Coffin Girls (Elegantly Undead: Book 1 of the Coffin Girls Witch Vampire Series) (18 page)

Marie nodded, “I agree about our blood link but what if
we’re wrong? I couldn’t live knowing that we contributed to her death. I’m not
ready to see her ghost flitting around the plantation. Knowing Anais, she’d
stick around once she’s gone to watch over us. I love the dead, y’all know that
but I’m not lovin’ the idea of seeing her flit around with our ghosts here.”

“We’re not going to lose her. There’re too many of us here
that will fight for her to live. We can’t lose her.” Sophie wrapped Marie in
her arms consolingly. “Didn’t Sylvain say that light and dark exists in all?”
Sophie’s question was rhetoric, so she continued, “Then that must be true for
us too. If you look at how we live, we live good, honest lives. We don’t hunt
or kill our sources of blood. We live by the vampire laws as well as the laws
of this country and we give back to the humans we share this land with.”

“I see where you’re going with this and I support the
sentiment.” V’s dark head bobbed up and down vigorously in agreement. “How’d we
do that?”

Sophie already had an answer; her lips curved knowingly in
anticipation of their task ahead, “We don’t have to do anything. We already
have that good in us. It’s in our bond of friendship, family and blood.” 

It was time to wrap this up. Sophie looked at each of her
sisters, allowing her to feel the pride and love for them as individuals and a
unit. Gently she gathered it and sent it back to them, her mouth curving wide
in appreciation as it hit them and catching her drift, they sent love back.
They continued to send the energy of their love to each other until there was
an ever-moving circle of positive emotions twirling around them, moving back
and forth through their connection as they fed light into each other.

Marie was the first one to break the connection. She felt
the first ray of hope in days and whooped in delight. Jumping into the air, she
grabbed an astonished Rose and smacked an enormous kiss on her cheek. Flushed with
excitement, she announced, “I think that says we’re ready ladies. Now, let’s
get these errands out of the way so that the real work can start! We’re the
vampire women of Papillion and we stick together! Let’s go kick some magick
ass!”

Perhaps it was hysteria born of concern, perhaps born of
hope. No matter the source, the vampiresses completed their tasks with renewed
speed and then set forth to inform the witches of how things would be done on
their plantation.

--------

Anais lay on the hard, uncomfortable floor of the old slave
quarters. Despite the warmth of the summer’s night on the plantation, it felt
like she was locked in a meat refrigerator. Her outer-body, as she’d come to
think of it, felt covered in thick, impenetrable ice. Inside, beneath the skin
was a different matter. Every inch felt like it was burning as though fire ran
through her veins instead of vampire blood. The pain was excruciating as though
a fire-heated knife was being run along her flesh and bone, searing a charcoal
path as it moved through her body, over and over again.  She let out a
scream as she felt it move through her intestines. It was a scream no one
heard. Her body seemed to be divided into two distinct parts; the one that was
going up in flames on the inside and the other nothing more than an ice-cold,
numb shell; external perfection hiding internal deterioration.

She’d heard everything that had occurred since Sylvain
thought they’d contained her demise. Sylvain’s horror story about the princess
scared her. If the pain leading up to death was as intense as she felt, the
pain increasing before it was enough to make her wish the ability to beg that
they’d decapitate her and save her from that torturous misery. The witches
seemed out of their depth despite their immense power. She listened to them
now, noting the logic in their debates and deliberations as they decided on
their magickal strategy. That didn’t placate her either. There was no logic to
what was happening to her. They’d given up on traditional unbinding spells and
rituals and seemed to lean heavily on the hope that they’d connect with her so
that she could break the binding. Anais didn’t see how she would find the
energy to fight when it was so much more alluring to let go and end it all.

