The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 1995: Ashlynn’s Last Letter

Jocelynn stared at the neatly folded stack of letters, feeling the weight of months of pain and joy, terror and love, desperate hope and looming dread all weighing down on her.

The months since Ashlynn’s wedding had been the hardest in Jocelynn’s life. She’d lost her sister, left her home, felt abandoned by her parents... She’d slowly realized that she’d fallen in love with a monster, and by the time she started planning her escape, it was too late. She’d been tortured and humiliated in the frozen dungeons beneath Lothian Manor, and she only survived the ordeal because her beloved cousin Eleanor sacrificed herself so that she might live.

Then, with a knife in her hands, she’d stabbed her tormentor to death, piercing his flesh dozens of times before the last, gurgling breath escaped his bloody lips. And Owain had praised her for it.

In the end, she’d been more than ready to die if it meant that she could take Ashlynn’s killer with her. She’d gone to her wedding with a knife strapped to her thigh under her dress, and she’d been prepared to take another life, and then her own, if need be, to shelter those around her from sharing her guilt or spare them the duty of rescuing her.

It had been the worst year in her life, one that few people could ever imagine, but compared to what her sister had faced...

"I got off far too lightly," Jocelynn said as she turned her attention to the last letter in the box.

The day that she and Ashlynn had spent cooking for their mother, Jocelynn had heard some of the story from her sister, but the letters made it clear how much Ashlynn had left out or glossed over in an effort to give Jocelynn a rosier picture of what had happened since her wedding night.

The letters were far more candid and raw. Even then, Jocelynn suspected that Ashlynn had been holding back.

But the worst part of all of it was the amount of love that had seeped into those pages along with the ink. Because Ashlynn hadn’t known that the person she chose to confide in, the sister she loved so much, was the one who had betrayed her secret.

By the first line of the final letter, it was clear that was no longer true.

~Nyri had to stop me from killing you.~

Jocelynn’s breath caught in her chest the moment she read it, and her hands began to shake, but she forced herself to keep reading.

~Isabell told me the truth. You told Owain about my mark. You wanted him for yourself.~

~You tried to kill me, Jocey. You used Owain’s hands to do it, but you tried to kill me. You should die for that. I should kill you so you can never hurt me again, just like I’m going to kill Owain so he won’t ever hurt anyone else again.~

~Nyri stopped me.~

~How could you, Jocey? Isabell says you didn’t think this would happen. She says you never wanted to hurt me. How can that be? You’re the smartest woman I know. Mother and Father hid me away for twenty years. How could you not understand how important this secret was? That it wasn’t yours to tell?~

~You tried to kill me, Jocey. You tried to kill me so you could have Owain.~

The accusation was brutally direct, and it left Jocelynn no place to hide from her sister’s pain. But Ashlynn was right. She had tried to kill her. Even if it had been careless, even if Owain had plied her with strong drink, her words that night had been no different than the knife in her hands when she took Percivus’s life.

And she had wanted Owain. She’d wanted him enough to throw herself at the man who murdered her sister. She’d forgiven the unforgivable, and none of the justifications she’d manufactured over the past several months could change that.

She’d protected the alliance between her family and the Lothians. She stopped the Lothians from handing her family over to the Inquisition. She’d carry on her sister’s part and bear enough sons that one could inherit their father’s title and lands...

None of those things required her to marry Owain. None of them required her to forgive her sister’s murderer. She’d chosen that. She’d wanted that. And she’d been willing to cast aside the most important person in her life for a chance to live the life of a fairy story’s heroine with the man she thought was a hero.

Ashlynn was right to want her dead for that.

~If the day ever comes that you meet my Nyri, if I don’t kill you when I see you again, then you owe her your life, Jocey.~

~There aren’t words for how much you hurt me. My heart ached so much that the sky wept with me. I hated you so much that lightning split the sky to vent the fury in my heart. A witch’s heart is the core of her power, and mine wanted to drown the world in my sorrow and destroy you and Owain...~

~Nyri brought me home. She betrayed me too. She used the Mesmerizing Gaze on me and made me forget the pain. Made me forget what you’d done. She trapped me in dreams during the day so I couldn’t escape her.~

~Nyri knows how much you mean to me, Jocey. She’s afraid that I’ll kill you and then regret it for the rest of my life. She thinks I should kill Owain first and then confront you.~

~She was willing to betray my trust to give you a chance. She risked destroying the love we have to spare me the pain of killing my own sister. My only sister.~

Jocelynn felt her heart freeze, as if it had been plunged into icy water, and a chill swept across her body. She knew that it had been a close thing. She knew about the storm that had reached all the way to Hanrahan and Dunn, and that it had been caused by the pain Ashlynn felt when Isabell told her the truth.

She hadn’t realized how much her sister-in-law had done, or what she’d risked, to stop Ashlynn from coming to claim her life.

~I love you, Jocey. Still. I don’t know how to stop loving you. You’re my little sister. We stayed up late at night so I could read to you; we snuck out to watch the ships together; we both worked hard to help find things that Father could do to help the people of Blackwell...~

~I want to believe that you made a mistake. I want to think that somehow, there’s an explanation that can make your betrayal make sense. I’ve lost so much; I don’t want to lose the little sister I love.~

~But maybe I already have.~

~I crawled out of my own grave, Jocey. But maybe the part of me that stayed buried is the part that had a sister she could love and trust with everything. Maybe you buried your love for me before Owain’s men buried my body.~

"No, that’s not true," Jocelynn sobbed. "I, I never... I always loved you..." she said, but the words tasted bitter on her tongue. She loved her sister, but she hadn’t shown it. She’d betrayed that love. Trampled on it carelessly. Her intentions didn’t matter because the truth was that she’d allowed petty jealousy to control her actions.

She’d put her selfish desires so high above her love for her sister that the latter might as well have died, even as she professed to cherish it. And Ashlynn knew that.

~I’m going to kill Owain. The raids on the Lothians have just begun. I’m coming for his life. When we meet again, if you plead for him, if your loyalty to him is greater than whatever love you have left for me, then I’ll kill you alongside your beloved.~

~But if you don’t. If Isabell is right and you truly understand the kind of man Owain really is and you really regret what happened... I’m willing to prepare a way forward for us.~

~Marcel is fetching a seed for me. I intend to nurture it with everything I feel for you... The love and the hurt. If you can face that, then maybe, just maybe, we can truly be sisters again. If you can survive the pain I feel at what you’ve done and the trial that will be shaped by it, I promise to do my best to be your big sister.~

~I love you, Jocey. And I hate you. I don’t know how to do both. I don’t want to do both. One way or another, one of those feelings has to die, and if the love dies, then you’ll die with it.~

~I’ll see you soon, Jocey. One way or another, I’ll see you soon.~

By the time Jocelynn’s eyes reached the last line, they were filled with tears. The crackling fire in the hearth felt like the flames of a smith’s forge and the whole room had tipped to the side. Her heartbeat thundered in her chest, and there was a rushing sound like waves in her ears. Her fingers went limp, and the letter fell to the floor as one phrase echoed again and again through her mind.

~I love you, Jocey. And I hate you.~

And then, just at the moment when it all felt like too much, she heard a voice calling out to her from the doorway. A voice that belonged to the only woman who would be allowed to disturb her here, in her sister’s private chambers in a tower that belonged exclusively to her coven.

"Jocey...?"