17. Murderer
Max limped out to rub his wet nose against my cheek. It barely registered. “Is it true, Max?” I choked out.
Silence.
“Don’t go mute now. What do you know?” Max blinked, averting guilty yellow eyes. He knows something. “That woman’s crazy, right? Viggo never would have killed my mother. There’s no way, right?” I pressed, on the verge of hysteria.
I tried to stop it, Max finally answered.
“What?”
Max closed his eyes and sighed—an odd reaction from a dog—and a peculiar thing happened. Images flashed through my mind. At first they were fuzzy and faint, but the clarity strengthened until it was like a movie trailer was playing inside my head.
It was night. Someone walked along a dimly lit sidewalk on a quiet street in drizzling rain, though the person had no umbrella, just a jacket hood. The camera angle in my head shifted to show car lights approaching. There was nothing unusual about it until the car’s engine revved. The person’s head turned, the headlights illuminating a female face. The face of my mother, as young and beautiful as I remembered her.
The driver suddenly gunned it and swerved, sending the car up onto the sidewalk. I caught the fleeting look of confusion on my mother’s face a second before the car struck her.
She didn’t have a chance.
I gasped, my hands flying to my throat. So many times I had recreated the accident in my head, but this was a thousand times worse.
And it didn’t end there. The car stopped after hitting her. The door opened and the driver stepped out. I couldn’t make out a face in the shadows but I recognized that it was a man. He took several long, casual strides over to my mother’s motionless body. When he stooped over her lifeless body to dip his fingers in her blood and the headlights shone across his face, I saw a blonde man with piercing blue eyes. And I knew who it was.
Viggo murdered my mother.
I cried out as wounds that had closed but never healed tore open as surely as if it were happening all over again. Only this time the wounds gaped wider than ever before. But why? Why would they kill my mother? What did Viggo gain?
The vision blurred, then disappeared altogether. I scrambled to my feet and swayed, barely able to stand upright, then bolted into my room, intent on escaping this prison. Instead I found myself face to face with my mother’s murderer.
“Thank goodness you’re okay. You were gone four days this time. We were beginning to worry,” Viggo said, stepping forward. I recoiled. He chuckled. “Oh, you heard that nonsense? She was a delusional witch. Pay no attention.”
“Why?” I quavered. “Why would you—” I couldn’t say the words—couldn’t get them to form in my head, let alone my mouth. “I saw!” I finally whispered. Mortimer and Sofie had stepped into the room behind him, but I kept my eyes on … the murderer.
“What do you mean, you saw?” Viggo’s eyes narrowed, their typical calm morphing into something altogether unfamiliar.
I nodded toward the giant dog, now standing at my side.
“What?” Mortimer’s whisper was harsh, and his eyes bulged. “How is that possible?” He turned to Sofie. “How is this possible? Did you do this?”
Sofie’s head fell back as she laughed hysterically. “No, but it makes me so happy!”
Mortimer glared at the dog. “You disappeared from my mind, but I thought you were just angry with me! I didn’t think you had traded allegiances.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I interjected, forcing bravery. “Why? Why would you do something so …” My eyes burned but no tears came. Even my eye ducts were in shock.
“Monstrous?” A smile flickered over Viggo’s lips. “Well, at least we can give up this silly charade. It was becoming quite taxing.” His voice, once placid and soothing, had a sinister edge now. Maybe it had always been there, but I’d been deaf to it until now. “I need to move somewhere less … cluttered.” Viggo’s eyes skimmed over the corpses and destruction in the room. “Sofie, why don’t you explain why I felt the need to kill Evangeline’s mother? And make sure you explain your part in it.”
Sofie was part of this? Of course she was. She’s a murderer. Ursula confirmed it. My stomach twisted, all the same.
“Do I tell her the truth, or your version of it?” Sofie retorted bitterly.
Viggo responded with a wicked chuckle. “Do you even remember what the truth is anymore?” With that, he vanished, Mortimer in tow.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sofie said quietly.
I nodded, not because I wanted to go anywhere with Sofie, but I needed to get away from this death zone. I zeroed in on the hallway beyond the door, not allowing my eyes to wander for even a second as we maneuvered around the blood and gore.
We went to the library. “Where to begin,” Sofie said, settling on the leather couch. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at them, lost in thought.
“How about explaining why you’ve been watching me my entire life,” I snapped, drawing her emotionless, pale green stare to my face, “and why you cursed me. And about my mother’s death.” Once the questions began, they spilled out like an overturned jar of beans, scattering uncontrollably. “This crazy Ursula woman, who was she? And Nathan, the guy you murdered?”
My last question sparked a reaction. Sofie’s pale eyes displayed raw pain. I had struck a cord.
