The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1676: A Seed Stirs (Part Two)

Ashlynn woke up screaming.

"Jocey, nooo! Nyri, help me save her!"

The sound tore out of her throat, raw and ragged in the dark of the room, and she came out from under the furs clawing at her own chest with both hands, certain she would find her ribs pried open and the roots still feeding, certain her fingers would close around the wet pulse of her own exposed heart.

But there was nothing. Her chest was whole beneath her nightclothes. Her ribs were sound. There was no blood on her hands, no coppery blood on her tongue, only the cold sweat that had soaked through to the furs and the wild thundering of her own heart, beating so hard and so loud that for one terrible moment she couldn’t feel the echo of Nyrielle’s pulse within her at all.

It was only a dream, she told herself, dragging in a breath that shook on its way down. It wasn’t real. Killing Owain had freed her from one set of nightmares, but her unresolved feelings for the sister who’d betrayed her left her shackled to entirely different ones.

Beside her, Jocelynn slept on, untouched and unpierced, her breathing long and even, one hand still curled beneath her cheek the way it had been when sleep first took her. She was safe and whole, and Ashlynn could have wept at the sight of her.

It was amazing that Jocelynn had slept through her panicked scream, but then, after everything her sister had been through in the past several weeks, now that she finally had a moment of peace, perhaps it was only natural for her to sleep like the dead.

"I love you, Jocey," Ashlynn whispered as she reached out to tuck her sister back under the blankets and the furs, only to be interrupted as someone else spoke.

"You always were a terrible liar, Ashlynn," a voice came from the foot of the bed. A voice that sounded exactly like her own.

Ashlynn went still the way a hare goes still in the shadow of a hawk. Someone was standing in the dark between the bed and the dying fire. Someone of her own height and shape, standing with a posture similar to the one Ashlynn adopted when she watched Nyrielle sleep. Only this time, the person standing over her held their head at an angle that gave their gaze a crueler, predatory aspect that felt alien on such a familiar figure.

It took several moments for Ashlynn’s eyes to make out the details in the gloom, but when she did, the air in her chest froze, and her heart skipped a beat.

It was made of olive wood. Pale silver-grey and close-grained, polished as smooth as the finest works of the Heartwood Clan and carved into the exact shape of Ashlynn herself, down to the fall of her hair and the line of her jaw.

Where its eyes should have been, there were only two dark hollows, as empty and vacant as the Void, but when Ashlynn met its gaze, she felt a horrible, piercing cold settle over her, as if the Olive-Ashlynn could read her thoughts and knew her heart.

"You can tell yourself it was only a dream," the Olive-Ashlynn said in a voice that might have sounded like her own, but possessed a slow, patient cadence that didn’t match with Ashlynn’s own crisp Blackwell accent.

"You can even tell yourself that you love her," the wooden woman said, her voice dripping with disdain. "But I am the thing you grew. I know what I was made for, even if you won’t let yourself remember. I know the truth that lies in your heart, and you cannot escape it, no matter how much you wish to."

"You’re not real," Ashlynn whispered. Her mouth had gone completely dry, and she felt like it had been stuffed with ash, but she forced herself to speak anyway and to defy the vision that had intruded on her moment of hard-won peace.

"You haven’t even been planted," Ashlynn said, accepting for a moment that it might be the will of the seed within her chest. "You’re still only a seed against my heart, you can’t..."

"I am closer to you than anything has ever been." The wooden thing tilted its head, and the gesture was so precisely her own that Ashlynn’s skin crawled across her bones. "You carried me against your heart for weeks, Ashlynn. You fed me every night. Do you remember what you fed me on the nights you couldn’t sleep? Shall I remind you?"

For a moment, the word twisted around her, and suddenly, Ashlynn wasn’t in the warm bed lying next to her sister anymore. She was lying in the cold, wet earth as rain poured down on her and heavy, sodden shovel-fulls of earth fell on her from above. Yet this time, as she stared up out of the muddy, shallow grave, she saw the figure of her sister standing over her, smiling sweetly and waving before her world went black.

Then the world shifted, and for a brief, frozen moment, she stared across the blood-splattered ice at the body of Adrus, one of her first Eldritch friends, before she felt a pair of small hands pushing against her and she plunged beneath the ice while massive, powerful hands dragged her down toward the frozen depths. Once again, Jocelynn watched from the edge of the ice, waving to her sister as the pressure of the water forced the air from her lungs.

Ashlynn emerged from the water gasping only to lose her breath again as fists rained down on her body. This time, she’d returned to the bedchamber she’d been meant to share with Owain as the man she married pummeled her to the brink of death. Only this time, as she lay beaten and broken on the floor, she watched Jocelynn walk up to her husband, wrapping her arms around him and smiling sweetly up at that perfect, charming face.

"Thank you, my hero," Jocelynn said sweetly. "Now, we can be together, the way we were always meant to be..."