Sleeping with Monsters

by Amelia Hutchins

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Lucian demanded.

  “They’re not yours, or theirs. They weren’t left inside the Guild for you or them, and you know it. Those grimoires were blank anyways. But don’t worry; I have them,” I laughed, pointing at my head. “Here. Where they are safe,” I smirked as anger pulsed from Lucian.

  “You were the one creeping around inside the Guild,” Synthia said, and I leveled her with a cool look of interest.

  “I was,” I admitted. “You should know better than to mess with another witch’s grimoires. Touching another witch’s history can turn you inside out,” I said, tilting my head to stare at Alden, who had joined us from the back of the club. My stomach twisted, and I struggled against tears. “You? You too? It all makes perfect sense now.” No wonder he was meeting up with royal Fae, he was friends with them. They were all working together. I took a deep breath and pushed my way through the pain clenching around my heart.

  “Kendra,” he began, as if he intended to come up with some excuse for why he was here among the Fae and Lucian.

  “I’m not Kendra, I am Lena!” I snapped, magic pulsing through me as I stepped back, moving closer to the men and women at my back. “You knew who I was too, didn’t you?” I demanded, turning to find Lucian regarding me with no emotion on his face. “You are not here to help us at all, are you? You’re here to destroy us. The Guild, the Fae, and whatever the fuck you are…we’re just fucking collateral damage, aren’t we?” My voice shook as tears blinded my vision. “How easy was it for you to erase me, and Lucian, did you even stop to consider what it would do to me?”

  “Lena,” Alden pleaded, and I spun on him, pulling magic around me.

  “No! No, don’t you fucking Lena me, you’re with them! I trusted you! You knew who I was, and you did nothing. You are not just a warlock, you are an elder and you’re one of them. You stay the fuck away from me and my mother. Did you ever even love her or was she just a means to stay close to us? You’re all fucking evil.”

  “It’s not like that,” he insisted, and I saw Synthia edge closer to him protectively, as if I was a lit cannon about to explode.

  “Not like what? Not like you erased what happened at the abbey and made us forget what really happened. You let us blindly go about living when so many had been murdered—and you!” I turned my rage on Lucian. “You let my sister be raped and tortured by Lucifer when it was me he wanted. He wanted to use me to hurt you. It should have been me! I should have been allowed to save her since you just left her to that monster!” No one said anything. I shook my head and eyed him as I stepped closer. “I want Luna back, and then I want you to forget I exist, which should be pretty fucking easy for you, seeing as you did it before. My grandmother thought you would fight for us, but I told her it was stupid to assume you were on our side.”

  “You would have died trying to save your sister from Lucifer,” he growled. “But not until he had done everything he did to your sister to you. And this time, I am sure it would have been far worse.”

  “Probably, but that was my choice to make, wasn’t it?” I replied coldly. “You didn’t even give me a chance before you decided what to do, and when you did, your cure was erasing me from this world. You took away everything that made me who I am. My tattoos, my memories of the pain I’ve endured—and you had no fucking right to do it. You erased Joshua,” I uttered as a sob bubbled up and my chest heaved. “I can’t remember him or the pain of his loss, and I know you took it from me. People are what they’ve endured. Pain we survive is what defines us. Memories keep those we love with us, and you took it all away from me. It may come back, it may not; I don’t know because you decided to play God in my world. You keep telling me I need you to protect me, but I don’t. The coven thinks they need you to protect us, but again, I don’t. I don’t need anyone in my life that can erase me so easily,” I laughed numbly, numb to the pain that threatened to rip me apart.

  “You can’t keep the grimoires inside of you, Lena,” Synthia said softly. “No one is strong enough to keep the memories and magic of that many witches inside of them. Not without going mad.”

  “Aren’t we all just a little mad?” I tilted my head as I took a good look at her. She was ethereal, beautiful, and she wasn’t Fae. She was more. “Besides, who wants to live forever?” I laughed coldly. “Haven’t you heard? It’s the end of the world and we know it, and I feel fine.” I laughed coldly again, pulling a line from R.E.M.

