Page 73 of When Bones Whisper
“Of course I do,” she said with a scrunch of her nose and brows. “Everything I do is out of love.”
“That’s not true,” he protested. “You knew how to break my curse, and you didn’t!”
He lunged at her but was forced to his knees by another spell. Zachariah sped beside him alongside Irene, but both of them were quickly paralyzed with just a flick of Gertrude’s fingers, unable to move, rooted to the spot.
A band of tension rippled through the room. She could sense the weight of their power. They were all channeling each other. It ran in a looped current through each of them, but the strongest waves of magic came from Gertrude. Charlotte had never felt anything like it. Her eyes dropped to the dead servants, theirthroats slit, and swallowed thickly. They were using those murders to fuel their magic. The thought made her nauseous.
“The Lysanmore witches needed to be punished,” Gertrude spat as he tried to stand, a sharp edge piercing into her voice. “Keeping you as a vampire was only meant to be temporary so I could siphon what power of theirs was left. Once they were almost extinguished, I would have sacrificed the last to make you mortal again, but you turned on me and destroyed everything I was building. You killed your own family—your aunts, my sisters.”
Nathaniel tore through the spell before the others, standing with hunched shoulders and a rabid expression. “They were compliant in what you were doing.”
“I was protecting us!” she boomed, making the Avery witches flinch. “I was gaining power to stop those who were hunting us, who sought to harm us. Sometimes, sacrifices must be made. Your immortality was one of them, a perfect anchor to bind my spell to keep their souls bound to that graveyard.”
“I know what you did and I may have ruined your plans, but you broke me,” he said in a strained tone, and Charlotte’s heart broke. “You were my mother. You were supposed to put me above everything else.”
“You say this, yet you are the one who snapped my neck,” she said her voice rising an octave, her tone still contained.
“You were animating corpses and killing children to do it.”
Gertrude inhaled sharply. “I was saving hundreds more by doing that. Do you know how many children of witches have been slaughtered because of an association to witchcraft?”
“You aresick.”
“So are you,” a young woman’s voice called out from behind Gertrude. “You speak of our elders' sins when you killed my cousins without mercy. My aunt too,” she pointed at the body on the floor.
Charlotte gazed at the girl who could not have been over nineteen years old, with auburn hair that cascaded down her back, adorned with purple wildflowers. Her features echoed the ghost Charlotte had witnessed in the manor. The spirit they siphoned looked just like her, save for the auburn hair.
In fact, the spirit bore an uncanny resemblance to each of the Avery women.
Her heart palpitated when she glimpsed the family ring on each of their long fingers. Each was engraved with the letter A. It was the same one the ghost wore, which meant the spirit she and Katherine had siphoned was an Avery witch.
Beatrice grabbed the girl's hand when she lifted it, stopping what Charlotte presumed was a spell in progress. “Not now, Josephine. He will get what is coming to him in time.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened as she remembered a snippet from her great-grandmother's journals. If they siphoned the energy from an Avery ghost, then their bloodline would have been able to sense that in the magic. Meaning, even if she hadn’t broken that spell, they would have picked up on the power she andKatherine had infused into the sigil engraved on the door, anyway.
Nathaniel’s voice came back into focus, pulling Charlotte’s attention onto him. “What did you expect?” he asked the Avery girl. “One of your cousins was sent to spy on me and the other tried to paralyze me with a spell.”
“We did what we had to do,” Beatrice chimed in, her voice coarse with pain. “My daughters did not deserve that. You won’t even tell us where their bodies are.”
“So you can consecrate their remains and gain even more power? I don’t think so.”
Beatrice raised her hands as Zachariah almost broke through Gertrude’s spell, paralyzing them, but was pushed back.
“Enough of this,” Gertrude stated. Flickers of disgust ran over her face when she glared at her son. “We are taking the witch.”
“To Hell you are,” he said, planting himself in front of the entrance to the ballroom, the music inside growing louder.
“Then you will know true pain again, son,” Gertrude spat. Intelligible whispers left her lips as a spell landed over Nathaniel, wrenching a scream from him as magic contorted his body with invisible threads, angling his bones until they snapped.
“Stop!” Charlotte yelled, stepping out from her hiding place.
“No!” Nathaniel screamed, grunting through moans, only gasping when she lifted her hands and the spell dissipated, dropping him to his knees.
Gertrude walked to Charlotte with an arrogance only invincibility afforded. “There you are. I’d recognize that Lysanmore frown anywhere,” she told Charlotte. “How lonely you must feel, being the last in your line.”
A pained groan sounded from Nathaniel.
“What have you done to him?”
