Chapter Twenty #3
“That’s not true,” he protested. “You knew how to break my curse, and you didn’t!”
He lunged at her but was forced to his knees by another spell. Zachariah sped beside him alongside Irene, but both of them were quickly paralyzed with just a flick of Gertrude’s fingers, unable to move, rooted to the spot.
A band of tension rippled through the room.
She could sense the weight of their power.
They were all channeling each other. It ran in a looped current through each of them, but the strongest waves of magic came from Gertrude.
Charlotte had never felt anything like it.
Her eyes dropped to the dead servants, their throats slit, and swallowed thickly.
They were using those murders to fuel their magic. The thought made her nauseous.
“The Lysanmore witches needed to be punished,” Gertrude spat as he tried to stand, a sharp edge piercing into her voice.
“Keeping you as a vampire was only meant to be temporary so I could siphon what power of theirs was left. Once they were almost extinguished, I would have sacrificed the last to make you mortal again, but you turned on me and destroyed everything I was building. You killed your own family—your aunts, my sisters.”
Nathaniel tore through the spell before the others, standing with hunched shoulders and a rabid expression. “They were compliant in what you were doing.”
“I was protecting us!” she boomed, making the Avery witches flinch. “I was gaining power to stop those who were hunting us, who sought to harm us. Sometimes, sacrifices must be made. Your immortality was one of them, a perfect anchor to bind my spell to keep their souls bound to that graveyard.”
“I know what you did and I may have ruined your plans, but you broke me,” he said in a strained tone, and Charlotte’s heart broke. “You were my mother. You were supposed to put me above everything else.”
“You say this, yet you are the one who snapped my neck,” she said her voice rising an octave, her tone still contained.
“You were animating corpses and killing children to do it.”
Gertrude inhaled sharply. “I was saving hundreds more by doing that. Do you know how many children of witches have been slaughtered because of an association to witchcraft?”
“You are sick.”
“So are you,” a young woman’s voice called out from behind Gertrude. “You speak of our elders' sins when you killed my cousins without mercy. My aunt too,” she pointed at the body on the floor.
Charlotte gazed at the girl who could not have been over nineteen years old, with auburn hair that cascaded down her back, adorned with purple wildflowers. Her features echoed the ghost Charlotte had witnessed in the manor. The spirit they siphoned looked just like her, save for the auburn hair.
In fact, the spirit bore an uncanny resemblance to each of the Avery women.
Her heart palpitated when she glimpsed the family ring on each of their long fingers. Each was engraved with the letter A. It was the same one the ghost wore, which meant the spirit she and Katherine had siphoned was an Avery witch.
Beatrice grabbed the girl's hand when she lifted it, stopping what Charlotte presumed was a spell in progress. “Not now, Josephine. He will get what is coming to him in time.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened as she remembered a snippet from her great-grandmother's journals. If they siphoned the energy from an Avery ghost, then their bloodline would have been able to sense that in the magic. Meaning, even if she hadn’t broken that spell, they would have picked up on the power she and Katherine had infused into the sigil engraved on the door, anyway.
Nathaniel’s voice came back into focus, pulling Charlotte’s attention onto him. “What did you expect?” he asked the Avery girl. “One of your cousins was sent to spy on me and the other tried to paralyze me with a spell.”
“We did what we had to do,” Beatrice chimed in, her voice coarse with pain. “My daughters did not deserve that. You won’t even tell us where their bodies are.”
“So you can consecrate their remains and gain even more power? I don’t think so.”
Beatrice raised her hands as Zachariah almost broke through Gertrude’s spell, paralyzing them, but was pushed back.
“Enough of this,” Gertrude stated. Flickers of disgust ran over her face when she glared at her son. “We are taking the witch.”
“To Hell you are,” he said, planting himself in front of the entrance to the ballroom, the music inside growing louder.
“Then you will know true pain again, son,” Gertrude spat. Intelligible whispers left her lips as a spell landed over Nathaniel, wrenching a scream from him as magic contorted his body with invisible threads, angling his bones until they snapped.
“Stop!” Charlotte yelled, stepping out from her hiding place.
“No!” Nathaniel screamed, grunting through moans, only gasping when she lifted her hands and the spell dissipated, dropping him to his knees.
