Chapter 600: Ashlynn’s Growing Darkness (Part Two)
"You thought that if you healed him, he would join with us more willingly," Nyrielle said with a heavy sigh as she listened to her lover’s explanation. "My darling, you are already pushing your coven to its limits to care for Ritchel. You have healed young lord Hauke much sooner than anyone expected and Heila has done more for Ignatious in a few weeks than I was able to do for him in months. The healing ability of witches is far more powerful than I imagined, but even you have limits," she chastised.
"I know," Ashlynn said as she wrapped her arms around Nyrielle, resting her head above her lover’s slowly beating heart. "I can’t heal Aspakos," she said in a voice so quiet that only people like Nyrielle with extremely sensitive ears would be able to hear, even from inches away. "He, his wounds feel like a cloak laying over him, and when I look closely, I can almost see through them, like they’re reflections of wounds instead of real ones. There’s nothing there for me to heal."
"That’s why you said that his darkness doesn’t belong to him," Nyrielle said. "But you also said that he wasn’t like me, or Ignatious or Thane... or you," she whispered as her hands stilled, resting gently on Ashlynn’s back and hair where she’d been gently stroking her lover. "The three of us are vampires and we’ve long been wrapped in the darkness of the abyss, but what about you, my darling? What darkness is it that belongs to you?"
"It’s not the darkness of being a vampire," Ashlynn said, biting her lower lip and closing her eyes against the memories that tried to float to the surface of her mind. "It’s the pain of loss and the thirst for vengeance. It’s the nightmares that," she started, only to cut off abruptly as her fingers clutched at the fabric of Nyrielle’s dress.
"The dreams have come back?" Nyrielle asked, pulling back slightly from Ashlynn to lift her lover’s chin up. Ashlynn’s eyes were still screwed shut against memories that haunted her while her body trembled and her hands clutched at Nyrielle’s dress like a drowning woman clutching a rope and the sight of it was enough to pierce the vampire’s heart like a sword thrust by her most hated enemy. "Ashlynn, my heart, why didn’t you tell me?"
"They, they never really went away," Ashlynn admitted after drawing a deep, shuddering breath. "They were less frequent before. When I was in the Briar, everything happening in Lothian March, my worries about Jocelynn and the hot, burning need..."
The need to see Owain’s body, broken and battered at her feet before she dumped it into a shallow grave in the wilderness where no one would ever celebrate his accomplishments or mourn his passing... Ashlynn might not have said the words, but Nyrielle knew her lover too well to need to hear them.
And even if she hadn’t known Ashlynn so well, the words weren’t much different from the ones she would have spoken all those years ago when her parents were burned alive for their crime of ’heresy.’ Some wounds cut so deeply that the only balm that would soothe the pain was seeing the person responsible for inflicting the wounds suffer the same fate or one even worse.