“Nathan is the vampire who turned me,” she answered quietly, then exhaled as if to compose herself before launching into a long explanation. But then she was up and pacing around the room, nervously chewing on her thumbnail. I wasn’t used to this side of Sofie—anxious, uncertain. I watched in silence, intrigued.
“Nathan and I were desperately, madly, irrevocably in love,” she began, running one of her slender hands through her silky red hair, a waver in her voice. “You should have seen him, Evangeline. He was the inspiration behind the tall, dark, and handsome cliché. Gorgeous. I remember the moment I first laid eyes on him. It was 1887. I was sure my chest would swallow itself whole.” She dropped her hand to her side. “Anyway, Nathan was a vampire and I was a witch and our kinds abhor one another, which made our relationship tricky, to say the least. Like the Montague and the Capulet families in Romeo and Juliet.”
So now you’re trying to compare yourself to the greatest love story of all time? I wanted to snort.
Sofie smirked. “Maybe not as enchanting, but definitely as heart–wrenchingly impossible.”
Ugh, I forgot—she could read me like an open book.
“We wanted to spend the rest of our lives together and, for Nathan, that meant eternity. Now, that was trickier. You see, witches, if exposed to a vampire’s venom, will simply die. Every single time. We can’t survive the transition. I don’t know why; it’s in the genes, I suppose. Anyway, na?ve and ambitious as I was, I was bound and determined to figure out a spell around this certain death. I knew I was a uniquely gifted sorceress and I was arrogant enough to believe I could solve what others had been unable to. I did solve it …” Her eyes sparkled with excitement that was extinguished almost instantly. “Or I thought I did. Never once did I imagine such terrible consequences.”
Sofie paused long enough to sit down in the leather chair. “Nathan was such a fool. He fully trusted me. I told him to bite me, to inject me with venom, and he did. When I woke up, I was immortal. I knew it instantly. I could feel the overwhelming power coursing through my veins. It was exhilarating.” Sofie sighed sadly. When she continued, her voice was thick with torment. “I found Nathan’s lifeless body lying beside me. The spell had reversed the consequences. It killed him. I killed him.”
She’d cast the spell for love. Not for selfish, foolish gains, as Mortimer had said. He had lied as well.
“I killed my soul mate, Evangeline. And I would have jumped into a flaming pit, had it not been for Veronique.” Sofie was out of her chair again and standing in front of the mantel in the blink of an eye, smiling adoringly at the painting of the dark–haired beauty. “Veronique was my younger sister.” Her voice fell, grew distant. “She was normal … Not a witch, I mean. The sorceress’s gene skipped her. She was always so supportive of my love for Nathan, for a vampire. The only supportive one. That’s because she understood implicitly. She was madly in love with not one, but two of them—one named Mortimer and the other named Viggo.”
I thought my eyes were going to pop out of their sockets.
Sofie turned to me and chuckled. “Yes, my silly, sweet sister saw something in both of them. Outrageous, isn’t it? Veronique was waiting to decide between the two before transforming to spend eternity with them.” She swallowed hard, looking down at the floor. “When I cast my spell, it destroyed that possibility for her. Mortimer felt the change immediately. He described it as the only life force within him, drained. Later we learned that every vampire felt something strange happen. They soon discovered that their venom was rendered useless. It was an unexpected outcome of the spell. Things like that can happen.
“In my attempt at eternal love and life, I destroyed any chance Veronique had of the same. As inconsolable as I was after Nathan’s death, I couldn’t leave my sister like that, to suffer and die alone. And no other witch would ever dream of helping her, even if they could.”
Intrigue overshadowed my anger with Sofie for the moment. “But you said that was a hundred and twenty years ago. So … Veronique died?”
Sofie shook her head. “I knew it could take years to fix my error and there was no way to reverse it because of the nature of the spell. As I told you before, once these types of spells are cast, they can’t be undone. Veronique didn’t want to get old and gray, waiting, so we decided to ‘preserve’ her and place her somewhere where she could safely wait.”
“Where?” I whispered, picturing an underground tomb or coffin of sorts, dark and dusty and morbid.
“You’ve passed her many times, even admired her.” Sofie smiled secretively. She watched intently as I tried to decipher her riddle. When I frowned, shrugging in a sign of concession, she prompted, “In the atrium … ?”
The atrium … I gasped. “The statue! You turned your sister into stone?”
“No!” Sofie laughed. “She’s inside it. Entombed—like a mummy, only without all the white gauze.”
I shuddered involuntarily, shocked at the realization that an actual person was trapped inside. But it suddenly made sense. “That’s why Mortimer and Viggo spend so much time there.”
She snorted. “It’s not for their love of fine art, believe me.”
“So she’s alive in there?” I whispered.
“Sort of. She’s basically frozen, her mind in a coma, her body not aging. Once you bring a vampire back with you, I can release her and she can be transformed and live happily ever after with whichever of those two urchins she sees fit to choose.”
