‘But how is that possible?’
“Place her here,” said a voice I knew was probably going to be there and yet I wasn’t ready to hear it.
‘Tobias?’
Victor placed me on some sort of long slab, letting my arms fall to my sides.
“You found her?” he asked Victor.
“No, she came looking for us.”
I could feel the smug asshole smiling through the thin depth of his emotions.
“So the tolepa potion worked?” a female voice said, walking up behind him in what sounded like a heeled pair of boots. My head fell to the left side and I saw Lenora looking down at me. She placed a hand on my forehead, trying to feel for something.
“Yes, I believe it did,” Tobias answered her.
I blinked a few times and tried to see my surroundings through the few strands of hair that fell in my face. My breaths came in heavier heaves as I started being able to breathe with more ease. Each limb slowly came back to life. First my toes. Then my ankles. Until feeling returned to me all the way up to my hips.
Lenora lifted her hand from my forehead and I saw the blue light of her magic drawing something out of my skin. It was the dagger’s paralysis magic inside my bloodstream. She was lifting it from me and gathering it in a small blue ball just below her palm. Then she whispered some words in a foreign language and the ball of light evaporated into nothing.
I could move again. Not great. Not even fast. But it was a start. I placed my hands under me and tried sitting up.
“Not so fast,” Tobias said, placing a hand on my chest and pushing me back down. I didn’t really have the energy to put up much of a fight so I let him do so.
“G,” he said to me in a tender voice. His tone took me by complete surprise. It was soothing. Seductive and reaching inside me. It was the way he said my name ages ago. When I longed to hear it spill from his lips like the foolish and naive young girl that I was.
“I needed you to see,” he said to me as he pulled the strand of hair in my face away and tucked it behind my ear. “I needed you to understand. It wasn’t something I could explain in words. And I knew you probably wouldn’t listen.”
I laughed. He wasn’t entirely wrong. Not just because I spent over two centuries hating him. I didn’t trust him. I wasn’t even sure if his crazy idea of us potentially ruling the Catach-Brayin side by side would work. And yet, if there was a chance I had to take it. If for no other reason, I would get my freedom back.
“I contacted Victor the moment we reached Denver,” he said. “I know the two of you haven’t exactly hit it off in the past so I couldn’t share what I was planning. And I still won’t share all the details. Not yet. Not until you decide where you stand.”
“Where I stand?” I mumbled. “How did Lenora do it?” I asked eagerly. “How did Lenora control my vision like that? Was it all real. Was that all going to happen if I let Edmund help me escape?”
Tobias looked at me a bit perplexed and steered his attention to Lenora.
“It was a possibility,” she said. “Just like most kruxa visions, they don’t all come to pass. But they do forewarn kruxa of all possible outcomes that could potentially cause harm. Therefore, you must trust them. I knew you wouldn’t be able to see that far into the future without my help. So I increased the strength of your vision with the tolepa potion in Christophe’s bullets, hoping you would see things from a different angle. ”
“And angle where I’m free from the vixra?” I muttered, finally starting to feel strength running through my body again at a normal level.
I sat up again and this time Tobias didn’t try to stop me.
That was when I saw my surroundings more fully. I was in a large cavern with lights hanging across the top. It was damp. It was cold. And it appeared to have been carved to perfection with curves and angles that miners certainly couldn’t have accomplished simply by looking for gold or silver.
“Not just free,” Tobias said. “More powerful than you ever thought possible.”
“I’m not like you,” I snapped. “I don’t crave power. I don’t leave those who care about me or put them in danger so I can pursue my ambitions.”
“I left you all those years ago, G, because Victor ordered me to.”
I threw my attention to Victor standing ten or so feet away, watching me with curious eyes. The man I had encountered many times and never managed to kill. The man who had my life in his hands multiple times. And the only reason I was still alive after those encounters was because the vixra placed a curse of immortality over me.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The large cavern started filling up with vampires filing in one by one in straight lines, dressed in long black and red ceremonial robes.
“I told you, Georgeanna,” Victor whispered in my mind. “Nothing happens to the Catach-Brayin that I don’t will.”
‘What is this?’ I asked Victor in my mind.
“Your rebirth.”
The moment the words left his mind and delved into my own I felt the magical cord around my throat tighten once more.
The vixra were calling to me. Summoning me. Demanding that I appear as I always did. I reached for my throat and saw Victor eye Tobias, who caught me before I fell right over from lack of air.
“What do you want, G?” he asked me as the vampires started moving around us and forming a large circle. There had to be a hundred of them. “Do you want to continue serving an eternally ungrateful set of masters? Or are you going to actually help me to stop what’s coming? Are you going to help me stop the war?”
