The Vampire & Her Witch

”He’s lying,” Jocelynn heard herself say, the words slipping past her lips before she could stop them. Her voice was thin, strained, and barely recognizable as her own, but she forced herself to continue. ”My lord, please, you can’t trust him. This is what he does. He twists everything, turns every situation to his advantage. It’s another of his sick games.”

But even as she spoke, she could see Owain considering it. Could see the wheels turning behind his eyes as he weighed the value of the information against the satisfaction of revenge.

”Let’s say, for a moment, that I believe you. You said that you wanted three things from me, and the first is to use the information that you possess. What else is it that you’re after?” Owain asked, his tone carefully neutral, as if he were truly considering the other man’s offer.

”I’m a pragmatic individual, Lord Owain,” Percivus said simply. ”I recognize that my current position is... disadvantageous. But I also recognize an opportunity when I see one. You need leverage to control the barons who will soon gather for your coronation. I need to leave this cell alive. So my second condition is only that, my life and freedom in exchange for the things I’ve learned in my years serving the Inquisition.”

”As to the third item,” the Inquisitor said, smiling as he turned to regard Jocelynn with his piercing hazel eyes. ”I could say that I’d like a position in your service, one that will allow me to continue my work,” he said, briefly letting his voice trail off as his eyes roamed over Jocelynn’s body. She’d recovered so quickly from what she’d suffered at his hands, all because of the miracle that Confessor Eleanor had performed when she sacrificed her own life to shield Jocelynn’s.

All of his work had been undone, or at least, most of it, and it vexed the Inquisitor to see her standing here, draped in black clothes of mourning as if the only thing Percivus had managed to accomplish was the death of her cousin.

Jocelynn flinched under the weight of his gaze, her body shrinking away from him as if she was afraid even now of what he might do to her if he were allowed to walk free from this dungeon. So perhaps his work hadn’t been completely undone...

But undone or not, he knew better than to press for a chance to dig out the secrets the young noblewoman had managed to keep from him, no matter how certain he was that she concealed the truth about an even greater conspiracy than the poisoning of Bors Lothian.

”But even I know that asking to continue my work in Lothian March would be a step too far,” Percivus said with a heavy sigh as he turned back to Owain, sounding like he was making a great concession. ”So I’ll ask simply for passage downriver and the freedom to leave Lothian March, to make my way to the Holy City where I can continue doing the Holy Lord of Light’s work, far away from you and the people around you who might wish to harm me,” he said.

”No,” Jocelynn said, louder now, desperation creeping into her voice. She turned to Owain, her hand clutching at his arm. ”Please, my lord, Owain.... You can’t believe him. He’ll twist everything. He’ll find a way to use this against you, against us.”

”You heard what he did to Eleanor, what he did to me,” Jocelynn pleaded, stepping up close to Owain, placing her hands on his chest, and pressing her body up against him as she poured everything she had into an attempt to convince him. ”He has to be stopped here, now, before he has a chance to whisper into the ears of the Church in the Holy City or the lords of the Royal Court,” she suggested, shuddering as she imagined what he could do if they let him make his way to the heart of the kingdom with what he knew.

There were too many secrets out here, and she’d learned the hard way what would happen if a secret was whispered in the wrong ear. Perhaps this was her punishment for exposing Ashlynn’s secret to Owain. If she hadn’t, if Ashlynn had been able to play it off as simply a mark on her skin rather than something her family knew about and had concealed from him...

If Jocelynn herself hadn’t told Owain that her father knew the mark was real because it healed even when he tried to burn it away, then Ashlynn might still be alive today. Ashlynn had trusted her with that secret because she believed that her sister could never betray her, and Jocelynn had trusted Owain with that secret because she believed that he would turn away from Ashlynn and toward her once he knew the truth.

She’d been right about the last part, but she’d also been so very, very wrong about the kind of man he was, and how he would react once he learned Ashlynn’s secret. And now, as she watched Percivus bargaining for his life with the secrets he knew as his currency, she was convinced that he knew things that would bring pain and ruin not only to her, but to her family in Blackwell and anyone else she still cared about in this cruel world.

”Please, Owain,” she said, looking up at him through lashes that glittered in the torchlight with the captured fragments of her tears. ”You can’t let him get away from you, or he’ll use whatever he knows against you... Against me,” she added. ”Even if they’re lies. He doesn’t care about the truth or justice; he just wants to see the nobility brought low, because... Because he’s a small, petty man who has never gotten over his jealousy of men like you who were born to greatness,” she said.

She hated herself for using her body this way, molding herself up against him as though she was one of the women from the brothels that Percivus had mentioned, selling her body for a chance to make Owain do the right thing, to put an end to Percivus’s madness.

She hated that she couldn’t think of a better way to convince Owain than by seducing him while she pleaded with him... but she knew Owain well, and of every method she could think of to prevent him from taking advantage of Percivus’s offer, this was the only one that she had any confidence in.

”But if you let him get away from you now,” she added. ”Then by summer, his superiors in the Inquisition will come for you. They’ll come for us both...”