Charmed by the Beast: an Adult Paranormal Shifter Romance (The Conduit Series Book 3)

by Conner Kressley

  Then again, impossible was my stock in trade these days.

  “When can I see him?” I asked as the doctor finished delivering the ‘good’ news.

  “He’ll still be unconscious, but optimistically, you’ll be able to visit in an hour or so,” he said.

  I thanked him, and he took his leave as I sat back down next to Abram.

  “Are you going to tell the others?” he asked as I slid my hand back into its place in his.

  “Not until there’s something to say,” I said. “I don’t want to get their hopes up. If Charlie’s not in there—”

  “Then perhaps Cindy would want a chance to say goodbye,” he answered.

  “It’s too late for that,” I said. “If he’s not there, he’s gone already. She wouldn’t want to see him like that. Believe me, it would haunt her forever.”

  The room hushed, and the ticking clock taunted me with every loud snap of the seconds passing us by.

  After a long silence, Abram looked over to me. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  “I’ll do what needs to be done,” I answered. “I’m just…I’m tired, Abram.”

  “I can understand that,” he said, more than a little sympathy in his tone. “You’ve had a hell of a night.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Not that kind of tired. I’m really tired, Abram. I’m tired in my soul.” Moisture pooled behind my eyes. “We’ve been through so much, lost so much. Satina is dead, Abram. She’s dead, and for what? What have we gained here? The Brothers are still after me. We can’t stop them. We don’t know how. And, if we did, I doubt we’d be able to.”

  “What happened to that faith, Charisse?” Abram asked, pulling me to him and kissing my forehead.

  “It’s hard,” I admitted, my voice cracking at the end. “It’s hard to keep it up, Abram.”

  “I know, my love.” He swept a rogue strand of hair away from my face. “That’s what I’m here for. So just breathe. Breathe and know that I’m here.”

  So I did. I breathed in and out, resting on Abram’s shoulder, and tried my best to calm down. Tried to focus on the Abram sitting next to me now and not the one who had been up on that rooftop. Tried to ignore that someone I cared about might have to die at my hands.

  It must have worked, because the next thing I knew, Abram was shaking me awake.

  “Wake up, Charisse,” he said. “It’s time.”

  “What?” I asked, sitting up, panic pricking at my heart. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and stared up at him. “Time for what?”

  “The doctor was just here,” Abram said, glaring at me with serious eyes. His body was rigid, and I could see more than a little of the beast peeking out from around his edges. This was game time, and my man was ready to play. “It’s time for us to go see Charlie. It’s time to find out, once and for all, just who in living inside that body of his.”

  Chapter 33

  I moved back through a series of automatically opening doors and around a seemingly never-ending maze of hallways that all looked the same.

  Once I was sure that I was irrevocably lost, a sandy-haired nurse with tired eyes and a plastered-on smile directed Abram and me to a room at the end of the hall.

  It was Charlie’s.

  I shuddered. Charlie’s fate, and maybe all of our fates, would be decided right there, in room 312.

  “Are you ready?” Abram’s hand came to rest on my shoulder, nearly encompassing it completely with its sheer size.

  “Do I have a choice?” I asked, unsure of what other answer would have been acceptable. “Just promise you’ll stay with me.”

  “We’ll see this through together,” he said. I put my hand on his, gave it a squeeze, and started forward.

  Abram followed behind me, but I stopped him.

  “I need to do this by myself.”

  “What?” His expression pinched. “You literally just asked me to stay with you.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I meant it. I couldn’t do any of this without you.” I shook my head. “And I fully expect you to be standing here when I get out. But this isn’t for me. This is for Charlie. If I have to do what I’m afraid I might have to do, Charlie at least deserves his privacy when it all ends.”

  Abram nodded at me, and a twinge of guilt rushed up my spine. Though I truly believed what I had just said about Charlie, it wasn’t the only reason I didn’t want Abram there.

  The truth was, the real reason I didn’t want him in the room was that I couldn’t bear the thought of him witnessing me coldly killing someone who looked just like my old boyfriend.

  Sure, he had seen me kill Dalton. But that was different. That was self-defense. It was to save him, to save myself. And Dalton was a raging monster, teeth and claws tearing at us as he went berserk in the woods.

  Charlie would be unconscious. He would just be a man, barely more than a boy, and I would be killing him in cold blood.

  I swallowed hard and tried to steady the voice in my head telling me to turn tail, run, and never look back.

  Working my breaths into even, steady whooshes, I mustered all my courage and pushed through the door to Charlie’s room.

  It took all of point-three seconds for my eyes to fill with tears.

  He was right there, the boy I had loved more than myself, the first person outside of my mother who had ever been home to me. And now he was stuck in a hospital bed, covered in wires and tags with a tube shoved into his mouth.

  If it was even him at all.

  For all I knew, it was Mandrake or Edwin swimming around in that ridiculously lovable head of his. He was gone. He would never see Cindy, me, or any of the rest of them again.

  I thought about having to call his mother and tell her what had happened to her baby boy, about talking her through the sobs with some clever lie about his new heart finally giving out. The worst part was that I knew I could do it. I could stand there, flatfooted, and lie to that woman with the best of them.