The cord tightened like a noose.
‘They know. They have to know that Tobias is trying to help me break free.’
I squinted my eyes through the pain and saw that the same green glow of the cord was no longer around Tobias’s neck. Lenora already helped him break free, just as she claimed in my vision. Knowing that sent a wave of jealousy straight through me like a shot to the gut. I wanted my freedom back. And at that moment, I didn’t care how I got it. I couldn’t continue to live like this anymore. As a slave. And I couldn’t live fully knowing that there may be another way to stop what was coming.
“Y-yes.”
“Do you swear your eternal loyalty to the Catach-Brayin?” he asked me. The intensity in his eyes shot through me like a lead weight being placed on my chest and lowering me down. Or maybe that was the vixra getting more and more angry with me.
“Yes,” I managed to say through the cord slowly strangling me and making my voice sound weak.
“And do you swear to protect the coven at all costs?”
“Yes.”
“Do you swear to me? To stand at my side and stop the future you saw from happening? Even if it means sacrificing your own life?”
“Yes.”
“About time,” Victor sneered as he placed both his hands on either side of my head and a red light oozed from his skin and into my body. If I could scream I would have. The cord tightening around my neck stopped me. The sensation of fire rose up inside my body and cascaded through my limbs as though someone had shot a flame thrower right through me.
But it wasn’t fire. Even as I screamed I could see that the magic coming from his skin wasn’t elemental magic. It was red. Victor was giving me crowning magic.
‘But how is that possible?’
Lenora took my wrist into her hand and I felt the god awful slice of a knife cut through my skin as my blood spilled into a cup in her hands. Enough of it to give to the vampires Tobias wanted to receive the power to walk in the sun. And just as Victor removed his hands and the sensation of fire stopped burning through my body like I had entered the last level of hell, Tobias took me by the head and brought me up to his eye level. I was too weak to fight back. Too stunned to move. And too frightened to say anything. I started trembling.
The way he looked at me wasn’t at all how I was used to seeing him. There was a vulnerability in his eyes. Regret in his emotions. Uneasiness for seein
g how frightened I was. And above all, excitement. This was what he wanted. Not to see me nearly lifeless but to have me near. By his side in all things. The man I thought was too callous to fight alongside me and too demoralized to keep living had something else in mind. And now, something else to live for.
Tobias tilted my head to the side and I waited for what was coming. He didn’t disappoint. The sharp plunge of his fangs dug deep into the most fragile layer of skin on my throat, finding a vein and sucking hard. I could feel the blood draining from each of my limbs, leaving my heart, and being drawn right into his mouth. Only this time I was mildly prepared. After all, I had already experienced it once before.
When he laid me back down on the slab, nearly lifeless, the vampires around us started chanting in an old language I couldn’t quite recognize. Something cold and wet dripped into my mouth. Tobias placed a hand on the back of my head and drew me up to his lap, placing his wrist on my mouth until I started feeling his blood seep into the back of my throat and slipping down into my stomach where it filled me with an impossible need for more.
I was allowing Tobias Vallas to turn me into a vampire. He, in turn, would let Lenora cast a spell to free me from my chains tying me to the vixra. And I was left wondering if it was all going to be worth it.
“Don’t forget that you’re here because I willed it, Georgeanna,” Victor whispered in my mind as I felt the rush of freezing cold blood start moving throughout my chest and into the rest of my body. My heartbeat raged inside my chest. “I willed you to die in your first life, your second, and your third. I let you live your fourth life only because the vixra got to you before I did. And your fifth reincarnation only survives in Harper Ashwood because she was meant to fulfill the prophecy. When you swear to the Catach-Brayin, you’re swearing to me.”
I opened my eyes just as Tobias moved his wrist away from my mouth and I felt my heart completely stop beating.
“Your life belongs to me now,” Victor’s words pierced through my mind. “It always has and it always will.”
Tobias lay me down once more on the slab as I felt the cool air in the room turn to nothing more than a lukewarm atmosphere. My skin wasn’t sensitive to the elements any longer. Nor did I need to breathe air. That didn’t stop my insides from panicking as the dryness took hold of my throat and begged for more blood. I needed to feed.
Lenora placed both her hands on the sides of my head and started chanting. I closed my eyes as the blue light of her magic did what she promised and shattered the magical cord that sat on my neck for over two centuries, breaking the bonds of my enslavement from the vixra forever. Only my worst fear had been realized. I may have walked into another trap. I had traded one master for another. And I could sense that Victor’s word would be more binding than anything that a vixra had ever told me to do.
