Page 114 of Claimed By Fangs and Darkness
“Isn’t this nice?” she asked me.
She wore a summery, floral dress with a corset top. While hers was white and blue, mine was white and pink.
For a moment, I caught a glimpse of us from above—we looked like lovers, a perfect mirror image.
I nodded and smiled. I’d never had a sister. I’d never known how it felt to be loved by a girlish best friend, to trade dresses and secrets. How it felt to wear whatever I wanted, to lay in gardens and kiss beautiful boys and girls.
I frowned, and the woman leaned closer, her lips inches from mine.
These weren’t my thoughts.
Soft, warm lips brushed mine. They were eager, demanding, and?—
I shoved Juliette off me.
“What the fuck is wrong with you!” I screamed.
Juliette’s face flickered from hurt to wrathful to impassive and back again, like she couldn’t decide who or what she was.
She needed someone else to decide for her.
I scrambled to my feet, and she did the same. In matching dresses, we stood in this poor imitation of the gardens I had tended to with care for a decade.
“You don’t know me!” I hissed, voice trembling like the ground beneath our feet. I gestured around. “This isn’t right. You willneverget it right.”
The woman of many faces settled on one. Her eyes were infernos, her chest heaving, her palms twitching at her sides.
“You want to take my place!” she screamed back. “You don’t want to be withus. You want me gone so you can have him all to yourself. You think you’re the special one. You can’t share.”
I opened my mouth to tell her I’d rather die than be with her predator husband, but I didn’t want to reveal anything about my motives.
“There’s a deep, frightening darkness inside of you, Evie,” Juliette said, her lower lip trembling as if from fear. “I told Aster about how you threatened me during the performance, to hex me with your dark blood magick. I can see you, therealyou.”
“You threatenedme,” I said incredulously. She was the one hexing all of Etherdale.
In the dreamworld, my subconscious was stronger than my conscious mind. It was harder to stay grounded, harder not to let Juliette’s words affect me at my core. To remind me of my mother’s last words, saying I was a plague on this world.
My throat tightened, and Juliette’s eyes flashed with satisfaction.
“You want to sever the tie between two souls meant to be together forever,” she said, a manipulative tear sliding down her cheek. “Sir and I have known each other in every lifetime, since the beginning of time. We’ve been lovers, friends, brother and sister, father and daughter…”
“Um,ew?”
I made a face of disgust, and Juliette fucking lost it.
“It’s romantic!” she shrieked as she tackled me to the ground.
Her long fingernails raked across my cheek, and I hissed in pain. We rolled, flailing limbs and bloodthirsty eyes.
On top of her, my hands finally closed around her throat. I’d been fantasizing about this since the moment we met.
I squeezed and pressed. Her face grew red.
Juliette began to laugh. “I want to smile when I die,” she said, straining to speak. “Like Princeton. He smiled.”
The yell that tore through me was inhuman. She had carved a smile into Princeton’s face with a knife.
“You are fucking crazy!” I yelled.