  That was the kind of person I had become, the same kind of person who could end his life if necessary.

  “Hey there,” I choked out, tears spilling down my cheeks. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but you’ve looked better.”

  I sat on the bed beside him, listening to the rhythmic beeping of the machines he was hooked up to. His new heart was strong. Still, it was early enough in the process so that no one would think his body rejecting it would be too strange.

  God, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted, maybe more than anything I had ever wanted in my entire life, for Charlie to be alive and well, his heart strong and true inside his chest.

  But there was only one way to find that out.

  I took another deep breath and placed my hand, palm down, against Charlie’s chest. “Here goes nothing, kid,” I whispered. “You better not let me down.”

  Closing my eyes, I mustered what energy I had left and poured myself into Charlie. Searching through him with whatever mystical nonsense now ran through my veins, I prayed to God that things would go my way. I had earned at least that.

  By the time I made my way to his heart, I felt a blackness seeping into me.

  God, this was it. I could feel Edwin’s creepy, creaky awfulness flooding around me.

  My own heart sank. I had failed. All my work, my plan…it had been for nothing. Edwin had survived this, snuck his way to the surface, and stayed within his own heart. He was now ready and willing to take over Charlie’s body the instant he woke up.

  I couldn’t let that happen. And it was going to kill me to do it.

  I sighed, ready to pull my hand away from his chest. But before I could pull myself away from the darkness, it began to sift away.

  It hadn’t been Edwin. It had only been a fog, a shadow of what had lurked within these walls.

  The evil was disappearing, and it was being replaced with a lightness that I both recognized and missed. Charlie practically appeared before me, his aura as bright and beautiful as it had ever been. And I had never been happier
to see anything in my life.

  “Took you long enough,” I ‘heard’ his voice say inside my head.

  I chuckled loudly as a different sort of tear ran down my cheeks. “It’s okay,” I answered in a whisper. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  And it would. At least for the moment.

  But then the shadow returned. It wasn’t Edwin. I could tell now that he was gone for good, as was Mr. Mandrake. But the body held memories, and I was about to be flooded with them.

  I shuddered as the darkness took me over. I could feel everything now, could see it as clear as day. And, worse than that, I recognized it.

  I was back in New Haven. But why?

  As soon as I asked that, the imprinted memories answered.

  I saw Edwin, a beast of a thing, drugged up on dark magic. He was talking to Dalton, working with him.

  My mind flashed again, this time with pure information.

  He was working with The Brothers then. His return had preceded even his daughter’s.

  Edwin had been the third beast back in New Haven, the one Abram was supposed to have killed.

  I pulled my hand away, my eyes wide. This had been going on since the beginning, since before the beginning.

  “You’re okay,” I said to Charlie in a breathless rush. “I promise, you’ll be okay.”

  With those words, I darted out of the room. “Abram,” I yelled the instant the door flung open.

  He turned to me. His eyes were wild and his body looked near contorted.

  Was it this hard for him to keep the beast in?

  “It’s not Charlie, is it?” he asked, blinking hard.

  “No,” I answered. “I mean, yes. It is Charlie, but there’s something else.” I shook my head, still hardly about to believe what I was about to say. “I saw things inside of Edwin’s heart, things I didn’t know before.” I swallowed hard. “I thought you killed the other beast in New Haven?”

  “What? No,” he said. “You know I didn’t.”

  “You told me you did,” I said. “Right before we went to Grimoult, you told me you found him and got rid of him.”

  “No, Charisse,” he said. “Our memories were compromised before Grimoult. It’s what sent us there in the first place, remember? When I went there, I firmly He sighed heavily. “I assumed whoever the beast was went underground after he saw what we did to Dalton.”

  “Well, he didn’t,” I answered. “At least, not in the way you’re thinking.” I ran tired hands through my hair. “It was Edwin. All along, it was Edwin. He was working with Dalton. He probably convinced him to come after us the way he did.”

  “What?” Abram asked. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Edwin work that angle?”

  “For The Brothers,” I said solemnly. “Why else? They’ve been on this since before the two of us met. They’re probably the reason I was sent back to New Haven in the first place.” A new thought darkened my mind. “Abram, what if they killed my mother? The doctors said the cancer was quick and aggressive. What if they gave it to her?”

  “Charisse, you need to calm down,” he said, eyeing the crowd that was forming.

  “I will not,” I said. “It’s all them. It’s always been them. They want me dead, and they won’t stop until they get it!”

  When a few people standing nearby gave me strange looks, Abram grabbed me by the arm and guided me down the hallway before pulling me into a stairwell.

  “Pull yourself together, Char,” he scolded. Gone was the way he used to comfort me. This was not the Abram I knew. He looked past me, and then to me again. “I know I said we’d take things as they come, but we can’t do that anymore.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, tears stinging my eyes.

  “I’m saying we take the fight to them. They might be gods, but they’re scared to death of you. And we’re going to exploit that. We’re going to find The Brothers before they can find you again.”

  “Is there a reason you two ducked into the stairwell?” came a familiar voice behind us.

