Page 68 of Bitten & Burned

“You’re going to kill me dead no matter what; might as well get something out of it. Go ahead. Kill me and she’ll never know what I know.” Rellin’s eyes were round and focused on Vael, but somehow, unseeing. As if he were looking into the distance behind Vael. At me.

If he wasn’t going to give us the information without it, I could bear him looking at me.

I hoped.

I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders, stepping into the light.

Rellin grinned a broken, toothy smile and started yanking on his chains again. He let out a low moan that made me feel sick.

“Gods, you’re so clean, I bet you’d taste so sweet. I’d leave marks on you wherever I touched you… just like your bloodsuckers…”

“Rellin—” Vael squeezed, and Rellin coughed, sputtered.

“Fine, fine… I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he rasped.

I nodded once.

“We mark what’s ours; when it’s got our mark, we touch the brand on our wrists and it tells us where it is. The marked thing. We can smell it. All of us. It bleeds. And it’s ours.”

The last word sounded wet. I ignored that. “So what, Drummond’s got one on him? One that controls mine?”

“No, no, no, no, not him, “Rellin laughed. “He wouldn’t put somethin’ so dirty on his skin, no. He’s got it on somethin’ else.”

“On what?” Vael asked.

But I was already thinking. Remembering.

“Told you, I dunno,” Rellin replied.

“The amulet?” Vael mused.

“No, I replied. “He’s got a stone. Small. He kept it in his pocket. It must be that. Quil destroyed the amulet. And even so, I was the one wearing it, not him, so it wouldn’t have helped him track me. There’s no way it was making me bleed.”

“And you are bleeding so good for us,” Rellin growled, smacking his lips obscenely. “You smell like mine… let me touch her, please just once…”

Vael shook him once, and he shut up.

“How do you get it off?” I asked.

Rellin started laughing salaciously. I rolled my eyes.“The sigil, Rellin. How do you get rid of it?”

He laughed again, but this one couldn’t be considered an innuendo at all; it was mean. Ugly. Loud.

“Answer me,” I hissed.

Vael shook him again. “In Camarae’s umbral name, you will answer her.”

“You don’t get rid of it, throat-slut. You are ours now. Forever. Once you’re marked, you’re marked. You’re ours forever. Forever, forever, forever.”

I blinked, panic rising in my chest like gas, but this wasn’t escaping. It was bloating. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Like I couldn’t see. Or think.

I stumbled backward, ran for the door. I raced to the stairs and I didn’t stop until I reached the top. I could still hear Rellin laughing at me.

“You’re ours! Forever, bloodbride, OURS!”

A sharp crack filled the room, and then there was nothing. No sounds but my blood rushing in my ears and my own breathing.

He was gone. Vael killed him.

I sniffed hard and leaned against the wall for support.

Vael caught up to me, his hand on my arm. “Rowena…”

“No…” I yanked my hand away. “No, I can’t… no…”

“I killed him; he won’t speak to you or look at you again.”

“Good,” I said, nodding. “That’s just one. I want them all gone.”

“We’ll do it, Witchling. We will.” He reached for my hand again, and I let him have it, but tears began to drip out unbidden. I used my other hand to violently wipe them away.

“I feel like…” I let out a frustrated cry. “Like such an idiot… gods, I’ve been researching this for months. Working so hard to-to-to try and figure this out. Working hard beside Silas, and he knew, he knew there was no cure!”

“Rowena… please calm down…”

“Calm down? Calm down? You shouldn’t be so calm, Vael. You should be furious. Why aren’t you furious? He’s been wasting our time… And for… and for…” I couldn’t even get it out.

“I am, but it does no good to scream, Rowena. To cry. We’ll get through this.”

“You’ll get through it,” I shouted. “But I will have to live with this godsdamned sigil until I die. I’ll have it there as a constant reminder that I am nothing but a pretty face and a potential hole to fuck, because that is all anyone sees when they look at me!”

“Rowena!” Vael flinched at my words, but I yanked my hand away, turning towards the conservatory. I stomped away, feeling the floorboards quake and my sigil pulse with pain as it radiated up my leg and into my hip.

I stopped to scream. To grip my hair and sob.

“I have to be in pain because some man wanted me? I’m in pain forever because a man wanted me? Do you know how fucked up that is?” I shrieked.

“Rowena… darling please…” Vael wasn’t alone now; Anton and Quil were with him, Quil’s eyes wide, Anton looking as if he wanted to reach for me.

“I am a person, I am a godsdamned person, and I am not a prize, I’m not a thing, a trophy to put on a shelf.

I am more than a pretty face, I am… I’m me, I’m me, and he took that.

He dared to take that from me because he wanted me?

” Tears were running freely now. “How are my life and my autonomy less important than some old man’s prick?

Huh? Answer me that, Vael. You’ve got all the answers. Tell me that!”

I could see the conservatory, so I hurried off towards it, tripping over a stone tile and banging my elbow on the door as I got there.

A few stacks of parchment lay on my desk. Months and months of research on runes, on sigils, on blood magic. All of it was a testament to what Silas Drummond had taken from me.

I took the stacks over to the fire and began to throw them. I crumpled each page and tossed them first one by one, then increasingly frantically, into the fire. I threw some so hard that sparks flew out onto the rug, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care.

I was broken forever because a man wanted to fuck me and couldn’t. And Vael wanted me to calm down?

