2 Witch and Famous (23 page)

“Everything went fine, David.”

I hadn’t gone very far with any of them. Never much more than a simple kiss, yet even so, everything about my upbringing told me that I should feel awful waves of guilt, not the faint euphoria that was actually there when I looked down into myself. I could tell myself that this was wrong as much as I liked, but Victoria had been right about one thing: this was what I was. I couldn’t deny the hunger, any more than I could simply leave Niall as he was.

I could control how I fed that hunger though. There was no blood. No manipulation. I didn’t have to kill people. I didn’t have to turn them into the kind of empty, easily cowed shells Victoria left. I certainly hadn’t been about to feed on the people I had only just saved from her. That would have been, not just hypocritical, but simply evil. They hadn’t had enough energy left for it to be safe. And truthfully, if I had tried to feed on them and they let me, I would have had no way of knowing if they were really doing it freely, or just because Victoria had broken them so much that they thought it was normal.

“And you’re okay, Miss Chambers?” the driver asked.

I nodded. “I’m okay, David.”

At least in the club, I knew that the people around me had wanted the little I gave them, even if they hadn’t known about what I took from them in return. I’d even sent a faint pulse of happiness through the place, lightening the mood a little, turning it into what would probably be a great night for everyone there. It had seemed more than fair.

David drove me back to Niall’s place at a sedate speed. We had quite a welcoming committee. Marie and Kelly were there, obviously, because where else would they be? They obviously cared enough about Niall as an employer to want to make sure he was safe. Both they and David had offered to let me take energy from them for this. I’d only refused because I knew Niall needed more than they could provide. I’d already taken too much from all three of them in the past few weeks.

Fergie was there. Partly, he was there to make sure no one attacked Niall’s house or staff while I was gone. Mostly though, he was there because Marie was. I noted that they were holding hands. That was good. She’d seen him nearly transforming, seen the worst of him, and it hadn’t ruined things for them. She’d just accepted it. Things might have been a lot easier for Niall and me in the last few days if I’d been able to do the same.

Finally, Siobhan was there. Well, she didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I couldn’t just leave her. I doubted that things would be safe for her back Underneath. I’d felt the resentment that had followed us out of the goblins’ home. The anger. I didn’t want that coming down on her just because she’d helped me.

“Is there any change?” I asked them.

Marie shook her head. “Everything’s the same as when you left.”

I nodded. I hadn’t expected anything else. I went upstairs to Niall’s bedroom. He looked almost angelic, laid out on the bed like some pale, golden-haired sleeper. He looked so much more innocent like that than he did while awake. I paused, thinking back to what I’d just done. Sometimes, innocence wasn’t what the world needed.

It was time.

I leaned over him, bringing my lips to his. I kissed Niall softly as he slept, and as I kissed him, I pushed my newly taken power into him. He’d done it for me, when I was just learning how to feed, and then again in Victoria’s oubliette. Now, I was the one who shared my power with him. I gave him energy the way someone might breathe oxygen into a drowning man. Second by second, I breathed power into him, letting it drain out of me like water from a dam. I kept going until I didn’t have anything left to give. I stopped just short of draining myself into unconsciousness.

Niall gasped underneath me, his eyes flickering open. I hugged him hard enough that he actually groaned in pain and I jumped back.

“You’re alive. Niall, you’re alive!”

He grimaced. “I really hope that way of putting it, doesn’t mean you’ve just done something unfortunate involving a lightning rod and a very big lever, Elle.”

I smiled at that. “This one was more Sleeping Beauty than Frankenstein.”

Niall’s hand went to his lips. He half closed his eyes. “You fed me. Yet to do that, you must have...”

“I’d do a lot more than that to save you.” I couldn’t help staring at him.  

“Everything, in its own time.” Niall took my hand, kissing the inside of my wrist right where the pulse was thrumming. “Thank you, Elle. I can guess how hard it was to do.”

I swallowed. I knew there were things I needed to say. That we both needed to say. “I’m going to stop running from what I am.”

“That’s good.”

This wasn’t going to be all one way though. “But you need to tell me things, Niall.”

Niall smiled. “I’ll try. I suspect we both will. Speaking of telling things, what did I miss?”

“Victoria is dead.”

I caught the small flash of pain there as I said it. I could understand that. The past didn’t suddenly go away simply because of the present.

“You’re sure?” Niall asked.

I shrugged. “I didn’t see the body, but I dropped half a cavern ceiling on her, Niall. Stalactites. I don’t care how old she was, or how powerful she was, she isn’t coming back from that. No one could.”

“You’re probably right,” Niall said.

“Probably?”

“Probably.”

“And I burned the hand fasting ribbon in front of her. I wanted her to be clear about that part before I killed her.”

He leant up to kiss me. “Does this mean I’m all yours now?”

I sighed. “Did I mention that you’re a lot less trouble when you’re asleep?”

Niall just kissed my hand again. “What else?”