  “You may not feel the grimoires inside of you yet, but the stronger your magic gets, the stronger they will grow until you lose control of them. Grimoires are living things. They can communicate with those who wield them, past and present. That’s why most witches won’t touch another witch’s grimoire.”

  “We must have had the same teacher.” I turned angry eyes to Alden. “I can control them.”

  “Not unless you’re a dark witch,” she growled.

  I smiled as she narrowed her purple eyes on me.

  “You can’t turn, not and remain with your coven.”

  “I wonder how you can know so much about us, seeing as you come from the Guild.” I wiped a few of the traitorous tears away and smiled grimly at her. “Our coven isn’t like yours. Yours runs towards danger, ours runs away from it. This time, though, there’s nowhere to run, is there?” I glanced at Lucian and let out an irritated huff. “Had we known what was happening, we could have hidden ourselves, but someone intervened and prevented that. Now, now we’re utterly fucked without the fun part. It’s okay, though, because I know what to do to save us. When you have nothing to lose, you have nothing holding you back.”

  I spun on my heel, heading towards the door as the others followed me. At the door, I stopped as I laid my hand on the exit bar and looked over my shoulder.

  “I want Luna back. You can deliver her to the abbey; leave her at the door and she’ll find me. Then you can go back to pretending I don’t exist anymore. I plan to figure out a way to get rid of the marks you and your men cast on me, so hopefully you’ll no longer feel the need to protect me. I will erase them from my body so that whatever connects us is gone, just as I want you to be from my life. I forgive you, but I will never forget what you did to me,” I seethed, somehow keeping my dignity intact. “I suggest you leave, though, since it might become hard to decipher friend from foe as we get ready to fight demons. Have a nice fucking life, Lucian.” I waved back at him as I pushed the doors open and slipped out of the club.

  I’d barely made it to the car before I was pushed against the door by an angry Lucian. His eyes were midnight, the color of a starless night. “You think I fucking wanted to do it? I had to protect you. You would have died in a manner more horrible than you can even imagine, and I couldn’t fucking live with that,” he gritted out coldly.

  “You weren’t protecting me. You were being a selfish prick. You knew we would run and you didn’t want to give me up. I know why you did it. You knew the coven would run from this, and they should have been able to. I wouldn’t have run from you, I’d have stood beside you and helped you get my sister out of Hell, but you didn’t give me the choice, did you? No, you took it from me and you erased me. I remember that night and everything you said as you turned me into her, every detail of it.

  “You thought I was weak, but I wasn’t. I could have loved you, Lucian. I could have been your everything and you mine, but you don’t want that, you want me destroyed. You’ve said it since the day I met you and I should have listened. Congratulations, you destroyed me. That Lena you erased, she’s gone. I’m not the same as I was, and I sure as fuck don’t need you anymore. You made sure of it when you decided for me. You told me you would ruin me, and so you have.” I pushed him away from me as the others converged outside the club to see how our drama played out. “Watch your back, because we are no longer friends. Us? We are nothing, just as you wanted us to be from the very beginning. You’re Luc
ian, the one who destroyed me, ruined me, and I’m just the girl who let it happen.”

  “I need the pages of those grimoires back,” he grated.

  “Take them, then,” I smirked. “Cut my fucking head off and take them back. The only way those pages can be returned is if I die, truly die. So kill me, Lucian.” I glared at him defiantly. “Do it, I won’t even fight you,” I chuckled as I held my arms out, offering him my neck. “No? Didn’t think so,” I laughed coldly as his eyes sparkled with anger.

  He swallowed as he took note of the resolve in my eyes. I was done being his fucking chess piece, one he moved when he needed to make a play. I was a Fitzgerald, born of the original bloodlines, granddaughter to the High Priestess, and I was no one’s fucking toy anymore.

