Page 92 of A Heart Of Bitter Poison
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Holy shit holy shit holy shit holy shit.
Okay, don’t freak out. Do. Not. Freak. Out.
That was totally badass but also terrifying and oh my GOD don’t freak out.
“You’re freaking out,” Ediye says.
“I know!I know I know I know,” I say, flapping my hands as though magic might pour out of them. “I killed him!”
“You’re a vampire, you’ve killed lots of people. He deserved it too. Definitely a douchebag.”
“But not with mymind, Ediye.”
She shrugs. “Well, I mean, kind of. Singing, mind control, tomato, to-mah-to.”
“Fuuuuuck. Fuck shitting fuck. This is not good.”
“Are you kidding? This is awesome,” she says, laying a hand on my arm. I rip it away.
“No. Don’t touch me. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Ediye laughs as though this is all totally normal. My eyes dart around to the others who all look wary, except for Ashen who just looks worried as fuck. I can feel it from him, humming beneath my skin.
“You hurt Leander because youwantedto,” Ediye says with a reassuring smile as she places her hand back on my arm and squeezes. “I know you don’t want to hurt me. I trust you, Lu.”
I open my mouth to tell her I that I don’t trust myself, but then I hear it. A sound in the distance. It’s so faint that I think I might have imagined it.
I scramble past the others, over to the window. I unlatch it and push the pane open as I look into the snowstorm, peering out toward the mountains and forests beyond the fortified wall of Valentina’s home. The sun is nothing more than a cold orb of muted yellow light looking down on me like an indifferent eye.
The wind batters the pane of glass in my hand. The flakes of snow whip at my face.
And then I hear it.
The howl of wolves in the woods.
I don’t bother shutting the window when I turn to the others and stride across the room.
“We need to get our weapons and find Valentina. She’s in the catacombs beneath the house,” I say, casting a final glance to the fallen angel impaled against the wall as I pass.
“The werewolves are already here.”
CHAPTER35
Ashen and I rush up the stairs to grab our swords with little more than a handful of practical words between us, but the silence is replaced with heavy, worried glances. It only takes a few minutes to grab what we need and reconvene in the foyer with the others, but I wish we could just stop, if only for a moment. I just want to talk. It might be the last chance.
Everyone is ready when we arrive. Davina is the only one that came unarmed, but she pulls a medieval pike with a gleaming, sharpened silver blade down from a display on the wall. She taps the long handle against her palm, testing the weight, and meets my eyes with a determined smile.
“This will do,” she says.
I return her smile with a single nod. “Let’s go.”
I lead the others toward the back of the house, down a corridor, into the library. We stop at a tapestry of a hunt that takes up a huge section of the stone wall, right down to the floor. The main figure astride a white horse is Vlad, leading a group of friends in the chase after a majestic stag. One woman is among them at the bottom right of the scene, looking meek and pious as she keeps company with a hunting dog.
“Hey guys, check it out. Photobomb,” I say, standing next to the woman and pointing from the image of myself in thread to my chest and back again.
“Ha! No way,” Ediye says with a laugh.