“Which one will she choose?” I wondered aloud.
“Good question.” Sofie leaned back in her chair. “It’ll spell disaster for the other one, surely. I want to be as far away from them as possible when that happens.”
“They’re not your friends, are they? Viggo and Mortimer, I mean. The fighting … it isn’t an act.”
Sofie smiled. “We tolerated each other until five years ago. The night Viggo killed your mother.”
“Why did he—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Renewed agony stabbed through my heart.
She cringed, sensing my pain. “Because I kept you secret,” Sofie admitted reluctantly, shutting her eyes. “I cast that Causal Enchantment one hundred and twenty years ago, Evangeline. We waited for the fates to respond, to provide us with the solution. Then one day, eighteen years ago, the answer flooded into my mind. The spell had affixed itself to a newborn baby.” Her eyes popped open. “You.”
A cold chill slid through my body.
“The spell had set all kinds of rules and boundaries, specific things that couldn’t happen or the spell would corrupt itself. You couldn’t know about the existence of vampires before the night of your eighteenth birthday; you couldn’t be compelled—ever. And you had to wear that necklace and touch the statue of your own free will. All kinds of stupid rules.”
She spread her arms, the movement like an unconscious plea. “I never chose a human to bear the brunt of this, Evangeline. Believe me. Your name, your birth date, where you lived … it was all decided already. Please believe me, I didn’t intend any of this for you … Anyway, I kept it from Viggo and Mortimer. For years, they didn’t know the fates had responded, that the spell was finished. Max kept you secret too.” Sofie turned to gaze adoringly at Max, all signs of hatred gone.
“When I suddenly moved to Portland—not exactly the mecca for urban life—Mortimer sent Max there to protect me.” Sofie rolled her eyes, snorting. “I wasn’t stupid. I knew why he was there. It was a cover, of course; he was to keep tabs on me and report back. But I discovered he was feeding lies to Mortimer about basic things that I was doing. It was his way of telling me he was on my side. It’s shocking, really, that a werebeast would disobey its master like that. I didn’t know why, but I thanked the heavens every day. Eventually I revealed you to Max and we watched over you, trying to protect you while you grew up normally. While I tried to break the spell.”
“What happened, then?”
Sofie paused, swallowing. “They found out … Mortimer somehow forced an answer out of Max and they learned of you. Viggo swooped in, ready to kidnap and imprison you. Exactly what I expected would happen. So I explained why he couldn’t—all of the rules. Viggo was furious that I had kept you secret for thirteen years, but he wasn’t willing to risk breaking the spell; he decided it was best you had no bonds in the human world. So he killed your mother.”
I flinched at her words; they may as well have been a solid punch to my stomach.
“And then he promised that anyone else who got close to you would die. He wasn’t bluffing. So I spent the next five years compelling everyone to stay away—your foster families, your friends, the boys at school—everyone. I didn’t want you surrounded by death.”
“Is that why …” My whisper faded to nothing. It wasn’t me after all?
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Evangeline,” Sofie confirmed, her expression sorrowful.
My whole life had been staged, controlled by vampire puppet–masters on a quest to fulfill their love for their entombed one hundred and twenty–year– old girlfriend and sister. “Why keep this story of Veronique a secret?” I asked, adding bitterly, “Viggo could have told me the other night, while he was painting himself as a martyr.”
She sighed. “Because Viggo thinks you’ll default to trusting him if you hate me. Plus they’ve sworn me to secrecy in all things Veronique–related, on penalty of injury to you.”
“But … why?” I was beginning to sound like a broken record.
“They’re terrified of someone finding out about her who could cause her harm.”
“She’s encased in marble and magic!” I exclaimed.
Sofie chuckled. “When you’re madly in love, you don’t act rationally. Like Ursula.”
I had forgotten about her until now. “How is she involved in all this? She was at the park, you know.”
“Besides being the witch that those two twits hired to spy on me? They don’t trust me.” Smiling sheepishly, she added, “With good reason, I guess.” She began massaging her temple with her hand. “Ursula is the classic example of a woman scorned, only she’s a witch so the fury is tenfold. She fell in love with Nathan and ensnared him in a love spell to ensure his mutual affection. She’s not pleasant, in case you hadn’t noticed. Well, sorceress spells don’t work well on vampires. Nathan realized what was going on, in effect rendering the spell obsolete. He would have killed her if she hadn’t been so pathetic. He had a compassionate streak in him.” She smiled wistfully. “One of the reasons I loved him so. Anyway, not long after that, he and I met. It was love at first sight. Ursula was bitter, believing that, if I had not ‘moved in on her territory,’ he would have forgiven her and fallen madly in love of his own accord.”
