Blood of the White Witch (30 page)

She looked at him hard for a moment as if
gauging how serious he really was before a look of fear flashed
through her face.

“What do you want to know?” she asked,
swallowing hard.

“Where is the box?” Vance asked bluntly,
jumping straight to the point.

Another moment of fear shot through her face
before she shuttered it again behind her demon red eyes.

“What box?” she answered. She nervously
flashed a look over in my direction before flitting back to
him.

“Now, now, Darcy,” Vance said, stepping up
within an inch of the glass. “Let’s not start playing games. We
were getting along so well.”

“I really don’t know what you’re referring
to,” she replied, trying to give him a nonchalant look.

“Is that so?” Vance said, looking at her
with a hard stare. “That’s funny, considering my father is the one
who had the box while he was importing witches and warlocks from
all over the world to perform a demon kiss on so he could steal
their powers. He was doing that specifically to give him more
powers to be enhanced by the Awakening.”

When he said that word, her eyes widened in
surprise.

“That’s right, Darcy. I know all about it. I
know that he had the box and you brought it here to give to Douglas
and Fiona, using it to get into their good graces. I know that they
intend to use it in the circle of stones next week during the
eclipse. I also know they’re desperately looking for me at this
very moment so they’ll have the vessel they need to complete the
ritual. So what I need from you is the location of the box so I can
keep this abomination from happening.” He looked straight into her
glowing eyes.

“Why do you think I’d tell you anything?”
she asked. “You’ve made it perfectly clear that you intend to ruin
my life. If you get that box away from Douglas and Fiona, I’d have
nowhere to go. They’d kill me for telling.”

“And I’ll kill you if you don’t,” he
threatened her in a soft voice that belied his meaning.

“You’ll kill me if I do,” she stated
flatly.

“Well, I can’t just let you live to stir up
more trouble now, can I?” he asked. “I let you go once before, and
now look at all of us. Here we are stuck in this dungeon trying to
fix all the problems that you’ve put into motion. What would you
have me do?”

“Let me leave,” she pleaded with him. “I’ll
go get the box and bring it to you. You can do whatever you need to
with it. I promise I’ll leave and you’ll never see me again.”

“There’s only one problem with that
scenario,” Vance complained with a shake of his head.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t trust you. I know that as soon as I
let you go you’ll run straight to my grandparents and let them know
where we are,” he stated.

She shook her head violently.

“I wouldn’t! I promise!” she pleaded with
him.

Vance laughed at her again.

“It’s never going to happen, Darcy, so don’t
bother trying. Just tell me where the box is,” he said. “Your fate
is going to be the same either way you go, so what do you care?
They’ll kill you or I will. Even if I let you go, they would never
believe you didn’t tell us anything. Face it, you’re dead.” He
shrugged his shoulders in defeat and stepped away from the glass,
turning to leave.

“Wait!” she called out in desperation.
“Don’t leave yet.”

Vance halted but didn’t turn around.

“I’ll make a bargain with you,” she spat out
after waiting for him to acknowledge her.

He turned and walked back to the glass, and
I could feel a self assurance that rolled through him when he
realized his interrogation tactics might be working with her.

“Lay out your deal then,” he said
matter-of-factly, acting as though he were truly interested in any
proposition she might offer.

“I’ll tell you where the box is if you let
me stay here, with you,” she answered, looking straight into his
eyes.

Vance gave her an incredulous stare.

“What the heck would I do with you?” he
asked completely amazed by her suggestion.

“I could be … your mistress,” she offered,
and she slid a quick glance over toward me.

“Excuse me?” Vance answered in shock, his
eyes widening dramatically, and I could see she had thrown him
completely off his game with the suggestion. “You’re joking,
right?”

“No. I’m very good at what I do. You’re a
young virile man who could easily handle two women,” she said with
a shrug as though this were no big deal.

I was off the cot and at the glass in one
stride.

