My Sunrise Sunset Paramour (My Midnight Moonlight Valentine 2)

“Axel will,” Simone sneered, her fist tight. “You think the coven will just let this go? It is forbidden. If you do not stop, you will become our enemy, too.” She stepped closer. “Druella…I’m begging you, if you ever considered me like your sister, please, please stop this.”

“You are not hearing me, Simone! I can’t. I cannot stop my heart, and I cannot ignore it, either. He isn’t the villain! Hear me out!” My voice drifted off as many other witches, seven in total, eight including Simone, began to circle closer to me.

When I looked, they were

all the same witches who had attacked Theseus and me at the gallery. A white, red-haired witch with fire, a black man with a scar on his face, and a snake wrapped around his arm.

“As your circle, we must stop you no matter what,” Simone said.

And I was surprised at how calm the witch in me was. “Simone, this is dangerous.”

“Just yesterday, we were all laughing,” the redhead, Faye, said. “If you come with us, Druella, the elders can erase this vampire from your mind, and we can go back to being a family. We all make mistakes. You’re Axel’s niece, the future of our coven, so he’ll forgive you.”

“I do not want to be forgiven by him!” I snapped, lightning striking through the night sky. “The coven is wrong!”

“How have you fallen so far?” The man with the snakes, Jericho, stepped forward. “For thousands of years, this is how it has been, and for as many years until the day of redemption, it will still be done after us. Monsters and mortals cannot coexist.”

“So, it is either you for us, Druella, or you for the monsters,” said the dark-haired woman with one green and one blue eye, matching the eyes of a small cat that sat on her shoulder. I didn’t know her name. But I also remembered seeing her briefly in the national gallery.

“What is your choice?” they asked in unison.

The wind picked up, and I watched as my witch self took a deep breath, looking up to the cloudy sky before smiling as drops of rain began to fall.

“The coven is wrong!”

A snake sprang toward my head, a bolt of lightning toward my stomach, and fire at my back. But it was as if I was watching the world move in slow motion, and everything took way too long to reach me. However, I was still moving at a normal pace, so I turned their attacks back onto them with a snap of my fingers. It was then I realized the witch me had slowed time. Then I released it to flow again, and all of them were thrown, burned, bitten by their own magic, with such ease.

“If you think you know my magic, you are wrong, and I am stronger than you.”

“Druella?”

“Druella?”

Theseus?

Everything faded into darkness, and when I opened my eyes this time, I was back with Theseus, his gray eyes watching over me carefully. We weren’t in the water anymore but traveling through the trees, and I was cradled in his arms.

“Oh, no! Was I gone again? How long? Please don’t tell me days again, please?”

“Only for a minute,” he said, stopping on top of a tree branch. “You seemed to drift off. Come, I am taking us back home.”

I groaned, putting my hands on my face. “Why won’t it stop? I’m so sorry.”

“There is no need for apologizes, for I much prefer fainting to you disappearing,” he said with a reassuring smile on his face. Though, this had to be as annoying for him as it was for me.

“Did we at least…finish.”

He snickered.

“Don’t laugh at me!” This was mortifying. I wanted to hide.

“You finished, at least…”

“Oh, no.” I now wanted to die of embarrassment.

Yet all he is did was laugh. “I jest. I was satisfied before you drifted off to only the gods know where.”

I removed my hand from my face to see him smiling at me. “You!” I smacked his arm. “Not funny!”