Demon's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  “Fils de pute!” he cursed, though he did not run.

  Why should he? If he knew the lethal power of silver on the Imnada, he knew enough to be patient and let the net weaken Mac until there was no fight left in him. Already his muscles cramped with pain, his breathing labored as the element acted on his body like a poison.

  Another attack met another retreat before the Fey-blood’s cohorts stepped in. A fist to the jaw knocked Mac back on his knees. A blow to the gut left him doubled over and retching. He struggled, but the blows came too swiftly. There was no time to react. No time to strike back. The poison sucked him into a downward spiral in which every breath hurt and his heart crashed against his sore ribs.

  He shot another glance toward Bianca, lying in a crumpled heap of silks and petticoats, her hair spilling free of its pins to lie in a ripple of gold around her head. A thin trickle of blood dripped onto her pale cheek from a cut on her scalp. He tried dragging himself toward her, hoping to discover whether she yet lived, but the Fey-blood stood in his way, towering over him, his face twisted with disgust and hate.

  “The stories talk of the Imnada’s incredible strength and cunning in battle, but they were wrong. You are weak. Weak and powerless.”

  Mac barely felt the vicious kick to his ribs as he retched, hands curled into fists against his chest, agony radiating through his body as if he were being cleaved in two. His lungs worked like a bellows, yet he couldn’t breathe. Spots danced in front of his eyes, his vision narrowing to a pinprick.

  “You’d love to kill me, wouldn’t you, shifter? So close and yet so far, eh?”

  Each taunt was accompanied by a flick of the Fey-blood’s blade. Each wicked jeer matching a wicked punch to the ribs or a kick to his side from heavy boots. Mac tried curling away from the worst of it, but nowhere was he safe against the violent onslaught.

  “We will kill you, your comrades, and then the rest of your filthy unclean race. It will be just as before, when the rivers ran with shifter blood and our swords feasted on your flesh.”

  “Are Fey-bloods always this melodramatic?” Mac shot back, spitting blood, the words clawing their way out of a painful throat.

  His bravado earned him a clout to the side of the head that left his ears ringing.

  “If she didn’t want to kill you herself, I’d enjoy gutting you like the dirty hell-spawn you are.”

  She? For a moment, as Mac watched, something—or someone—else seemed to enter the man’s lethal gaze. A woman. Mac sensed her presence. A musky-sweet scent in the air. A shadow’s flicker caught out of the corner of his eye. If he focused, he could feel her tangled thoughts fuzzing his already fuzzy brain.

  So the man’s purpose was to capture Mac, not kill him outright. This left a chance. Slim, but he’d take it. It might be the only one left to him. Sucking in a last shallow breath, he twisted away from his captors’ grasp, lunging for the man’s knife. Forcing it from his grip. Celebrated his success for a mere heartbeat’s time before the Fey-blood’s battle magic struck. Enough to slow him. To knock him from his stride.

  He ducked as another scorching ripple seared the air above him, striking the wall at his back. He never saw the toppling bookcase until it fell, slamming him to the ground. A boot swung toward his head. He threw up a hand as it connected. Lights pinwheeled across his vision.

  He never saw the second blow.

  Never felt the third.

  * * *

  Images came to Renata along ribbons of smoke, sparks dodging and darting within the spiraling columns erupting from an endless black sea. Alonzo was her eyes and ears. Through him, she observed, she planned. Able to travel where a woman of fortune and standing could never remain unnoticed or unmolested. Away from duty’s confinement. Freed of her husband’s clinging control.

  Even as a tiny part of her mind remained aware of her surroundings—the rumpled bedcovers, the soft gray light pouring through the lace at her windows—she became one with the smoke, traveling out across the depthless void to crouch behind Alonzo’s eyes as she clutched the locket containing a curl of his dark hair.

  The smoke rolled thick and black-red, revealing the dimly lit interior of a house. A man, bent and stumbling, a hand pressed against his stomach. He possessed a face of chiseled lines and angles, a clean jaw, a thin nose, lips that if not pressed grimly together would curve deliciously upon a woman’s flesh, and eyes of an unnatural yellow-green, irises long and cat-thin.

