Page 22 of Claimed By Her Monsters

A Terrible Year

“Alister!”

Doesn’t matter. It’s not them I call for.

It’s him.

“Alister!”

I’m so hot. I’m burning. I don’t understand why the flames won’t listen. They are my friends. I have taken care of them and they of me, but now they sear, scorch, and it hurts so bad. A killing pain.

This isn’t possible.

I’m the Clover Witch.

The birthmark on my wrist shows it, three leaves are filled now, red, black, and green, but the fourth is still pale, empty.

I live forever, but now the light leaves my body. It sags. This broken vessel, hanging uselessly as my eyelashes catch fire, my lips blacken, and my lungs turn to dust.

A stranger is in the mob of people that cheer for my death even though I’ve healed their children, eased their aches, made potions so they could find love.

The stranger has a tall black hat, and his eyes are an abyss lit by a single glowing coal.

That’s how he’s doing it. How he’s burning me, but I’m the Clover Witch.

There are only two others as powerful as me, and they are my mates.

With my final feeble heartbeat I call out to him one last time.

“Alister.”

Back in a haunted mansion, Mick and Caspian watch the black of Alister’s pupils spread to the rest of his eyes, until no blue or white remains. Only black. They shudder when those hollow pits turn to them.

“She calls.”

The three men join hands and form a circle. They are the anchors. This is their job.

“We answer,” they chorus as one.

Ice, snow, sleet. He brings it all to me and lays it over me like the softest, whitest blanket. Until the fire in my heart cools. I open my eyes in my coffin. I sit up and look out over the snowy field where he dug me up. “I’m dead?”

Alister shrugs. “For now, little witch, but in the future where I come from, you already live again.”

We have lived many lives, my loves and I.

Death holds no fear when you have power like ours.

“We are threatened,” I tell him of the Tall Hat Man, and Alister’s pupils turn black.

“My maker. The one who killed me and then made me undead,” he says.

I nod. “It is as I thought.”

“We have waited for this day,” Alister says, “but we must wait some more. He knows you saw him. He will kill you again and again. If he made me, I fear he may kill me too, the final death, and our mate isn’t strong enough yet, here in the years of the pilgrims. We need time.”

“We’ll need armies to defeat him,” I say.

“It’s a good thing we have them, our mate has them.

Covens, packs, tribes, all are ours.” Alister grins, the same smile that has ushered many men into the dark, their blood on the tip of his blade.

I tilt my head as he wavers slightly, reminding me that he’s here with me, but he’s also somewhere else, a different time.

“What future do you come from, Alister?”

I say his name, but others whisper in my ear.

Arav, Aurelius, Augustus, Alexander, Abraham.

So many lives, so many names we have had.

I call him by his truest name. I tell him the truth in my heart. “I love you, Vampire King.”

“And I love you, Clover Witch, Queen of the Witches.”

He takes my hand and brushes his lips over my knuckles, sending a thrill of desire racing through my veins. I want him to take me now, to drain my blood and give it back to me. I will drink from him as well. We are a circle, my mates and I. Never-ending.

Alister reads my expression. A rueful smile.

“No time for that, little one. We must hurry. The gate closes soon. The clock nears midnight.” He grasps both my hands and holds tight.

He shows me a storm-dark room where three men are linked, red pulsing over their heads.

“I have found our fourth mate. I have found you, but asleep in the body of a girl.”

“The fourth leaf of the clover?” I touch a finger to the inside of my wrist where the clover has three leaves in color—red for fire, black for the sea at night, and green for earth—but the fourth remains pale.

“Oh, Alister,” I cry. “Let me see him! Let me have him!”

“He is already yours, little witch.” Alister chuckles. “You have spellbound him, just as you did the rest of us.” He grows sober. “Our fourth mate is young still, weak.”

“We will protect him.” An unyielding need to shield my mates rises in me. My life is theirs and theirs is mine. “I vow it.”

“So fierce, my love.” Alister traces my jaw with a single finger, and I lean into his touch with a sigh. “Now, in this time, it’s not safe for you. Witches are hunted. The Tall Hat Man hunts us too. You must go to sleep so you can come to where I am now and awaken in the girl we call Madison.”

“Madison?”

His smile brims with tenderness. “She is lovely. You are lovely. We love her, you.”

“I will sleep until it’s time,” I tell him, laying down in my bed of satin. “You must slumber, too, at least the parts of you that know of the Tall Hat Man. He can follow fresh memory across time. You must hide.” I lay my palm against my mate’s brow. “I will take the memories.”

He puts his hand on me in the same way. “I will take the memories and the memories of our mates too. Until the day of the storm in the house that’s alive, where we may all awaken together and once again be reunited.”

Before we set loose our magic, we share a single kiss, made sweeter by the knowledge that we leave each other for now, but since we are fate-bound, we never truly part.

The magic flows from one finger to the next until it’s a ring, connecting our hands, connecting our minds. Together, Alister and I speak a single word.

“Sleep.”