I was cut off from my goddess because a man wished to own me. Inera, save me, I couldn’t bear this.

“Rowena, stop this at once, you are more than this!” Vael stalked over and held onto the stack of papers with his hand so I couldn’t throw more of them into the fire.

“Am I, Vael? Am I? Because right now I feel like this ball of anger and rage, and this is what the anger and rage want, Vael! They want it all to burn!”

“You’re allowing him to take your humanity from you, Rowena, don’t do this,” he pleaded as I yanked the papers from him again. The others were at the door. The bond was chaos. Everyone wanted different things. I knew what I wanted.

“My humanity? My humanity?” I screeched, throwing another stack of paper into the fire.

“My humanity is tied up in pain. Forever in pain. I feel it always, Vael. Always, and it will never ever go away. And you want me to roll over and take it? Easy for you when you don’t have this…

” I whipped up my skirt to show him the sigil, blood dripping down my leg.

“... To deal with. And you never will.” I tore more paper free and tossed it into the fireplace. Freeing. All of it. Freeing.

He set his jaw. “Witchling. I love you. I will never understand what you’re going through, but you must stop this. Please. You’re going to hurt yourself more. You’re going to burn yourself or worse, so please. I don’t want to restrain you, but I will.”

“No, you won’t,” I hissed, tossing in the rest I had in my hands. “You will not.”

“What’s going on?” Cassian stood at the door.

“She’s destroying her work because Rellin told her there’s no cure for this sigil, that it’s never going away. So she’s having a…” Vael trailed off.

“A perfectly sanctioned and understandable breakdown,” Anton filled in. “Let her be.”

“She’s… Vael’s right, she might hurt herself,” Quil added. “I don’t think restraining her is the answer, though.”

“She doesn’t need restraining,” Dmitri said calmly. “She needs someone to hear her.

“Believe me, we’re all hearing her,” Vael snapped.

“Enough,” Cassian said, his voice drowning Vael’s. “Stop snarling at each other and listen.”

I turned to Vael. “You haven’t listened to a thing I said,” I croaked. “You’ve only heard how loud I am.”

“We’re listening, darling,” Anton assured me. “We just want to help.”

“You… you can’t…” I sobbed, tears blurring my face as I grabbed another stack of paper and tossed it into the fire.

“I wasted my time. These are months of my life. Those are gone. You don’t get it.

Because you have all the time in the world for anything you want to do.

I don’t. And I wasted months of it researching something that would always be a dead end.

Just marking time while I thought I was marching forward.

Because someone I trusted hurt me irreparably.

And now, the rest of my life… is just… this.

It’s this. It’s pain and it’s this, and it will never end. ”

“Oh sweetheart…” Quil pushed forward, walking up beside me just as my knees gave out.

I clung to him as he took us down to the floor in front of the fire.

It roared behind him, but I was pressed to his front, small and safe.

“Sweetheart…” He pressed his lips to my forehead, and I felt seen.

Held. He didn’t try to fix it. He got it. He understood.

It was Anton who spoke next.

“Why don’t you let one of us turn you?” he asked, the words soft, but hitting me hard anyway.

It wasn’t as if Vael and I hadn’t discussed this a million times. But my answer had always been the same.

“No,” Vael said bluntly. “That’s not an option.”

“Why not?” Anton asked. “We were all thinking it.”

“Not all of us,” Vael said softly.

“I don’t want to be a vampire,” I said softly, my voice thick with tears and snot. “I want to be me.” I sobbed into Quil’s shirt.

“Alright then,” Anton said, pausing to breathe. “What next?”

“Well, the bond extends her life,” Cassian said. “She’s not immortal, but she’ll live longer than most humans.”

Oh gods, they don’t understand. Not at all.

My shoulders shook, and Quil spoke, his voice rumbling against where my ear was pressed to his chest.

“It’s not the same, Cassian,” he said. “She’s telling us what’s wrong, and you’re telling her to shift focus.

It’s not the number of years she has left; it’s that these months were taken from her, and the future she planned for is gone.

We can’t fix it.” He said, his voice thick with guilt. “We can just… hold her through it.”

A sob tore out of me as I fisted my hands more tightly in his shirt. Because gods, yes. Exactly that. The tension eased out of my shoulders.

There was a long moment where nothing happened, and then… everything happened. Quil held me, and I turned to watch the rest of them.

Cassian took the poker and began to poke back the fire, taming it as it devoured my useless research.

Vael, for all his posturing, walked around the room and picked up all the fragments that I’d dropped and tossed those into the fire, too. I knew it must have hurt him to do so, but he was doing it because it’s what I wanted.

“We need wine,” Anton said softly, turning and walking swiftly down the hall to the wine cellar.

And Dmitri slid down to the ground beside me and Quil. His big hand smoothed up and down my back as I burrowed against Quil.

My entire world had shifted with one sentence. The future I had wanted was nothing but ash, like the fragments of my research in the fireplace. It was gone, never to return, and useless before that anyway.

I knew, deep down, that Inera wasn’t gone, but it would be so much harder to reach her now. It used to be second nature, but now I’d have to work. And try.

I would never go back to walking ruins by myself; I’d always have to have attendants or other help. I couldn’t plan my days because, if this continued to flare up, continue to hurt for the rest of my life… how could I ever make plans?

Normal wasn’t normal anymore. And I didn’t know what to do with that.