The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 2056: The Shallow Grave (Part One)

The first blow split her lip.

Her teeth cut into the inside of her cheek. Something hard and loose rattled against her tongue, and when she swallowed, she swallowed blood and a sliver of broken tooth along with it.

The second cracked her cheekbone. Jocelynn heard it, a dull, wet crunch somewhere inside her own head, and then the pain arrived a heartbeat later, white-hot and blinding. Her head snapped sideways and struck the wall. Stars burst behind her eyes.

Owain didn’t stop.

Below them, the fiddles played on. Bright and quick, a jig for the wedding guests, and his fists fell in time with it, as though he were dancing too.

His fists came again and again, pounding into her face, her shoulders, her ribs. She felt something give way in her chest with a sharp, splintering snap. Then another. Her left eye swelled shut. Blood filled her mouth, hot and coppery, and spilled down her chin onto the ruined silk.

"You made a fool of me," Owain snarled between blows. "In front of everyone. My bride. My bride, a witch. You laughed at me. You thought marrying me was a sacrifice..."

Jocelynn didn’t answer. She couldn’t.

She didn’t raise her arms to shield her face. She didn’t scream. She stood against the wall and let him beat her, because this was what Ashlynn had suffered, and Ashlynn had suffered it because of her.

I deserve this, she thought, as another rib broke. I deserve all of it.

Her legs gave out. She slid down the wall and crumpled onto the cold stone floor, among the scattered pearls.

Then the kicking began.

His boots drove into her stomach, her back, her side. Reflexively, her body curled into a ball to protect itself, but that only forced him to change his technique from kicking to stomping. He stomped on her hands when she tried to shield herself. He stomped on her hip, on the mark itself, as though he could grind it out of her flesh with his heel. Something in her hip gave way with a wet, grinding crunch, and the mark blazed beneath his boot as though it had been branded all over again.

After so many blows, the pain stopped being separate sensations and transformed into a single endless thing: a roaring ocean of agony that she was drowning in, and still, he didn’t stop.

It went on forever.

When it finally ended, Jocelynn lay on the floor and couldn’t remember what it felt like not to hurt.

Owain stood over her, breathing hard. Then he turned his back, as though he couldn’t bear to look at what his own hands had done. He bent and wrenched the antique ring from her broken fingers. He tore the last of the pearls from around her neck.

"Tommin!" he bellowed. "Broll!"

Footsteps pounded in the corridor, and two men filled the open doorway. Through the blood in her one good eye, Jocelynn saw them. Sir Broll, huge and brutish, with the stag on his finest tabard. Sir Tommin, older and grey-faced, staring at the floor with horror.

She wanted to call out to them. To beg them to rescue her. They were knights. They should save a damsel, even from their own lord. But her body wouldn’t move. Even her eye barely focused and she could feel the life flowing from her body along with the blood pooling beneath her on the floor. Each breath came shallow and wet, bubbling in her chest where the broken ribs had pierced something they shouldn’t have.

"Take her body into the Vale and burn it there," Owain said hoarsely. "I will not have a witch buried on my father’s lands. Scatter her ashes to the winds and crush her bones. Leave nothing that could haunt us later."

"My lord," Sir Tommin said. "Shouldn’t we bring her to the High Priest? The Church..."

"No Church," Owain snapped. "Do it quietly. Tonight."

Sir Tommin’s face twisted. For a moment, Jocelynn thought he might refuse. That he might kneel beside her and lift her up and carry her to the temple, and everything would be different.

He didn’t. He looked at the floor, and he said, "Yes, my lord," and the moment passed without rescue, just as it had for Ashlynn.

They wrapped her in a bedsheet pulled from the bridal bed, as if to mock her for dreaming of lying with Owain. Rose petals came with it, crushed and bruised, and they stuck to the blood on her face and her bare skin like wet, red kisses.

She felt them lift her. Felt every broken bone grind as they carried her down a servants’ stair and out into the cold night air, and dropped her into the back of a cart. The wheels jolted over cobblestones, then dirt. Rain began to fall. A light drizzle at first, pattering on the sheet over her face. Then harder. Then a freezing downpour that soaked through the linen and into her skin until she was shaking uncontrollably.

She had no idea how long she endured the jostling in the cart. Minutes. Hours. A day and a night. It was impossible to say. For a few blessed moments, consciousness fled only to come screaming back with searing hot pain when a wheel struck a rut or the horses changed their gait.

At last, the cart rolled to a stop. Rough hands dragged her out and threw her down on wet ground.

Jocelynn could smell lamp oil. She felt it splashing over the sheet, cold and slick, soaking through the linen and into the split skin of her lips. It stung like nettles in every cut on her face. It ran into her swollen eye and set it burning, and she couldn’t even lift a hand to wipe it away. And then she heard the scrape of flint on steel, again and again.

Sparks. Through the thin, sodden linen, she could see them, tiny points of orange light that flared and died above her face. One landed on the sheet beside her cheek. It hissed. She waited for the flame to catch, for the oil to bloom into fire and swallow her whole, and she couldn’t scream, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything at all but lie there and wait to burn.

"It won’t catch," Sir Tommin muttered. "The rain..."

Sir Broll’s boot drove into her side, cracking another rib. Jocelynn would have screamed if she’d had the breath, but even crying out was beyond her in this horrible world caught between life and death.

"She’s already dead," Sir Broll grunted. "Let’s just bury her and be done with it."