Fated Curse

by Skye Malone

  Anxiety prickled through her, and she fought the sensation down. It felt wild. Inhuman. Like a predator worried another predator was encroaching on its territory.

  But how the hell had he come up behind them so quietly?

  Henry simply nodded at the man. “Knox.”

  “Clear?” Maeve demanded.

  The man nodded once. “Nobody followed.” His voice was low and even like a still pond.

  Maeve harrumphed as if the fact barely passed muster. “Well, best come in, then. No sense standing around in the cold.”

  Henry chuckled like the woman amused him. Without a word, he climbed the steps.

  Knox watched them all a moment longer, and Lindy couldn’t bring herself to move until he did, like the first one of them to flinch would be lunch meat. His gaze flicked past her to land on Wes only for a heartbeat.

  Fury flashed through his eyes. Lindy suddenly wanted to growl.

  But the man made no move toward them. Giving only a brief glance to her, Knox turned and walked away without a sound.

  As her family trailed Henry toward the house, Wes came up to Lindy’s side. “You okay?” he asked softly, watching Knox too.

  Taking a steadying breath, she nodded. Keeping an eye over her shoulder to the man’s retreating form, she followed her family.

  Past the front door, an airy living space waited. A rust-colored tile floor ringed the edges of the room, while the entire center was sunken several steps down. In the middle, a carved wooden table stood covered in books and papers. Bookcases lined the room, and overhead, a cathedral ceiling rose to a point with a chandelier of antlers hanging down. Windows and a sliding glass door at the far end of the space revealed a wooden deck overlooking the backyard, while a fireplace burned merrily to the left and a cozy kitchen waited to the right, a pot smelling of spices and cider boiling on the stove.

  The entire place radiated the comfort of the library in the woods, somehow still standing even though the rest of the ordinary world was gone.

  “Everett!” Maeve called. “They’re here.”

  Footsteps came from a hall to the side of the door, and a man easily equal to Henry in size walked into the room. He wore denim jeans and a thick flannel shirt of dark-green plaid. A bushy beard covered the lower half of his face, the shade nearly matched by the copper curls atop his head. At the sight of them all, he nodded while he continued drying his hands on a towel that was dwarfed by his size. The boy, Otis, was nowhere to be seen.

  Trepidation tightened Lindy’s smile into a flinch of her lips. “Henry says you can help me?”

  Everett made a neutral noise. “Maybe.”

  “Well, she’s brought a wolf with her, of all things,” Maeve commented, continuing past them toward the kitchen again. “So there’s that.”

  Lindy looked between them. “What are you talking about?”

  “You left this to us, didn’t you?” Maeve frowned at Henry.

  “Just wanted to make sure I got the details straight,” the man replied neutrally.

  Harrumphing, Maeve shook her head.

  “Maybe you all would like to explain?” Henry continued.

  “What I’d like is for you not to have brought—”

  “Good enough,” Everett interrupted.

  Maeve gave him an irritated look and then glanced at Frankie. “I could use some help in the kitchen.” The statement was flat and blatantly untrue.

  Andrew nodded and motioned for Frankie to go on.

  “I’d like you to take a look at this,” Everett said to Lindy, ignoring the others. He headed down to the sunken space at the center of the room.

  Swallowing nervously, Lindy walked down the steps, and she could hear Wes follow her immediately.

  It helped.

  “Do you recognize any of these?” Everett said, pointing to the books laid out on the center table. The pages were filled with text in languages that were only vaguely familiar and others she’d never seen at all. But the pictures…

  She trembled. In image after image, a figure stood at the heart of black smoke. In some, people fought around them. In others, there was nothing but death. An old tome with illuminated pages lay atop the rest of the books, and in the painting there, the shadowed figure crouched beside a throne like an animal, a leash of smoke running from a thick collar on its neck and held by a figure with its opposite hand raised in benediction.

  Countless wolves and bears lay dead around them.

  Her eyes lingered on the crouching figure. It had no face, no eyes, though sharpened teeth glinted in tiny notes of silver where its mouth would be. Blood glistened on the ground beneath it, and smoke rose in swirls of gray and black from its hunched shoulders.

  Beneath it all, the words Scythe of Niorun glinted in flakes of gold.

  She shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. “What’s your point?”

  “That you knew what was waiting for you. That you chose this anyway.”

  Anger flared in her chest. “Is that why you brought me here? To prove I deserve what’s happening to—”

  A hand caught her arm, and she realized she’d taken a step toward the man. She looked back to see Wes holding her wrist, concern on his face.

  Closing her eyes briefly, she took a rough breath.

  “No,” Everett said calmly. “To see what you’re willing to do now to change that.”

  Lindy shuddered. “Anything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She stared at him, incredulous.

  “Can you help her or not?” Wes interjected, his hand still gripping her wrist.

  Everett eyed him for a heartbeat. “Yes.” He tilted his head to the side. “Possibly.”

  “How?” Lindy demanded.

