by Alina Banks
Jessie reached out a hand, one I was sure would grab Sasha, but instead, she stroked a gentle hand down Sasha’s back. “I did try Damien’s way of feeding, but I…he’s going to need my help if we go through with his plan. Joseph is so strong. With Madeline by his side…I know my body would be able to get used to animal blood, but I think it would take too long for me to be able to regain my strength. I need to do this to be there for him and to fix the damage I did when I was first changed.” She sighed. “My sister wanted to help me, since she hated the thought of me being used by the demon, but I told her not to bother. I told her I wasn’t worth it. The demon had offered me something I wanted in return for my help, and I’d taken that offer. So everything that happened was my own fault. But she wasn’t willing to listen.” She ran her tongue over her lips. “She came after me when we were banished, and I…I’ve never told anyone this before, but I think the time has come for me to tell the story and let some of this weight off my shoulders. It’s been there for so long and changed me so much more than I honestly believed was possible.
“Upon reaching me, she told me they’d created a spell she was certain would work. A spell that would give me back the mortality I’d thrown away without truly understanding how much I wanted it. I told her if she thought it would work, then I was willing to try, because I needed to do something. Turns out, the spell wasn’t quite right. I don’t know exactly what happened.” She blinked away tears. “I think the memories are hitting me so strongly right now because of what happened to Delilah. The only time I’ve ever seen that happen before was when it happened to my sister. The spell rebounded on her, and there was nothing I could do to help her. All I could do was hold her as the last dregs of life left her body. Honestly, knowing what I do now, I don’t think she was strong enough to cast it, even if it had been right, and things would have still gone wrong.
“Thank you for listening to me, Sasha.” Jessie smiled. “Thank you for taking my story to Ana, because she needs to know what might happen if she doesn’t have the strength to do what she’s planning. I like her, and I don’t want anything to happen to her.”
“You want me to what?”
“Give this to your mom and tell her it’s a tonic to help her get stronger.” I bit down on my bottom lip, trying to work out a story I could tell Alex that might make some sense, because it was obvious he wasn’t going to just do as I asked without a reasonable explanation. “She’s not been feeling well. I know you haven’t noticed, but that’s probably because she doesn’t want you to. You need to pretend you did. Give her this. It will help.”
“This has something to do with the Easons, doesn’t it?” His eyes met mine. “They aren’t human. Joseph can’t be, if he was here when the hospital was first built.”
“Alex…”
“I was the one who made the decision to look into it. I was there when Principal Woods was…whatever it was he’d become. I saw something on the other side of that wall. I can’t keep pretending things are normal when the woman I love keeps throwing herself into these situations in order to fix them.” He reached out to take my free hand. “I’ll give the tonic to my mother. Is there anyone else who needs it?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Look, it makes more sense if I go out giving them to people. If one of the Easons notices you, then it might cause you some issues. Maybe I can give them out to random people too, who might not need it, in order to make it seem like everything is normal.”
“Why are you like this?”
He shrugged. “I told you that I can’t keep pretending like everything is normal. This obviously isn’t normal, so I need to do something to help, until I feel ready for the whole story. Nothing about this is easy right now, Ana, because I know you’re going to be in danger again. I know you’re doing something I couldn’t possibly imagine, and I’m not ready to be by your side when it happens because…honestly, I’m scared. I’m terrified of learning the truth. I’m terrified of learning why so many people died and finding out that there’s no way to stop it from happening again in the future.”
Nodding, I squeezed his hand. “I can’t make any promises about what might happen next. All I can do is tell you I’m working on making sure that this will never happen again, Alex, and what’s happening now is a part of that.” My eyes met his. “You doing this really will help, so thank you.”
“Clermont is my home. If you’re doing something to keep the town from falling apart somehow, then I’ll do whatever I can to help. I believe that is what you’re doing. I believe that’s what Miss Cane is doing, and has been doing for a long time.” He kissed my cheek. “Let me know if you need me there for the wake. Even if we aren’t together, I can still be there as a friend.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Damien wrapped an arm around me as we stepped into the lunchroom, and I realized as he did that, that Joseph was watching us closely. “He doesn’t believe we’re together, does he?”
“Mostly he does, but he saw you with Alex this morning, so…” He shrugged. “What was up with that?”
“We were talking about Mom’s funeral.” The last thing I wanted to do was tell Damien the whole truth. “He was just being there for me after what had happened, and he probably does still care far more than he should. I’m glad he made the decision to keep being a part of my life, even if things are very different now, because I honestly don’t know what I would have done without him through everything that’s happened.”
“Then I’ll talk to him later. If I’m going to stay here as a mortal, then I want a chance to be friends with him too.”
“He doesn’t know everything. He’s not ready for it.”
“Yeah, I can understand that. I wasn’t ready for what happened either, and I know I was an idiot to accept what the demon was offering, but I had no way of knowing how complicated things would become.” He squeezed me gently. “I need to make plans for both possibilities - the spell working, and the spell not working. I desperately want the spell to work, but I can’t assume that things are going to work out the way I hope they will. All I can do is hope for the best and plan for the worst.”
