by Eva Brandt
The thought turned my stomach and I glared at him, angry at him and at myself for almost succumbing to his tricks. “You’re right. I don’t believe in giving up without a fight. But that doesn’t mean I’ll ever take your hand. I have a family, a soulmate. I belong with them. And you’ve hurt them, hurt my father, Clara, my aunts. You need to pay the price.”
“And yet, here we are, still alive and still talking to you,” Mathias pointed out. “I don’t think you want to hurt us as much as you claim.”
I hated that he was right, hated that I couldn’t quite bring myself to summon my magic and attack them again. Something was niggling at the back of my mind, a knowledge that refused to let me go.
It was strange, but everyone else had stopped fighting as well and seemed to be staring at me. All the people who were on my side—my own guards, the Alarians and the fae—looked so very wary, like they expected me to turn on them.
Maybe that was just it. They did, and I couldn’t figure out why.
“I need you to tell me the truth, once and for all,” I said at last. “I can’t live like this, in such perpetual uncertainty. I can’t live while seeing someone else in my reflection.”
I didn’t know why I said that, but it worked anyway. It wasn’t any of the new arrivals who addressed my question. Instead, it was Pierce. “You’re not seeing someone else. You are Princess Dahud of the Ancient Kingdom of Kerys.”
I stared at him in disbelief. Princess Dahud? Me? No way.
“Over one thousand and five hundred years ago, in a misguided attempt to save your life, your parents forced a powerful magic user to cast a spell on you, one that shattered the soul of your soulmate and destroyed your ability to feel,” he continued. “Most of the records of what happened during that time have been lost, but we do know that eventually, you turned on them. The end result of the whole debacle was the destruction of Kerys, the creation of the Accursed—and of five separate people who identify as your soulmates.
“But your true soulmate, the only person who has always been waiting for you, is me. A thousand and five hundred years ago, my soul was crushed by your father’s magic. And I will go to my death before I allow us to be separated again.
“Yes, Lucienne, we all lied to you. We betrayed you. You might as well hear it from me, because your father will never say it. We used you and we were going to use you again today. But I won’t play along with that, not anymore. I won’t play along with any of their games.”
My head started to spin at his admission. I remembered all the times he’d pulled away from me without explanation, his strange behavior when I’d practically thrown myself at him for sex. Was this the real reason, because he’d been lying to me all along?
I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t accept it. Surely if I had been a mass-murdering lunatic, I would’ve remembered it. Right?
Except... I sort of did remember, didn’t I?
That mysterious woman in the mirror had certainly looked like a princess, and although the lunacy part hadn’t been obvious, I was realistic enough to admit that I wasn’t very sane.
Did it even matter? Everyone else seemed to think it did, but it had been over a millennium ago. You’d think we’d be able to let go of past hurts and start over properly in our new lives.
I must’ve said that out loud, because Mathias smiled bitterly. “If only we could’ve done that, we wouldn’t be here right now. But you know as well as I do that Dahud’s curse—your curse—never vanished. We’re wrapped up in it too. We’ll always be reborn for you, so we can be together.”
“No,” Blossom suddenly said. “You’re reborn because you’re anomalies created by dark magic and so far, no one has been able to find a way to destroy you. But once you are all dead, the Accursed Syndrome will vanish as well, and so will the plague on the world that the Accursed represent.”
He waved a hand, and that was the moment when things got really weird.
Ten
Friends, Foes, and Family
Mathias
When I’d agreed with the others to come to this meeting and attempt to rescue Lucienne in such a crazy way, I’d known our plan wouldn’t work. So far, every battle we’d participated in had gone wrong, mostly due to our own inability to maintain control of our shattering minds. At this point in my life, after one thousand and five hundred years of fighting and torment, I was old enough to not rely on false hope.
I’d been prepared for an attack from an infuriated Lucienne. I’d been prepared for an ambush from Louis. High King help me, I’d even been prepared for our magic to fuck us up all over again. Declan certainly seemed to be heading in that direction.