She felt the absence of her sisters when they left to fulfil
the tasks the witches gave them in preparation for the unbinding ritual. Her
sisters, she thought and her heart broke. The pain of their pending loss struck
deep even through the heat of the fire. What would become of them, she
wondered. Sophie had said that she was the glue that bound them, the lynch pin.
What would they do when she wasn’t around? Would they stick together, rebuild
their life on the plantation without her? Would they be able to? What happened
to vampire children when their makers died? Anais had never bothered to find
out. She’d been so complacent in her assumptions of immortality, so busy
carving out a life for them all that it never occurred to her that those she
sired would one day be without her. Now she wanted to go, to slip away into the
inviting darkness of death so much, increasingly so as the pain stabbed at her
again. Yet, she wanted to pull through for them, for her sisters. The casket
girls of New Orleans.

Casket. Coffin. Would she, when she died, dissolve into
ashes as vampires do upon death or would the witch half, royal witch half of
her remain in solid human form. If she did remain in her body, would they bury
her? Ludicrously the grave stone would read, ‘Anais born 1794 died 2012...
Conall’s voice interrupted the tombstone she imagined as a means of separating
the fire-fed torture from her conscious thought. Conall. He’d been right. She’d
never experienced love-making like they’d had before. Conall. The man was still
a mystery to her but he drew her like no other. Not even Raulf tugged at her
the way the Irish witch prince did. Now that she had royal blood in her veins,
mingling with that of Yves’ vampire legacy to her, would that change things
between them? Anxiety coated every word he spoke; it seeped through her frozen
skin whenever he reached over to touch her reassuringly. Raulf had touched her
too. She knew his because she’d smelled his unique, earthy scent as he came
forward to whisper reassuringly to her. Strange that she could feel Conall’s
touch and not his. Possibly because they were related through shared ancestry
and he was the race’s prince whereas she had no blood ties to Raulf at all. The
connection that Conall was always ranting about for not being there with her,
was perhaps there all along, bound by the same shackles that kept her magick
locked away. 

They witches seemed to be nearing the end of their strategy.
Encouraged by her lack of thrashing and screaming, they were positive that
she’d pull through. Sylvain was the only sceptic amongst them. She hoped he
knew. Knew somehow that they’d moved all of what had happened to her
internally. It wasn’t better, it was worse. Disempowerment ate at her as she
lay there, silent, still, unable to have even the luxury of expending the
horror through screams.

Her eyes were glued shut by some unseen substance, so she
fought the feelings of pain and focused on words, footsteps and her memory of
what the room had looked like to figure out what was happening around her. The
sound of fresh chalk scraping along the floor boards meant that they were
re-drawing the protective circle. The smell of matches lighting new wicks all
around her, meant that they were placing candles at four points of the circle,
one for each of the elements. Expletives escaped from both Niall and Raulf when
they felt her cold skin, lifting her. Conall’s spicy scent momentarily washed
over her, when he crept beneath them to re-draw the pentagram. Rosary beads
clicked as Miss Suzette said a prayer while the ritual space was being
prepared.

The sudden silence indicated that they were ready. The
silence gave a gap for the excruciating pain to invade her mind. Thank God, the
witches opened the ritual with rhyme and a call to the elements and Goddess. It
was words that Anais clung to, to maintain sanity, as her insides continued to
char courtesy of the branding knife of the dark magick within her. The
chlorinated smell of water. Holy water. Miss Suzette must be sprinkling her
with it. She smelled the scent of the pure earth very close, all around her
-  the sisters offering soil from the land of the Goddess, the witch
Goddess  - they were sprinkling that over her and within the circle.
Conall came over and whispered what sounded like a blessing in the Gaelic tongue
that rolled from his lips into each of her ears. She whimpered mutely as she
felt his touch when he leaned over and placed a kiss on her forehead. She
wanted to hang onto the feeling of those warm lips seeping through her cold
skin. Then silent darkness. Aggravated by the lack of connection to the world
outside her suffering body, an involuntary shriek mutely departed from her
motionless form.

