The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1675: A Seed Stirs (Part One)

The fire in Jocelynn’s chambers had burned down to a low amber breathing in the hearth, and the oppressive stillness that had blanketed Lothian City when the sun set had given way to a cold drizzle that tapped hypnotically against the shutters. It was the sort of cold, rainy night that made people burrow deeper into the blankets, grateful for the warmth offered by the soft furs lying atop the bed that kept the cold at bay.

Ashlynn lay on her side beneath the heavy furs with her sister’s back tucked against her chest, and for the first time in more nights than she could remember, she let herself simply be still. Jocelynn had fallen asleep mid-sentence while reminiscing about the orchard at Blackwell Manor and how much she missed it.

She’d been talking about the way the pear trees in the south garden used to taste the sweetest when they picked the pears themselves and how she wondered if Master Ivar held the best ones back for their parents when he made tarts before she had drifted off the way she had when they were girls. Her voice trailed off into nothing while her breathing went long and even with one hand curled loose beneath her cheek and the other clutching Ashlynn’s hand to her chest.

It was such a small thing. Two sisters in a bed, talking the night away as they had before the wedding and the betrayal and the grave. And yet Ashlynn felt the weight of it settle over her heavier than the furs atop her and the weight of everything she’d carried on the long road to reach this point.

For the first time in nine months, she was no longer cut off from the family of her birth, and that meant more to her than she’d ever believed possible.

Gently, she pressed her lips to the crown of Jocelynn’s head and breathed in the warm sleep-smell of her. Ashlynn’s heartbeat felt truly calm for the first time since the night began, pulsing in time with the echo of another heartbeat within her chest.

’Sleep,’ that echo seemed to murmur. ’I’ll watch over you. Sleep.’

And Ashlynn slept, falling into a deep, dark slumber filled with every kind of warmth her heart desired.

But when she woke, she woke to the feeling of warmth on her hands.

Not the warmth of the furs. Not the banked warmth of the fire. This warmth was wet, and it was oozing in a slow, thick rivulet that slipped down between her fingers.

Ashlynn lay perfectly still for a confused half-breath as she struggled to understand why her hands were wet. For a moment, she thought that one of the wounds she’d suffered in her duel with Owain had reopened, but when she shifted in bed, testing her body for soreness, she found no pain.

She did, however, hear a moist -squelch- as she shifted in the sodden bedding and the air around her tasted like copper on her tongue in a way that reminded her of Nyrielle’s bloody kisses, only there was nothing safe or sensual in this taste.

Then she opened her eyes and discovered that the seed she’d been nurturing for Jocelynn had erupted from her chest.

She felt it before she truly saw it. There was a horrifying wrongness to it because she should have been in excruciating, agonizing pain, yet she felt no pain at all despite the horror of what the seed had done to her.

Her ribs seemed to have been pried open from the inside like a chest of drawers wrenched apart, exposing her pulsing heart wrapped in a tangle of roots that extended from a single olive seed. Then she looked down, and the breath died in her throat.

From the center of her, from the place over her heart where she had carried it close and warm for weeks, a tangle of pale roots had burst free. They glistened in the faint light of the hearth’s dying embers, and they steamed faintly in the cold air.

And they did not stop at what they’d done to her own body.

They had crossed the small space between the sisters in the bed, and they had burrowed into Jocelynn; into her back, her shoulders, the curve of her hip, burrowing beneath her skin and pinning her there, splayed and helpless, like an insect run through with a hundred fine silver pins before it was mounted in a glass case for display.

"No..." The word slipped involuntarily past Ashlynn’s lips, sounding as small and feeble as a little girl’s as she trembled in horror at the sight before her eyes. "No, no, no..."

Blood ran down the roots. It welled up dark around each place where the pale tendrils entered her sister and it ran in thin bright ribbons along the curve of them, dripping onto the soaked furs, and with every drip Ashlynn could feel it.

She could feel the roots drinking as they pulled something up out of Jocelynn the way Nyrielle fed on her prey when she was forced to feed on the unwilling. It was slow and patient and absolutely without mercy. The roots were draining Jocelynn bit by bit, drawing a little bit more with every beat of Ashlynn’s heart. They were drinking her sister’s life and feeding it back into the thing that grew from Ashlynn’s own breaking heart.

"Let her go," Ashlynn cried as she seized the roots in both hands. They were warm, and they pulsed beneath her hands, slithering like snakes as they tried to evade her grasp.

"Let her go!" Ashlynn cried as she drew deep on her bond with the living earth, summoning the authority of the Mother of Trees to bring the twisted roots under her control. "Let her go, I, I command you," she ordered, placing all of her power and authority into her words.

And her words did absolutely nothing.

The roots didn’t so much as shiver. For the first time since she’d crawled from the shallow grave, no emerald energy came at her command. It was as though she shouted at a venerable elder who patiently smiled back at her and kept on doing the thing it had been made to do with no regard for the petulant, desperate little girl that tried to stop it.

"Fine," she spat, refusing to yield to the monstrous thing that she’d grown. If the seed of the Olive wouldn’t obey her, then she would rescue her sister from it and deal with the poisoned seed afterwards. But first, she had to heal her sister before the Olive seed drained her dry!

"Through willow’s soft, swaying grace,

And the water of the tears on your face..."

Ashlynn started only to find the roots extending from her chest growing stronger, feeding off the power she’d summoned and drilling deeper into Jocelynn’s body.

"Ash?" Her sister’s voice was thick and slurred, surfacing slowly from somewhere very deep within her exhausted, frail form. Jocelynn’s eyes had cracked open, and they found Ashlynn’s face in the dark, and the terrible thing that shattered Ashlynn’s heart and her will to struggle more was that Jocelynn didn’t scream in pain or cry out in fear.

She lay there on the bed, run through by dozens of roots... She was dying, and her barely open eyes were soft and gentle while her lips curved into the ghost of the smile she had given Ashlynn at the Festival of Light half a lifetime ago.

"It’s fine, Ash," Jocelynn said, even though each word cost her. Blood spilled from between her teeth, running in a crimson rivulet down her chin and dripping onto the blood-stained furs. "After what I did... This... This is what I deserve."

"Don’t," Ashlynn cried, reaching out to cup her sister’s face in her hands, smearing it red in the process. "Don’t you dare, Jocey, don’t you say that to me... Just hang on, and I’ll fix this, I swear, somehow... just, just hang on and..."

Before Ashlynn could finish, a root broke the surface of Jocelynn’s throat.

It came up from inside her, pale and questing and wet, splitting the soft skin beneath her jaw, and then it climbed. Ashlynn watched it climb, frozen, her hands still cradling her sister’s cheeks as it pushed up past Jocelynn’s tongue and emerged between her parted lips, blooming there obscene and tender as a flower.

Whatever Jocelynn had been about to say next, she would never say. She would never say anything ever again, because the thing that had grown from the seed Ashlynn had planted next to her own heart had grown straight up through her sister’s voice and silenced it forever...