Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 115432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
“With me,” he whispered, hugging me. “Dru…ella,” he moaned.
Closing my eyes, I tilted my head and gave in to the feeling completely. My mind soared, all of me relaxed, and it was a different sort of heaven.
“Aren’t you ashamed?”
My eyes snapped open as I knew that voice, but it wasn’t Theseus. I was no longer in the water or with him. I was no longer even in Greece. Instead, I was standing outside of a cabin somewhere in Virginia. The voice was none other than that of Simone Ward, with cuts on her light-brown skin and her brown eyes glistening with some sort of magic.
“I asked you a question!” she yelled at me…but not the vampire me, the witch me, who stared at her in silence from the cabin porch. “Aren’t you ashamed that you, of all people, have become a vampire plaything!”
“Simone—”
“Don’t try to deny it. I can sense him. He’s in there with you now, isn’t he? A vampire, Druella! Our sworn enemies, bastards of nature and magic.”
“Don’t talk about him like that!” I yelled back at her with so much force that all the birds in the trees around us took to the sky. “Just because we’ve been told and taught they are our enemies doesn’t mean they are.”
“No one needed to tell us, Druella! We’ve seen them murder for ourselves!”
“He and his kind do not need to kill. People offer—”
“What choice do they have against a vampire? Do you hear yourself?” I’d never seen Simone look so…so heartbroken, her eyes filled with tears she didn’t let fall and the rage. “Did you forget about what one of their kind did to our parents, to your father—”
“It was not the vampire who did it.”
Wait. What?
“It doesn’t matter!” This time, the earth seemed to quake at the force of her rage as she yelled back. “It doesn’t matter if he didn’t do it. He is a vampire, and vampires drink, kill, and they—”
“And they love,” the witch who was me said softly. “Theseus loves me, and I love him. Vampire, witch, human. I don’t care. No one tells me who I am allowed to love. I can’t even tell myself—”
“Axel will,” Simone sneered, her fist tight. “You think the coven will just let this go? It is forbidden. If you do not stop, you will become our enemy, too.” She stepped closer. “Druella…I’m begging you, if you ever considered me like your sister, please, please stop this.”
“You are not hearing me, Simone! I can’t. I cannot stop my heart, and I cannot ignore it, either. He isn’t the villain! Hear me out!” My voice drifted off as many other witches, seven in total, eight including Simone, began to circle closer to me.
When I looked, they were all the same witches who had attacked Theseus and me at the gallery. A white, red-haired witch with fire, a black man with a scar on his face, and a snake wrapped around his arm.
“As your circle, we must stop you no matter what,” Simone said.
And I was surprised at how calm the witch in me was. “Simone, this is dangerous.”
“Just yesterday, we were all laughing,” the redhead, Faye, said. “If you come with us, Druella, the elders can erase this vampire from your mind, and we can go back to being a family. We all make mistakes. You’re Axel’s niece, the future of our coven, so he’ll forgive you.”
“I do not want to be forgiven by him!” I snapped, lightning striking through the night sky. “The coven is wrong!”
“How have you fallen so far?” The man with the snakes, Jericho, stepped forward. “For thousands of years, this is how it has been, and for as many years until the day of redemption, it will still be done after us. Monsters and mortals cannot coexist.”
“So, it is either you for us, Druella, or you for the monsters,” said the dark-haired woman with one green and one blue eye, matching the eyes of a small cat that sat on her shoulder. I didn’t know her name. But I also remembered seeing her briefly in the national gallery.
“What is your choice?” they asked in unison.
The wind picked up, and I watched as my witch self took a deep breath, looking up to the cloudy sky before smiling as drops of rain began to fall.
“The coven is wrong!”
A snake sprang toward my head, a bolt of lightning toward my stomach, and fire at my back. But it was as if I was watching the world move in slow motion, and everything took way too long to reach me. However, I was still moving at a normal pace, so I turned their attacks back onto them with a snap of my fingers. It was then I realized the witch me had slowed time. Then I released it to flow again, and all of them were thrown, burned, bitten by their own magic, with such ease.