I lift an eyebrow. Is she honestly asking that? I’ve spent my life feeding on others, taking what I need to survive. I’ve watched bodies collapse at my feet and felt nothing but satisfaction as their life force filled the endless void inside me. “What else could I be?”
Elizabeth sighs, leaning back. She crosses her legs beneath her elegant black nightgown and bounces her slippered foot. “Julia, this binding spell is designed to force you to confront that question. You have to decide what you are.”
“Sanguine witches don’t get to decide that.”
She stares at me, and I stare back, struggling against the invisible bonds. My magic pulses erratically, trying to help me escape, but her hex is too strong.
“You left Hannah the moment you thought you were free.” Elizabeth tilts her head. “Why?”
Nausea rises, but I swallow it down. I will not feel guilty for choosing my freedom. “Because that’s my nature. I take what I need and I leave.”
“Is it? Or were you running from something else?” She stops bouncing her foot. “Perhaps from what you felt when she surrendered to you so completely?”
Heat rushes into my face at the memory of Hannah spread beneath me, begging for me, offering everything. The way she looked at me felt dangerously like trust. I open my mouth to defend myself, but what can I say? That I panicked? That seeing her so vulnerable, knowing I could have killed her, terrified me?
Instead, I say flatly, “I felt nothing.”
“Really? Nothing at all when she offered you her life, her soul?” Elizabeth’s voice is too knowing. “Surely, from what I gather about the nature of these feedings, you felt something when she came apart beneath you—”
My chest tightens. “Stop.”
“You care for her.”
I scoff. “It’s not in a sanguine witch’s nature to care. Anyway, Hannah won’t surrender to a monster, which means breaking this binding spell is impossible unless we find a loophole.”
Elizabeth’s laugh is soft and pitying. “You truly don’t understand your own power, do you?”
I flex my fingers, a spark of magic prickling between them. I don’t have time for this. “I understand it perfectly. I drain life to survive.”
“You think sanguine magic is only about taking?” Elizabeth leans forward. “Tell me, Julia. In all your years of feeding, when did you feel the most powerful?”
Tonight comes to mind, after I fed on Hannah. And there was Charlotte, of course. Those months when nothing could stop me.
Elizabeth seems to know what I’m thinking because she nods. “Why do you chase freely given power when you have the option to steal it?”
Because Hannah won’t let me kill,I think, though I know there’s more to it. Feeding on Hannah is more pleasurable in so many ways.
“Sanguine magic thrives on connection,” Elizabeth continues. “On genuine intimacy. The willing surrender born of real feeling is more powerful than anything you could take by force.”
“That’s not—”
“Charlotte didn’t just offer you her essence. She offered you her heart. And you felt something for her too, didn’t you? That’s why she was so intoxicating.”
The memory threatens to choke me. Charlotte’s beautiful face as she undressed for me one last time.
She was supposed to be different from everyone I’d fed on before her. She offered herself willingly, and so I wouldn’tneedto drain her dry. For a few precious months, I thought I could be something other than a parasite. Maybe I could give as much as I took.
“You’re so certain that you’re beyond redemption.”
“Aren’t I?” I try to laugh, but it comes out strangled. “I killed her, just like everyone said I would.”
“Not everyone.”
“Enough of them. Don’t think I forgot their words.A hungry ghost, forever feeding, never satisfied. A monster who destroys everything she touches.”
“You were young with Charlotte. Inexperienced in matters of the heart and in your craft.”
“That doesn’t excuse what I did.”
