Gift

21

Creatures with their backs against the wall usually responded to a threat in one of two ways: aggression or submission. Humans were much the same. Baring teeth, snarling, posturing, or cowering. She couldn't say that's exactly what the young witch was doing. She was pacing, fliting from one end of the solarium to the other, her heels kicking up dust, brow furrowed to the point it seemed a sinkhole would appear in the middle of her forehead.

Her energy arrived ten minutes before she came barreling through the door all but breathing smoke from her nostrils, interrupting her mentor who had been in the middle of meditating.

Dahlia had thrown on her customary coat Bonnie had never seen her without for the last few weeks, and perched herself on her dais. Within fifteen minutes the young woman had gone from rage to despair, back to rage, to uncertainty.

Dahlia took it in stride as she enjoyed a steaming cup of oolong tea.

Bonnie really couldn't believe she was back here. Not after what happened last night, but she honestly had nowhere else to go. Everyone in her circle were killers and they would understand the blood you couldn't wash off no matter how clean your hands appeared, but what she had done last night was different.

Wasn't it?

Maybe it was a distinction not worth ruminating on when it came to the efficacy of killing. Blood spilled, whether it was a drop or an ocean, still meant the end of a life. And though she hadn't killed, she came worryingly close to it last night. Too close. Right on the edge, close.

"What am I supposed to say to them?" Bonnie demanded. "Alaric's fiancé is laid up in the hospital and why? Because my mentor decided to send an assassin after me as a test? That'll go over well."

Dahlia merely stared.

Bonnie sighed. "How is she?"

Dahlia didn't pretend not to know who the young witch was referring to. "Recovering...How did you find the members of the Gemini coven?"

Bonnie did a double take. The words she was about to spew, she swallowed. "Weak."

Klaus' aunt snorted. She wasn't surprised.

"Not because they lack power," Bonnie went on to explain, "but because none of them wants to take the lead in dealing with Kai. They're scared of him. Scared of him siphoning their power."

"Is that the only reason you believe they're frightened of him? Have you not asked yourself why did they merely banished him to a prison world and not outright kill him? Witches and warlocks of the past have died for far less grievances than what you confided to me that he did to his coven."

"Hell if I know why they didn't gut him the way he gutted his siblings. Like he gutted me. Maybe because his life is tied to Jo's since they're twins."

"A tie that could have been broken," Dahlia sagely interpolated.

"Or maybe something happens to them if they break with tradition. The Gemini coven...One twin has to kill the other and the victor 'ascends'," Bonnie air quoted.

"Ascends to what?"

Bonnie had no fucking idea. She figured Dahlia had already worked out the variable she had been struggling with for months. She tried to think back to the conversations she had with Liv about her coven, but nothing the curly-haired blonde shared with Bonnie had ever made sense. She never understood their practices.

"I don't know," she admitted with a rueful shrug. "My mind doesn't want to solve that equation."

Dahlia signed and drained the rest of her tea. "There are bloodlines in this world created for the sole purpose of carrying out a specific function. There are bloodlines born to cultivate peace, others disruption, or to guard knowledge, so forth and so on. Then there are lines which were never supposed to be. A mishap of nature, a corruption of a gene. A disorder, in a sense."