Biting down hard on my lip, I stopped myself from saying what I’d need to do if the spell didn’t work, because I didn’t want him to know that I might have to kill him in order to kill the demon. “That makes sense.” I did my best to smile. “Jessie, I think, wants to be mortal too. When we were watching her last night…” I shook my head. “She’s more broken than I think you realize. If I can do something to help you both, I will.”
“Jessie has been through a lot, the same way I have. Madeline and Joseph…I think it was easier for both of them. When I first met Madeline properly, not long after we were first changed, she talked about how she felt like a weight had been taken off her shoulders. I didn’t know exactly what she meant then, but as I got to know her, I came to understand that she felt like she was less of a woman due to not being able to have children. With the two of us in her life, she was able to pretend she had had children, while also not having to try again with her husband at the time, who blamed her every time she lost one of the babies. He told her she was broken. I know she killed him not long after she became a vampire. She made it look like a fight outside of some bar, as he was also a drinker.”
Wandering into the hospital was something I’d done before, but I’d never gone there looking for Madeline. Finding her was easier than I thought it would be. It almost seemed as though she was waiting for me.
My eyes met hers for a moment and she spoke. “Damien told me the two of you are becoming closer, and I know when that happens, he finds it easier to open up. He would have told you what my life was like before the demon, and I knew you would come looking for me, so I listened out for you.” She almost smiled. “You feel sorry for me, don’t you?”
“A little, but you still made the choice to become a vampire.”
“Yes, I did.” She gestured for me to follow her. “I think this m
ight be a conversation we’d be better off having in private. Damien and Jessie know a lot, but they don’t know everything, and with what’s coming, I think you need the whole story. You need to understand what happened. Why it happened.”
Nodding, I went with her through the hospital like I had done before, until the two of us reached her office. Stepping in there was easier the second time, because I knew she wouldn’t make any moves without Joseph giving her the okay. Since I knew that he wanted me in a specific place at a specific time, he wouldn’t have said it was okay. “I know a lot more than I did before.”
“That’s because you’re smarter than Joseph gives you credit for, but then again, he is still a person of his time.” She studied me. “I, unlike the others, have greater skills with being able to read surface thoughts, and you…well, I think Joseph would be a little irritated to find out you have learned the majority of the truth without any help from Damien.” She smiled. “Not that Damien knew. Joseph didn’t even tell me until we’d been together for a century, but by then, he’d come to trust me, even though I’m not certain he should have. All of us became vampires for our own reasons. He was the first of us, actually. He was created around the same time the first witch came into being, who happened to be far stronger than either the demon or Joseph imagined would be possible.”
“How did it come to be?”
“Joseph would have died, mauled by a bear, had it not been for the demon saving his life in return for help and control of the town that would come to be built here. Being the younger brother, he knew he was never going to inherit the family estate. It was unquestionably his older brother who was going to inherit it, so to Joseph, it made sense to work with the demon. He did everything that was asked of him, multiple times, until he realized he couldn’t do all of what the demon wanted by himself. That was when the two of them decided to convert the rest of us and form a family. They were careful not to make too many. Joseph didn’t want us to be able to take control away from him, so he chose from a number of possibilities, all who he believed would be best to work beside. He believed that the three of us would be easy to manipulate, but he was wrong about that.
“Well, honestly, it’s more like as time passed, all three of us realized that this wasn’t what we wanted. We didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives being controlled by someone who viewed us as nothing more than a means to an end. In the beginning, we did our best to act the way he wanted us to, but it never worked out the way he hoped it would, and the more he pushed, the harder it was for us to carry out his demands. I’ve managed to stay close to him because I needed to. I had to hold on to him in order to know what he was planning.” Her eyes met mine. “The other reason he chose me, apart from the fact he believed I was going to be easy enough to manipulate after the relationship I had with my husband, was because of who my sister was. All of us had someone in our lives who had magic, and my sister was a Cane. I didn’t know that until after I became a vampire. That changed everything for me. Canes sometimes make the decision to give a second child away to someone else to raise. That was what happened to me.
“I think both Joseph and the demon thought I’d want to take control of the hospital the same way Joseph does. He told me it belongs to both of us and that the Canes who have been in control of it for so long should be dead. He has always believed that. From the day he walked into Clermont, his goal was to try to kill the first Cane. After a shameful failure, he was shown the error of his ways. That truly affected his view of himself and his view of all the people around him. She, he said, should have known her place. She should have let him take control of the hospital, because no woman should have total control over everything, and that’s when I knew that I didn’t want to work with him. I don’t want to be on his side even if he does manage to take control of the hospital.”
“Both of you want to use us to open a door.”
