Page 102 of Bewitched By a Vampire

Night staggered backwards, breathing hard as he looked at his shoulder and saw the shard of glowing blue ice protruding from it. He growled through his clenched teeth as he stabbed his left sword into the earth, gripped the icy blade and yanked it free of his flesh. Fiery pain throbbed in his shoulder as he cast the shard away from him and he struggled to focus through it.

“Night,” Lilian breathed and a wall of shimmering glyphs appeared before him, between him and the witches.

She sounded strained, as tired as she felt on his senses, but there was something else in her voice too.

Shock? Fear?

He swallowed hard and pressed his left hand to his shoulder, and looked for the witch who had hurled the ice spear at him, stopping him from claiming his prize.

He stilled right down to his breathing.

Perhaps it was both of those emotions he had heard in Lilian’s voice, feelings that flowed through him as he stared at the blonde witch before him.

He stared into the witch’s hazel eyes, unable to believe his.

Jana.

The witch who had tried to claim his head asherprize.

Chapter 28

Lilian recognised the two new witches. Not because she had met them before, but because she had seen them in Night’s memories.

The blonde with the hazel eyes had been the one to almost kill him. Lilian thought her name was Jana. She definitely remembered the name of the other witch. It had been clear in Night’s memories, as if the pain and grief of the moment, and the eternal fire of his rage had seared it on his mind.

Karlotta stood beside Jana, looking exactly as she had the night she had killed Franz, only her black hair was shorter now, barely reaching her jaw.

Night grabbed his second sword and gripped the hilts so hard his knuckles burned white, and Lilian closed ranks with him. She gently touched his arm and focused, using some of her remaining strength to summon a healing spell and funnel it into him. His eyebrows knitted and his jaw flexed, and she wanted to apologise for hurting him. It was necessary. The spell would knit the worst of his wounds back together. She wasn’t strong enough to fully heal him, had to hold back and not use all of her magic, but she could take away the worst of his pain for him, so it wouldn’t be a distraction in the fight ahead.

The sculpted planes of his face hardened as he stared the two witches down, his shock subsiding at the same rate as it did in Lilian. Rage burned through her too as she pieced together what he probably had.

Jana and Karlotta had been the witches who had ‘witnessed’ his brother near Lilian’s coven’s house in Germany.

They had turned another coven against him.

They had set him up.

She could only think of one reason why. They wanted revenge for what he had done, wanted to stop him from constantly hunting them, and they weren’t strong enough to face him alone, so they had killed all the witches in the house in Germany and had then pretended Bastian had been there, all so her coven would target him.

And Night.

Apparently, Grave wasn’t the only vampire in their family who had made a powerful enemy who now wanted to wipe out his bloodline and everyone he cared about.

The two witches hadn’t only set Night and his family up. They had set her up too in a way. She had come dangerously close to being owned by Bastian because of them and had almost been killed by her own coven.

Jana didn’t look pleased as she stared at her.

Why?

Lilian guessed this hadn’t been part of the plan.

Jana had wanted Night to end up alone, at the mercy of witches, but he wasn’t. She might not be as powerful as Beatrice or Petra and Maryon. She probably wasn’t as powerful as Jana and Karlotta. But she was going to fight.

This wasn’t going to go anything like how Jana had envisaged.

Lilian wasn’t going to let these witches take Night from her.

She was going to give him the revenge he needed instead.