Pain hit her hard, ending her body’s immobility as she felt
her body jerk up into the air, legs and arms flapping like a rag doll, her head
bent backwards at an impossible angle an inch away from snapping. Pain so
intense she didn’t, couldn’t force her attention to what was happening around
her. She wanted to die. The peace of death seemed so near, nearly within reach
but not quite close enough to grasp. The magick was taunting her, keeping her
away from even escaping to death. Whatever the witches were doing was ripping
her insides apart, scattering blood, organs and bone in every direction inside
the vessel provided by her skin. Anais screamed and both felt and heard the
anguished sound tear itself from her throat. Her vision came streaming back. It
was blood red. She saw flashes of the room as her head rolled around, still in
the air. Everything in the room looked as though gallons of blood had been
thrown at it, covering it.

Suddenly her skin was on fire too, as it had been before
they’d contained the bound magick’s attempt at escape. Anais looked at her body
and saw that it had erupted into crimson flames. She was burning alive – and
the last time she checked, vampires erupted into ashes when burned.

“Anais! You need to fight it!” Conall’s firm voice, filled
with fear, penetrated the wall of anguish that surrounded her and infiltrated
her. 

Throat sore from screaming, parched by fire, she barely
whispered, “How?”

Relief flooded through him at that first sound of hope. “You
need to feel for the binding inside of you. Find what’s hurting and visualize
yourself pulling it away from the rest of your body. Pull it into a ball and
put it somewhere.” Conall saw her attention being pulled from and grasped her
face between his hands, forcing her to look at him. “Find the pain and pull it
together. When you do, the pain will be concentrated into one spot. I want you
to blink or shout or anything you can do to indicate to us when you’ve done
that and we’ll cast the spell.”

Anais had heard what Conall said but was once again consumed
by the fire. She tried to let herself feel it, to imagine her hands pulling at
its strings as it attached itself to her body like a parasite. She tugged and
twisted the strings but nothing happened. She was too weak. “I can’t,” she
croaked. “It’s too far gone. It’s everywhere.”

“Do it Anais,” sweet Sophie’s voice urged and her beloved
friend came into her red hazy view followed by the rest of her sisters. “Feel
the witches’ magick. Let it in. Use it to help you fight.”

Anais concentrated, battling the singeing slices of fire and
found tendrils of magick lingering just on the inside of her skin, like guests
unsure of their welcome. She visualized her hands reaching for it and pulled
the magick towards her. The more she pulled, the more the flames dancing on her
skin abated and her vision started to return to normal. It was happening again.
The fire was being contained inside her skin. “It’s not working. Like before.
It’s just taking it inside.” Breath gasping, it took all the steel in her spine
to get the words out, to communicate with them. Something she’d taken for
granted until now.

V stepped up to her. “Will you trust in us, Anais?”

Anais could barely nod her affirmation, feeling like an
inadequate master puppeteer holding onto the witches’ magick with one visual
hand while desperately fighting off the enveloping binding with another.

“Conall, Sylvain,” V addressed the men in charge, “she’s not
like your princess or your average royal witch. She’s half vampire. It is a
good half of her too and she needs that magick to help fight this.”

“It’s too risky,” Sylvain was fighting memories, old demons
he thought he’d laid to rest. “We can’t trust that the dark magick in vampirism
won’t feed the binding.”

“She will not survive like this! The white magick you’re
using is not working. There’s good in the vampire half too, the good’s in the
love and bond she has with us. She trusts us, so let us help.” V bit out, anger
and fear making her eyes glow red.

“Let them try. If anything happens, we’ll be ready or as
ready as we can be for the unknown.” It was Raulf that had stepped into the
verbal war. “V’s right. They do love and no dark can exist in that.”

“We don’t have time for this fretting. V, do what you think
will help.” Miss Suzette had been operating on robotic energy until then, found
her voice and stepped up for her girls. She pointed a finger at the witches and
Sylvain, “They know her – trust that.”

Conall was at an end. He’d racked his brain for answers and
had found none “Very well, let’s do it.” His voice was sounding strained. He’d
given more of his energy to Anais than what was prescribed as safe – they all
had.

Vampiric motion soon had Anais drinking down a goblet of
their combined blood. Thereafter, arms linked, Sophie, who stood in the middle
connected first to her sisters and then to Anais. The pain Anais was suffering
immediately branded them, bringing them to their knees. Teeth clenched, they
held on.