  The man sighed. “With a theory. The only one we have.” He sank down onto the cushion seating around the edge of sunken space. “As you both know, the Order has made it their mission to wipe out any shifters on this planet—and they’ve nearly succeeded. The ulfhednar were scattered even before Ragnarok began. And the berserkers…” He smiled, something cold in the expression. “Well, the world thinks we’ve been dead for decades.”

  Lindy trembled, her suspicions utterly confirmed.

  “Our theory, however, is that there was a reason for that genocide, beyond the Order’s hatred of anything ‘impure.’ As I’m sure you learned as a child, the Order wishes to take the world back to their vision of perfection. ‘The good old days,’ as it were. They want to do away with what they view as chaos and the rest of us simply call life, and instead create the epitome of ‘order.’” He scoffed. “Nothingness. Oblivion. To destroy all of creation and return it to the abyss of Ginnungagap because what is a purer example of order than zero? A category comprised only of itself. No passion or color or variation or diversity. Merely the darkness of the abyss and the opportunity to rebuild the world as they see fit.”

  Wes shook his head. “But that’s backward. That’s not how the myths go. The abyss was chaos. This—” He gestured to the house. “Life was order. That’s what the ancients believed.”

  The other man chuckled. “No one ever said the Order of Nidhogg was sane.”

  Lindy shivered.

  “But basing our actions off of what we believe of prophecy is foolish,” the man continued. “Who’s to say how events truly will unfold? Prophecy is a blind scribe, scribbling the edges of things and giving us precious little definition at the core. To hear the stories, we should all be dead now, the sun and moon consumed by Sköll and Hati, the land drowned and then poisoned by Jormungand’s rise. And where are the gods? Has Odin marched his armies forth? Is Heimdall locked in battle with Loki? Seemingly no. To the gods, time is not the same, and this apocalypse could play out over centuries or end tomorrow for all we know.”

  “So what are you saying?” Lindy managed.

  “That nothing is certain. That perhaps the Order could succeed in recasting reality. We cannot assume they’ll fail—or, conversely, that we’re all doomed. Even some propheci
es speak of survivors after Ragnarok walking forth into a new world, though others speak of this being the end of all things. But if there are survivors, and if we mean to be them?” Everett shook his head. “We have to understand what the Order is after because they have many strings to pull, and we have precious few.”

  “I-I don’t…” Lindy shook her head warily. “What’s your point?”

  Everett leaned forward in his seat. “We believe it’s why they sought to kill the shifters. Why they feared us enough to seek our utter destruction long before Ragnarok came to pass. Because in the battle of order versus chaos, shifters…” He chuckled. “We’re neither. And both.”

  Lindy’s brow furrowed.

  “At their core, shifters are both animal and human, and neither at the same time. Just as a bridge touches on both things it connects, and yet is simultaneously not those things, so too are shifters creatures of both the wild and the civil, order and chaos, neither and both all in one body. ‘Corruption,’ as the Order calls us. But a ‘corruption’ that has some members who are fully capable of using seidr, of wielding it and controlling it and using it to thwart the Order’s plans. Thus, while the Order have made themselves into something new with the advent of Ragnarok, we have always been something outside the dynamic of order and chaos.” Everett smiled. “And that means we can stop them.”

  “How?” Wes demanded.

  Taking a breath, the man leaned back against the cushions again. “Tell me,” he said to Lindy. “Had you still been on the Order’s side and had your transformation to the Scythe proceeded according to their plans, how would it have gone?”

  His tone sounded almost rhetorical, but he waited for her answer all the same.

  She fought back the urge to fidget with discomfort. Where the hell was he going with this? “Like that.” She pointed to the pictures without looking at them.

  Everett nodded. “But it didn’t. You’re fighting what the Order wishes you to be, which means some of you is still, for lack of a better term, human. And therein lies your chance. What’s been done to you, we suspect, is a process designed to destroy every last shred of your humanity, and yet maintain your human form as an anchor, turning you into a creature of pure—well, we would call it chaos. They would call it order. Through you, they wish to claim nightmares from Niorun’s realm and put that power under their control. Ultimately, we believe they even intend to channel the power of the abyss Ginnungagap into this world, manipulating the destruction and molding it to their desires. The spells they wrought upon themselves are mere shadows of that effort, and the powers they control are as well. But then, they wish to retain their identities. Yours, I suspect, is meant to be consumed.”

  “So what do we do?” Wes asked.

  Lindy couldn’t even bring herself to look at him, and she could feel his grip on her wrist shaking.

  “Your humanity is the key. With some part of it still intact, you might yet escape the trap the Order has created for you. But only if you are removed from the dichotomy of order versus chaos and made into something else entirely. If, for example, you were bitten.”

  Lindy blinked, her mind hiccuping in attempt to process his words. “Bit… bitten?”

  “We suspect the effect of a shifter’s bite upon whatever remains of your human side could thwart what the Order has attempted to do to you. A shifter and what you are becoming cannot, by their very natures, exist in the same body. And while what the Order has attempted is powerful, the forces that make a shifter are far older and have changed many, many people over the course of the millennia.”