“You stay away from him!” I said, lifting my
finger up to the barrier, anger flushing through me at her
ludicrous proposition.

Vance reached out and pulled my hand back
down.

“I’ve got this, Portia,” he said, and he
turned back to the glass with a completely calm demeanor. “Darcy,
there’s nothing you could possibly do, or say, that would ever
induce me to even consider such an arrangement, with you or anyone
else. Why would I trade in absolute perfection for a whore like
you?” His eyebrow quirked up in question, and his face went
completely dead of any emotion.

Darcy was instantly out of her crouch,
screaming, and she hurtled herself at the glass once more, only to
be shocked and sent flying once again.

“Come on, Portia. We’re done here,” Vance
said, and he grabbed me by the elbow, turning me around so we could
leave.

“Wait!” Darcy called to him again, but we
kept walking. “Wait! Please! I don’t know where it is!”

He stopped this time, letting go of my arm
and turned to stride back to the glass.

“What?” he asked harshly.

The tears rolled down her face in earnest
now.

“I don’t know where the box is. That was
part of the deal when I brought it to them. They got to keep it and
I could stay as long as I didn’t ask about it, tell anyone about
it, or try to find where they’d put it. They said they’d kill me if
I did,” she sobbed.

Vance considered these things for a moment,
and I could see how hard he was clenching his hands. He ground his
teeth together before he spoke to her again.

“Well, you’ve just sealed your fate with
them then, haven’t you?” he said accusingly.

“What do you mean?” she asked, wiping a tear
away with the back of her hand.

“You just told us about it. That’s a breach
of contract with Douglas and Fiona. You just signed your own death
warrant, I believe. I guess I can send you back to them now.”

He grabbed my hand and led me out of the
magical illusion. She screamed at the top of her lungs behind us,
begging us to not send her back.

Her cries echoed through the tunnels while
we made our way through the twisting labyrinth to the stone steps
that lifted us up out of the bowels of the earth and to the
magically secured door.

Vance unlocked it and strode down the hall
to the sitting room where we found the rest of the family.

“What’s going on?” Dad asked hopping to his
feet when we entered the room, noticing our concerned expressions
immediately.

“Darcy is awake,” Vance informed him.

“Already? I expected her to be out for
hours,” he said looking very surprised. “Let’s go talk to her.”

“I already have,” Vance replied, reaching
out to grab my dad by the arm when he started to walk past him.
“It’s no use, Sean. She doesn’t know where the box is. This is a
dead end.”

Dad looked down to where Vance was still
holding him by the arm. Vance released him then, letting his arm
fall back to his side.

“How can you be sure?” Grandma asked. “It
would be in her demon nature to lie.”

“They had a very long conversation,” I spoke
up then. “Darcy tried all of her tricks before she confessed the
truth. She knows that Douglas and Fiona will kill her if she goes
back. Vance said he was going to send her to them. She’s down there
freaking out now.”

“This is not good,” my dad said. “If she
can’t tell us where the box is, we can’t stop the ritual.”

“Actually we can,” I replied. “If they don’t
have Vance, the Awakening will do them no good. They have to have
his blood in order for it to work. No one else has any white witch
blood that they can assimilate.”

“You may be on to something, Portia,” my dad
said as he nodded his head, shaking his finger toward me in
agreement. “We need to get Vance as far away from here as
possible.”

Vance shook his head.

“No. We still need to get the box and
destroy it. Otherwise, they can just wait for the next time they
can perform the ritual and we go through all this all over again.
Portia and I would always be running, looking over our shoulders. I
won’t live like that,” he said.

My dad looked frustrated.

“But it gives us more time to find the box,”
he replied.

“They know that we know! We have the book.
Do you think that box will ever come out of hiding into the open?
No. It’ll only be out at the ritual. It’s the only possible chance
we have of getting it,” Vance said in frustration.

