Page 68 of Wolfsbane Hall
But wasn’t it too late?
It’s never too late.This time, it wasn’t Margot inside her head—she’d been strangely dim since the attack. It was Dean, or at least an echo of what Dean would have said. And channeling the man of her nightmares—or dreams—she kneed Lorraine in the breasts.
The force was hard enough to knock the older woman away momentarily.
“You’re dead,” Celestine wheezed, coughing, her mouth, throat, and lungs burning. “The dead don’t—”Come back alive during the show. Only after. She finished the sentence in her head, because all the air was ripped once more from her lungs.
“The dead can’t die twice, girl,” Lorraine hissed.
It didn’t make sense. Celestine must have been hallucinating, being sucked so far into unconsciousness that words were distorting themselves. It made no sense, but then delirium had its claws in her brain, sinking in and pulling all rational thoughts from her mind. It was possible she’d said something entirely different altogether.
Lorraine placed both of her knees on Celestine’s chest, preventing her struggle.
“This won’t be the first time I save one of my sons from an unworthy match, and it probably won’t be the last.”
Celestine’s eyes fluttered shut, and she was hit with an eerie vision.
Lorraine pressed the full weight of her body down on Margot as Irene slipped a noose around her neck. The rope was looped over a metal bar at the top of a tower in a Victorian castle. Margot tried to kick and claw, but her pannier skirts were far too bulky and cumbersome to get any traction, and she was no match for the two women. Worse, she’d been drugged. Her limbs were growing dim and drunken.
Irene tightened the noose, and Margot’s fingers curled into the fringing edges of the coarse rope. Then Irene grasped the other end of the rope and pulled.
“No,” Margot tried to scream, but it came out more like a gargle. “I love them.”
“You cannot possibly love both of them,” Irene spat, placing all her weight on the rope, levering it until Margot’s feet scraped against the floor. “You broke my daughter by marrying herwretched son.”
“Everett isn’t wretched,” Lorraine said.
“But you admit Dean is, then?”
“Of the two of them?” Lorraine questioned. “Yes, Dean is far more wicked. Everett is mostly the harmless one.” Lorraine pulled again on the rope, and Margot’s feet left the floor. Dangling. Dying.
No,please, I am not ready to die. I am not prepared.
Margot bucked, kicking her legs out like she was in a swimming pool, but the action only pulled the rope deeper into her skin. After a minute, her eyes rolled back into her head and her limbs fell limp.
As Margot died for a second time, in the vision, she was expelled from Celestine’s mind. Dead once more.
“The difference this time, Mother, is that I will not allow it,” Dean said, towering over his mother with a wine bottle in hand. “I am not Everett. I am the Beast of Winter, and I do not stand by and do nothing when something I care about is in danger. This you should know by now.”
He brought the bottle down on his mother’s head hard enough to kill her…again. The woman slumped on top of Celestine’s limp body as her eyelids drifted shut once more, consciousness a faraway aspiration, much like her dreams of Hollywood.
23
Saturday, November 11, 1939
On the way to Dean’s Study
Her hand fell limp at her side as Dean cradled her into his chest and walked her to his private study. Consciousness was a tango. Quick turns, sharp edges, and a sensual seduction.
No, that wasn’t right.
Perhaps the smell of rosewood, musk, and oranges wafting into her nostrils was confusing her, because Dean’s scent was pure debauchery.
Decorative wallpaper, golden wall sconces, and a smattering of ancient mirrors, paintings, and sculptures blurred together as a kaleidoscope of color. Pain swarmed all over her body. She’d thought that if she’d only been choked, only her neck and upper body would hurt.
Nope.
Everything. Her muscles, her bones, even her sinews. Everything.
