The Vampire & Her Witch

It wasn’t possible.

In a world where nothing had gone right for nine long months, where every hope had been snuffed out like a candle pinched between cruel fingers, it simply wasn’t possible that Ashlynn Blackwell was standing in the Great Hall of Lothian Manor.

Yet here she was, standing not twelve paces from the dais, wearing a cavalier hat and a sailor’s coat with a sword at her hip as if she’d stepped out of one of their father’s stories about the great captains of old.

She looked... different than before. Strong and fearless with her head held high and an emerald gaze that refused to look away from the danger in front of her, even if that danger came from the man who had ’killed’ her just nine months ago.

She looked like she’d become the hero Jocelynn had once thought Owain was.

Jocelynn’s mind rejected it even as her eyes confirmed it, and the war between the two left her standing on the dais with her hands clasped so tightly at her waist that her knuckles had gone bone white beneath the cerulean silk of her sleeves.

She knew Ashlynn was dead. She knew it the way she knew the times of the tides and the taste of salt air at home. Ashlynn was dead because Owain had killed her, and because she had whispered the secret of the mark on her hip into Owain’s ear on the night of their wedding. She’d been the one who set the whole terrible chain of events in motion.

For a moment, she wondered if the woman before her was a ghost or a phantom... A dying remnant of the woman whose selfish, careless words had doomed. Eleanor had appeared to her that way at the end of her life...

But the Ashlynn before her looked as real and solid as ever, even if her standing here should have been impossible.

”Jocey,” Ashlynn said, and her voice was soft, so impossibly soft after everything that had happened. ”Come here. Sir Ollie will keep you safe.”

The sound of her childhood name, spoken in that voice, in that tone, shattered something inside Jocelynn that she hadn’t known was still intact. It was the same voice that had read her stories when the storms kept her awake at night. The same voice that had promised, in a chamber not far from here, that everything would be all right even after she married Owain, because they would always be sisters, no matter how far apart they were.

Whatever walls Jocelynn had built in the months since that promise was broken, whatever steel she had forged in her heart to survive the dungeons, Percivus, Eleanor’s death, and the long, dark days of preparing to die on her wedding night, none of it had been designed to withstand this.

Ashlynn was alive and she was calling for her, and the big sister who had always, always been there was reaching out her hand just the way she had when Jocelynn was small enough to need help climbing the stairs.

”Ash,” Jocelynn said as tears gathered in her eyes and the edges of the Great Hall grew fuzzy in her vision. ”Can, can I really?” Jocelynn asked around the lump in her throat. ”Can I come to you...?”

”Of course you can,” Ashlynn said gently, as if there weren’t hundreds of people watching them, or knights with drawn swords lining the central aisle of the Great Hall. She spoke as if she and Jocelynn were the only ones in the entire world. ”Big sister has come to take care of you, so come,” she said, holding out her hand and beckoning for Jocelynn to join her.

Jocelynn’s first step was unsteady. Her legs trembled beneath the heavy layers of cerulean silk as the tears she’d been fighting since she first whispered Ashlynn’s name finally broke free, spilling down her cheeks in hot, silent streams that caught the candlelight as they fell.

She didn’t deserve this. She knew that in the depths of her bones. She had betrayed her only sister. She had doomed Ashlynn with her jealousy and her foolishness and her desperate, idiotic need to be the one who stood beside the handsome, heroic lord.

She didn’t deserve forgiveness and she didn’t deserve comfort and she certainly didn’t deserve the gentle warmth in Ashlynn’s voice when she said ’come here,’ as if none of it had happened.

But she couldn’t stop herself from going.

She took a second step, then a third, moving down from the dais toward the aisle with the unsteady gait of a woman walking in a dream, as if she were afraid that if she moved too quickly the vision would dissolve and she would wake up back in her cell in the Lothian dungeons, shivering in the dark with Eleanor’s ghost and the weight of everything she’d done pressing down on her chest until she couldn’t breathe.

”Jocelyn, stay away from her,” Owain snapped. His voice was low and rough, but the tone of command in his voice and his expectation of obedience couldn’t be clearer. But Jocelynn didn’t hear his words, or if she heard, she didn’t care as she continued moving toward her sister.

”Lord Owain,” High Priest Aubin said, taking a small step forward. ”Whatever has happened, surely we can grant them a moment of grace...”

”Jocelynn, stay here,” Owain snapped, ignoring the white-haired priest as he finally made a move.

His hand shot out like a striking snake, reaching for Jocelynn’s arm with the possessive desire to hang on to something that belonged to him, as if Ashlynn were stealing one of his greatest treasures and he refused to let go of it. He’d paid a price in blood and death to ensure that Jocelynn was his and his alone, and he would be damned before he gave her up to the ghost of a witch who was supposed to be dead!

But before his fingers could close around the fabric of her sleeve, a wall of blood-soaked emerald and midnight appeared between them.