable.
Next, I go over to the bar cart by the wall and pour us each a couple of inches of cognac. When I turn back, he’s staring at me from the doorway, looking like a spooked stallion about to bolt.
How have I not seen how desperately lost he is? Rune and Finn have been worried about him and I’ve done nothing but snipe about him not being worth their concern.
If any part of this is because of me, I have to help him. I hold out the snifter and swirl the amber liquid at the bottom. “Sebastian, please.”
He takes the drink and swigs it down before striding to the cart to give himself a top up.
Standing before me in just his boxers, I’m drawn in by the scars marring his body. How the hell did he get diced up that badly? Was it one event or a hundred battles? Was it before he became a vampire or after?
He catches me staring and his head quirks to the side as his lip lifts in a smirk. “Did you want something, or are you just going to ogle my body?”
My irritation at my runaway libido knocks me out of the planes of his abs and back into the moment. “Right. Sorry. I wanted to talk to you more about what that was.”
“What what was?” he asks, lifting his glass to hide his expression.
I take a sip of my drink and work to calm my nerves. He’s going to deny everything and play like it’s nothing. “Sebastian, I know the signature of my family’s magic and I know my mother’s voice. Given what I felt and saw in your memory, I want to know what is going on.”
A flash of anger burns in his gaze as he rushes forward. “The same fucking thing that’s been going on every night for twenty-five fucking years. Your mother cursed me and reaches from the grave to invade my mind and poison my thoughts.”
I blink, his sudden nearness bringing back the lethality in him. This is the Sebastian I’m used to. And, as silly as it may sound, I find him less alarming than the vulnerable version of him I’ve been with for the past ten minutes.
“How is that possible?”
He empties his drink a second time and then sends the glass sailing across the room to shatter against the stone fireplace thirty feet away. “I don’t fucking know how she did it, little witch. If I did, I would’ve broken her hold on me by now, wouldn’t I?”
I suppose that’s true. “And you go through torture like that every night?”
He dips his chin. “Every fucking one.”
No wonder he’s losing his grip. A whorl of nausea churns in my belly. “Why would she do something like that?”
Sebastian’s temper subsides, and he sinks into one of two chairs, gesturing for me to take the other. “I won’t pretend I was a good man to her, Josephine. I wasn’t. There was a war going on and people I cared about were being torn to shreds and the witches performed that damned ritual…When the bond took hold, I looked at our unity bond as a way to tip the scales with more power.”
I swallow. “I give Rune hell for thinking like that, too.”
Sebastian leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Rune’s right to recognize it. But in those first days, with the magic of the ritual taking hold and tempers hot, mistakes were made. Big ones.”
“But it was Egan who killed my parents and Adelaide who ordered it. Nothing you did could’ve been that bad.”
“That doesn’t bring Celine back.” A clouded expression passes over his features. “I’ve often wondered if I had approached her differently…if we could’ve been a team instead of me feeling like she was mine, could we have worked? Was it destined to end in tragedy, or was it my fault?”
The remorse in his dark gaze pierces me to the depths of my soul. He wasn’t the one who killed my mother, but he’s been paying for it both physically and mentally every night and day since.
“It’s time to get past it.” I hear the words come out of my mouth and I can’t believe I said them. But the longer I sit here with him, the surer I am. “Now that I know the truth and the four of us are bound, we can rewrite history. I’ll break whatever curse she placed on you, I swear. It’s not right. If I have to take the first step to fixing this, I will.”
He stares at me for a long moment, and we sit in silence. It’s the first time we’ve been at peace with one another, and it feels strangely surreal.
We might still be semi-stuck in a shared dream state, but something between us has shifted. Tomorrow he’ll likely be all asshole-ish again, but for this moment, we are of one mind.
He scrutinizes me for a long moment before he stands. “Wait here. I have something for you.”
He strides out of his bedroom and into his suite beyond. I’m pretty sure that no matter what he wants to give me, I won’t like it, but I don’t want to trash the truce just yet.
I stand and set my glass back onto the drink cart and when I turn to the door, he’s standing there, holding the Dumont grimoire.
“Are you serious? You’re giving my ancestral spellbook back?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the catch?”
“Your next witch trial is to create a unique and potent potion from scratch. I thought you could use some inspiration from the Dumont witches who came before.”
I move slowly so as not to spook the mercurial vampire and gently ease the book from his possession. Whoa, it’s heavy. The magnitude of his grand gesture sinks in as I brush my fingers over the leather cover.
He wants me to have an edge in the next trial.
“This is the part when you thank me.”
I snort, arching a brow at Sebastian. Yeah, there’s the King of the Quarter we all know and loathe. “Thank you, Sebastian. Although, you were the one who stole it from me in the first place.”
“Yes, and now I’m giving it back.”
I press my palm on the front cover and meet his gaze. “Thank you. I’ll figure out what my mother has done and I’ll make it right. I gave you my word and I won’t forget.”
He nods. “Any and all help on that front would be welcome…but may I make one request?”
I swallow. “You can ask, sure.”
He hears the qualification in my words and almost smiles. “Tell no one. Keep it between us. I would never have shared my suffering with you willingly and I don’t want others to look at me like I’m crazy.”
They already do, but I refrain from pointing that out. “Finn and Rune are worried. If they knew what you’ve been going through?—”
“No one, Josephine! I mean it. We have no trust between us and if you want to build it, you will keep this between us.”
I nod. “All right…but I think you’re wrong to keep them in the dark.”
“Your objection is noted.” Sebastian walks me to the door. “It’s your grimoire now, little witch. Take care of it, and don’t let men like me get their hands on it again.”