I hadn’t expected the Dorado fae to have something so frustrating up their sleeve.
In hindsight, that had been stupid of me. Most species hated Accursed and if news had reached them of Lucienne’s true identity, it stood to reason that they wanted to take steps. As much as I loved her, I could acknowledge that Lucienne was a threat to world stability.
But it was impossible to get rid of her as long as we were still around. Clearly, the fae intended to fix that and so did every other type of paranormal.
I had to give credit where it was due. They’d been resourceful. In the miniature army that popped up in the grove, I recognized at least ten different types of creatures. The nosferatu had come in particularly large numbers, but that wasn’t a big surprise. They’d hated Accursed vampires for centuries, since the Middle Ages. At the time, Accursed vampires had had a tendency to attack humans and spread the fear of the undead, especially throughout Europe. The undead panic had killed many normal vampires, and the slight had never been forgotten.
No wonder the fae had picked this hour for the meeting if they’d invited so many undead to join the party. Nosferatu were even more vulnerable to sunlight than Accursed vampires. Had all this taken place in daylight, some of the creatures would’ve likely burst into flames before they could’ve approached us.
Every single nosferatu in the group zeroed in on Malachai, and their eyes burned with a hatred so intense I was surprised they didn’t attack immediately.
The rest of the new arrivals weren’t any happier. A shifter of some kind was leading the group, and he bared his fangs at Declan. “You die today, creature,” he said.
Declan didn’t falter. He was accustomed to such treatment. Regular shifters had problems with Accursed ones, because their natures weren’t magical. Unlike Declan, they would never be able to wield any kind of elemental magic. For this reason, they considered the sheer existence of such shifters offensive to their sensibilities. As a guardian, Declan had crossed paths with other shifters before, but they’d never actually fought because Alarian authority had protected him. Things were different now.
“Really?” he drawled. “I think you’ll find I’m not the one who’s going to die.”
“Your magic is no match for ours,” a sprite said from behind the shifter.
I wasn’t all that surprised to see sprites in the group. While they didn’t feel the same personal resentment toward Accursed, they wanted to protect humans or had problems with black magic. The elves with them were a different matter. As notoriously reclusive as they were, I wouldn’t have thought they’d get involved in something like this. Oh, well. I’d been wrong before.
In the end, none of these people had the courage to break the tentative stalemate between our forces. Instead, a blast of water erupted between us, stemming from the body of a green-clad man.
A mer. Wonderful.
Contrary to popular belief, merfolk were perfectly capable of wandering around at will among humans. They were also vicious fuckers and had a tendency to keep grudges. They couldn’t speak well while on the surface, but some things—like violence—were universal and whenever they crossed my path, they never failed to show their displeasure with me and with Dahud.
I met the explosion of water magic with a fire blast of my own. “When are you going to let this bullshit go?” I snapped in
irritation. “Honestly, it was a millennium ago.”
Hot steam rose around me, and the charge of magic made it settle into a strange mist. Our visibility dropped to alarming levels. I didn’t need to rely on my eyes to see my foes, but I definitely would’ve preferred it.
By my side, Lucienne huffed and lifted her hands. Just like that, a harsh wind began to blow. As the fog lifted, she shot me a disgruntled glare. “You’re such a hypocrite, you know that? Just a minute ago, you said forgetting about this curse isn’t possible.”
“That’s different,” I grumbled.
It wasn’t, not really. I would’ve liked to claim that the curse was the only thing that kept me so bitter and angry, but truth be told, that had nothing to do with it. I wanted revenge. I wanted the world to suffer like I had suffered. I couldn’t ever set my past aside, not after all the pain we’d endured.