Victor walked over to me as my eyes opened and I saw the entire cavern with new eyes. Vampire eyes that seemed to take in each detail of the cavern with new acute clarity.
“Don’t stress, Georgeanna,” he whispered in my mind as he let a single finger caress my face. “You made the right choice. We’re going to have so much fun.”
THE END OF BOOK ONE
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Witchling Wars Glossary
CATACH-BRAYIN = ka-tesh brae-yin
Once the most powerful vampire coven in the Western world and lead by Tobias Vallas. Former members remain scattered across the continental United States.
THE CHANGING
In ancient times of northern Europe a coven of luxra witchlings called the Roganach-Ciar entered a pact with a group of kruxa witchlings. The luxra coven cast a spell granting the kruxa more magic that had been lost due to years of breeding with humans. The spell went wrong and quickly turned into a curse, causing the kruxa to feed on magical beings for their magical blood and soon turning to humans to satiate their thirst. Those affected became known as vampires. The next few centuries were spent hunting down the vampires considered a risk in exposing witchling existence to mankind due to their lack of control over their cravings for blood and their senseless disrespect for life.
CROXA = crock-sha
A deceased human whose soul has turned rabid, often the result of consuming vixra blood. These ghost-like creatures feed on emotional fears and haunt humans and witchlings alike. Stuck between worlds, they are not living or entirely dead. Their appearance if often distorted, rotted, and very frightening.
DAY WALKERS
Vampires who have killed a kruxa and absorbed a small portion of their magic to gain the ability to walk in the sunlight by drinking their blood.
KRUXA = crew-sha
A low-tier witchling with very diluted magical powers. Their magic is often unpredictable and very difficult to control given their ancestors chose to mate with humans, therefore diluting the magic in their offspring’s blood. They are not well-respected in the witchling world and many live in exile after years of being hunted by vampires for the ability to walk in the sun after having killed a kruxa witchling.
LURING
An ability vampires have that allows them to place thoughts and memories in the minds of humans and sometimes witchlings. Humans are most susceptible to luring.
LUXRA = loo-x-ra
A middle-tier witchling with diluted magical powers but substantially more magical ability than kruxa. They can tap into the supernatural and wield their magic through wands for better control. They do not have complete control over their magic given their ancestors chose to mate with humans, therefore diluting the magic in their offspring’s blood.
MARKING (known to vampires as scarring)
A process in which the magic in a kruxa’s blood attaches to a vampire, causing the vampire to slowly turn into a mortal. The spell surrounding kruxa witchlings marking vampires was created by vixra as a long term to plan to eventually rid the world of vampires in a peaceful manner so they live out one mortal life then die. The process frightens most vampires and many spent the majority of the middle ages hunting down kruxa and killing them to minimize the risk of being marked.
THE PROPHECY
Over a thousand years ago, a very powerful vixra witchling foresaw of a time when humans and witchlings would be at war. The results of the war were unclear as only the cause and conflict were ever recorded in written and oral memory. The prophecy spoke of a young red-haired kruxa witchling of inferior magical ability who would mark a vampire and cause witchlings to be exposed to the whole of mankind. If in a single life this burden was not realized, she was would reincarnated every two centuries until the prophecy is fulfilled.
VAMPIRE = vam-pyre
A magical being that feeds on both witchling and human blood for survival. They are considered the lowest of magical beings and not respected or trusted by any echelon of witchlings. Most are so consumed by their desire to drink blood that they turn rabid and have little to no control over their impulses. (See ‘The Changing’ for details on their history).
VIXRA = vicks-ra
A high-tier withchling with nearly 100% pure magical powers. They have complete control of their magic and the power to rule over all other witchlings. They hand down laws that all must follow or risk severe punishment. They are considered the royalty of the witchling world and age one year for every five human years making them the oldest living witchlings
in the world.
VIXRA TUNNELS
Magical tunnels built with vixra magic for quick ease of travel anywhere in the world. They can only be opened through vixra witchlings or the consumption of vixra blood.
About the Author
Before Shawn was a writer, she was a history teacher who spent all her spare time reading historical novels and tales of fantastical worlds, past and present. After years of classrooms and countless hours in university libraries, she decided to pen down her own imaginary worlds in novels.
She write urban fantasy books.
She lives in Georgia with her husband and pet Yorkshire terrier.
Also by Shawn Knightley
KRUXA ECHELON SERIES
Blood Marked
Grim Defeat
Peril Unbound
Death Hunt
Cursed Relic Page 16
