Page 119 of Taming Ivy
Rachel’s hand trembled. She thrust the bottle at Ivy. "Drink it. All of it.”
Ivy flung her arm up, knocking the bottle away while launching herself at the older woman. Crashing to the floor, they both lay motionless, the breath knocked from their bodies.
Smashed upon impact, the contents of the vial began spreading in a wide black puddle across the hardwood. Horrified, Rachel stared at the shards of glass, and retaining the grip of the pistol, she sat up, her movements sluggish.
Ivy lurched forward, attempting to wrest the weapon away. A hoarse cry ripped from her throat when Rachel knocked her back to scramble atop her. In a matter of seconds, Ivy was pinned to the floor, the weapon and her wrists held in Rachel’s iron-like grip.
Despite her exhaustion, Ivy was slippery and desperate, kicking and bucking until Rachel lost her balance and toppled partly off her. Scuttling away, Ivy knew a momentary triumph as her foot connected with Rachel’s ribs and her muffled shriek echoed in the room’s stillness.
The flash of victory was short-lived. Rachel latched onto Ivy’s ankle, using it to crawl up her body. Like fierce tigers, they rolled about on the floor, gowns tangling about their legs and hindering any efforts to gain a steady footing.
"I'm going to enjoy killing you,” Rachel hissed. With a sudden, twisting motion, she straddled Ivy again. For all her thinness, the woman was wiry, a crazed fury giving her astonishing strength. Her venomous expression was unlike anything Ivy ever witnessed before on another human's face. Hatred lit the blue eyes, an insanity that chilled to the bone. With one hand, she reached down, ripping at Ivy’s dress, tearing at something...
A scream finally poured from Ivy. High, foreign and so full of terror, she did not even recognize that it came from her. It seemed to go on forever.
In the depths of his nightmare, a sound reached Sebastian. To his fevered brain, it called, rousing sluggish blood to beat in frantic rhythm. Consciousness flooded him, making him dizzy, a shower of sparks inside his head touching off fires. Clarity rushed in with a punishing vengeance.
A scream reached a heart-stopping fullness then died away, buried in the muted sounds of a violent scuffle beyond the cool comfort of the bed he felt bound to with hidden ropes. Giving a massive shove of his shoulder, Sebastian raised himself. He must be hallucinating. Caught in a nightmare...because he thought it was Ivy screaming.
Peering over the mattress edge, he tried making sense of what he saw.
Locked in struggle, two figures were highlighted by the small pool of light thrown by the bedside lamp. His aunt straddled Ivy, their hands entwined around a dueling pistol Sebastian hazily recognized as one of Timothy's prized possessions.
“I’m going to kill you,” Rachel grunted. “For Timothy. For me. I don’t care if it looks to be an accident or not…” Both strained for control, a desperate fight the older woman was winning. Ivy sobbed, forcing the gun away from her face. She was drowning in the full black skirts of his aunt’s gown.
"What the hell...” His astonishment was a weak whisper.
"Sebastian!" Ivy’s eyes filled with gut-wrenching horror. "No…NO!"
Rachel’s thin lips curled. With inhuman strength, she jerked free of Ivy’s grasp to level the weapon at her nephew.
With the fierceness of an angry hornet, the gold butterfly stabbed Rachel, the long needle burying into the flesh of her forearm. She shrieked in pain.
Sebastian launched himself from the bed while at the same instant Ivy shoved Rachel back. Her fist connected with flesh; there was the sound of bone cracking and Rachel’s moan. Maniacal laughter and a gunshot...
The echo was deafening and yet it amplified everything, every sound, every noise. Stunned, Sebastian stumbled back, staring at his shoulder and the tiny, emerging stain. From a great distance, he heard people running, doors slamming. And a scream which slowly dissolved into a long, low wail of anguish.
Ivy.His Ivy.
Was she shot? Oh God, was she hurt?
The sound rang in cadence with Rachel's crazed glee as Sebastian sank to his knees. Hard footsteps thumped behind him. He needed to comfort Ivy, needed to reach her, to ease her pain, to wipe away her sorrow, but he could not seem to move. Never had he heard such agony. Except the night his mother died. His father made the same gut-wrenching sound that night…Sebastian remembered it so clearly, those horrible cries. The torment of someone’s heart sliced in two.
Something large and solid passed by with a whoosh. Sebastian crumpled in its wake, befuddled, staring at Gabriel’s back as the man appeared then disappeared from the pool of light. The subdued sound of a hefty fist striking flesh underlay the sobs and the laughter.
That laughter abruptly stopped; dying away into the shadows like a terrifying nightmare fades with the morning light. Everything grew grey, an eerie silence falling over the room.
Sebastian drifted for a moment, or maybe many moments, alone, untethered from earth. Until the aching sweetness of Ivy's lips brought him back. Dampening his cheeks were her salty tears, her soft hands cradling his face and pushing against his shoulder. The silky darkness of oblivion beseeched him but he fought its insistent appeal.
I can’t go…not now. I won’t go…
Ivy embraced him, saying things he did not understand. He focused on her lips, watching them shape words he never thought to hear again. Now she sobbed them.
"Sebastian, I love you.I love you.Do you hear me?" She kissed him again and again, tears splashing everywhere and Sebastian wanted to drink her tears. Like wine of the gods, their magic would sustain him, keep him alive. “Sebastian, my darling...my love, I love you.”
His breath escaped in a gasp of pain when Ivy pressed the heels of both palms against his left shoulder, blood seeping through her fingers. In the lamp’s glow, it appeared as inky ribbons of black streaking down his body. There was no color to the fluid. No color to anything, not even something as important as one’s lifeblood, he mused. Only black, white and grey.
Sebastian’s eyes closed, his body limp and sagging as Ivy shifted to support his head in her lap. She held him together with just her tiny hands. Holding him. His heart. His life.