Lucienne let out a low, exasperated sigh. “Listen, we didn’t come here to fight. All we wanted was to have a diplomatic meeting that would help us defeat a shared threat. There’s clearly been a misunderstanding of some—”
“Shut up, demon!” the sprite snarled, her magic swirling around her angrily. “You have no right to exist. You should have died when you killed your homeland.”
“Considering the company you keep, I find your choice of insults very interesting.” Bjorn smiled at her, an unpleasant twist of lips that promised a lot of pain to anyone who dared to come any closer. “Maybe we’re not the only ones who are hypocrites.”
“Hypocrisy and lies are just tools, Bjorn,” Malachai said. “We all know that. Some people are simply afraid to admit it. They’re always too blind to see what is right in front of their noses.”
Malachai’s comment had very little to do with the sprite’s hypocrisy. It was hilarious, but because of all the drama, power displays and threats, no one seemed to have realized that Darius wasn’t actually here.
It shouldn’t have been possible, but Darius’s former underlings seemed to have trouble understanding his body and his mind as two separate entities. Most of them still believed Darius would never cooperate with a scavenger, or refused to accept the possibility of his betrayal. Because of that, they ignored the obvious and it was their downfall.
It was one of the shape-shifters who sensed him approach. “Life steal!” he shouted as a warning. “Look—”
He never got the chance to finish the sentence. A wave of Darius’s magic swept over the grove, striking each and every one of the new arrivals.
Thank fuck. Darius had been able to stay calm so far and keep his power under control. Our luck would probably not hold, but for now, I’d take my blessings where I could find them.
We hadn’t wanted to make excessive use of his skills, acknowledging the trouble he was having with controlling my abilities. At the same time, though, we’d known it would be necessary and that, sooner or later, someone would try to attack us from behind.
Darius had decided to be the one to return the favor, when the unavoidable happened. In my body, he had more than enough juice to compensate for the plan Louis had come up with. Out of control or not, my power had always served him well. And naturally, we hadn’t left him without reinforcements.
Until now, he hadn’t needed them. He emerged from his hiding spot with his eyes glowing and electricity crackling at his fingertips. “You didn’t think your little display would intimidate us, did you?” he asked with a smirk. “We are death. You cannot kill us. And there’s nothing in this world we wouldn’t do to achieve our goals.” He turned to look at Lucienne and his expression melted into a soft, kind smile. “Isn’t that right, Ms. Hastings? You agree, don’t you? You’d do whatever it takes to save the people you love.”
I didn’t know what made Lucienne understand what we were telling her. It could’ve been the reference to the words she herself had said or the way Darius spoke her last name, with a fondness that made it sound a little like an inside joke. Or perhaps we’d just needed to be together to get Lucienne to fight off whatever Louis had done to her.
In the end, her reasons were beside the point. The only thing that mattered was the way her gaze cleared and her face lit up. “I’ll go with you. I’ll go.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” a nosferatu snarled. He hadn’t been as affected by the life steal as his accomplices. He and all the other undead were already getting up. So were the sprites. The shifters would probably take longer in recovering.
Darius had neutralized roughly fifty percent of our foes with one blow. It wasn’t a bad percentage. We could handle the rest the old-fashioned way.
Lucienne shook her head at me, as if sensing what I had in mind. She turned toward the nosferatu and offered him a smile.
Anyone else might have been surprised. I wasn’t. I knew Lucienne was at her most dangerous when she was smiling.
Dahud had been smiling too, when she’d committed genocide. And in memory of that smile, I’d spilled oceans of blood, just so that I could see it again.
“You know, I’m not a fatalistic person,” she said. “I don’t think I ever have been. But there are some things you just can’t stop.
“I understand why you might be wary of me. Assuming I’m Dahud—which I still don’t completely believe—you’re not wrong to want to make sure I’m not a threat to you.
“But here’s the thing. I don’t care about your opinion enough to let it stop me. You want to kill me because you know you can’t beat me. I’m not going to allow it. So I’ll give you this one chance to stand aside. If you keep insisting on this absurdity, I will go through you.”
