“Are you laughing at me?” I snapped at him.
“You have to admit it is a little funny seeing you try to fight yourself and lose,” Atarah replied. “What is the score now?”
“Spellbound seventy-eight. Druella zero,” Arsiein answered.
“You both are not helpful!”
They shrugged.
“We are…” Arsien’s voice trailed off as his gaze went to the woman in the bed. We all heard it, the change in her heartbeat.
I turned from them to her, taking a seat on the bed as her eyes shifted under her eyelids. A few seconds later, they opened slowly.
“Ah, so loud.” She groaned at her wounds and looked around the room.
“Adelaide?”
When I called her name, she sat up quickly, her eyes wide, the faint scent of fear coming off her as she backed up against the headboard of the bed, touching her neck and quickly checking for a pulse.
“Relax, witch. You are still a witch,” Arsiein said, his voice much colder as he spoke to her now.
She glanced at him and Atarah, taking deep breaths and holding the sheets tightly before her eyes fell back onto me. “Shadow, are you here?”
Appearing out of thin air, the cat was in her lap. Adelaide deeply exhaled as she petted the cat on the head, holding it to her chest. I glanced to Arsiein and Atarah, and while they were calm, I could tell they couldn’t see it, either.
“What happened to me?” she finally managed to speak to me.
“You collapsed from your injuries,” I told her. “After you tried to attack me.”
She frowned. “I was trying to get my magic.”
“Really? It felt like you were trying to burn me with whatever poison is on you.”
“It’s a protection spell,” she replied, peeking carefully at Arsiein and Atarah again. “You can never be too careful with vampires.”
“Yet you came to us,” Atarah reminded her.
“I came for Druella,” she replied, petting her cat more now. “I remember before I fainted, you said you weren’t running. So why haven’t you undone the spell.”
“Maybe because I don’t know how, and you fainted before you could tell me.”
“Why would I know how to undo your spell? If I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t be here or need you,” she snapped at me.
“Well, that sucks for both of us, then, because I don’t know shit about magic or spell casting or spell breaking.”
She stared at me as if I were crazy. “I felt magic, deep and strong, being done here. Someone opened the door of the dead here.”
One of the Wiccans of the Vyara had said that same thing. “What does that mean? Open the door to the dead?”
“How do you not know this?” She tilted her head and looked me over. “Wasn’t it you who did it?”
“Witch, she was not—”
“My name is Adelaide,” she snapped at Arsiein. “Adelaide Proctor.”
I paused. I’d read of that name. I could remember the drawing it had been under in one of my textbooks. “Proctor as in John Proctor of the Salem witch trials? Are you related to them?”
“You connected that fast for someone who is pretending not to know about magic or witches.” She rubbed the neck of her cat, and it purred in her arms.