Page 10 of Chosen, Eternally

I can’t help my gasp as I stare, wide-eyed, at the woman who raised me. “Aunt Cybbie? How do you know that?”

“Wait, hold on.” Ian glances back and forth between us. “What’s going on?”

“You mean you don’t know?” I ask him.

“Know what?”

With the wave of her hand, Tilly forces all the doors of the meeting room closed, locking them with a spell. The sound of the locks clicking into place reverberates through the room, echoing off the mahogany walls, each click sending shivers down my spine.

“Okay, then,” she says, her voice taking on one of authority. “Someone better start talking. Fast.”

The rest of the council nods, each one with a stern expression on their face.

Heart racing, I glance anxiously between my aunt and Ian, epically confused. “Well, I thought… Aunt Cybil?”

My aunt sighs and rolls her eyes at me. “You really are just as idiotic as your mother, aren’t you? Just as ungrateful, too.”

“I—” I genuinely don’t know what to say.

“Cybil, this is highly irregular,” Jane Winthropp, an old friend of my mother’s, speaks up.

“Oh, shut up , Janie. You and I both know Isobel was a waste of a Protector. We complained enough about it all the time when she was first selected.”

“Still, it isn’t right to speak ill of the dead.”

“Really?” Cybil raises an accusatory brow. “Then why is it that I’ve had to deal with the constant whispers of this entire group since the death of my sister? Why is it that my family isn’t allowed to move on from it?”

“I—” Jane stutters, but drops her eyes to her neatly folded hands in her lap.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “What does any of this have to do with?—”

“Ugh!” Cybil bangs her fists on the table and gets to her feet. “Are you an idiot? I thought I raised you better than that. I was the one who organized James’s abduction with the vampires.”

“ What ?” I screech. “But James’s autopsy shows it was Ian who?—”

“Well, I obviously wasn’t going to write my name, was I? So I used his. Used a bit of olde magic to get Ian to give me all his passwords and such.”

The entire Council is outraged, screaming at Cybil and me and everyone around us.

“You— What ?” Ian gasps.

Meanwhile, I’m on the verge of losing control. And more importantly, I don’t care. My skin is a destructive wildfire, so much so that the chair beneath me begins to smoke, its fabric slowly burning.

“Baby, you need to stop,” James speaks beside me. “You’re going to spontaneously combust or something.”

“I can’t ,” I murmur, seeing literal red. Because I am about to end her.

“Take a breath, Cate. Take a breath and try to focus.”

But I steadily ignore him. Instead, I choose to get to my feet.

Cybil glares at me. “Don’t you dare, you little twit.”

Her words are like a slap across the face. The kind of punch in the gut that knocks the air out of you and leaves you immobilized.

The anger and resentment I feel emanating from my aunt surprises me. In my 29 years of life, I have never felt anything but support from her, and now this?

The fire spreading across my body doesn’t fade, so much as evolve into ice. Every inch of me goes cold.

“Cate,” James whispers again, even though no one can hear him—especially not through all the arguing and yelling.

The rest of the Council members are not happy with Cybil, and they’re making it very known.

“Cate you need to release me from the restraints. She has that look in her eyes. The kind bad people get before they’re about to do bad things. ”

My first instinct is to tell him he’s overreacting. After all, why would my aunt want to harm me? But then I remember she fucking tried to ruin my life and figure he may have a point.

Except… what if this is the moment he loses his soul? What if it disappears when he’s freed from all that makes him good and it’s my fault I let an invisible vampire into our headquarters to murder all the members of our council?

James senses my hesitation. “Baby, I promise. If I turn into some evil monster, kill me, okay? But I have a feeling something bad is going to happen.”

I nod and snap my fingers, releasing him from any restraints or links. For obvious reasons, I keep him invisible.

“THAT’S IT!” Cybil screams over the arguing, bringing me back to the moment.

“I’ve had it with all of you.” With a swipe of her hands and an incantation I’ve never heard of before, in a language I don’t recognize, she ties every member of the Council, including myself, to their chair with ropes that appear out of thin air.

With a second motion, she slaps a Silencing spell on everyone else but me.

“What the hell are you doing?” My world has been turned upside down, and I’m completely lost. These past twenty-four hours have been an absolute roller coaster I definitely want to get off.

“ Fuck ,” James says. “I’m going to take her down. When the moment is right, I’ll take her down.”

“I need to hear what you did, Cybil,” I say, for his benefit and hers. I need him to know to stand down. At least until I hear everything she has to say.

James shoots me a quiet nod and goes to stand by Cybil, ready to take her on when she least expects it.

“I am tired of this family’s reputation being tarnished by the selfish behaviors of its members!

First your mother, and now you. It wasn’t enough to have your mother reject the post of Protector simply because your pathetic father couldn’t accept she was a witch.

No, you had to follow in her footsteps and do the absolute same thing! ”

Tears stream down my cheeks, warming my cool skin. Hearing the woman who raised me say that she was the traitor has left a hole inside my stomach. “What did you do?” I rasp.

She shrugs, nonchalant. “I reached out to one of the leaders of a vampire clan and offered him protection so long as he helped me get rid of James. You were too wrapped up in your childish crush,” she spits out, disgusted.

“This family couldn’t afford another member rejecting this most sacred position.

I mean, why the Magicks picked you two instead of me , someone who is utterly devoted to this cause, is insanity!

So I wanted James dead. I wanted this strong connection to your non-witch life gone—and he was supposed to be.

It wasn’t until early this morning that I got a message from one of the vampires of the clan I worked with saying James had escaped. ”

Cybil scoffs before continuing, flipping her auburn hair over her shoulder.

“I cannot express my rage. He was supposed to be dead! ‘Mangled beyond recognition,’ is what they told me. You don’t need to worry about them, my dear Hecate.

I’ve taken care of them. No one betrays me and gets away with it.

But where is James now? So I can finish him off. ”

“You stay the hell away from him,” I practically growl.

James takes another step toward Cybil, ready to pounce on my command.

In the back of my mind, I admire the poise, strength, and self-control he has to overcome the urge to murder the person who is responsible for having him locked up for over a year.

I would’ve ripped her throat out already. I want to.

Cybil laughs at my outrage. “Is he still human? Or did the vampires turn him? Either way, it doesn’t matter. This will all be over in a minute, and then I’ll find him and kill him myself.”

“I cannot believe you. How could you do that? How could you just stand there and so openly admit to wanting to murder James? He was the love of my life. He was everything to me.”

“Oh, please,” she rolls her eyes at me. “I wanted his death to give you an insatiable hunger for revenge, and it worked. The final push to get you to accept your role. It turned you into a better-than-average Protector.”

“I’m a fucking amazing Protector, you jealous, back-stabbing bitch.”

James grins proudly in my direction, a crooked smile that would otherwise turn my legs to jelly.

Cybil narrows her green eyes at me, not impressed by my vocabulary. “Contrary to what you believe, Hecate, I didn’t do anything new. The witches have secretly worked with the vampires—or used them—many, many times over the years.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She laughs softly. “How else do you think we saved ourselves from the Salem Witch Trials?”