Page 19 of Losing The Vampire King
I keep my teeth clenched like that for as long as I can, but her fingers dig into my cheeks at this point, and I am forced to do as she orders me. My mouth flies open wide, and to my complete and utter shock, she takes the little container from her hand and pours something bitter into my mouth, making sure to clasp it closed with both her hands, so I could swallow it.
I fight hard to do the opposite, but it’s impossible. Some of the liquid comes out through my nose, as I push it with the power of my breath. The pain sears through my sinuses.
A moment later, I manage to regain my composure and I use both my hands to push her off of me, breathing heavily and coughing out the little of the liquid that I had left in my mouth. Unfortunately, she forced me to swallow most of it.
“What… kind of poison… did you give me?” I hiss at her angrily, bent forward as if carrying a heavy load on my back, but unwilling to take my eyes off of her for even a single moment.
“It’s not poison,” she says, shaking her head.
The animal inside of me is ready. It will attack… now.
I watch the woman take steps away from me, her eyes big and frightful. I don’t understand what just happened. I thought she didn’t want to hurt me.
What did she give me?
Suddenly, the world around me starts to spin around. I feel dizzy, nauseous. My stomach protests what I’ve just been given by pushing the contents back up. I almost vomit everything, but nothing comes out.
I drop to my knees into the shallow part of the lake. My entire body is convulsing from the cold, from whatever poison she gave me.
“Eddie?” she calls out to me again.
I want her close, but at the same time, I don’t. She should stay away from me, at a safe distance. I can’t see her clearly any longer. My field of vision is diminishing, becoming darker and more foggy, until finally, I can’t see anything any longer.
I hear her voice as if through a haze of long forgotten memories, but I don’t see her. My mind is a blank. I am blind. I am deaf. I no longer exist.
Everything is darkness.
Chapter Eleven
Bianca
“What a spectacle! Bravo! Bravo!”
The words are followed by a roaring thunder of applause that echoes all around us, almost as if this is a macabre theatre, set up deep in the woods, just for the three of us. I hear a voice that has haunted me through my darkest nightmares, the same voice I hoped I would never have to hear again.
My conscious mind refuses to believe in the identity of the person the voice belongs to, but I know it can’t be anyone else. I’m sure of it.
My mind tries to hide in a corner, just like I used to do before. For a moment, fear takes complete hold of me, and I am unable to fight it off. I should be able to, because I’m not the frightened little girl from before. I’ve grown. Eddie proved to me that I am not a poor excuse of a creature, but rather someone who deserves to be loved and cherished. That is something I couldn’t believe for a long time, but with his love, I finally accepted that truth. I accepted him.
“Gala?” I say her name incredulously, disbelieving that it could actually be her.
But it is. She appears from the deepest, darkest part of the woods, clapping her hands together in rhythm, refusing to stop until she has made her point, like a wicked forest creature who had risen from the depths of hell to wreak havoc on unsuspecting passersby. I unfortunately, happen to be one of those, only she thinks I deserve what is coming to me.
“What are you doing here?” I demand to know, although pieces of the puzzle have already started to come together in my mind. It is all slowly starting to make sense.
“I thought you had it figured out by now,” Gala mocks me. “Don’t disappoint me now.”
“You did this to Edmund!” I shout at her, hoping that the sound of my voice might be enough to wake him up, but when I glance over at him, I see he’s still unconscious.
“And it was ever so much fun to try and convince him that I was his long lost love, waiting for him to remember me!” she explains, laughing with all her might as she did so. “Can you imagine the ridiculousness of the whole situation? And he actually bought it! That’s the most idiotic thing of all!”
He bought it? Her words ring inside my mind, stinging with the might of a thousand bees. I can’t believe that. I refuse to believe that.
“Why would you do this? Why not just kill him when you had the chance?” I demand, wanting to show her that I’m not afraid of her anymore.
She tortured me for such a long time, when I was still with the skin walkers. She and her gang would find me in the woods. They would belittle me. They would hit me. They would tell me all sorts of horrible things, probably in hopes that I would run away on my own, but I never did that. The last time they accosted me in the woods was when Eddie scared them away, saving me. That was when our love story started. In a way, she is responsible for us having fallen in love. I have her to thank for that, her malice and her evil nature. Because if she didn’t almost kill me in the woods that night, Eddie would have had no one to save.
“Oh, but where’s the fun in just killing someone like that?” Gala shrugs, walking around me and over to Eddie, who is lying on his back in the shallow waters of the lake. “No!”
