1 Witchy Business (17 page)

“Oh!” she exclaimed in surprise. I could see the fear in her eyes. I could feel it. I could practically taste it. I’d never liked girls, sexually, but right then, it didn’t seem to matter. All I could picture was how easy it would be to lean forward, press my lips to hers, and drain her. Every last drop of emotion pulled out in seconds as our lips touched. Or I could throw desire into her. I could make her want it…me. I could…

I shoved her away from me, hard enough that she stumbled and fell to the floor.

“What did I do?” Kelly said, truly frightened. “I don’t understand.”

Right then, I didn’t care that she didn’t understand. I didn’t care that she was petrified of me. I was too busy heading in the other direction. Heading for the door. What had Niall done to me? What was I, that I could think about killing someone just like that? That I could ignore everything I thought about myself so easily? I had really just almost…

I was out of the house and into the street almost before I knew it. I looked around, trying to work out where to go. Trying to work out what to do. Home? No. I couldn’t risk home. How many people would I meet on the way? People I might hurt. People I might…I couldn’t even bring myself to think about that right then.

I couldn’t turn around and run to Niall either, because he’d already shown that he didn’t understand how much this upset me. He thought this was normal. He talked about living forever as if it was nothing. He talked about being able to cast spells as if it didn’t run against everything I’d been told was possible, or good. He’d ripped away everything I thought, everything I knew, everything I was, and he treated it like it was natural. He expected me to go along with everything he had planned out, just like that.

There was only one place I could go. I knew it as certainly as I knew anything in that moment. Not that it was saying much. I staggered across the street on unsteady legs, my own body not feeling like it was mine right then. Each step seemed to have too much energy or too little, out of balance, out of control.

Despite that, I strode straight up to the door of the house from which the others were watching Niall’s place and I hammered on the door with my closed fist. The spider that had spoken to me before ducked inside the broken window with a small, thin cry of alarm. It was crazy that I was behaving like this, yet I couldn’t think what else to do, except ask for help, for counsel, for protection.

Rebecca opened the door, and I could see the concern on her face from the moment I pushed past her into the building.

“Elle, what’s wrong? What happened to you?”

“Niall,” I said. I was crying. I couldn’t stop myself. If I didn’t tell someone, I felt like I’d burst. No, it felt like some part of me had already burst, and I didn’t know how to stop what was left from crumbing into the gap. “I…slept with him, Rebecca, and he said things, and now…I don’t know what to do.”

“I see. You really slept with him?”

I nodded, dumbly. “That…that part was the only one that seemed to make sense. The rest of it…” I shook my head. On the verge of tears by then, I looked at her, hoping she might have an answer. “Help me, Rebecca. Help me.”

She took hold of my chin, looking into my eyes as if she was searching for something. I heard her sigh heavily. “It looks like it’s already much too late for that.”

I started to open my mouth to ask her what she was talking about, to demand that she just act like my friend for once. I didn’t even have a chance to get the words out because a blast of force hit me at point-blank range. I flew back into the wall so hard it knocked the wind out of me and burst red stars in an arc through my field of vision. The last thing I felt was the dull throb of my head where it had cracked against the plasterboard.

I woke dimly, by stages. The first half-dozen times that I tried to open my eyes, pain flared in my head. As my awareness grew, I could hear Rebecca’s voice in the background, and it sounded like she was talking on the phone.

“Come on, pick up. Honestly,
this
has to be one of the times he decides to go out for food? Voicemail? Oh, for…Evert, it’s me. Get back here, pronto. We have a problem. A big problem. She’s turned. I have her contained, but you need to get back here and do your job. Now.”

Slowly, I managed to force my eyes to open. I squinted as the light hit my eyes and sent stabbing pains into my eyeballs. I was handcuffed to an iron radiator. I rattled against them, but only succeeded in hurting my wrist.

Rebecca had moved me. I was now propped against one of the walls of the room where Evert had put together his surveillance operation. My head was throbbing as if it had heard about the volcano under the city and wanted to emulate it. Oh, and Rebecca was standing in the middle of the room glaring down at me with an expression on her face that sent chills through me.

“You couldn’t just do what you were told, could you, Elle?” she demanded as I managed to focus on her.

“You…you attacked me,” I stammered back.

“Don’t try blaming me for this.” For the first time since I’d met her, she actually seemed flustered, her perfect neatness slightly out of kilter, her gestures a little too quick and stabbing. She moved like a marionette, her strings jerked in the wrong directions by some unseen puppet master.

“Why?” I asked, completely bewildered.

“Why? You might as well ask why this didn’t happen a decade ago. I did everything I could to live up to what your mother wanted. Everything.”

