Chapter 44
I YANK ON THE TIES behind me, nothing budging, leaning for a better view, but all I can see is a mass of brown hair cloaked around Rosemary, and then I hear her shrieking voice.
Soon Cassius Delacroix is flying through the air, bolts of electricity shooting from Rosemary’s hands, sending him to the side of the stage.
He came for us, but not just him. Nicola too, who’s on top of Violetta.
And far in the distance, through the trees, is my fucking cousin that I love more than life, Chantal.
“Get Aven!” I yell, but I don’t know why.
Cassius and Nicola are fighting for their lives, and there’s nothing I can do to help.
My gaze spans to Nicola trying to get hold of Violetta’s neck, and I can hardly believe what I’m seeing.
Two vampires faces in the light of day for the first time in hundreds of years.
My mouth falls open, my eyes racing to ensure Aven is out of harm’s way, even though there’s nothing I can do about it, and it seems he’s safe for now.
Nicola pins down Violetta, and I spy the glint of a dagger in her hand, preparing to swipe along Violetta’s neck, but it couldn’t be that easy, could it?
“Get off me!” Violetta screams, shooting Nicola through the air, and at that moment, Violetta jumps down from the stage, breaking a chair over her knee. She grabs the sharp end and sends it after Nicola.
“Die!” Violetta shouts as Nicola soars into space, a stake for her heart flying right toward her. It hits me then, how these vampires have come to save my life. The vials of potion I found and pressed into Cassius’s hand. For emergency only, and here they are, this is the emergency.
“Nicola, it’s a stake!” I scream, watching Nicola’s face as her back hits a tree, and then the stake drives through her skin, and I scream once again.
No, no, no. My eyes take inventory of Nicola, who is not a gooey mess of blood; instead, the piece of chair has gone through her shoulder, pinning her to the tree. She’s bucking in pain and won’t heal as long as she’s got the chair leg in her shoulder.
“Chantal?” I whisper, who I saw running, but now I can’t find her.
Rosemary turns to the bayou behind us, chanting words I can’t decipher, but suddenly whips back around with a deep inhale of breath and shouts, “Possession!”
She turns back to Cassius who is fast once he stands, this time able to avoid the strings of lightning coming from Rosemary’s hands, but then from behind her, its tail wriggling from the swamp, runs an alligator, eyes red from Rosemary’s possession—its threatening mouth chomping, willing and anxious to do her bidding.
It moves fast, its sharp teeth sinking into Cassius’s leg, yanking him to the ground.
“What the…fuck?” he yells, kicking it with his other leg, but within seconds, he’s being pulled into the swamp, shouting.
Violetta bends over, trying to collect her breath, and screams to Rosemary, “Light Aster’s pyre! NOW!” Nicola must have hit somewhere, because blood pours from a gash on Violetta’s forehead, and I’ve never felt more fucking useless in my entire life.
Rosemary turns to me, her eyes like two flames, and it’s like she’s shot those flames right to the pyre I’m tied to. The embers kindle at the bottom of the wood, but without gasoline to help ignite it, the fire will seep much slower than the aunts would have liked.
“I haven’t had my trial!” I scream, watching the fire catch, and I yell it again, but it’s useless.
Cassius is in the swamp, and Nicola is pegged to a tree.
There’s no sign of Bastian, and I find Chantal on the ground, writhing.
She must have been hit by something, and I missed it.
Mother doesn’t move a muscle next to me.
And Aven sits in his car seat, feet kicking, the beginning of a meltdown.
The fire is catching. The embers have turned to small flames, and I can already feel the press of heat against the top of my feet as it inches closer and closer.
“What now, Grandma?” I cry, tears stinging my eyes, the flame growing to a roar around me, the heat threatening to consume me. I clench my eyes shut because it can’t all be for nothing. I had so much hope, so much faith.
I open my eyes to the sky above me, expecting the gray, overcast sky to be the last time I look upon the clouds, my death closer than ever, the fate of my soon-to-be motherless child unknown.
But there’s a break in the clouds—a glowing, single ray of sunlight pokes through the hazy sky, so I follow its ray until my eyes meet Aventurines, and my lungs freeze at the sight of him.
Bastian, with the sun luminously shining upon his tan face. My sunshine boy, the man who was once a vampire. My heart stills because he’s here, and it’s not all for nothing. And as terrified as I am, I am so full of love for this man who keeps showing up for me, for us.
With predatory eyes, he clenches his hands as he runs toward me, a single ray of sun still shining on his face. The witches haven’t noticed him yet, and he runs swiftly, with a purpose, and I’m terrified for his humanity. How they can kill him at a moment’s notice.
Tied to the pyre, I look upon him with all the hope in my chest, and my grandmother’s words hit me like a hurricane. When the sun can shine on the vampire. And the witch is tied to the pyre…
“Don’t move!” I scream, urging him to stay in the light, but he doesn’t stop, face confused, eyes filled with agony, seeing the danger I’m in. “Stay in the light!” I say, and this time he stops, his mouth opening, his head shaking with confusion.
Everything seems to fall away around me, the trees in my line of vision, the rows of chairs, and then I’m sinking, my head falling back, my eyes slipping closed, my body feeling weightless and disconnected from the pyre I’m tied upon.
A Seer sees visions. It’s not something one can always force, and I’m being pulled somewhere as my heart pounds like a cobra’s sting.
I wonder how this can happen, given my powers have been bound from me.
But this is a gift, a power I didn’t call upon.
