Page 99 of Claimed By Fangs and Darkness

I ran through the events of the past few months, dread growing heavier in my gut.

“I never forgot about you, Evie,” Aster said, delighting in my confusion. He fed off my terror as his eyes lit up. “You conjured storms as a child too.”

What?My traumatized brain was forced further backward through time, a vague sense of recollection arising from the abyss. I remembered my power as a child, the way I’d been punished for it. The way I cried when it rained, the terror of each lightning strike. I’d been scared of storms, yes, but…

Had I been causing them?

No one spoke to me about my magick, only how I could serve the coven. How I could be a good daughter of Lillian and wife to a vampire.

I’d known instinctively to hide my connection to the shadows, the friends who whispered things I wasn’t supposed to know. I knew to hide. I knew to make myself small.

“Everyone said you were dead, that the atrocity must have been the work of one of Lillian’s heretical bastards, but I had my own intuitions,” Aster continued. His thumb caressed my shoulder. “I always knew you were powerful, despite assurances from your mother that you were ever-so-sweet and harmless.” He chuckled.

At the mention of my mother, I felt the color drain from my face.

“The moment I heard about the witch-conjured storm over Etherdale, I had my lead. It was easy to connect the dots from there, given you’d made enemies of some exceedingly vocal and well-connected humans. They were more than willing to blabber on and on about the mysterious girl who showed up with her brother on a woman’s front porch a decade ago. The country accent she’d erased, the frightening nature of her magick.”

Now I was sure I was white as a ghost. The music, lights, and laughter were all suddenly too much. I felt exposed. Or maybe like I was on trial.

“They were going to take me toyou,” I whispered, forcing the words from my lips. I ran through the incident in the woods, the site of my magickal explosion. I thought my identity was safe—neither the born nor the Servant of Lillian seemed to know anything about my past. They treated me like just another chaos witch with clan ties. I studied Aster’s smirk. “You already knew who I was.”

Aster sighed, glancing at the born around us. “You made things rather difficult for me—forus—when you killed some highly esteemed friends of ours. But perhaps I should’ve known better than to let them involve your brother. You were just so untraceable… ”

But I was hardly paying attention to him anymore, my gaze now locked on the girl who watched me with crazed, assessing eyes.

She’d been here in Etherdale because ofme.She’d killed Princeton because ofme.

It wasmyfault Princeton was dead.

“Why would you do that?” I asked, a tremor racking through my voice as I glared at her. “Were you trying to kill me? Is that why you killed him?”

She balked, shaking her head. “I would never kill you, Evie.”

Her voice was sickly sweet, and my intuition slammed into me in a cacophony of warning bells. Something was terribly wrong with all of this, more than I could’ve ever imagined.

“Oh, you just wanted to pluck out my fucking eyeballs?” I asked. Candle flames grew taller, the air turned colder.

A hush fell over the room, and Aster straightened.

The girl’s lower lip trembled, as ifIwere terrifyingher.

She looked to Aster as she spoke to me. “I was only trying to protect you, Evie.”

“You did a very good job, pet,” Aster consoled. He shot me a scolding look, as if I were bringing down the vibes of his tasteful dinner party.

My fists clenched. But still my mind ran in impossible circles, trying to make sense of this twisted web.

What. The.Fuck.

“Just like you protected your brother, right? Was that why you killed your parents?” she asked, her big doe eyes imploring me intently.

“You massacred an entire building full of people,” I spat, horrified. I scanned her for answers the same way she did me.

Juliette reached out a dainty hand as her lips curved. She managed to barely stroke my arm with her long, pink fingernails before I jerked backward and out of her reach.

“It’s not a competition,” she said with a pout. She crossed her arms. “We’rebothspecial.”

“That’s right, kitten,” Aster said. “You’re bothveryspecial girls.”