The threat didn’t intimidate them. It just fed their determination to end things, here and now. They didn’t bother answering through words again. Instead, they just attacked.
I had no desire for Lucienne to have to resort to using her magic. If that happened, the already tenuous balance between her current life and her past as Dahud might shatter, and she’d end up as fractured and broken as we were.
Mercifully, Pierce realized this as well. He grabbed Lucienne’s arm and pulled her back, away from our attackers. Lucienne let out an angry cry, but it was too late for her to fight him off. The rest of us had already engaged the undead, sprites, and their various accomplices in battle.
The first person I killed was the same sprite who’d dared to call Lucienne a demon. I didn’t consider it an insult, but the sprite had, and that was enough.
She came at me herself, her wings glowing silver in the moonlight. I grabbed her foot and dragged her down, snapping her spine without even bothering to use my magic.
That was what I liked about Alarians. They were so versatile. Darius didn’t always bother to use his physical strength, preferring his mind magic or fire wielding for battle. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty, though. Since I was deprived of my own preferred methods, it was nice to have this option.
After that, everything exploded into madness and chaos. Suffice to say, I felt right at home. I’d been in countless battles before and I’d killed more people than I could count. This was easy and comfortable for me in a way few things were. Just for fun, I caught up with the leader of the fae delegation and ripped his wings off. He screamed as I tore into the delicate tissue and I tasted his magic, his pain, and his death on my tongue.
Oh, right. I’d forgotten. Fae of his type died quickly when deprived of their wings. How boring. I preferred the Dames Blanches. They were irritating, yes, but at least they put up a fight and didn’t have a far too obvious vulnerable spot.
As I dumped the writhing form of the fae on the ground, a silver bullet wheezed past my head, missing me by inches. I turned, only to find Valerian Christensen now engaged in battle with Bjorn.
It wasn’t much of a fight at all. Bjorn had always been powerful, even before he’d abandoned the cage Alarians had placed him in. Now that he was feeding on a regular basis... Well, suffice to say it took him about ten seconds to make Valerian’s mind succumb to his own.
The enfo
rcer’s eyes glazed and he slumped against Bjorn, unable to continue fighting back. His power was already drifting away from his body, into Bjorn’s. It was a strangely arousing process and I made a mental note to explore its potential, once we weren’t all at risk of dying horrible deaths.
Unfortunately, Bjorn didn’t get the chance to finish the job. The group of enforcers that had accompanied Valerian tried to come to his aid. A rain of silver bullets swept over the grove, striking several plagues. Bjorn didn’t bother dodging. He simply shielded himself with Valerian’s body.
Valerian grunted when the projectiles struck him, but he was too out of it for his body to try to fight off the silver poisoning too much. When the tremors started, Bjorn dumped him on the ground and laughed. “Oh, dear. That’s regrettable. You really should have better aim. His Highness taught you better.”
With a corner of my eye, I stole a look at Darius. Valerian had been part of his guard, one of his most trusted lieutenants. Once he’d been able to, Darius had cared about him, at least a little.
He certainly didn’t seem to care now. “Bjorn, no more playing around,” he ordered. “Just end it quickly.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Bjorn replied, too lost in his power to care that the address wasn’t appropriate for Mathias Vandale.
Then again, at this point, no one really cared. My subordinates were too busy dying or killing people to focus on semantics. We were outnumbered, but they were putting up a good fight anyway. Plagues might have their faults, but they could always be relied on to do the maximum amount of damage against an opponent in battle.
Declan and Malachai were fighting back to back, a whirlwind of destruction almost as devastating as the magic Darius wielded. Declan hadn’t shifted into his newly discovered middle form, and I surmised that he had more control over his beast in a confrontation that didn’t involve him tearing his former pack apart. Malachai, on the other hand, had thrown all caution to the wind and was feasting on the blood of whatever idiot got close enough to draw his attention.
