The SpellBinder's Grim Book Two: Incinerate

Chapter 1

"Aralena was your wife? Ara was your wife? That- it is not possible." Emily gasped. She looked behind her at the post, the iron chains still clasped around her grandmother's limbs. The charred skeletal remains screamed at her.

"She was very much my wife," Fredrick said.

"That would make you my- my grandfather," Emily said quietly.

Fredrick licked his top fangs in thought.

"I suppose it would."

"All this time! Why have you not said anything!" Emily yelled at him. She braved passed the safety of the border and poked her finger into his chest harshly.

"You bit me! Animal! I will be like you! You condemn your own kin to a life like this?" Emily's face twisted.

"I was not aware that you were mine at all. It has been years since I have even been able to smell Aralena."

"What about my mother? Did you not think to say anything to her? All this time she thought you were dead."

"Of course I wanted to."

"But you did not," she said pointedly.

"I cannot even go near where she lives. She is greatly protected. Even in death- Aralena sees that she is safe- so long as she does not submit to her darkness."

"You know of the Darkness?" Emily asked skeptically.

"Of course I do. When I had disappeared Ara had been so... so drastically changed."

"Ara struggled with her Darkness?"

"It made it worse that she was pregnant. That kind of potent darkness- our child would feed off of it while in the womb. I would watch her from a distance, her kneeling on the dirt naked, veins black as night- she had become worse and I would watch from the forest. It was all I could do, because I was afraid of her. The night after I had turned into this was the night that my daughter came into the world. The birth of my daughter was a dark time, for myself and Ara both. I was there- but yet I was not. There was this beam of light that fell from the sky and it engulfed everything inside of the barrier. Every Night creature was attracted then- as if they felt the power there- even I could not resist."

"It took me many years to be able to get to this point- to be this human enough to talk to someone without killing them. Honestly you are the first, and I believe it is because you are my own."

"The great Aralena The White Witch had a dark side," Emily scoffed. She had always pictured her grandmother as a model citizen.

"You sound surprised. No one can walk through life without having one sinful thought. Witches have a more pronounced dark side than humans. It is the most common of ailments with witches. Aralena had many encounters with her own darkness. She was strong enough to conquer it."

"She would have had less trouble just giving in," Emily quipped.

Fredrick rose one furry brow at her and made a low growling noise.

"She wanted so much to be good. She wished for a day that she and her children, and her children's children would not be judged for how or who they were born as."

"That kind of thinking got her killed."

"That kind of thinking made you. Besides, your grandmother believed in God, and the Devil. She had hoped to go to Heaven."

Emily laughed at this.

"Heaven? Is that what all of this is about? Battling some evil inside of yourself so you get to sit in a fairy tale land?"