Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5)(66)

“Witch,” said Asil darkly into the pause, as if he could not help himself. “She was an Irish witch. It is true that she escaped hanging for the death of a child in her care, but I suspect that she was more frightened of the witches who were pursuing her for what she stole from them.”

“Who told you my story?” said Wellesley suspiciously.

“You did,” Asil told him. “This part at least. One night after a full moon, shortly after I arrived here.”

Wellesley stared at him, then looked down, frowning. At last he nodded. “Yes. Yes. I am sorry. My memory is tangled. I think I remember. You told me of your mate’s death. I told you … parts of this story.”

“You were talking of the nursemaid,” Sage said, her body leaning forward on the kitchen chair where she sat. She had a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the table.

Anna wondered what elements of Wellesley’s story had tangled with Sage’s own to make her engage so strongly with it. Sage wasn’t old, old. Older than she looked, maybe, but not old enough to have experienced institutionalized slavery. Maybe it was the witches. Witches tended to send the hairs on the back of Anna’s neck up, too.

“Yes,” agreed Wellesley. “The nursemaid was a witch. No one paid attention to such women. They were to keep quiet and do the work of raising the children. The children who were the future of the family. Someone, you would think, should have understood just how much power that gave them.” He shook his head with sorrowful incredulity. “This man’s nursemaid was a witch, Irish, yes, because her accent was still strong. But how she came to the Caribbean and why—this was all based on rumors in the slave pens. Who knows how much of it was true?” He sent a frowning look toward Asil.

“The Irish witch part was,” said Asil, when it seemed that Wellesley had quit speaking. “Sometime since I first heard your story, I realized that I knew another part of it. I knew the witches who were hunting that one. She stole a small book of family spells from one of the nastier witch clans in Northern Europe, the kind of spellbook witches kill for. As I know what that witch did—and I know the rumors of that family’s powers—it was not difficult to connect the two stories.”

“You knew the witches whose spells she used?” asked Wellesley in a dangerous voice.

Asil smiled, showing white teeth. “We were not friends, Wellesley.”

“Asil doesn’t like witches,” said Anna firmly, and the tension in the air died down a notch.

“That bloodline has died out,” said Asil. “Not entirely by my efforts.”

“Well and so,” said Wellesley. “Well and so. It seems that this will be informative for all of us. This Irish witch was sold as a bondswoman to my … to the man’s parents when he was eight or nine. She was given the raising of him. Rumor was that his parents were the first people he and his mentor tortured and killed—but I suspect not. The slaves were easier prey, and predators usually begin with easier prey.”

“Not always,” said Sage into the silence that followed. “But usually.”

“No one cared about the slaves, not even the other slaves,” Wellesley said abruptly. Then he stopped and gulped down the wine until it was gone. He shook his head. “That’s not for this tale either. This witch could make collars that forced the person wearing one to obedience. She had to torture a lot of people to death for the power to create each one.” There was horror in his eyes, but his voice was steady.

Wellesley, thought Anna, had witnessed the making of those collars. She occasionally had nightmares about her encounters with witches. So did Charles.

Wellesley continued speaking quietly. “I understand at first she tried to use them on all the slaves but found that it took power to control the collars, too. She could use no more than six of them at a time or they became less effective.” He grimaced. “The power in them had to be renewed twice a year.

“It was a matter of great disappointment to her that instead of an island of willing slaves, who would torture themselves for her pleasure, she had to make do with ‘special’ slaves who enforced her will on the rest of the people on the island. If one of the collared slaves died or was killed, she replaced him with another. All the time that I knew her, she was trying to find a way to make the collars more permanent, to make them power themselves.”

He had to quit talking again. Sage reached out a hand to him—wolves tended to touch each other a lot when they were under stress. But Wellesley wrapped his arms around himself and shook his head. He rocked a little in the chair, and his eyes glittered with shades of gold.

“And then they found themselves a werewolf,” Charles said, when the silence stretched too long.

Wellesley nodded, but he still didn’t speak. Maybe he couldn’t.

After a moment, Charles went on. “Probably he was, himself, a victim. He came to the island because there were stories of a woman who knew magic, who knew how to remove curses.”

“Be careful of those,” said Asil in a low voice. “The only people who can remove curses can put them on, too.”

Wellesley looked at Anna. “Not always,” he said in an intense voice. “There are healers in the world as well as killers.”

“That was mostly Charles and Bran,” Anna said, embarrassed at receiving such a look. “They had the power. I was just a conduit, I think.”