Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 115432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
My eyes shifted to the bed where her cat now sat in the lap of my bound self, both watching me.
“Please hurry. I want to get this over with as quickly as possible.”
Before I go crazy.
* * *
“How many witches do you think they had to kill to get all of these?” Adelaide questioned in disgust as she looked over the collection of grimoires, my own not included as it was hiding—again.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, lifting one of the worn leather-bound books and checking over it carefully.
“Monsters,” Adelaide muttered under her breath as she gently touched one.
I glanced up at her and tilted my head to the side. “You’re in love with one of those monsters.”
“Jason is different,” she said quickly.
“I had another memory of you,” I said, lifting another one of the books. “Not just you, I think it was the whole circle.”
“What happened?”
“You all attacked me…wanting to do to me what I guess they did to you. Cleanse me. Punish me for loving a vampire. You said”—I paused, trying to remember.—“‘So, it is either you’re for us, Druella, or you’re for the monsters.’ Now, here you are in the home of one of those monsters, dressed and clothed by them, not being tortured by them.”
“Yeah, only being watched and held prisoner,” she said as she nodded to Arsiein and Atarah, who sat quietly, reading behind me.
“You would rather be tortured?” I asked, knowing she didn’t mean that. “Witches do bad things. Vampires do bad things. I don’t believe one group is worse than the other.”
“You all kill people to live,” she said to me.
“From what I’ve learned, you don’t need to kill anyone for blood. Some people volunteer,” I said to her.
She rolled her eyes. “Really? You think they all ask for permission or pay for their meals? Or they all drink from animals. They are killers. You are a killer—”
“Omeron witches have been killing vampires in America, correct?” I interrupted.
“That is to protect ourselves and our land. Especially the Lesser Bloods. They are the worst, the lowest—”
“Stop,” I snapped at her, and the table shook with my anger. I couldn’t help but be mad as I thought of Lucy, a Lesser Blood merely trying to exist with the person she loved, too. “Because you love Jason, you see him as different, but he is a vampire, he drinks blood, and he’s most likely killed also. He is not different from any other vampire. But you love him anyway, so you find a way to overlook it and see him as someone, a person with a history, a life, wants, and needs. A person like all of us are. Why is that hard for you to accept?”
“Because we weren’t taught that,” she whispered slowly, taking a seat across from me and running her hands through her hair in frustration. “They are monsters. Monsters who attacked most of our families and killed our parents. Cruel, evil, without conscience or heart. And I’ve seen it, watched as they attacked and killed people we cared about…and laughed. I’ve fought them. All my life, vampires were the curse upon the earth. Then I met Jason…and…”
“And you no longer know who the bad guy is?” I said.
“I just want my magic back so I can save him and disappear,” she replied as she lifted a book. “Whoever the bad guy is, I don’t care. I don’t want to think about it.”
She also seemed not to want to think about the fact that, as a mortal, she’d die. Jason would live on without her. If she chose to become a vampire, she’d become what she’d been taught to hate.
I wondered if I were just like her a year ago. Was that why I didn’t want to become a vampire.
“So, where is your grimoire?” she asked, looking around the table.
I shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe disguised as something else in here.”
“Why don’t you just call it?”
“How do I do that?”
She tilted her head to the side as her eyebrow twitched in evident frustration and annoyance before sighing. “You outstretch your hand and call its name.”
I winced, knowing she’d want to scream at me, but I had to ask. “They have names?”
“Ugh.” She groaned and put her head to the table. “This is so frustrating!”
“Sorry—”
“Derowen,” she called, and a dark, wooden book with a leather-bound spine and a Celtic tree knot burned into the front appeared in her hands. It smelled of an old forest, not just trees, but spices, herbs, grass, and I even smelled fresh water coming from within. She opened the book to show me the first luminated page with her name on the front. “Derowen has been in my family for generations. It has all of the magic my family has ever done, where they lived, what they had seen, the spells they cast or broke. It is the history of us.”