Page 39 of Can't Bite This Feeling
Her incisors elongate into fangs. Her eyes are alive, the pupils circled with gold.
The silver cords restraining her burn away like mist. Runes crack. The bloodlight magic recoils like a beast struck blind. Power roars outward—not Cassian’s, buthers.Raw, wild, and righteous.
Then, my beautiful, powerful butterflybreaksthe circle.
The worldshifts.The temple trembles. And in a breathless blink, we’re not in Screaming Woods anymore.We’re somewhere older.Somewhere sacred.
I blink against the light, and the ruin around us begins to flicker. Columns become whole again. The scorched altar is now gleaming black marble. Torches flicker in sconces that haven't existed in centuries. Moonlight spills through a high, arched opening where no roof should be.
A tether between past and present has opened, woven from her soul and mine.
The cursed clearing in Screaming Woods is still here—burned stone, twisted trees, rot beneath our feet—but it'soverlaid with memory, with magic, with the ghost of the bond we forged all those centuries ago.
The temple as it once was, the night we planned to escape.
The place where Cassian killed her has become the place where she rises.
Cassian stumbles back. “No,” he breathes. “That’s not… What have you…What are you doing?”
Drusilla turns toward him, radiant and terrible. Her hair whips in the rising wind. Power rolls off her in waves.“Sorry to disappoint you,Father,” she says, snarling the word, “but youdidn’t destroy me.” Her eyes flick to mine. “You brought me home.”
And I suddenly understand.
Bloodlight magic.Cassian summoned bloodlight magic to power the ritual. But instead of unraveling her, the ritual has reignited the vampiric part of her that once tasted forever and wanted it. It knows her blood. It remembers the first bond she ever chose.
Cassian used it, thinking he could erase her soul, burn her from existence, and cleanse his legacy. But the magic was born here in this place of blood vows and eternal bonds.
The pain in my chest blurs as my eyes lock on her. My Drusilla.
But she’s not mine right now.
She’sherself.Glorious. Terrible. Eternal.
Drusilla steps forward, the ritual circle crumbling behind her. Cassian screams and lashes out with the blade, but she catches his arm mid-swing, her strength amplified.She breaks his arm with a crack that echoes through both centuries. His sword clangs to the ground as he falls to his knees.
Drusilla retrieves the sword, pressing the tip to his chest.
Cassian’s eyes spew hate as he looks up at his daughter.
Hers are molten with retribution.
“You built your legacy on blood and fear,” she says, her voice strong. “But I am not the reason for the end of your legacy. You are. And I’m the reckoning.”
Cassian flinches as she drives the blade forward... but the temple answers her before she can finish the job.
The runes at their feet ignite insearing gold. The altar beneath Cassian cracks wide open as wind shrieks through the ruin, stirring the ghostly veil of Roman grandeur. The past demands balance.
Cassian howls as the magic turns inward, dragging him down, down, into the altar stones, into the earth, intotime. He reaches for Drusilla, but she doesn’t move. She simply watches as he’sswallowed whole,and nothing of him remains.
No blood. No ashes.
Only silence and peace.
Drusilla exhales shakily and turns to me. She falls to her knees beside me, hands already on my chest, trying to stem the flow of blood.
With a monumental effort, I raise a hand to cup her cheek. “So proud of you…my beautiful butterfly.”
“No,” she breathes. “No. Not again. Not like this.”