Gertrude walked to Charlotte with an arrogance only invincibility afforded. “There you are. I’d recognize that Lysanmore frown anywhere,” she told Charlotte. “How lonely you must feel, being the last in your line.”
A pained groan sounded from Nathaniel.
“What have you done to him?”
Gertrude smirked. “He is incapacitated for now. I shall return him good as new once we are done here.”
Charlotte held her breath, her gaze flitting to Nathaniel’s bloodshot stare.
Silent grunts stretched his lips, one set of his fangs sliding from his mouth.
Thin fingers curled into fists as he tried to push himself out from under the spell she had cast, but it was too strong.
She could feel the pulse of magic from there—suffocating, heavy and enveloping.
How on Earth could she incapacitate four vampires, nature's strongest creatures?
“How is that possible?” she asked. Even with sacrificial magic, that was too much.
“Why are you surprised, dear?” Gertrude asked.
With another slow, purposeful step forward, she said, “We are nature’s warriors.
The manifestation of our desires moves in our bones.
It is embedded in our souls. There is no person nor creature alive that is stronger than us.
Look at them. See how quickly these predators bow to us when we embrace our power. Now, you will come with us.”
The scent of rosewater wafted around her when she took another step closer.
With a loud growl, Nathaniel broke free of her spell again, while the rest struggled, and raced to Charlotte, stretching out his arm over Charlotte’s chest. “Don’t touch her!”
“Step aside,” Gertrude warned.
“No! You could have eased my pain once and now you plan to take away the only one who can save me.”
Save me.
Charlotte’s stomach twisted.
Gertrude scanned her eyes over Charlotte, forcing a chill into her core. “You truly believe this woman is going to help you?”
His brows creased and he shot her a wary glance, something potent breaking in his darkening stare. “We have an agreement.”
“My son the fool,” she said, and looked at Charlotte. “It appears you have not mentioned what the cost is to break his curse.”
Nathaniel glanced at her. “Charlotte?”
Oh God. The way he said her name sent a blade of pain through her chest.
She averted her gaze, swallowing hard when a lump formed in her throat.
The truth was about to come out and she couldn’t look at him when it did, in fear of him revealing the truth that hurt the most—that the cost didn’t matter and he would sacrifice her life if it meant becoming mortal.
As much as she wanted to believe he’d softened toward her, she knew what he was and what he could do.
Gertrude continued when Charlotte did not speak.
“She must sacrifice herself.”
Charlotte’s stomach hollowed, heart thrumming in her ears. Slowly, she opened her eyes and saw Nathaniel's gaze fixed upon her.
“Is this true?”
She chewed on her bottom lip before nodding gently.
His face crumpled, a long, heavy sigh whooshing past his lips.
Looking away, to anywhere but him, her gaze landed on Gertrude.
A flicker of movement drew Charlotte’s attention to her arm. A cockroach crawled onto her shoulder, its antennas flicking when it looked at her. Either she truly was losing her mind, or she had seen that exact insect before.
Her hip pulsed with pain, throbbing deep into her muscles, eliciting a short groan.
There had been a cockroach in her room the night she heard knocking on her door at Lovett Manor, again on her first night here, when she’d arrived back from the graveyard by her garden gates, and when Duke had tried to catch it.
The insect ran into her gray hair, settling there after twisting its legs into the strands.
She lifted her index finger to its exoskeletal back and smoothed it.
It was Gertrude’s familiar.
The realization stunned her to spot.
Oh God.
“You hexed me,” Charlotte said, lips parting in disbelief.
“You did not know?” Gertrude asked, gray eyebrows rising, deepening the wrinkles on her wide forehead. “I assumed you would have figured it out by now, but then, just like your mother and sister, you shy away from our craft.”
“How do you know that about my family?”
“After Amelia Lysnamore killed herself,” she said, glancing at Nathaniel before continuing, “I believed that was the end of your bloodline, but when my spell did not work, I knew there was more of you somewhere.”
“What spell?” Charlotte asked, latching onto the statement.
“To discover if there were more of you.”
Charlotte’s brows knitted together. That didn’t make any sense. She was hiding something.