  Chapter 19

  My hand slid over Luna’s glossy coat as she purred in my lap. She’d been scratching against the door, and once the coven figured out that she wasn’t a threat, they brought her to me. I checked her for any sign of neglect, and instead found a very healthy, very fat cat who had obviously been pampered. I’d opened the cat food which had been in a bag that was sitting just outside of the wards. Evidently he’d been feeding her a kitty version of caviar, something I’d never be able to afford. He’d spoiled my baby, which tugged at my heartstrings and pissed me off even more. She’d been wearing a shiny new collar, which I wasn’t so sure didn’t have real diamonds in it.

  At least she’d been happy to see me, which was how I ended up with her in my lap, stroking her glossy coat as I thumbed through journals from the abbey’s library, written by witches who had died over a century ago. The first witches to be housed in the abbey had written down just about everything, yet it was really nothing at all. The journals held no clues about demons, or how to fight them. They spoke of farming and the herbs that grew wildly around the abbey and other boring shit.

  I tossed the last journal onto the large pile and picked up Luna, disturbing her and ruining her nap. She growled as I held her up before nuzzling her neck. As I pulled away from her, I noticed a little message capsule attached to her collar. I pulled the removed note from the capsule and stared at it a moment. Setting her down, I considered opening it, and then, as the butterflies erupted, thought better of it and pushed it into my purse. Lucian was a rabbit hole, one that sucked me in no matter how hard I tried to ignore it.

  Too many things were going wrong right now, and my personal issues—and my libido—had to take the backseat to it. Considering everything happening, I didn’t have time to worry about him or the array of emotions that man made me feel, which were mostly rage and the need to strangle him, followed solely by the mortifying and conflicting need to fuck him into next year.

  I stretched and bent down to retrieve the journals as Luna growled at the door. I twisted my head towards it and tried to concentrate on listening for whatever it was that Luna might have heard. I hefted the heavy load and made my way to the door, slowly opening it and peering out into the hallway.

  Nothing was there: the entire hallway looked abandoned and no noise filtered through it from the kids playing or otherwise. I closed it and went to my dresser, yanked the drawer open and pushed the books inside. I bounced onto the bed beside Luna and my mind wandered to Lucian on its own.

  I got where he was coming from; I probably would have died if I had attempted to go after Kendra. It didn’t change what he’d done. He’d erased every trace of me coming home. Then he’d taken my memories of Joshua away. Grandma had worked strong magic to bring back many of my memories.

  Then, there was the horrifying truth of what he’d allowed to happen to Kendra by covering up the fact that she was missing, taken by Lucifer. I knew firsthand what kind of sick, twisted shit he was into.

  She’d been with him for months, and even though she didn’t admit it, I knew she blamed me. There was coldness in her eyes when she looked at me. She moved away from me if I got too close, as if she feared me. She was my best friend, and I’d lost her because Lucifer had wanted me and taken the wrong girl.

  Kendra still wouldn’t speak of what she’d endured to me, other than screaming at me if I asked her. There was a wedge between us, one I wasn’t sure I could easily fix. She told Grandmother of how she’d been called Lena by Lucifer, how he’d boasted of impregnating Lucian’s girl. She never told him the truth of who she was; some of the suffering she’d gone through. If I’d known, I could have tried to find a way to trade places with her, or tried to save her.

  No matter how much I tried to push the guilt away, it ate at me. Lucifer had wanted me, but why? What had Lucian done or taken from him that he’d torture an innocent girl and impregnate her? The coven had confirmed her pregnancy test, which meant Lucifer had succeeded in what he’d set out to do to me, except that he’d taken the wrong twin, and to protect me, Lucian had erased me. There was no record of me ever coming home for the Awakening.

  In fact, there was no record of me being in this small town, not since Joshua’s funeral. I waited for the familiar pain to rip through me, and yet it didn’t. I couldn’t even recall his face. I got up and padded over to the mirror. I looked tired, empty. My blue eyes seemed duller, my hair was a mess, and I didn’t care. I pulled at the neck of my shirt to get a better look at the bite that graced my shoulder, and I winced.

