Page 70 of Winter Unleashed
I pressed my hand on his chest to put some space between us. “We have to kill her.”
“Astrid?” he asked, his eyes widening so much it looked painful.
“No, doofus. Cybil.”
“Oh, yes, I know.”
“But we’re going to bluff her. We have to threaten to kill Bruno in front of her if she doesn’t tell us where Celeste is.”
He grunted. “And if she doesn’t care?”
I furrowed my brow. “He’s her son. She’ll care.”
“She won’t. Trust me. We can try it, but we need a backup plan.”
We discussed different ideas before finally settling on a few that we thought might work. The last one, which in my opinion should have been the first one, was to make Astrid stay with us and kill Celeste the next time she showed up. But Liam insisted Astrid wouldn’t go for it.
We went back to Astrid and told her our plans. Our friends were already there. Philip looked bored. Stella looked excited. And Bruno, in typical Bruno fashion, looked confused.
As Liam predicted she refused to stay with us. “No. Absolutely not,” she said when we finished explaining why we thought it was best.
“Why?” I asked. “I deserve to know why.”
“One, I hate the human world. It smells like them. No matter where you go, their stink takes over. Even in your shifter communities. And two, she’ll know I’m there and will never show up. Our best bet is to take her by surprise. That entails making Cybil tell us where to find her. If that fails, I’ll work something out so I’m alerted when she comes to visit you again.”
“Um, let’s do that then. It’s way easier. We can just kill Cybil and you can pop up the next time Celeste shows up.” I couldn’t figure out why she’d never offered it before but that was the past and there was no use trying to get a fairy to explain their reasoning.
“I just said why. Taking her by surprise will work best if we show up on her turf. At her home. She’ll be more likely to have her guard down and not have bodyguards or vampires or pixies protecting her.”
“Mm-hmm, fine. Bring us to Cybil.”
I assumed we’d follow her through a magical hallway or something, but I blinked, and we were suddenly standing in an enormous black room. There was so much black it was hard to tell where the floor ended and the walls began. The ceiling was so high I wasn’t sure there was one.
The only thing breaking up the monochromatic scenery was a glint of glass about twenty feet from us. As we neared the massive glass cage, I saw its occupant rise from a plush armchair. She moved with the same grace she had before being locked up, but there was something different about her.
Cybil’s eyes stayed on me the entire time we walked toward the cage. Once we stood in front of it, I studied her for a bit, trying to figure out what had changed in her.
“Hello, Ember,” Cybil said in her cool, seductive voice. It was the same but there was still an underlying change I couldn’t put my finger on.
“Cybil,” I replied with a nod.
“Have you missed me? I know Celeste can be a little much.” She spread her lips into her sexy grin, but I didn’t feel the usual urge to jump her bones.
“You’ve lost your glamour,” I said finally figuring it out. I gave her a little pout. “Aw, did Astrid take away your fuck magic?”
She glared down at me, flicking her hateful gaze to Philip when he cleared his throat around what sounded like a laugh. Liam and Isaac on the other hand, didn’t hide their laughter.
“How does it feel to lose something so important to you? Stings a bit, doesn’t it?” Liam asked.
Cybil sneered at him. “Is this why you’ve come here? To mock the trapped vampire?”
“No, of course not,” I replied with a wide-eyed look. “That’s just an added bonus.”
She snorted and turned on her heel. I watched her walk back to the chair, her hips swaying with thousands of years of practice. But, without her glamour, it wasn’t nearly as hot as she thought it was.
Her glamour had worked to block how disgusted I felt by her malevolence. Once her glamour took away my revulsion toward her, all that remained was the animalistic desire to fuck her. Without her magical allure, my revulsion overwhelmed my lust which made her no better than a cockroach to me.
“Why are you bothering me?” she asked as she crossed one leg over the other.