2 Witch and Famous (18 page)

“Now, Elle, you know you shouldn’t ask a lady her age.” She nodded to the goblins. “Take her.”

The goblins dragged and shoved me down a dark corridor that smelled of damp earth and mold. One of them opened a locked door with an old-fashioned key before they threw me into the oubliette. Literally threw me. They shoved me down a slippery slope on which I couldn’t keep my footing as I fell into darkness.

Though I dropped to my hands and knees and scrabbled for any handhold or foothold I could find, I still slid. The slope fell away into the looming darkness, and then I sailed off an edge, gasping in fear as I touched nothing. I was in free-fall. As I dropped, in that moment, I was hanging in the air. I had a moment to think about the landing that might be waiting for me. Would I break my neck or other body parts? Any broken bone would be bad down here. Were there sharp things at the bottom? Carnivorous beasts? The unknown terrified me as much as the fall itself.

It wasn’t some hundred-foot shaft, though. Truthfully, I hadn’t expected it would be. Only my fear had tried to tell me that. Instead, I quickly crunched into a hard floor, groaning as I hit it, my breath going out of me. My arms and legs scraped on the stone of the floor, bruising but thankfully not breaking. Around me, it was pitch black.

“I’m going to kill Victoria for this,” I said aloud, although that wasn’t true. I was going to kill her for everything
else
she’d done. For Jessica Hammersmith’s murder, for making me suspect Niall. For the look on Siobhan’s face as she saw Dougie lying dead on the floor of that throne room.

 “Elle?” Niall’s voice came out of the dark, not far from me. “Elle, is that you?”

My heart leapt.

“Niall! It’s me,” I said. “I came to get you. To save you. But they got me. Victoria got me.”

For the longest time, Niall was silent. I sat down in the dark, waiting for him to answer. Wanting to know how badly I had messed things up, back when I’d accused him of murder.

After a while though, Niall laughed. “You really came all the way down here to save me?”

“Yes. Um… it probably hasn’t worked out as well as I would have liked.”

“Victoria has used me to trap you.” This time, I could feel the regret coming off Niall.

“I know about what Victoria did. All of it, I think.” I thought back to what Victoria had said about him going to her to try to warn her off. To him hunting her on the walls of Edinburgh Castle. “Why didn’t you just tell me all this?”

Niall didn’t answer for a moment. “I never wanted you to know about her. I thought I could deal with this. Drive her away before she got close to you. I thought that if you ever learned about Victoria and the things we had done together, I would lose you. I worried that if you learned about her, you might let her get control of your life, too.”

“But if you’d told me, I might have avoided all of this.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” Niall took a shuddering breath, there in the darkness. “I was barely twenty when I succumbed to her. She was so glamorous. So beautiful. She became my teacher, my lover, everything. I couldn’t see beyond her. What Victoria said was the truth, to me. How could it be anything else?”

“What did she teach you?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. I’d seen the contents of the box Niall kept locked away. I knew what Victoria wanted to teach
me
.

“She taught me to kill,” Niall said. “Not every time. Not even most times. But she taught me that it didn’t matter if my prey died. She taught me to use people. To get as much from them as possible and then discard them. The first time I killed, I didn’t even know that feeding might do so. Victoria was there beside me, urging me on, and it just felt so right.”

“Was that why you went to so much trouble to find me?” I asked. “You thought I needed a teacher?”

Niall paused. “Yes. Although I stayed for very different reasons.”

Love. We both knew it.

“After I killed the first time, I panicked. I ran. I fled the scene. Young and impressionable, I had let Victoria make me into a killer. Yet, where else could I run but to her? She hid me, for a time, and then imprisoned me, telling me she could only protect me if I gave her what she wanted. If I gave in to what she wanted me to be. What do you think I did, Elle?”

 “You married her. I saw the ribbon.”

“Handfasted for a year. I did that because it was the least I could get away with. Victoria accepted, because she assumed that with me bound to her for a year, she would soon be able to make me hers in truth.”

“She kept you killing,” I guessed.

Through the darkness, I couldn’t see Niall’s expression, but I could feel him. I could feel the pain.

“She kept me killing. She used me to help control people. She told me again and again that they didn’t matter. That they were too short-lived to matter. I so nearly believed her. I so nearly became what she was.”

“But you didn’t,” I said. “You cut the ribbon.”

“No. I fled her when I could. Ever since, though, I have been frightened. I knew that she would pursue me eventually.”

“She’s very strong.”

“She is ancient.”

“How ancient?”

Niall sighed. “You don’t want to know. I’m not even sure
I
know, not really. She…she would talk about the past sometimes, so long ago that it seemed ancient, and she would talk about it as though it was yesterday.”

“She’s that old?” I asked.

“She is so old that the rest of the world doesn’t seem real to her,” Niall said. “So old that human lives seem like those of mayflies. You wouldn’t hesitate to squash a mayfly.”

