Chapter 34

Confused?  Go back!  I updated twice today!  Happy thanksgiving!  :)  Here is chapter two!  Thanks so much for the support guys, I truly appreciate it!  Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Chapter 34

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“What the hell are you planning?”  Eliot was snarling the words as he barged into the guest house—even before he came face to face with Alazzdria, who stood in the center of her cabin reading an open book.

While balanced on tip-toe.

The fact that her black hair was a tangled mess, there was soot on her pale cheeks, and the tiny detail that she couldn’t see enough to read were three clues that made Eliot suspect that the witch had been doing something else before his unceremonious appearance.

“Eliot!” She exclaimed, snapping the book shut in one pale hand.  “How kind of you to drop in—”

“Don’t play games,” he growled, crossing his arms over his chest as the door slammed shut behind him with a bang. “You sent the twins after me.  Why?”

It was a struggle to keep himself from mentioning Miriam, and just how close she’d come to falling into Sage and Hazel’s grasp.

Once again, he couldn't help thinking that the mortal was very, very lucky.  While Sage mysteriously didn’t seem affected by her blood, he doubted that Hazel would have resisted the opportunity to taunt him.

His scent had to be all over her by now…

“Why?”  He snapped, forcing herself back to the current situation.  “What did you do, now?”

“Nothing!”  Alazzdria said, a little too quickly.  With a graceful twist of her arm she tossed the book to the floor and twirled on her heel.  “I’ve just been thinking of our dear, lovely Miriam.”

Eliot’s jaw clenched.

He didn’t like leaving her alone.  Especially not with the terror twins on the loose.

While the witch may have pledged her protection to the mortal, he still doubted it. It wouldn’t have been the first time the witch had lied to him—especially when it came to protecting her own skin.

He wouldn't have put it past her to send the twins after him in some elaborate scheme of betrayal.

Once again, he was reminded of the fact that it should have been him after the witch’s blood, rather than shadowhunters…

“It’s a rather perplexing riddle,” Alazzdria said wistfully, and he realized that she’d been speaking the entire time.  “A mortal who seems…”  She seemed to fish around for the right word, waving a pale finger through the air.  “More than mortal.”

She didn’t even know the half of it.

Miriam’s words from earlier ran through his mind, sinking through him like stones ‘she used to joke that my grandmother was a witch.’

And that name…

Poor Miriam.  She had no idea the weight of what she had unknowingly admitted to him.  Hell, even he didn’t know the whole truth—he didn’t want to know.

“I’ve gone through all of the old literature,” Alazzdria went on, oblivious.  “All the old myths and tales.  I can think of nothing to explain it!”

With a frown, the witch elegantly raised her arms over her head and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

“It is a rather perplexing riddle.  In all the old history there is nothing about a mortal with that kind of blood—”

“It’s because she isn’t mortal,” Eliot heard himself grumble.  “She’s part witch, though I doubt that she even knows it.”

“Oh?”  Alazzdria paused, body raised on the tips of one foot while the other was held poised in the air.  “A witch you say?”

All at once her lithe body lowered to the floor and she began to pace, chewing on her bottom lip.  “A witch,” she repeated in a murmur.  “Can you be sure?”

“No,” Eliot admitted, leaning back against the wall.   “But can you think of any other explanation?”

It made sense, now that he thought about it.  Only a witch could smell so good—a pure one, unlike Alazzdria, with the scent of raw magic flavoring her blood.

“Hmmm.”  He glanced up to find Alazzdria staring studiously into space, rubbing at the bottom of her small chin.  “But that doesn’t explain it—the wrongness,” she added on a shudder.  “Did you happen to get a family name?”

Eliot sighed and pulled away from the wall to cross over to a small window where that white house loomed in the distance, bathed in moonlight.

Yes,” he forced himself to say.  “Her mother’s.  It was Danva—”

Thud!

He jerked around, to find the witch curled on the floor, nursing a stubbed toe.

The sight was the equivalent of finding a giant elephant in her place wearing a tutu while wearing her old tee shirt for some mortal cartoon.

It was that odd.  Even blind, the witch never fell—ever.

