The Vampire & Her Witch

Moments as intense as the reunion between the two women from Blackwell County could only last for a very short period of time. Like a candle flung into the hearth, the moment burned so brightly in the eyes of the onlookers, no one felt comfortable watching.

The kneeling soldiers all kept their gaze firmly on the soft, damp earth while Ollie and the other notable people turned their backs, giving the two women a moment of relative privacy while they held each other tightly.

”Sir Ollie,” Hugo Hanrahan whispered, clearly shaken by what he had just seen. ”She’s the real, really the real Lady Ashlynn? Lord Owain’s wife?”

Seven months ago, during the grand wedding between Lady Ashlynn and Lord Owain, Hugo had been an unimportant guest at the grand ceremony. It was his father, Ian Hanrahan and his brother Bastian who sat in the front rows of honored guests while the poor bastard Hugo was lucky to have received a place in the gallery, watching from a distance. He’d never come close to the stunning woman before them, but he remembered how lucky Owain was to marry such a beautiful woman who looked so radiant in her gleaming gown.

Months later, when he met the ’Lady Ashlynn’ in the summer villa, he still thought that she was a beautiful woman and Lord Owain seemed to be very affectionate with her in the few moments where he saw them together. Certainly, her light had dimmed with her advancing pregnancy, but that was normal, wasn’t it? But if the woman in the Summer Villa wasn’t Lady Ashlynn, and if the real Lady Ashlynn wasn’t carrying Lord Owain’s heir, then who was the woman he’d met in the villa?

Hugo felt his mind tearing in two and the world falling away from him as his scholarly intellect started assembling pieces of a puzzle that the rest of him refused to accept. The strangeness of keeping Lady Ashlynn at the Summer Villa well into the fall when she could have just as easily taken her rest in an isolated wing of the Lothian Manor without being threatened by the demons and vampires that prowled these lands in winter. The strangely light guard on the villa that more than tripled in size when Lady Jocelynn visited and then reduced immediately after, even though Lady Ashlynn should be the one the Lothian March most needed to protect...

The closer he examined everything had seen, the less it made sense. To the outside, to the people who didn’t know any better, there was a natural explanation for everything, but after months of traveling at Lord Owain’s side, Hugo and seen too much... he’d just been too afraid of what Owain might do to him to ever allow his mind to put together the pieces. He’d accepted without challenging and followed orders without questioning because if he did anything else... his whole world might collapse, just as it was falling apart now.

”She’s really Lady Ashlynn,” Ollie said, wrinkling his nose and frowning when the other knight mentioned Ashlynn’s marriage to Owain. Following the banquet, the fact that Lady Ashlynn was still considered Owain’s wife was a stain that everyone wanted to see expunged, and Ollie wasn’t the only one who wished he could kill Owain Lothian, for no other reason than that it would free her to follow her heart and marry Lady Nyrielle.

But if anyone was going to kill Lord Owain, it would be Ashlynn herself and as much as he yearned to do it for her, to free her even one day sooner, a larger part of him simply wanted to be there when Lord Owain realized the depths of his mistake before Lady Ashlynn collected her vengeance with her own hands.

”Did she leave Lord Owain?” Sir Rain asked, turning on Ollie with a balled up fist. His face had turned a reddish purple in rage, and he found himself doubting the young man’s earlier words that he wasn’t romantically involved with her ladyship. Glancing at the exceptionally handsome, if slightly effeminate Marcel, he began to wonder just how badly Lady Ashlynn had cuckolded his liege lord. ”If she’s betrayed her vows to him, so help me, I’ll...”

”You’ll do nothing,” Marcel hissed in the portly knight’s ear. No one had seen the handsome young merchant move, but in less than the blink of an eye, he had appeared behind Sir Rain. More than that, he held one knife pressed up against the hollow of Rain’s throat, just beneath his jowls, while the tip of another knife pressed between his ribs near the small of his back.

”Your lord treated you like a disposable tool,” Marcel said, glaring menacingly at Hugo, pinning the scholarly knight in place with the intensity of his gaze while he pressed the point of his knife against Rain’s throat firmly enough to spill a single drop of blood. ”You think he treated Lady Ashlynn any better? She’s fought harder than you can imagine for this, so don’t you dare take this from her with a stupid display of ignorant fealty to a man who sees you as lesser than the mud on his boots!”

Nervously, Sir Rain swallowed his anger as color drained from his face and sweat beaded on his brow. He’d known that Marcel had the connections to hire assassins but until this moment, he’d never really appreciated how dangerous the man himself was. He hadn’t seen or heard the man move, he’d just suddenly appeared, as though he was a shadow dancing on the edge of the firelight.

In a fair fight, he was certain he could best the soft-skinned merchant, but at the moment, his situation was anything but fair. Desperately, Sir Rain’s eyes stared downward, trying to catch a glimpse of the blade of the knife, wondering if it was coated with the same kind of poison they’d hired Marcel to use against Sir Tommin’s family. Or, if the blade at his throat wasn’t poisoned, was the one at his back?

He had no way to know, but he was certain that the instant he tried to resist, one knife or the other would take his life.