“That may be,” my dad replied. “But you will
not be the one doing the getting of it! You’re to stay as far away
from that ritual as you can possibly be, do you understand me? I
hate to pull rank on you, Vance, but I’m still the leader of this
coven, and you’ll do as I say.”

I could feel the anger boiling inside Vance
at these remarks.

“Fine,” was all he said in a deadly calm
voice, and everyone else in the room silently watched the strained
interaction.

He didn’t let go of my hand, and he led me
out of the room behind him, heading back toward our bedroom
upstairs.

I didn’t say anything while he towed me
along, trying to give him some time to let his anger cool.

He pulled me into the room and closed the
door softly behind me.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly to him.

He looked at me, his gaze traveling up and
down the length of me, then he pulled me hard up against his
body.

“Don’t talk,” he said while he threaded his
fingers into my hair and proceeded to give me a smoldering kiss
that matched his smoldering demeanor.

I just stood there, letting him release his
pent-up energy into the kiss. It was rough and bruising against my
tender lips, hard and demanding. He pushed up against me until I
was taking steps backward under the pressure, not stopping until he
finally had me up against a wall.

He ravaged my lips with an almost
uncontrolled desperation. His fingers tightened in my hair,
brusquely tilting my head backward to give him better access while
he continued to punish me with his mouth. My necked arched under
the pressure, and his mouth moved down my skin where he placed
several nips in a none-too-delicate fashion.

I gasped at the assault, feeling both desire
and worry over his handling of me. He had never been this way with
me before. I began to tremble underneath him, both from excitement
and nerves, and I lifted my hands to run over his muscled arms as
they held me.

I wasn’t afraid of him. I knew he would
never hurt me intentionally. I was just worried over how frustrated
he had become with everything.

He finally released me, stepping away from
me for several steps.

“Sorry,” he apologized with a hurt look on
his face. “I don’t want to use you in this way. You mean everything
to me, and I’m letting my emotions excuse my rough handling of you.
Please forgive me, Portia.”

I walked back up to him and wrapped my arms
around him.

“It’s okay, really,” I said, reaching up to
kiss him on the lips, and he let his arms slide back around me. “I
want to do this, Vance. Will you let me do this for you?”

He stared at me for a moment with several
emotions warring on his face before he swallowed thickly and nodded
his head.

This time I grabbed his face in my hands and
delivered a scorching kiss back to him.

I heard a low sound emanate from his throat,
and suddenly I found myself pressed back up against the wall once
more.

Vance had spent the next several days pacing
the floor in the sitting room while he watched the monitor of the
Cummingses’ driveway, waiting for any sign of life from the
inside.

The tracker we had placed on their vehicle
had shown that it had returned to the house without Darcy. It
appeared that it hadn’t moved since.

Dad and Grandma had spent a lot of time down
in the dungeons trying to see if they could get any information out
of Darcy.

She refused to speak to anyone but Vance,
and he refused to give her the time of day. Grandma had even begged
him to please go try to talk to her again, but to no avail. He
would not have anything more to do with her.

Relations between Vance and my dad had been
particularly strained ever since Dad had ordered him to stand down.
They both seemed to avoid each other on purpose now.

Vance and I had been eating meals in our
room, rather than joining the rest of the family.

I understood why he was isolating himself.
He was trying not to blow up at anybody. I was afraid it was only
going to be a matter of time, though. His emotions were boiling
just under the surface.

It hadn’t helped matters when Dad had
entered the dungeon this morning to find that Darcy had committed
suicide sometime during the night.

He blamed Vance completely for it, saying if
he had just gone down there and reassured her, this would have
never happened.

Vance had turned and very calmly told him
that the world was now a better place without Darcy in it, as far
as he was concerned, before he left the room.

This had made my dad very angry, and he had
shouted down the hall after him, something about Vance being an
ungrateful hothead.

Grandma had finally pulled Dad over into a
corner to try and talk him down. I had gone after Vance, and
everyone else had been walking on eggshells around the two of them
ever since.