  I still had the one from Spyder, but it wasn’t his that ached in the twilight hours of dawn. It was the one on the inside of my thigh, close to the apex of my sex, which pulsed with need. It had been a little over a week since the doors to the abbey had closed, and yet I still felt his presence with me every minute of the day and long into the midnight hour.

  It shouldn’t have bothered me inside the abbey because nothing should have been able to reach us through the protection spells and wards that covered every inch of this place. Runes that had been painted on little rocks littered the ground outside, ones meant to keep all kinds of creatures away from us. Everything was meant to keep evil out, and yet I felt something inside of me growing as the anger I felt pulsed with a life of its own. I felt like a prisoner inside this place, unable to breathe or feel.

  He’d ruined me, as he said he would. I’d fallen for him somewhere between meeting him and him erasing me. I’d fallen a little in love with the monster who had said from the very beginning that he’d destroy me. And the worse part of it was that I’d let him. I’d wanted him to, and something inside my soul still wanted him.

  I stepped away from the mirror and glanced at Luna, who watched me with a bored look as she cleaned her paws. I grabbed my jacket and the journals from my dresser and headed out of my room, only to find Kendra standing across from my door, leaning against the stone wall as she glared at me.

  “Kendra,” I whispered, narrowing my eyes when she didn’t respond right away. “Kendra?” I repeated, louder.

  “Hmm?” she said absently, moving away from the wall as her eyes gained focus. “It is a beautiful day outside,” she mumbled before she turned away from me and headed down the winding hallway.

  Shaking my head, I made my way through the corridors of the abbey to the library, placing the books I’d brought back on the return table before moving to the older section. My fingers slid over the bindings for each book, hesitating on one where the leather was older, more distressed than its neighbors. I pulled it from the shelf and stared at the ancient scrawling.

  I moved to one of the benches and opened the pages, knowing it held dark magic within its ancient bindings and there would be more consequences for using any of the teachings in this book. I knew the older witches in our coven were investigating the usefulness and effects of harnessing dark magic, and every day more questions arose of what would become of us.

  The news had begun reporting fewer deaths in the mainstream media, and yet we knew without the reports that hundreds had been killed, and in their place were demons.

  Murders were up, husbands slaughtering their families and
disappearing into the night without a trace. Some reports included entire families going missing, and yet they’d left not a single trace of where they’d disappeared to.

  For those of us who knew that Hell was wide open, it wasn’t surprising. Human hosts only lasted a little while before they began rotting, so the need to find a new one would continue unless the demon found a body that could last longer. That meant we were becoming their main targets.

  Messages were coming in from other covens via magical routes, such as scrying, or ink appearing upon pages next to one of us here at the abbey. Witches were now being targeted because of the ability to permanently house a demon.

  We’d sent out instructions for tattooed spells to protect them, but some refused to cast the simple ward on their body. Maybe they didn’t believe us, or maybe they knew there was little hope living through Hell on earth.

  Heels clicked across the library floor and I lifted my gaze from the ancient tome as my grandmother approached. She looked exhausted, but not many of us were getting sleep with everything we knew was happening outside the walls of our sanctuary. Hiding didn’t mean obliviousness to the deaths or chaos that reigned outside our doors. It did, however, mean we couldn’t help them, either. Shit, we couldn’t even help ourselves right now.

  “Magdalena,” she murmured softly as she sat on the bench beside me. “You said Alden trained you and a few others in magic that our coven traditionally doesn’t teach, correct?” She peered around us as if she was afraid we’d be overheard.

  “He did,” I said quietly. He wasn’t on our side, but what he’d taught us wasn’t child’s play, either. He’d taught me how to contain my power, to tap the leyline without being detected by others. He’d trained us to defend ourselves, as well as fight, which I was thankful for, even if he was now the enemy.

  “Do you think you could get inside your mother’s shop and retrieve some of the items on this list?” She handed me a neatly folded sheet of paper. “It’s imperative we be well supplied if we intend to hold up here for much longer.”