  Imnada. Her certainty washed over her like a warning from her father’s ghost. Imnada, his voice whispered up from the void. Older than the Fey. A demon race. A dead race. This one would be dead soon. She, with Alonzo’s help, would make it so.

  The smoky billows rose high before dispersing out across a roof of dim stars, dragging her spirit back to her bedchamber, her body torpid and slack, the sounds of her house unnaturally loud against the leaden silence of the smoky, spark-filled blackness.

  She gripped the locket tighter, willing herself back into Alonzo’s mind. His elation sped her own pulse as he bent over the man, caught like a herring in a fisherman’s net, his breathing ragged, his face a sickly green as the silver sucked him dry. From the corner of her sight, Renata caught a glimpse of tangled golden hair and the ivory features of Bianca Parrino lying still upon a carpeted floor.

  “Madame, are you awake?” her maid queried from beyond the door. “The gong has sounded to dress.”

  Letting go of the locket, Renata retreated into her body. She fought back the pressing desire to storm free of her bedchamber, call for a carriage, and fly to the actress’s home. A fool’s desire. Froissart expected her to be dressed and downstairs within the hour, ready to attend one more boring political dinner. Weakened from such a focused use of her powers, she had no strength left, even for the simple manipulation of her husband’s feeble mind. She must appear. There was no escape.

  Fury and desperation scalded her throat, and she gripped the bedclothes as if she would shred them in a shrieking rage. For the first time since she was a little girl, she allowed bitter tears to fall, her pain sharp as the blade Alonzo had used upon the Imnada.

  Then, emotions mastered once more, she rose from bed, retreating to the privacy of her dressing room to do what she’d learned to do best and yet hated with all her heart: wait.

  9

  The sound of the door opening skittered along Bianca’s shredded nerves. The creak of hinges threw her back four years to her darkest days. She went limp, pretending to be unconscious. A ruse that had always worked with Lawrence.

  Slow, heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, accompanied by the thud-thud-thud of something being dragged.

  Unfortunately, Bianca knew exactly what that something was.

  She’d tried turning off her mind to the sounds of violence coming from the floor above her. The scrape and crash of bodies. The painful grunts and curses. And finally the screams cut off almost as soon as they began, leaving an even more ominous silence in their place. She’d whispered to herself lines from plays, great long soliloquies, even stage directions. Anything to keep her mind from imagining, her thoughts from flying into a million broken pieces.

  Now, as she feigned sleep, her chair rocked back and forth, the man dumping and then securing his load in a chair back to back with hers. As her shoulders were yanked and the ropes at her wrists tightened, she bit her lip to stifle any whisper of a breath that might give her away.

  A few minutes of this, a final tug on her bonds, and the footsteps retreated back up the stairs, followed by the slamming of the door.

  Alone once more, she opened her eyes, stretching to look over her shoulder. Mac hung lifeless against his bonds, his face shielded by his blood and sweat-matted hair.

  “Mac?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  The slightest movement of his fingers against hers. A shallow breath that became a strangled moan.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she lied, her gaze drawn unwillingly to the narrow window set beneath the rafter
ed ceiling. She wouldn’t look at it. Wouldn’t think about it. That would only bring on the panic, and she already hung by the thinnest of threads. “Say something so I know you can hear me.”

  She felt his body pulling against the ropes that lashed her wrists. His breath came quick and painful. And when he spoke, his voice was threaded with pain and hoarse from shouting. “The clans are safe, Father. I told him nothing.”

  * * *

  “Let us out! Someone—anyone—help us! Please!”

  Mac struggled up from a thick, soupy blackness to Bianca’s frightened voice bouncing against his egg-fragile skull. Every inch of him hurt, but his left shoulder throbbed with an agony unlike he’d ever experienced, not even at the worst of the curse’s onset. He vomited at the pain eating its way up through his flesh, stomach muscles convulsing, throat raw.

  “Can anyone hear me?” Bianca called again. “Dear God, let us out!”

  “Stop,” he muttered. “Please stop yelling.”

  “Mac? You’re awake. You’re alive.”

