The Vampire & Her Witch

”There’s no debt between us,” Rhys repeated, taking a deep breath to steady himself, inhaling the combination of cool, salty air and the unique scent of the ocean depths that accompanied Esselk’ti. ”Only a misfortune and a misunderstanding,” he said, pausing to see if the witch understood his choice of words.

”Just like what happened to expose Ashlynn’s secret,” Rhys added, hoping the witch would drop the matter of learning who had betrayed Ashlynn. ”A terrible misfortune born of deep misunderstanding.”

For months, Rhys had wrestled with his feelings over Jocelynn’s actions. He had carried the weight of secrets long before Ashlynn was ever born, and he knew very well how dangerous her secret was, but clearly, he’d failed to instill similar caution in his youngest daughter. She thought that, because her mother could keep Ashlynn’s secret despite being so devout, Owain could do the same, even though she expected him to break off their marriage because of it.

It was stupid and foolish and... And Rhys could hardly say he’d never done anything stupid and foolish with potentially deadly consequences in the name of love. After all, he had no business fighting duels with anyone, but for Maela... his heart wouldn’t allow him to retreat, even if it meant risking his life.

He just wished his daughter had spoken to him first, before they’d left for Lothian, instead of taking matters into her own hands.

There was a part of him that was glad Jocelynn had gone away, securing some kind of path forward for their family out of the wreckage of her actions. He was glad that he didn’t have to see her every day to face the reminder of what her careless actions had cost.

But that was the smaller part of his heart. The rest of it ached with the loss of the family that he loved and cherished more than his own life... and the person he cursed for that loss wasn’t his daughter Jocelynn, but the Lothian monster who had nearly taken Ashlynn from them all forever. Jocelynn’s words were careless and selfish, but it had been Owain’s hands that did the deed, and Rhys refused to hate anyone in his own family for what Owain had done.

He just wished that he could extend the same grace he extended to Jocelynn to himself, because if there was anyone in the Blackwell family who truly deserved to suffer for what had happened to Ashlynn, he only needed to look in the mirror to find the person responsible for exposing her to danger in the first place.

”Can you tell me,” Rhys asked, hoping to change the topic when the witch didn’t respond, favorably or negatively, to his calling Jocelynn’s betrayal a misfortune and a misunderstanding. ”Can you tell me how Ash is doing? What has her life been like with these other witches? Was she hurt? Is she well now?”

”And... does she blame us, blame me,” he corrected himself as he forced himself to ask the hardest question he needed an answer to. ”Does she blame me for what happened to her?”

”Hard to tell,” Esselk’ti said, choosing her words carefully. It was hard to speak to Auntie Ashlynn’s heart when they’d never met, and she was afraid that Rhys might misunderstand his daughter because she herself only had a limited understanding. But more than that, she was afraid of what hearing about his daughter’s desire for vengeance would do to him. ”Tale is harder to hear. Certain you wish know?”

”Please, Auntie Esselk Ti,” Rhys said as he lowered the last of the barriers in his heart, preparing to hear the most wounding words of his life. ”I have to know...”

”Because you ask, you call ’Auntie’ for me like I ask, I tell about daughter,” Esselk’ti said as she shifted her posture in a fluid, graceful movement until she was sitting next to Rhys, leaning up against the stone wall beside him, and keeping contact with his body with the entire length of her body.

He was cold, she realized, and though he was too distraught to realize it, his body was beginning to tremble from the strain of the wind, water, and stone all conspiring to steal his body’s warmth.

With a short, sharp barked phrase and a twist of her hand, the blue ball of flame at the center of the lighthouse chamber pulsed brighter, then dimmer, but what it lost in brightness, it made up for in warmth. Like a kettle full of boiling water poured into a cool tub, a wave of gentle warmth enveloped the room, pushing back not only against the chill of the blustery, winter weather but shutting out the winds and bringing calm to the chamber where they sat.

”Auntie Ashlynn,” Esselk’ti started slowly, once she felt Rhys’s body begin to relax into the room’s warmth. ”She suffers great pain, here,” she said, tapping her chest before moving her hand to point at her head. ”Here also. Screams at night with ghost dreams.”

”She also hungers,” Esselk’ti added, watching the look of pain flickering across Rhys’s weathered features. ”If this ’Owain Lothian’ lives, she cannot live. Cannot rest. Cannot pull back claws or put down club. He must die. She must kill. She knows this, fights for this, learns for this. She kills this man. She kills all who hurt her. Make great fight,” she said, frowning as she realized the words she used weren’t quite right.

Esselk’ti had struggled to understand what Auntie Amahle meant when she explained that the Mother of Trees and the Harbinger of Death were raising an ’army’ to fight against the Lothians. In the Eldritch way, a challenge between lords would have been impossible to refuse. Owain Lothian’s status as the next lord should have made it impossible for him to hide from Ashlynn’s challenge, and then she could have her revenge and be done with it.

But humans didn’t fight the way that the Eldritch did. And they had their own word for what would happen when they brought all their soldiers together to fight their enemies.

”Auntie Ashlynn comes to Lothian lands with army,” the witch said as she remembered the word Amahle had used at last. ”She comes to make war with her enemy, and to take from them their throne.”