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Because of the bloodsuckers, her own killing instinct had risen to the surface, vibrating like a ers had ached to touch soht and rid her world of a few sets of fangs

She hated this aspect of being a witch, the driving need to strike another species down But every one of her kind, once having gone through the alter, felt an intense pressure to self-protect She’d come to accept that what she experienced was a basic survival mechanism Vampires and shifters killed witches, her kind returned the favor, though for her she’d only done so when attacked However, that didn’t change how much she detested her new nature

The criht had torn her own heart into a thousand pieces Two children were found at the Phoenix entrance to Sentinel Bridge, a boy and a girl, about nine or ten They’d accidentally gotten hold of one of the flaun the process of change But children couldn’t handle the sudden physical trauma involved Death always followed

They’d held hands as they’d died, facing each other It had broken Iris’s heart, seeing their twisted bodies, fingers entwined She’d wept quietly, and that’s when Connor had arrived

She’d seen him many times at various crime scenes, but never like this He’d taken one look at the pair then dropped to his knees, covered his chest with both arh his head at thather over and over, wrecking her heart and so her to become fixated on a damn vampire

Ashim with a terrible need

She was tired of thinking about hihts turned into elaborate fantasies that usually involved his fangs buried in her neck and his cock plunging in and out of her sex Sick as hell

Tonight, she was detere all that

With a fresh lime in her hands, she arden She set about creating a spell that she should have used about eleven o She had no doubt, once completed, the formula would end her obsession

She fired up her cast iron pot-belly stove, using elder wood Once blazing, she placed the blade portion of her hatchet on top She needed the h a thick wax candle

On her worktable, she cut the lime in half, then squeezed the juice onto a purified elder wood tray She rolled a thick black candle in the juice and invoked Connor’s name several times until she felt the spell move into place At the same time, she made use of one of her most powerful incantations She then picked up the heated hatchet and held it aloft ready to slah the thick wax and break Connor’s hold on her

She felt her witch power racing through her veins, giving her a heady buzz The swirl of electrified energy let her kno potent the spell was She had no doubt it would work

With her arh her of things hidden behind the veil of death Her sister ca fingers down both cheeks

She closed her eyes, her throat tight “Violet Are you here?”

A wind fro of thyme, the herb of love she always associated with her sister Tears tracked down her cheeks

Violet was long dead, killed in a vao Yet, in this moment her sister’s spirit was here, in Iris’s workroom

“Violet,” she whispered again

Once ust and the scent of thyme thickened in the air “Don’t you want me to end this obsession?”

This tiers once more touched her cheeks while the wind blew No-o-o-o, came softly into her mind

Iris talked with Violet a lot, but her sister had never communicated ords before, not once in all these years Yet, she had now

“Violet?” She looked around, wondering if the ghost would show herself

But nothing happened, no fingers on her face, no words in her

She lowered the hatchet and returned it to a slab of cast iron on the long butcher block counter near the sink It would need time and a safe place to cool

She felt frightened suddenly So and Violet was part of it, as was Connor She walked back out to her garden to try to cal her

But why? She knew the reasons she’d fallen into an obsession with him, but why did he so often hover above her house?