The Vampire & Her Witch

”I, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, it’s just...”

Loman’s fumbling apology, combined with his hand on Ashlynn’s shoulder, did nothing to make the situation between them better. Instead, it made it even worse as Ashlynn bristled under Loman’s touch.

”I know,” Ashlynn said as she reached up to pull his hand off her shoulder without turning around to look at him. ”It’s too soon. The wounds are still too fresh. By the time the wounds have healed, if they ever do, it may be too late,” she said with a heavy sigh.

”I’ll help you however I can, Loman,” she promised, standing firmly on her spot in the middle of the sitting room and refusing to turn to face her brother-in-law. ”But I may not be able to wait for you to recover. Now, excuse me while I let Virve know that I’ll need to have her walk you back to your room. You don’t have to join the others for dinner tonight if you’d prefer not to. We can speak again tomorrow, if you’re feeling up to it,” she said as she started toward the door again.

She’d failed utterly with Loman, or at least it felt that way. Maybe she should have encouraged him to come to dinner instead of giving him an excuse not to attend. Lunch had been all but a disaster, but he might do better with a group of his peers around him... or it might be worse when Ashlynn was accompanied by a group of hers. She didn’t know, but pressing forward now seemed like the worst thing she could do and she just wanted to step away from it all for a little while in order to think of a better way to handle her prickly brother-in-law. There had to be something...

”No, Ashlynn, don’t...” Loman started as he grabbed her shoulder again, only this time, Ashlynn did more than just brushing his hand off her shoulder. She spun rapidly before his hand had done more than brush the fabric of her dress, grabbing his wrist and yanking on his arm hard enough that Loman momentarily feared she’d decided to tear the other arm from its socket.

Ashlynn didn’t pull nearly hard enough to do actual damage, but she did send him tumbling to the floor of her sitting room where he landed in an undignified heap atop the room’s soft rug.

”You don’t get to touch me like that, Loman,” Ashlynn said sharply as her body trembled with visible rage. ”You and Owain, sometimes, you’re exactly the same,” she spat. ”He couldn’t be wrong about anything, and when I tried to walk away from him instead of having an argument, he did just what you did. He grabbed me and he wouldn’t let me leave.”

Looking back on those moments, she should have realized the kind of man he was sooner. Every time he did it, he always played things off with a laugh, acting as though the source of their disagreement was too trivial to be bothered by.

He never gave ground, never admitted he was wrong, he just said that it wasn’t worth spoiling the day over and redirected her back toward whatever outing had brought them together again. Their time together was short, he said, so it would be a shame to waste any of it on minor disagreements. It was just that, to Ashlynn, they hadn’t been minor at all or she wouldn’t have walked away.

To have Loman grabbing on to her in the same way now, as if she were a piece of his property... He probably hadn’t meant it that way, in fact, she was sure he hadn’t, but it didn’t matter because the behavior was exactly the same. He thought he was strong enough to hold her back, to make her give him another chance, and while she was willing to be gentle with him once, her restraint evaporated like morning mist on a hot summer day when he tried again.

”There’s only one person in this world who’s allowed to touch me like that, and you’re nothing like her,” Ashlynn said hotly as a dangerous gleam formed in her eyes, while the faintest thread of emerald energy coiled around her feet, like the roots of a tree, anchoring her in place and giving her strength.

”I know you’re hurting, Loman,” she said as she forced herself to calm down enough to hold out a hand to her one-armed brother-in-law. She deliberately drew on the energy of the forest around her to ground herself, and to borrow some of the patience of the ancient hemlocks outside the castle walls. ”I know you’re afraid. And I know that injuries like yours will come with nightmares that last for months or years, if they ever go away.”

Were it not for Nyrielle’s help, guarding her in her sleep and protecting her dreams, Ashlynn would likely have been consumed by her nightmares within a few days of learning that it had been Jocelynn who betrayed her. Knowing both Sybyll and Loman, Ashlynn would have been amazed if the young priest hadn’t woken in a cold sweat at least once, imagining the powerful vampire’s crimson eyes or her towering figure as she tore off his arm and disfigured his face.

The scars of some injuries ran too deeply to shed easily, and in her most vulnerable moments when she let down her walls to rest, she was still haunted by the feeling of shovelful after shovelful of dirt falling on her body, the sound of metal scraping in the sodden earth, or worst of all, the image of Owain Lothian standing over her, face purple with rage as he pummeled her body.

”I know you’re hurting,” she repeated. ”But I don’t want this to turn into another cycle of hurt. You can lash out because it hurts, and I can understand that... But it doesn’t mean I’m going to sit here and take it. I don’t want to hurt you because I’m protecting my own wounds from your brother, so, if we’re just going to keep escalating until one of us loses their temper and someone gets severely injured... We should stop now, before that happens.”