The power is calling upon me. So I accept it and go where it takes me.
I open my eyes, and I’m back in my courtyard with Bastian.
I’m just a passenger in my old body, sitting in front of him, but I can feel the lust he enticed from me that night. The memory twists my brain, seeing him before the potion, before he died, before Aven. I’m frozen in the moment until the whiff of tequila and fresh-cut limes fills my nose.
Bastian is drunk, staring at me, and says, “Do you want to marry me and my aventurine eyes?”
I groaned then, but inside—inside I was a field of butterflies, wings taking flight at those words.
“Our children would be ravishing. With your red hair and my aventurine eyes. In fact, that’s what we’ll name our first daughter. Aventurine.”
Aven is not our first daughter, but he is our first child, and my stomach does a spin, and it all fades away again, this vision taking me someplace else until my eyes open and I’m back in Pirate’s Alley.
With Bastian and Cassius, but this time, I’m smaller, I’m looking up to Bastian and the man at his feet.
I’m in my grandmother’s body, just a passenger again, but seeing her little hand, seeing how tall the vampires were compared to her, her bravery, her fortitude, only solidifies that I am of her blood and want to be everything she was. At all stages of her life.
Finally, her hand frames her mouth, inching it up to Bastian’s listening ear, and she whispers, “When the sun can shine on the vampire. And the witch is tied to the pyre. The child of Rue Royale will set you free, with his aventurine eyes of a visionary.”
It’s like I’ve been thrown across the world, the magnitude of the vision quaking through my body.
I open my eyes, still tied to the pyre, as Bastian waits for my cue, the determination in his eyes striking me to the core.
I think of Grandma’s words. How I spent the last year so weak and lost, hiding, scrambling, bowing at the mercy of the coven.
I’ve been bound long enough. I’m taking my power back now.
The rhythm of Grandma’s words, the cadence, tells me it’s to be yelled out loud, so I do. I scream it out to the heavens, so the angels themselves can hear, I shout it with everything that I am.
“When the sun can shine on the vampire, and the witch is tied to the pyre, the child of Rue Royale will set you free, with his aventurine eyes of a visionary!”
My screaming alerts Rosemary and Violetta, and they both turn toward me just as something sparks in the corner of my vision.
A neon green glow emits from Aven’s eyes, brighter than an orb, brighter than a green ball of fire, like he’s possessed. His eyes swirl in the color of his namesake but darken into a deep emerald, the two glowing pools expanding.
Aventurine eyes of a visionary.
My thoughts run into each other, trying to figure out what it all means.
Aven’s eyes have caught the attention of Rosemary and Violetta, and it’s my grandmother’s spell. When the sun can shine on the vampire and the witch is tied to the pyre, the child of Rue Royale will set you free, with his aventurine eyes of a visionary.
Aven is a child of Rue Royale with his aventurine eyes wide open, casting a green glow out into the sky, projecting a neon square, and inside it, footage of a countdown from ten begins to roll as if we are watching a movie on a screen in the sky.
“Mom?” I whisper, my eyes on the sky, my stomach rolling. Wanting her to wake up now more than ever. Her eyes blink slowly, her head pulling up to the bright glow in the sky.
The fire on my pyre suddenly extinguishes, and a rush of relief sends words flying to my mom. “Mother, look up!” And she squints, assessing where she is, and the bright green glow in the sky.
“What is that?” Chantal shouts, sitting up in the grass, finger-pointing above.
Footage begins rolling inside the neon square like it was filmed on a vintage camera.
But an old movie isn’t cast onto this screen in the sky, no, it’s footage of Violetta and Rosemary, inside a spell room, with rows and rows of tinctures and herbs behind them.
They sit at Violetta’s wide workstation, Rosemary’s fingers rifling through a spell book.
“I don’t feel the least bit guilty, Violetta.
She had the affair. The coven won’t want her to die because the rule is archaic, and we both know that.
Do you think they’ll kill a witch for falling in love?
No. So, we’ll have her killed and then wipe out her bloodline.
And we keep all the money in our family.
And Franklin will take the blame.” Rosemary bites her lip, trying to convince her sister that the world is best without me in it.
“She’s vexes me, her and her awful mother. But Cora, Cora was…” Violetta’s eyes look almost solemn, almost unsure, as she nibbles on her thumb.
“Weak. And couldn’t keep Delta in line.” Rosemary clasps her hands before her, like a prosecutor trying to convince a jury. “Look at it this way. It’s the exchange of her life for the life we want.” Rosemary’s hand finds her sister’s. Violetta winks at her, tapping her hand on top of Rosemary’s.
I look at the aunts, frozen on the lawn from the spectacle in the sky, their mouths in perfect circles, their eyes glued to the scene before us.
A conversation about killing me, and my son’s eyes are showing us something more powerful than I could have ever imagined, and my grandmother knew it all along. Why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t she warn me about what was to come?
‘It must unfold just as it should. I cannot meddle or get involved’ were her words to Bastian. And the words she said to me, You are a true witch. Don’t lose our home. Don’t let our name be forgotten with time.
I had to create the potion so I wouldn’t lose our home.
And if I died, our name would have been forgotten with time.
The chess pieces seem to come into full view.
She couldn’t tell me everything because this would not have been the outcome.
But this is what I, what Aven was meant for.
To take control of our own lives, to start something fresh and clean.
“He’s a Visionary,” Mother yelps. My eyes shoot to the aunts, who are no longer looking at the screen in the sky.
Their hands are collecting balls of fire.