  I spun to find Ramsey. He was wearing a black jacket. While obviously tired, he looked more rested than anyone I had seen in hours.

  Abram glared at our mage. “What’s going on?”

  Ramsey frowned as he folded his hands in front of him. “While I’m usually not one to interrupt a spectacularly bad idea in progress, I feel like I have to tell you something.”

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, wondering how much more I could take.

  “That depends.” He bridged the gap between us. “I take it by the fact that a flood of doctors and nurses aren’t rushing toward the room that Charlie is alone inside his body now?”

  “Yes,” I answered, thankful for at least that.

  “And how long do you think that’ll last?” Ramsey dared me.

  “What do you mean?” Abram asked.

  “You replaced one Conduit’s heart with another,” he replied. “Don’t you get it? It’s one window for another. The connection is still there. And I promise you The Brothers will use it sooner rather than later. The only difference is that Edwin will be in Charlie’s body instead of Mandrake. It’ll be the same thing all over again.”

  “No.” I shook my head, stepping back. “No, you’re wrong. I moved the—”

  “Moved the spirit,” he finished. “Yes, I know. I’m afraid that’s not enough. They can just move it right back again.”

  I just kept shaking my head. Was this real? Had I really just been through all this for nothing? For less than nothing? How stupid was I that I hadn’t considered this possibility? Of course The Brothers could send Edwin right back in. Of course they could.

  “Don’t worry,” Ramsey said, raising his hands as thought to calm me. “There’s something I can do.”

  “Tell me.” It was more a command than request.

  “The heart of the Conduit retains magic. That’s the reason The Brothers can use it. If I transfer that magic, I can cut the cord, severe the connection. Charlie will be safe, but—”

  “Do it,” I said, my decision quick.

  “Char, there’s a price.”

  “There’s always a price. Do it.”

  “You’re going to want to listen to this one,” Ramsey said, pleading with me.

  “I don’t care, Ramsey. I’m tired. I’ll pay the price, whatever it is.”

  “That’s all well and good,” he said. “But you’re not the one who has to pay.”

  My throat clenched. I could barely get the words out. “What are you talking about?”

  “I have to transfer the energy into someone,” he said. “It won’t just melt away into the ether. And it’s not as simple as finding anyone. I have to channel it as a curse. To do that, I have to find someone that Edwin would want to curse, that the magic would accept flowing into.”

  “Then transfer it into me,” I answered. “I’m not afraid.”

  “Absolutely not,” Abram cut in, stepping in front of me. “I’m warning you, Ramsey, don’t you dare even consider that idea.”

  “I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” Ramsey said, spreading his hands. “Part of Satina’s parting gift was to shield her from dark magic. Think of it as a life insurance policy.”

  “Do it to me,” Abram said, folding his arms.

  “Are you insane?” I asked, stepping around him to face him. “You’re already cursed. You can barely keep it together now.”

  “I can handle it,” he said, looking as stoic as ever.

  “Edwin definitely hated you,” Ramsey said to Abram. “And you’re certainly physically strong enough to take it. But the other ramifications are different story.”

  “He’s not doing it,” I said.

  “I am,” he said.

  “You’re not listening to me,” I said, louder this time.

  “You’re not listening to yourself,” he said. “You would have given your life to save Charlie.”

  “But I wouldn’t give yours,” I said, tears springing to my eyes. “Yo
u’re the most important person in the world to me. And Charlie is already saved.”

  “For how long?” Abram asked. “You heard Ramsey. Charlie is a walking disaster waiting to happen. The Brothers will use him for as long as they can. And I won’t allow that.” He turned back to Ramsey. “Do it, Ramsey. Curse me.”

  Chapter 34

  Ramsey directed us back into the room where Charlie still rested unconscious. Since I was the only one here with actual magical ability, it would be up to me to transfer this, meaning I was going to have to curse the love of my life with my own hands.

  And here I though my night couldn’t get any better.

  We held hands in a circle, standing over Charlie’s bed.

  Ramsey explained it. We would all be connected. His guidance would flow into me, my magic would flow into Charlie, effectively pushing Edwin’s residual energy into Abram, where it would take the form of the curse Edwin undoubtedly wanted to lay on him.

  I swallowed hard, looking over at Abram. “I don’t want to do this,” I said.

  Looking in his eyes and knowing what I was about to do was hell. But not being able to touch him was worse. My left hand was with Ramsey and my right rested on Charlie. It was the way the spell had to be. And something told me that if I could just touch Abram, if I could just hold him, all of this would be okay somehow.

  But I couldn’t, and it almost certainly wouldn’t.

  “We have to, Charisse,” he said, his voice solemn and low. “But don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  “You’d better be,” I answered, gritting my teeth.

  “We have to do it now,” Ramsey said. “The longer the magic sits in Charlie’s heart, the greater the chance The Brothers will redo what they did before.”

  “Ah,” I yelled. “This sucks! I hate my life!”

  “Really?” Abram asked, the hint of a smile tugging at the ends of his lips. “Because I love mine.”

  I shook my head. “Promise me you’ll be okay.”

  “Always.”

  I took a deep breath and started the spell.