The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 2057: The Shallow Grave (Part Two)

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

Already dead. Jocelynn wanted to laugh, or sob, or scream that she was still here, still breathing, still feeling every broken piece of herself grind together. Nothing came out but a thin, wet rattle that the rain swallowed whole.

"And if someone finds her?" Sir Tommin asked. His voice shook, and Jocelynn couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or something else.

"Then they’ll find a dead witch in a hole," Sir Broll said, hawking and spitting into the mud. "Get her feet. I’m not carrying her alone."

They carried her two hundred paces into the woods. She counted them, every single step and the jolt of pain that accompanied it. Twelve. Thirteen. Broll’s shoulder dug into her shattered ribs with every stride. Forty. Forty-one. Her head lolled against someone’s arm, and her broken fingers dragged through wet ferns. Ninety. A hundred. Tommin stumbled on a root and dropped her legs, and the jolt sent a white-hot bolt of agony through her body that momentarily robbed her of her senses.

Then they dumped her onto the sodden ground, leaving her in a puddle of cold water and mud. She woke to the rasp of their shovels against the earth, but still, her body refused to move. How she was still alive, she couldn’t fathom.

Ashlynn had called it a stubborn refusal to die. She said that she’d clung to life with every fiber of her being, but Jocelynn couldn’t comprehend how she’d done it. Death would be a blessed escape from this torment, and a part of Jocelynn yearned for that release. But her sister had held on, so there was no escape for Jocelynn. She couldn’t die yet, even if she wanted to.

"Light, preserve us," Sir Tommin muttered between strokes. "His bride. On his wedding night."

"Shut your mouth and dig," Broll grunted. His shovel struck something with a dull thunk, and he swore. "Bloody roots. Bloody rain. Should’ve left her for the wolves."

"Lord Owain said..."

"Lord Owain will never know." The shovel bit into the earth again. "Not unless you tell him. As far as he’s concerned, we did as he said, burned her to ash and shattered her bones on the stones. We put an end to this business, and we will never speak of it again," Broll snarled.

At last they dropped her into a hole beneath the roots of a tall, broad cedar, and the first shovelful of wet earth landed on her face.

It was heavy. So heavy. It pressed the sheet against her nose and mouth. Another shovelful and then another. Mud packed into her nostrils. Grit ground between her loosened teeth. The weight settled on her chest, on her broken ribs, pressing them inward until she felt the jagged ends grate together inside her. The smell of wet cedar and mud filled everything, filled her mind, filled the whole world with darkness and pressure all around her...

Something brushed her cheek through the linen. A root, thin and cold, curling against her face like a finger.

This is where Ashlynn lay, Jocelynn thought. This is what she felt.

Ashlynn had held her breath. Ashlynn had waited, and fought, and dragged herself up out of the earth with roots wrapped around her arms, because she refused to die.

Jocelynn didn’t hold her breath.

She let the mud seep through the linen. She let it fill her mouth as she lay in the sodden, freezing dark beneath the weight of the earth. She surrendered to it, completely, the way a stone surrenders to the bottom of a well.

But her body didn’t surrender. It bucked against the earth without her permission, convulsing, heaving, her lungs clawing for air that wasn’t there. Mud poured down her throat with every useless gasp. Her chest burned. Her vision burst into red and black. Her heels drummed weakly against the bottom of the grave, and she couldn’t make them stop.

I’m sorry, Ash, she thought. I’m so sorry. After Percivus and the dungeon beneath Lothian Manor, I thought I understood, but I was wrong... I was so wrong...

The darkness took her, and for a moment, everything was blessedly still...

Then, something seized her roughly by the hair.

It pulled so hard that she felt her scalp tear, felt hair rip out by the roots. She was hauled upward, out of the mud, and out of the grave. The earth slid away from her in heavy, wet clumps. She was flung down on the forest floor in the rain, and she lay there choking and retching up dirt and blood.

"Through olive’s deep and deathless root," an almost familiar voice said above her, slow and patient and calm. "Knit the bone and bear new fruit."

Warmth flooded through her.

Then the warmth became fire.

Her ribs knitted, each jagged end dragging back across the others as they wrenched themselves into place. Her cheekbone slid back into place with a grinding click that she heard before she felt it, and when she felt it, she screamed. Her hip ground back together. Her fingers straightened one by one, each knuckle popping as the bones set. Her swollen eye opened. And then, finally, the pain drained away like water poured from a bucket. All of it, every broken bone and every bruise, until she lay whole and unbruised on the wet ground.

But she remembered it.

She remembered every blow and every snap of bone. She could feel every shovelful of earth clinging to her still. The healing had taken the pain out of her body, but it had left all of it behind in her mind, as sharp and fresh as if it were still happening.

Jocelynn raised her head.

A figure stood over her in the rain. It was her sister’s height and had her sister’s shape. It stood with its weight on one hip the way Ashlynn often stood. But it was made of wood. Pale, silver-grey olive wood, smooth and close-grained, carved into every line of Ashlynn’s face and hands and hair.

Where its eyes should have been, there were only two dark, empty hollows, like windows into the Void.

"Pathetic," the Olive Seed said. "Your sister clawed her way out of that grave. You lay down in it like you belonged there. You gave up."

"I..." Jocelynn started, only to stop as she coughed up more mud. "I needed to understand," she said once she could finally draw breath. "I needed to know what she felt..."

"And now you know," the Olive Seed said curtly. "And you failed."

Jocelynn stared up at the wooden figure, her heart pounding in disbelief.

"That’s it?" she whispered. "It’s over? No. No, I can’t accept that! I need to go back to Ashlynn. I’m not willing to let it end now, not like this..."

The Olive Seed tilted its head. The gesture was so perfectly, precisely Ashlynn’s that Jocelynn’s skin crawled.

"End?" the Olive Seed said softly. "One failure isn’t nearly enough to let this end."

It leaned down until its empty eyes were only inches from her own.

"We’ve only just begun..."