  “Debatable.” He cracked open his swollen eyes to a dank, mildew-smeared cellar. A few broken bits of furniture stood in a corner beside a set of rickety steps. At the opposite end, an enormous black fireplace gaped like a mouth, a few dusty, cobwebbed tools scattered on the cold hearth bricks. So the Fey-blood had moved them from Bianca’s house to a more secure location. Somewhere close to the river, from the smells blowing through the crumbling brickwork, the wind chilling his sweat-drenched body.

  The silver net that had trapped him had been replaced. Now, wrapped round and round his neck, hung thin silver chains as if he’d rifled twenty women’s jewelry cases. The freezing burn of the poisonous metal against his bare skin sent needles of fire chewing through his spasming muscles. Blood slicked his chest and arms, slid cold down his legs. Straining against the restraints holding him into a chair, he nearly passed out as his shoulder exploded, the pain numbing his arm, throwing splashes of light across his vision. He clawed back a scream at the cost of another round of retching that left him heaving for breath and weak as a kitten.

  “I’ve tried. They don’t budge,” Bianca said, her voice trembling.

  He looked up at the window. Was the light dimming? “How long have I been unconscious?”

  “A few hours. I don’t know.” She struggled against the ropes. “There’s no air in here, Mac. I can’t breathe. We’re trapped.” With every sentence, her voice rose an octave. “Let us out!” she screamed before dropping to a half-sobbing whimper. “Please, I’ll do as you ask, Lawrence. I swear.”

  There was obviously more to Bianca’s terror than the current disaster, bad as it was, but he’d leave those questions for later—if there was a later.

  “Deep breaths,” Mac said, using the same easy tone he’d mastered while breaking colts for his father and later calming raw soldiers in the minutes before battle. “In through your nose and out through your mouth. Steady, even breaths.”

  He felt the tension in her body lessen slightly as she did as he instructed, but each moment he used to pull her back from collapse brought him one step closer. There was no telling how long he had until the Fey-blood returned. Until the sun set. Until the silver killed him.

  “I’m sorry, Mac. I . . . I hate small spaces and locked rooms. When Lawrence . . .” She swallowed back whatever she’d been about to say. “Molly always tells me I’ll catch a cold sleeping with the window open. My head knows it’s foolish, but I can’t help how I feel.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to find a way out of here, then.” Though how he proposed to do that, he had no idea. Every moment the silver leached further into his system. Every second the poison moved like acid through his veins.

  Outside, the rain had turned to sleet. The tapping and rattling against the window beat against his pounding head, making it almost impossible to focus his scattered mind or harbor his waning strength.

  “He wants Adam’s journal, doesn’t he?” Bianca asked, the brittle edge gone from her voice, though he sensed the tenuous control behind her quiet words. “That’s what this is about.”

  His mind rolled back to the incessant pounding of the Fey-blood’s questions, the torturously slow devastation he wrought with fists and boots and knife. Over and over until Mac’s mind shut down, his body curled against the attacks. He’d given nothing away, but he’d emerged with answers. Answers that both reassured and terrified. “No, Bianca. It’s me he wants.”

  “But—”

  The secret of the Imnada had been discovered—that much had been demonstrated with dreadful certainty. But how far had it spread? How great was the danger? And could the threat be stopped?

  “How much does Lord Deane know about the Imnada?” he asked.

  “Sebastian has nothing to do with this. He wouldn’t—”

  “Murder an innocent man in cold blood? Why are you defending him? He’s sold you to the dogs as well.”

  “I’m not defending him. I don’t know anything about Fey-bloods or Other or any of the things you keep asking me. Sebastian caught me doodling the symbol I found in Adam’s journal and asked me about it. Then he showed me the book and told me a story about a shifter warlord who betrayed King Arthur to his death. That’s all.”

  “Did Deane and Adam ever meet?”

  “No. He wanted to after he learned Adam had helped me pick out his birthday gift, but by then it was . . . by then Adam had—”

  “Adam picked out a book for Lord Deane? What was it?”

  There was a long pause when he thought Bianca might not answer. He sensed her desperation rising once more to the surface. It was obvious in the tension of the ropes, the shallowness of her breathing. “Think, Bianca. What book?”

