Page 105 of Heart of a Witch
***
He wasn’t in the ballroom, or in any of the corridors, or the garden. I headed back upstairs and found him standing in his room, looking out his window, his hands clasped behind his back. “Have you come to keep me quiet?”
Chapter Thirty-One
Elijah
“No,” she answered, hovering in the doorway. “Well, a little, honestly, but it’s not the only reason I’m here.”
I looked over the sprawling gardens, coated in a blanket of white. Noelle was coming soon, but it didn’t feel like it. The decorations did nothing but add a splash of color to the awful season. “You could have told me you were a witch.”
“So you could string me up at the gallows?”
The muscle in my jaw ticked. I turned slowly. “Do you think so low of me?”
She didn’t look at me. I couldn’t help but stare at the spatters of blood on her cheek. At least the black of her dress hid most of the truth of what had happened in his room. I still couldn’t believe she was a witch, but the evidence was overwhelming. I couldn’t deny what had happened right in front of my eyes. Words of warning flickered into my mind, ones I’d heard all my life of their trickery and lack of emotions, but it didn’t feel true—not when she’d spoken so painfully of her heartbreak over her sister.
“Don’t pretend you would have understood. I was protecting my family. I couldn’t risk them by telling you.”
“You lied so much to me. To us. Was any of it real?” I held my breath, but I wasn’t sure why. Did it really matter? Yet I needed to hear her response before I decided what to do next.
“At first you were a means to an end, the perfect person to get closer to Damian.”
Pain jilted in my chest, but I didn’t let it show. “Good to know.”
She took a step into the room. “It all changed. I’m not sure when, but I felt things.” She shuffled on the spot. “I feel things, for you.”
I raised my eyebrows. That looked way more painful than it should have been. “So you’re a witch,” I said, as if somehow it still may not be true.
“Yes.”
“Your parents never really died, did they?”
She shook her head. “My dad did years ago. My mother’s alive.”
“My father killed your sister.”
She nodded, her eyes glossing. “He ripped out her heart.”
I winced. “You said she was light.”
She looked off into the distance. “She was a better person than I.”
“You hurt him in there, with your magic.”
“Yes, but most witches don’t use magic sourced from the underworld,” she explained. “I have dark magic inside of me, but it’s still of this world. Some call it blood magic, but it’s not strong enough to take down my enemies. Magic taken from demons, from the underworld, has no boundaries like normal magic. I can use it to harm others.”
“Witches can’t harm others normally then?”
“No.”
I hadn’t expected that. “But you wanted to harm my father.”
“He also killed my cousin,” she said. “We had to flee our family home and everything we had built. My mother is far from us, suffering. I couldn’t let him continue to get away with murder.”
My head swarmed with questions and flashbacks of my father lying on the floor, beaten and bleeding and offering my life for his. I shook my head as if to scatter my thoughts. “Why doesn’t everyone use the underworld magic then?”
“It does come at a price.” She pressed a finger against her bottom lip. “It takes a toll on the mind. I’ve started falling apart since I’ve been using it, but I had no choice. It’s also how I kept my and my family’s magic from being detected.”