“We do, but he’s doing it to get what he believes he’s been owed all this time. I just want this to be over. Like Damien and Jessie, I’ve had enough of this life.” She shrugged. “I would happily use one of you to free us, because that’s what I want more than anything, but if you have another option, then I’d be happy to work with it. If I could regain what I lost…” She looked at me, and I could see the pain in her eyes. “I made a mistake. I don’t want to have to deal with that until the end of time.”
Sasha was waiting for me when I walked into the sanctuary. With a flick of her tail, she jumped off the chair and stepped over to me. “You know better than I do how complicated everything has been for the vampires, don’t you?” She gave me a look that seemed like an affirmative. “I guess I simply assumed they were going to be a certain way because of what they were. Joseph definitely is that way, but I think he was like that even before he became a vampire. I think he was jealous of his older brother and thought he deserved something more. The others seem to have learned from the mistakes they made.” I looked at the journals. “The demon created a vampire first and then found he wasn’t going to be able to fight against the witch alone. That led to the demon creating the witches, believing they would work with him, but that wasn’t what happened. They turned on him, not wanting to walk that path, and he was angry with them for what they did, leading him to work more with Joseph. By the time Joseph returned to Clermont, the witches were much stronger than they had been before.”
“Due to this, I went hunting for more information on the Canes from before.” I turned, my eyes meeting Miss Cane’s. “I found the journal of the first Cane, something I didn’t even know existed. I’d always known of the Conway journals, and when you said you found something interesting in your basement, I thought I might have a look to see if I could find something to help us out. You’re right. Joseph was probably created about a year after the demon learned that someone in Clermont had magic. She managed to banish him, somehow, so I think that’s why he was forced to keep his distance. This series of events led to the demon’s decision to create more witches.”
“Which led to the coven he’s been trying to destroy for centuries.”
“Joseph has been helping him for almost the entire time. I think that’s a sign of the kind of being we’re dealing with.”
Nodding, I brushed a hand through my hair. “The other vampires, I think, regret the choices they made before. I know we don’t have long before Joseph tries to open the door, so we need to be ready for that. As far as I can tell, the spell to remove the curse is ready. I’m not feeling any missing pieces. If it does work the way I think it will, then the likelihood is, is that it won’t do anything to Joseph. He doesn’t view what happened to him as a curse, but as a gift. He believes this is the path he’s meant to walk, and that’s going to make things a lot more complicated than they would have been otherwise.”
“Are you ready for what he might do?”
“Yes, and no. I don’t think anyone can truly be ready for something like this, but I should be able to do what needs to be done.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
With Mom buried in the witch’s cemetery, that meant there were only four of us at the actual funeral. That was how Dad wanted it to be. I know the power let him into the cemetery because it knew who he was, and the priest that was chosen to bury Mom was one Miss Cane had introduced to Dad. He was the priest who’d buried the rest of the family, one of the few people who knew about the coven, and I’d learned that he often prayed for us as we were fighting a demon he believed had been sent by the darkness. There was a chance he might even be right about that. Like Dad, the cemetery accepted him because of who he was. Then, as Mom’s coffin was lowered into the ground, I realized we were actually surrounded by the spirits of the witches who’d passed before. Conways, Canes, and others, all gathered together to show their respects for the last coven leader, and her more recent replacement. I felt them touch my shoulder gently, one after the other, and I knew they were giving me strength.
That was what made me cry more than anything. Hav
ing so many of the witches there showing their support, and the last of those witches was Mom. She stayed close to me as Dad stepped over to talk to the priest. “We all know what you’re planning. Dealing with both the vampires and the demon is going to take everything you have. If you need anything, then all you need to do is come here.”
“I don’t know how to do this without you.”
“Yes, you do, because I was never meant to be the leader of the coven. It should always have been you.” She kissed my cheek. “You know what your next steps need to be, and you’ve already been preparing for it. One more week and then whatever happens with the vampires will be over.”
“What if I fail?”
“You won’t.” She sounded so certain of that. “I believe in you, and I know Becca does too. The time will come when you can believe in yourself as well.”
Another of the spirits stepped forward. “With it being just the two of you, things are going to be hard, but they have been worse. I was the only witch here for around six months, at a point when the demon was trying to come through once more, which means that, should things go badly, you’ll be able to do this. I’m nowhere near as strong as you.” I glanced over my shoulder at her. “I can give you some ideas about what steps you can take in order to protect yourself and the people you care about, should you need them. For now, I suggest focusing on doing what needs to be done and then going from there. There’s no reason to think things will go badly.”
“Of course not. I’m just taking on four vampires.”
“Three of them don’t seem to care all that much about doing what the demon wants, if you’re able to give them their freedom.”
“Unless they’ve been lying to me this whole time, to make me think things will be simpler than they are.” I shrugged. “I’m not going to assume anything will be easy. That’s something no logical person should do, especially when they’re dealing with vampires. I believe I can do this. I believe I will be able to return mortality to the three who say they want their freedom, but there’s also a chance this will all fall apart if they’ve been lying to me the whole time.”