I thought I understood. Victoria wasn’t evil, not in her own mind. She was simply so terrifyingly old that no one but her
mattered
anymore. They didn’t seem real, the way she was. And because of that, she did things that
were
evil. Undeniably so.

I moved over in the direction Niall’s voice had come from. I could feel him there, too. I reached out until I could feel his skin against my hands, then sat down beside him.

“Niall, I’m sorry. So very sorry that I ever doubted you. I thought, I felt…”

“I know, Elle.” And that was the thing about what we were. He
would
know. He would always know what I was feeling. How much I loved him. Just as I could feel the love coming from Niall then. It was hard to believe that we could both feel that and still end up so far apart.

“I didn’t understand what you were facing,” I said. “I didn’t understand why you couldn’t tell me the truth.”

“All that does not matter now,” Niall whispered, close to me.

“It matters to me. I should never have suspected you. I accused you of being a killer.”

Niall’s hand brushed my arm. “I am a killer. I have killed. I told you that. It doesn’t go away.”

I swallowed. “But you didn’t kill Jessica, you didn’t kidnap Rebecca’s people. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.”

Niall paused, just briefly. “I made it very easy for you to accuse me. From the start, I could have told you about Victoria. I could have told you how I have been running from her. We could have dealt with this together. Perhaps, we could have battled her together.”

I leaned against him in the dark. I needed that contact just to know that someone else was there. “Why didn’t you tell me? All of this?”

“I did not want the past ruining things here in the present,” Niall said.

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t want to parade all of my painful mistakes in front of you. I wanted it to fade into the background. Pretend it never happened. Now, it has come full circle again, with Victoria. She has made me her prisoner again.”

“I could have helped you, Niall.”

“Maybe. But it wasn’t just that. I’ll admit, I felt like I owed Victoria something. She was my mentor. She taught me, from the time when I was young. I did not wish to see her killed. I feared her. I loathed what she did to me, yet she brought out my powers and taught me how to use them. I hoped that I could deal with this without her being hurt.”

I could understand that. Even when I had thought Niall was a murderer, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to simply kill him. “I don’t blame you. But I could have helped.”

“I know you would have, but I feared that in the process, she would hurt you. I knew she would find the thought of you irresistible. I thought she might even be jealous.”

“Jealous? Of me?” I found that hard to believe. Victoria was old, powerful, beautiful, dangerous.

“Of you,” Niall said. “Because you are everything that she is, and you are more. You are better than her in so many ways. And you hold my heart completely, totally. You have held it since the moment we met, without ever needing to force me to your side.”

“I love you, too,” I whispered, my lips managing to find his despite the blackness. For long moments, we were caught up in our reunion of kissing and holding each other.

Eventually though, I had to ask him the obvious question. “What’s going to happen to us here?”

“Nothing,” Niall answered after too long a pause. “That is the point. We have been abandoned here to darkness and regret and shattered dreams.”

I didn’t bother trying to look around. “A prison cell with no way out.”

“Exactly. In the past, long before even I was born, they would throw prisoners into deep cells and leave them in the dark, throwing food down if they remembered. Leaving them to starve if they did not.” Niall laughed bitterly. “I fear Victoria was more than a little upset that I would not join her again. Not by her side. Not in her bed.”

I caught the drift of that. “She wants your support back in
every
way?”

“Of course she does. It would be proof to her that I was obedient once more. What did she say to
you
?”

“Victoria said something about teaching me what I was.” Just the thought of those words scared me. “She said they would throw someone down here with me when I was hungry enough.”

“As I said,” Niall said, “they would throw down food when they remembered. And once we are starving, we will not be able to stop ourselves.”

I understood then. “She wants to make us kill. She means to starve us until we are willing to kill to survive.”

“That’s right. Just as she did to me. After all, once we have killed, how big a step would it be to doing anything else she wanted?
Anything
else.”

Because what else would be left for us? Victoria had already shown me what I would do when I was hungry at the club. I had fed on the bartender through simple instinct. I had no illusions about what might happen if she left me down here long enough. Would killing break me? Would she leave us down here long enough to turn us into something barely human? Would she eventually come for us like some kind of angel to lift us up, so that we would fall at her feet and beg to help her?

“She is relentless.” Niall’s voice almost broke. “She is old enough to have learned patience, too. She will keep us hungry enough that we will kill and kill.”

I thought of all the steps on the road here. All the manipulation. “All of this, just to get us here?”

 “Not
us
, Elle.
You.
Victoria could have tried to lure me back at any point in the last hundred years. But she didn’t. She left me alone until you came into my life. Only then, once she learned what you are and guessed at your power, did she become relentless in pursuing me again. She used me to get to you. At best, I am a bonus to her. An opportunity to express her…displeasure at being abandoned.”