“But that was over a hundred years ago. Are witches immortal too?” I asked, recalling her mentioning something about host bodies but not understanding this hocus–pocus stuff.
Sofie shook her head. “It appears she found a way to jump from one human to the next, taking possession of them for her own form of immortality. She’s clever. That’s why I didn’t recognize her. When Viggo and Mortimer discovered Max’s betrayal, it seems they decided to hire a spy as another source of intel. I had sensed a witch from time to time near me but I never put the two together.” She smirked contemptuously. “I just thought I had a fan.”
My head was spinning by now, trying to keep track of all the different ways they had deceived each other. There was small comfort in the fact that I wasn’t the only victim. “But Ursula’s dead now, right? Viggo killed her?”
Sofie shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s not the last we’ll see of Ursula in one form or another. I’m not exactly sure how she possesses her host bodies, but it must use up a lot of her powers. Don’t worry. She won’t get through these gates a second time, now that those two half–wits know not to invite her and her conjured leopards in.”
I nodded, working to digest everything. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?” I asked, my eyes studying Sofie’s eyes for any signs of a lie.
She met my gaze steadily. “Everything I’ve told you is the truth. I swear it. On Nathan’s grave.”
Does that mean anything, considering she killed him? I wondered. It didn’t matter. I decided she was now the least harmful snake in the pit of vipers. Her and Max.
We sat in silence for awhile. Max came over and hunkered down, resting his chin on my lap to look up at me with soulful golden eyes. I looked from him to Sofie. “How am I hearing Max?”
Sofie shrugged. “I don’t know, but … you have no idea how pleased I am!” A goofy grin overwhelmed her face.
“Mortimer said something about him lying to him?”
“Yup! He’s been making up things and leaving out details since you’ve come here. And after you snuck off to the park, he just stopped talking to Mortimer altogether.” The broad smile was still plastered on her face. “I guess all those years of spying on you made him fall in love.”
She talks too much, Max interrupted inside my head, his irritation evident.
I couldn’t help giggling, even given the bizarre method of communication. I hadn’t been wrong about Max’s friendship, after all. One genuine thing around here, at least. Patting Max’s head once, I stood up and walked over to Veronique’s picture to study the catalyst of my curse. Gazing up at those olive green eyes, I searched my feelings for resentment, but found none. Rationally, I knew this was no more her fault than being cursed was mine. Or even Sofie’s.
“What a devastatingly beautiful woman,” a relaxed male voice suddenly said from beside me. Viggo, sliding in unseen like a ghost, as casual as ever. As if he hadn’t murdered my mother.
I instinctively assumed a defensive stance, my hands balling up into tight fists. A soft, wicked chuckle escaped him, one that sent a shiver down my back. My anger morphed instantly into fear. He was a monster.
“I met Veronique at the Emperor’s Royal Ball. I watched her glide down the O’Hara staircase with the purity of an angel, wearing this very dress. I knew I had to have her.”
“And she settled for you until she found something better,” Mortimer chimed in, appearing from a corner, an edge of competitiveness in his voice.
I stood quietly, wondering what their new angle was.
Viggo rolled his eyes. “One evening, Veronique was traveling to meet Sofie in the next city when a group of bandits attacked her carriage. They would have raped and killed her, if not for the aid of Mortimer here, who happened to be hunting in the nearby woods. I owed Mortimer for saving my true love and, so confident in her love for me, I never thought my lovely angel would fall prey to this rugged brute’s wiles. Alas, Mortimer and Veronique grew close and, before I knew it, she was professing her love to both of us. We became bitter enemies, ready to tear each other apart, except that it would cause pain to Veronique for one of us to die. So we waited, impatiently, for her to choose—me, of course—so I could transform her and have her forever. But then her witch of a sister had to go and mess things up!” Viggo said lightheartedly.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked bitterly. “You didn’t want to tell me anything before and now you’re just brimming with true–life stories.”
“To show you that we’re just like you!”
My mouth dropped open in shock. “You murdered my mother and destroyed my life. You probably snack on newborn babies! You’re nothing like me! And you’re trying to win me over with epic love stories, thinking I’m going to help you?” I trembled with rage now.
He quirked a brow. “Are you saying you’re not?”
“Help my mother’s murderer spend eternity with his true love? Hmm, let me see …” Uncharacteristic bravery was yanking words from my mouth before my brain could process them. But I didn’t care. I couldn’t hurt Viggo’s feelings if I tried.
“Well, then … there’s no reason to keep you anymore, is there?” Viggo’s eyes had turned cold, his smile menacing.
All four dogs leapt forward to form a wall around me, but not before Viggo had my pendant within his grasp. “You may tear my heart out, Max, but not before I rip this pendant from Evangeline’s neck,” he said, his eyes locked with mine.