Chapter 101 Chapter 101

Chapter 101 Chapter 101

KILLIAN

“Trouble has a way of finding you,” my uncle said, pinching the bridge of his nose, and I gave him a small frown as I folded my arms across my chest.

“You say that like I invited it.”

“Did you not?” he muttered under his breath. He found out about the attack this morning—Fabien had been the one to tell him—and before Lenore and I got here, Aurel had given him a rundown of it. I’d filled in the rest, including the fact that Fabien had identified the witches but was still working on identifying the coven they were from, and my uncle was less than thrilled about the entire ordeal.

“What have you done recently?” he asked and I raised a brow. It was fair of him to assume I’d done something that contributed to me getting attacked, but come on…

“Nothing short of staying out of trouble.” Yes, there was that minor thing I had with Ravaryn five days ago, and yes, he had relations with witches just like my uncle did, but he definitely had nothing to do with the attack.

“Such as blindly attacking your father?”

Anger shot through me, hot and sharp, and I narrowed my gaze at him. “Do not start with me,” I ground out. I’d tolerated him ripping into me last night about it and about killing Cederic, but I wasn’t going to stand here and let him act like what I did was stupid.

My father’s vile words came back to mind, and my jaw clenched as my uncle heaved a sigh. Then he shifted the conversation back to its main topic.

“They would not risk going into Eyrosa to attack you without good reason and—”

“They could have just attacked me at the club. I know, I know,” I muttered, rubbing my forehead, before the memory of the witches at my suite’s door resurfaced.

They were dead, but my anger still doubled at the fact that if I’d stayed with Aurel and Fabien in the kitchens for a bit longer, they would have walked into my suite and found Lenore. The chances of them hurting her just because she was in my bed were low, but they weren’t zero. People were unpredictable after all, and they might be the type to hurt anyone associated with someone they hated.

“I truly haven’t done anything to make them attack me recently,” I added. “For the past year, at least.” Before Lenore practically crashed into my life ten days ago and my mother reached out to me six days ago, at least ninety percent of my time was spent trying to contact my mother. Of course, there was the occasional witch, werewolf, or vampire who wanted to kill me and thoroughly failed, but… I doubted those three witches had come into Eyrosa to avenge a fallen friend. The entire thing felt odd, and there was what the ponytail witch said before she died: ”They said they would fix everything. All we had to do was get—”

Who’s they? Her coven? Someone else? And what were they supposed to get?

Now that I was no longer essence drunk, my thoughts were back to being clear and not knowing the answers to those questions was starting to bother me.

“Are you sure they were there to attack you?”

It was a reasonable question and the blond witch had claimed they were really not there for a fight but—“Why else would they have come then?”

He shrugged and I turned to fully face him as a cool breeze swept past us, stirring the shrubs along the path to the driveway.  “It just feels… odd.”

Evidently, we were on the same page.

“We could have had a nice conversation if they didn’t try to set me on fire right off the bat,” I replied just before the ponytail witch’s last words replayed in my mind and I paused.

Hold on. The way she’d died… “Someone killed her.”

I would have realized it earlier if my mind hadn’t been fixed on the fact that she and her companions had Lenore’s scent on them before the essence I drained from them derailed my thoughts. Speaking of the essence, I had not expected it to keep me drunk for that long. Yes, I’d drained three witches, but the Turis I’d drained in the past had only kept me in that state for two hours max. Not almost eight hours.

Then there was how intensely their essence had pulsed through my veins. They were definitely not average Turis.

“Huh?”

“The last witch—the one who talked to me,” I clarified, my frown deepening.

“Oh.” A line appeared between my uncle’s brows. “Why do you say so?” he asked and I told him exactly how she’d died.

I’d written her death off as being brought on by a spell that had attached her life force to one or both of the other witches who’d been with her, so when they died, it had naturally taken her with them. Or something equally unimportant. But that wasn’t it.

Except for the tears and terror, she’d looked fine after her companions died, then the moment she was about to tell me why they’d come, someone had stopped her. I was sure it had been a person and not a spell designed to keep her from saying whatever she’d been about to, because if it had been the latter, she would have died before she even said that much. No, another witch had been watching us.

What I didn’t know was whether she’d been in the main hallway with us, hidden from sight by a spell, or somewhere close enough to the palace to spy on us with her powers. If she’d been in the main hallway… I didn’t even want to think about that.

My uncle blinked at me, saying nothing for a couple of seconds before he let out a harsh breath. “So there’s a very strong chance you have witches plotting against you.”

Not average witches, either.

“Isn’t that just delightful?” he added as I worked my jaw.

This was the last thing I needed right now—not when I already had other shit to deal with, and, more importantly, not when I had Lenore with me. My nails dug into my palms.

“Don’t look so worried. It’s a rite of passage for our family,” he said, his eyes glinting as he placed a hand on my shoulder, and I shot him a hard stare. His lips twitched with a small smile. “Give me a couple of days. If Fabien doesn’t have any luck, I’ll find out what coven they belonged to. It would be very telling if I started asking about three witches you killed.”

“Don’t want your friends to know you care about your nephew?”

“Appearances, Killian,” he answered even though I was precisely why he lost a good number of his witch friends, and a wry flicker of amusement tugged at me.

“…Thank you.” Without him, I’d have been screwed more times than I cared to count. He patted my shoulder in response before my gaze drifted to the car Lenore and Aurel were sitting in in the driveway, and the undying spell on her surged back to the forefront of my mind, demanding to be addressed. My jaw tightened.

“I should go,” I said. Before my father found out Lenore wasn’t in the city.

“You should,” my uncle answered and I gave him a nod before heading down the stairs which led to the path. Halfway down though, I paused and turned to face him, my brows furrowed.

“Why did he invite you to the banquet?”

They’d been at odds for decades—he sure as hell hadn’t been invited because my father wanted to present the vampire family as a united front to the werewolf representatives—and he’d spent the night in the main palace to keep my father from retaliating. Father had to have said something about why he’d invited him.

“You’re nosy, Killian.”

“I learned from the best,” I said and he flashed me a smile.

“Your mother or me?”

I shrugged. “Who knows at this point?”

His smile widened a fraction before his expression shifted, like he was choosing his next words carefully. “Nothing you need to worry yourself over, Killian… You have a lot on your plate already.”