“Oh damn,” she snapped, startling him even more; it wasn’t like her to use mortal curses. “I can feel it bleeding.”  Angrily, she tore off a piece of her tee shirt and wrapped it around her sore foot.  “I don’t even have my healing herbs—”

“Did you hear what I said?”

The witch only muttered angrily, cradling her foot.  “I knew I should have had you clear out the furniture—”

“Laz!” Eliot pulled away from the window and moved to stand behind her when she didn’t answer.

He reached for her slender shoulder, but at the same moment she glanced up and the look in her gray eyes would have stolen his breath if he had any.

It was an expression that he hadn’t seen the witch wear in years.  Not since she had lost her final ties to humanity.

For the briefest of moments, the ancient witch had disappeared leaving only a scared, frightened woman in her place.

She was afraid.  Not her typical unease, but pure raw fear.

“I thought they were gone,” she began in a voice so soft that he had to strain to hear it.  “I hoped they were gone—dead.  After five hundred years, I never thought I’d hear the name of that damn bloodline again.”

“So it was yours then,” Eliot murmured, feeling his worst fear sink into his chest like a stake.  “Your coven.”

“Yes,” Alazzdria whispered.  “What’s left of it, anyway.”

For a moment, he was transported back to the days when they had been close.  Back when she had just been plain old Laz, and he just the idiot brute who’d always protected, no matter what.

They had both been different in those days.

He had still had a heart, emotions—a soul.  And Laz…

Well, she had been another girl back then; soft, sweet, innocent.  Almost like Miriam he realized.

But that so called 'innocence' hadn’t lasted long.  In a way, it wasn’t the witch’s fault—not in the beginning at least.

All she had ever wanted was to belong to her coven, a powerful band of witches known only by the name Danva.  Witches who prided themselves on the purity of their bloodline and physical strength as well as the magical.

Being born blind, Alazzdria didn’t fit into that ideal.

She had been driven out of the Danva territory at an early age from what he knew, forced to find any means of survival.

Begging.  Scavenging.  Stealing—but somehow always finding a way to hone her magical talent.

When he had first met her, she had been a dancing girl in the modern-day equivalent of a traveling circus.

So small…

The sight of her, slender and pale dancing more beautifully than anyone he’d ever seen, even though she couldn’t see the damn floor in front of her, had intrigued him.  He’d pitied her.

She had been older than him then, he realized, but even still they had always paired together like a big brother and a little sister.

He had sheltered her.  Protected her—not that he had been much of a guardian himself.

The year had been…  Well, he couldn’t quiet remembered what year, but the world had been in chaos.

His family had been killed in a raid by the thugs of some nameless warlord or king in the aftermath of some forgotten war.  He had been a wandering vagrant, who’d hired himself out to Inns or farms for any odd job.

Chopping wood for fires.  Pitching out during a harvest.  Assisting the town blacksmith.  Hunting.

He had done it all--whatever it took to get by.   But, the coin had been getting harder and harder to live by.

Leaving only one option left.

He had been on his way to war, he remembered.  On his way to join up the army of a leader he'd never met for some cause he didn't really care about.  Traveling through some big—now deserted—city was when he’d first met Laz.

He could still remember the sight of her unseeing gaze as she twirled around for the amusement of city-dwellers who threw cheap coins at her feet.

Even as a human, he had known that she was special--different.  It didn't help that she had an uncanny habit of moving with an ethereal poise across a ground she couldn't see.

Magical, he remembered thinking as he watched her.

But he hadn’t been the only one to notice the graceful blind girl in the market that day.  They had both been spotted by an unseen danger that had only haunted dark whispers and gossip back in those days.

In the end, they both had been changed by it.

And in the end, Alazzdria had more than gotten her revenge on her old coven; an act that still haunted them both even to this day.

He had never wanted to hear that name again either.  But now with Miriam…

“Oh Eliot,” Alazzdria sighed, head buried in her hands.  “If she is…if she is a…then…I’m so sorry.”

“Stop it,” he snapped, hating the sight of her like this more than when she taunted him about being chased by shadowhunters.  “Even if she is a Danva, it doesn’t mean—”

“Yes it does,” Alazzdria insisted, gray eyes glancing up to bore into his.  “You know it does.  That bloodline is cursed—tainted.”

She took a deep breath that shook her entire lanky frame and added on a whisper, “because of me.”