“My mother? How dare you blame her for this?” I didn’t know where my mother fit into it, but if Rebecca was going to bring her up, I was going to keep it going. “You blasted me with magic, Rebecca.”

It just earned me another hard look. “If you’d still been human, that would have killed you,” Rebecca said. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. She
felt
like she was trying to convince herself.

“I’m human!” I insisted.

Rebecca shook her head. She looked like it hurt her to do it, but she still did it. “You’re not…you’re one of them now. A
monster
.”

That hurt.
It hurt almost as much as the rest of it all put together. As much as everything that had changed for me. It hurt far more than my aching head. Rebecca and I hadn’t been friends, exactly—we hadn’t gone out shopping together or spent evenings commiserating about men while drinking wine from a box and eating bad pizza—but she’d been a kind of constant in my life, one figure who didn’t change. She had always been there, whether I needed her or not. And now, I thought I knew exactly why.

“This has been your job all along, hasn’t it?” I demanded. “To play my watchdog. You watched, and I guess, you reported. I thought you were there to give me jobs and support from the coven, but really, you were always there to watch me. Waiting for this. Waiting for the day it went wrong. Weren’t you?
Weren’t you
?”

“I was there to look after you,” Rebecca said. “The way your mother wanted, the way the coven wanted. She…if it hadn’t been for her, do you think you would have lived this long? You’re a vampire. She knew the coven’s policies, and she still tried to keep you safe. All those tutors to keep you from turning into what you are. All that work from me. I gave my life to this. All that effort and you throw it back in our faces.”

I could imagine it almost perfectly. My mother learning what her little girl was and panicking, trying to keep her safe. All of the people she had hired to teach me not to use my powers just delayed my “coming out.” The tutors had taught me how weak enchantresses were, that they could feel a little emotion and do small things with it, just a tiny step above normal humans. All of those people had been holding me back from coming into my own, trying to make me behave normally enough that the coven wouldn’t kill me for being what I truly was. In that moment, I didn’t know whether to love my mother more for protecting me or to hate her.

I swallowed down that cluster of emotions to confront Rebecca with the obvious question.

“What do you do with the ones who aren’t the daughters of major coven witches?” I asked. I needed to hear Rebecca say it. “What do you do with them, Rebecca?”

She shrugged. “What do you think we do?”

“You
kill
them? What about the tolerance directive?”

Rebecca shook her head. “We told you when we warned you away from Niall Sampson. Vampires are different. Goblins, fey and the rest aren’t a threat. Being generous at least lets us know what they’re doing. It gives us loyalty. Not vampires though.
Never
vampires.”

The sheer vehemence of that took me a little by surprise, and I couldn’t help thinking of other enchantresses, elsewhere. Had they even known what they were when the hunters came for them? No wonder we were so rare.

I could feel a hint of regret about that. Just a hint, though. Most of it was anger. I took that anger and I bundled it up with my fear. Neither would do me much good now. I thought about Niall, who was just across the road. So close, and yet so far, all at the same time. He wouldn’t even know that I was here, a captive.

What would he be thinking by now? That I had walked out in my fear and my anger, in some dramatic exit designed to show that I wanted nothing else to do with him? It would be no more than the truth if he thought I was running away from him. I had been. What would he think if I didn’t come back, though? What if something happened to me before I could tell him that he was the most wonderful, amazing man I had ever known?

Oh, Niall, what have I done?
I thought, lowering my shields and trying to get some sense of him. I had no idea just how far apart we could be and still feel each other, only that we had a connection I couldn’t ignore.

“So, what happens now, Rebecca?” I asked her. She wouldn’t look me in the eye as I rattled the handcuffs on the radiator. “What happens?”

“Are you still so naïve you have to ask that, Elle?” Rebecca demanded. “How many options have you given me?”

Which didn’t leave me with a lot of options either. I didn’t have many weapons left to me, but I wasn’t helpless. I’d been in bad situations before. Not quite this dire, but if all it came down to was whether I could persuade Rebecca to let me go or not.

“You don’t have to do this, Rebecca,” I insisted. “I haven’t hurt anybody.”

I could have left it at that, but with my life at stake, I had to make certain. I reached out with my power, brushing against her shields, trying to find a scrap of the emotions I wanted to boost, to—

“Stop it!”

This time, she didn’t hit me with magic. She just hit me. Right across the face. My face stung from her slap, but what stung more was the simple fact that she had done it. For so long, I had thought she was my friend.

Rebecca still looked furious, and I guessed that I’d just blown any chance I had of persuading her. “Do you think I can’t feel what you’re trying to do? I’ve tried so hard, so hard, to be a good friend. To keep them from killing you. I even spoke up after Annette died. I said I’d keep watching you. But you…you’re just a manipulative little bitch. A freak. A
monster
.”