Page 8 of Azure Mania

And, oh, do I find her.

She’s just sitting in a chair, eyes closed and sipping tea.

The bitch is actually sipping tea.

“Do you not have any sense of danger?”

She slowly opens her eyes, then chuckles. “I don’t see any danger here, though. Come,” she says, patting the seat beside her, “take a seat.”

The words irritate me beyond belief, but I swallow down the anger, a little curious as to what she actually wants. She’s so composed; almost too relaxed, for someone who has a monster in her home. She’s dressed in her pyjamas, a pair of black, silk shorts with a matching top.

The fashion truly has changed over the past two hundred years.

Back then, this would’ve been too provocative, too much.

“You do realize I’m here to kill you, right?”

“Too bad,” she chuckles. “You can’t kill me.”

Momentarily, I falter. She didn’t say it to test me, or to challenge me. No, her words are laced with a level certainty that I don’t quite understand. Where is all that arrogance coming from? How is she so confident that I won’t be able to kill her, when just a while ago, she was trying to hide the fear in her eyes?

So, I sit down, staring into her.

“You see,” she starts speaking, lowering the cup down onto the saucer. “My friend, Octavia, will likely kill me for telling you this, but… to ensure my safety, I have to.”

“Bold words. Ensuring your safety from the man who’s here to kill you?”

“I knew that would be your reaction,” she chuckles. “You see, I came to realize that the curse I put on you worked, a little too well.”

I blink. “What does that even mean?”

“It means that I didn’t do it properly. Instead of using a proper spell, I improvised.”

“Cut to the chase,” I urge. “You’re beating around the bush, and it’s pissing me off, Yvonne. What did you do?”

“So, funny story,” she laughs, but it’s not humorous. If anything, I’d say she’s anxious and nervous beyond words. “We may or may not… be connected now.”

“Excuse me?”

The next scene plays too quickly. In one moment, Yvonne’s looking at me sighing, and shaking her head. In the next one, she’s grabbing the knife on the table, and throwing it at me. It’s not too much of a threat, so I don’t avoid it and it slices through my right shoulder, falling to the floor.

It doesn’t hurt. I don’t even flinch.

But my eyes widen when I see that the wound on my shoulder, then appears on Yvonne’s too. She winces in pain, gripping the hem of her pyjamas and taking a deep breath. The wound is identical to mine — from the depth, and size, to the amount of blood that drips from them.

Once my wound heals, hers disappears too. Like it was never there to begin with.

“What the hell did I just witness?”

“We’re connected now,” she admits through gritted teeth. “That means if you kill me, you die, too. Do you honestly think I wouldn’t have already killed you, if there wasn’t a reason for me to keep you alive?”

In an instant, I’m in front of her, grabbing her by the throat, just like I did earlier. However, this time, she doesn’t flinch. In fact, she doesn’t react at all. She expected me to react like this.

“Go ahead,” she croaks. “Test it out.”

“I can’t die by strangulation,” I grit out.

“But I can and if I die, you die.”