“Well, we’ve given some of Victoria’s coven victims to Rebecca to help. That has at least shown her that we’re trying to save people. It might get her off our backs for a while. Oh, and we’ve acquired a goblin.”

“That little thief of yours?” Niall asked, looking suddenly concerned. “Elle, I know most of my more valuable pieces are no longer in the house, but even so…”

“Relax,” I told him. “Siobhan will be coming home to my place, not your home and not my office. She can have the sofa. Maybe she can help out around my office during work hours. She needs to do something with Dougie dead, or it will eat her up.”

“The goblin boy died?”

I nodded slowly. “Victoria had him killed, to punish Siobhan for associating with me…with us.”

“And you need to help her now because you feel guilty.” Niall obviously caught my expression. Or just felt what I was feeling. It wasn’t exactly easy to keep anything from him. “I’m not saying that it is wrong to help her, Elle. I’m saying that you should not feel guilty. Victoria did what she chose to do. You could not have changed that, even if you had known.”

I knew it was true, but even so, there was a part of me that wished I had killed her when I first met her. “I need to help Siobhan. She has no one else and she helped me. If it weren’t for her, I probably wouldn’t have found you down there.”

Niall sat up, stretching back against the bedstead. “I love that about you. That, even for goblins, you can manage such moments of compassion.”

I found myself thinking of Victoria, and the way she’d thought about people and manipulated them.

“Does it get harder, as you get older?” I asked him. “Does it get harder, when they don’t ever seem to live as long as you do? Does it ever feel like no one else really matters?”

Niall looked at me for several seconds. “You’re asking me if you’ll ever wake up one day and find that you have turned into Victoria?”

I nodded. I had a lot of fears for the future. The coven. What Niall and I would do. What the goblins might do once they recovered from the damage to their home. That fear, though, was worse than all of them.

He shrugged eloquently. “I do not know what to tell you. It could happen. It could happen to me. I can’t tell you for sure what the future will hold. I will tell you that I would bet against the sun coming up before I bet on you becoming her. You’re two different people. I can’t see you on a throne making people, or goblins, come to you on bended knee.”

“But you can’t know.”

“I know,” Niall insisted. “It wasn’t age that made Victoria like that, though I suppose it might have helped. It was who she was. She has never been any different.”

“You’re sure?” I asked, because that was one thing I couldn’t face. Niall had only known her for a hundred years or so. He couldn’t truly say what Victoria had been like when she was young.

I didn’t want to end up like her. I didn’t want to think, a hundred years from now, that people didn’t matter. That they would just be my slaves or my meals. I thought about what she had said, about being powerful when Rome first came to Britain. Had something happened back then to make her the way she was? It was impossible to know.

“You won’t be like her,” Niall assured me. “I won’t
let
you. Just as I hope that you won’t allow me to become that, either. I felt betrayed up on the walls of the castle, but looking back…looking back, there is a part of me that is glad you were prepared to do that.”

“I’m just sorry I got things so wrong,” I said.

“It’s done now. It’s over. Victoria is gone.”

I nodded, although I think we both knew that things wouldn’t be that simple. Victoria had used her powers to improve her place with the goblins, but did I really believe that it was just her powers that had them on her side? No. I didn’t know how many of the goblins it was, or how strongly they felt it, but at least some of them wanted to get back into the daylight world. That wasn’t going to stop simply because I had stopped Victoria.

Worse, the coven probably knew all about it by now. The same people who would have told Rebecca that I wasn’t a threat would also have told her all about the goblin menace beneath the city. That could make things pretty tense with the coven. In fact, we’d probably be lucky if they didn’t suggest sending strike teams down into the tunnels. I’d have to talk to Rebecca about that.

For now though, it was over, and there were more mundane things to think about.

“I don’t know about you,” I said to Niall, “but I’m famished. For real food, I mean. Do you want to go downstairs to the kitchen and maybe let everyone know that you’re all right?”

“I’d rather stay here with you,” Niall suggested. “Let’s not forget that the original version of
Sleeping Beauty
involved rather more than a kiss. I’m feeling a little shortchanged here.”

A kiss was all he got though. “How about if we head down, grab some food, and then come back upstairs with it?” I suggested. “That way, we wouldn’t have to leave the room for a while.”

“Well, when you put it like that…”

So, Niall dressed and we headed downstairs. The others were already in the kitchen, where it seemed Kelly had killed time by cooking enough food for about twenty people. They were all happy to see Niall, although Fergie frowned slightly when Marie hugged him. I sensed the slight flare of his jealousy, but put it down as pretty natural for the situation. When we reached Siobhan, Niall put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m told that you helped Elle to save me. Thank you for that. I owe you a debt.”

 “T-thank you.” Siobhan shook his hand nervously, obviously shocked that someone like Niall would say something like that to her and promised that she wouldn’t steal anything while she was there without even being asked. Niall seemed satisfied with that.

She still seemed pretty nervous, though.

“What is it, Siobhan?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It’s just…I don’t know. What am I going to do now?”