  “It was by Thistlewood or Thistlethwaite. I can’t remember. Adam swore it would suit someone like Deane perfectly.”

  Someone like Deane. Adam must have recognized that the earl was Fey-blood. And in sending him the sorcerer Thistlewood’s book he had tipped the earl off. Had Adam been that witless? Or had he had another motive for sending a message? One Mac couldn’t begin to fathom.

  He shot another glance at the window. Yes, the light definitely grew dimmer.

  Jaw clamped against the blasts of pain ripping through his shattered shoulder, he worked at the ropes holding his wrists. If he could free a finger—hell, a fingertip—he might be able to loosen the knots enough to work his way out. But every excruciating movement pushed more of the silver’s poison into his bloodstream. Already, his eyesight grew fuzzy. Darkness crept in around the edges as his muscles twitched with a tingly numbness. “Bianca, I can’t. It’s up to you. Try working loose.”

  “I’ll hurt you.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  Immediately, the ropes tightened, cutting into his skin, sawing back and forth until he gritted his teeth against the burn, blood sliding hot down his palms. Bianca’s every breath came punctuated by a panicked sob, but she never paused, never tired as the minutes dragged on for what seemed an eternity. As the sun dipped ever lower in the sky.

  Taking his own advice, Mac tried breathing deeply to stave off his own terror. By now, the humming burn along his bones was not completely due to the silver but to the coming sunset. A premonition of onrushing disaster jangled at the base of his brain. If Bianca was hanging by a thread now, what would seeing him shift do to her sanity? If she was like the rest of humanity, it would be a mixture of horror, loathing, and disgust. He would lose her forever. “Hurry.”

  She huffed as the ropes dug into his blood-slicked flesh. “I’ve . . . almost . . . almost got it.”

  A numbing, vicious tug on his hands sent a shooting, tearing pain up his arms and into his shoulder, but Bianca was free.

  Scrambling out of her ropes, she knelt in front of him, her gaze locked on the wreckage that his body had become. “Dear God, Mac, what did he do to you?”

  “Can you loosen the knots?”

  She tugged at the cords binding his chest, struggled with thos
e at his ankles. “They won’t come. They’re too tight.”

  “The silver, Bianca. Remove the necklaces,” he gasped, a fiery burn licking up through his body.

  By now his vision had become a blue sheet of flame, signaling the onset of the curse.

  She leaned forward, lifting the anchoring weight of the chains from his neck, her scent and the warmth of her body like a drop of heaven amid the needling blast of agony. Freed of the silver, he lifted his head. A choice lay before him: Did Bianca speak the truth? Was she ignorant of the Imnada and Lord Deane’s perfidy? Or would he be setting free the woman who had betrayed Adam to his death?

  Did he trust her or didn’t he?

  She fought with the ropes at his wrists, her fingers slipping on knots damp and slick with his blood. “Damn it, I can’t get . . . just a little bit—”

  His decision made, he nudged her away. “Go, Bianca. It’s me they want.”

  She stepped back, the inches between them yawning wide as a canyon. “I can’t abandon you.”

  “Go to the village of Bear Green. Find Jory Wallace. Tell him Mac sent you. Tell him to warn St. Leger and de Coursy. He’ll understand.” Nausea rolled his gut, a wash of cold sweat drenching his body.

  “Mac, I—”

  “By the Mother of All,” he snarled. “Get the hell out!”

  She touched his shoulder, the gentlest contact enough to make him moan, jaw locked, teeth clenched. “I’ll do it, but against my will.”

  “Just go.”

  He heard the scrape of her chair being pulled across the stone floor. The screech of rusty hinges as she forced open the narrow window, followed by a blast of cold, damp wind against his face, the soft hush of snowfall. Bianca’s grunts and rustles as she snaked her way out into the yard beyond.

  “I’ll find Jory Wallace. You can trust me.”

  He smiled through cracked lips. “I’m beginning to think I can.”

  She gave a hard bark of laughter. Then silence but for the slosh and gurgle of drains, a steady drip from a leak in the roof, and a banging in his skull like musket fire. Or was that the jump and squeeze of his heart as the Fey-blood’s curse pushed its way through him like an unstoppable rising tide?