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“You understand the gist of it, don’t you,” Alazzdria demanded.  Slowly, she raised her head, gray eyes staring unseeingly into nothing.

“Yes.”

Everyone knew about the Danvas; a coven of witches whose pure witch blood had become mingled with none other than a vampire's.

The resulting mix had been unstable—unnatural.

An abomination.

Many of the witches either went insane, or died when they reached their full powers.

The few that did reach their true potential had been…

Destructive.  Evil—corrupted by the tainted mixture of blood running through their veins.

By now, he had thought that most of the witches had died out.  He had hoped as much.

Apparently not, because one was currently climbing into bed, in that house across the grove, unaware of the danger he’d just brought down on her head by opening this Pandora’s box.

If his suspicions were correct, then Miriam wasn’t just part witch.  She was part witch with an even smaller bit of vampire mixed in.

A ticking time bomb.

“I don’t even know how that girl has managed to live this long,” Alazzdria went on darkly, arms wrapped around herself.  “If I would have known, I would have killed her myself the moment I saw her—”

“Stop it,” Eliot growled.  He pulled away from the witch and went back to his window.

“It’s the truth, Eliot,” the witch insisted.  Her usually charming voice shook.  “You know about the Danva curse.  You know what happens to them all in the end.”

“No,” Eliot snarled, even as his shoulders slumped.  “Not her...”

“It all makes sense,” Alazzdria said from behind him.  “You said that she had seizures—”

“Mortals can have seizures, Laz,” he interrupted coldly.  But even he didn’t sound convinced as he remembered that day she’d been walking only to fall stiffly into the mud.

He had seemed other mortals with epilepsy before in the past.

But none of them had literally died and come back to life right before his eyes.  Even then, as he carried her in his arms, he had known that the scene had been…

Unnatural.

“Many of the Danva presented with seemingly normal disorders,” Alazzdria snapped.  “I suspect that she’s had them all her life, of course, but what age did the incidences spike?  Has she told you?”

Eliot sighed, eyes glued to the white Victorian across the way.  “When she was sixteen.”

“Aha!”  Alazzdria made the little sound of triumph in her throat, and rose to her feet.  Eliot could hear her behind him, beginning to pace again.

“That is the age when a witch is supposed to come into her true power.”  She stopped pacing.  “But in Miriam, it’s stalled somehow.”

“She doesn’t have any power,” Eliot agreed.  “At least, not any that I can see.  She might as well be human, for all that I can sense from her.”

“Yes.”  Alazzdria’s voice faded to a soft whisper.  “But that will be her downfall, because she isn’t human.  It’s her blood; the Danva bloodline is dangerous even in a full blooded witch, but in a part human—”

Something in her tone made Eliot stiffen.  Whatever the witch was about to say, he knew that he wouldn’t like it.

“It all makes sense," Alazzdria murmured.  "No wonder her scent is so disturbing—”

“Not to me,” Eliot challenged.  Even thinking of the sweet smell made his mouth water.  “She smells perfectly alright to me.”

“Well, of course she would.”

He turned to find Alazzdria watching him with an odd expression.  Deliberately, she raised her wrist, where a slender, white scar was etched into the otherwise flawless skin.  It was an old, old wound that time had never erased.

“You have some of my blood, remember?”

He’d forgotten about that.  All of those years ago, none other than Alazzdria had saved his life using her own blood.

The very same night they’d both been turned into vampires.

“In a way,” the witch added on a sniff.  “You’re just as much Danva as she is.”

“Yeah,” Eliot grumbled.  “But I don’t have seizures that make my heart stop beating—”

He broke off suddenly, realizing that he’d said too much.

Rather than call him out on it, Alazzdria just nodded.

“It’s because you are not a mortal,” she said sadly.  “Miriam is.  Her humanity is warring with the vampiric essence in her blood…and she’s losing.”

She took a step toward him, pale hand reaching out.  “I’m sorry Eliot.”

Eliot turned back to the window.  A shadow had fallen over the curve of the moon, leaving that white house bathed in shadow.

“What are you saying?”  He demanded without turning around.

Alazzdria’s reply was simple.

“She’s going to die,” she said.  “As long as she remains human…she’ll die.”