  “But…” Her father’s voice came from behind her, sounding horrified. “That could kill her. Henry, dammit, you never said—”

  “There is that chance, yes,” Everett interrupted with a remorseful tone. “Bitten shifters have a hard enough time surviving the change in the best of circumstances, and these are far from that.” He met Lindy’s eyes solemnly. “Your odds of survival would be low, and what you would experience would be… extreme. But that is why it’s best to act quickly. The more of your humanity that remains, the better chance you have.” His head moved ambivalently. “Given that your alternative is to become what the Order wants… This is the best solution we could devise.”

  “But…” Her mouth moved. “What would I… I mean…”

  “There is no way to know for certain what would happen. It is only our theory, but it is the best we found.”

  Lindy shook her head. “I could become a monster even worse than the Scythe.”

  “It’s more likely you would simply die,” Everett said, a note of apology in his voice.

  Her mouth moved again, and she couldn’t find words. This wasn’t what she’d wanted. What she’d hoped when Henry and her father said they knew of a way to help her.

  But then, in the face of certain death by becoming a monster, even a sliver of a chance to escape that fate was worth something… right?

  “Now,” Everett continued. “If you choose to go through this, the choice is yours. Maeve and I have already discussed it. Either one of us would be willing to”—he bobbed his head as if seeking a better word and then settled for the obvious—“bite you, if that’s what you wanted. But seeing you now…” His eyes twitched to Wes behind her. “I’d say you may have another choice in mind.”

  Her breath went still, and then she turned, seeking Wes.

  He was frozen, his eyes locked on the middle distance with an unreadable look on his face.

  She couldn’t find her voice, staring at him now with her father and total strangers all around. But something stirred in her belly as she floundered, warming with desire at the idea of truly being like him and of being with him in that way.

  If she survived.

  “Wes,” she started.

  He flinched hard like he’d been hit, and when he looked up at her, his eyes were like nothing she’d seen from him. Horrified. Lost. Staring as if all of hell was opening up in front of him and he was inches from falling in.

  His head shook.

  “Wes.” She took a step toward him. “What—”

  Before she could even finish the word, he turned, fleeing the house like all the Order was on his tail.

  22

  Wes

  This was hell.

  His hell.

  Gods above, somebody wake him up.

  He fled the house, barely seeing cabins around him as he strode for the forest, aimless, seeking nothing but an escape. The wolf inside him clamored in protest because of course that rabid bastard did. It wanted to bite her. It probably loved the idea of him finally, finally becoming the same as the monster who’d covered him in scars and brought the beast into his life.

  And with her.

  His fist slammed into a tree, pain rioting through his knuckles but doing nothing to fix what he felt inside. Days of protecting her, of fearing for her, of fighting the feelings rising up inside him because what sane person could ever be with a wolf like him, and now…

  He’d be the one to kill her.

  A scream tore from his throat, bursting through the forest around him and sending a pair of ravens cawing up into the sky. Why this? This, of all the ways to help her. Why this?

  “Wes?” Lindy’s voice came from a distance behind him, and of their own accord, his feet stopped, rooting him to the ground with his body as rigid as the trees around him, quivering with rage.

  Her footsteps carried through the forest.

  He closed his eyes. She couldn’t ask this of him. Him of all the wolves in the world. Because if he bit her… if he took the rabid sickness that made his wolf what it was and spread that to her, and let that foul bastard who’d bitten him gain one more victim…

  “Wes…” Lindy’s voice was breathless behind him, as if she’d been running.

  “You can’t ask me to do this,” he said without turning around.

  “Please. If this is the only way—”

  “No!” He whirled to face her.

  She
stared at him, pain and confusion in her eyes. “But—”

  “Don’t you get it? I can’t. I won’t. The monster that made me this…” His head shook. “I won’t do it.”

  She gave him a helpless look. “But… what’s the alternative?”

  “I don’t know!” His voice rang through the forest, and he scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to calm down. “One of the bears, maybe. They could—”

  “You’d let them be the ones who bit me?” Hurt filled her eyes. “You’d let me become that instead of… And it wouldn’t matter to you?”

  “You have no idea how this matters to me.”

  “Then how could you let them—”

  “Because I can’t kill you!”

  She looked at him like she couldn’t understand him at all. “This is killing me, Wes.”

  Guilt wrapped a stranglehold on his throat, pressing all the air from his body. How did he solve this? How did he help her and yet make her see that he couldn’t possibly do what she was asking? Because he cared. Because he…

  He loved her. Loved her so much his bones ached, and his heart wanted to rip itself from his rib cage. His entire being screamed with the need to help her, but he couldn’t. Not like this. Not when it would kill her or else destroy every good thing she’d trusted him to save.

  And yet if he did nothing…

  His wolf thrashed inside him, howling in misery, and he bashed it down so hard his chest hurt. “I can’t, Lindy. I’m sorry.”

  Turning from the anguish on her face, he made himself walk away.

  23

  Lindy

  The ground rocked beneath her feet as she watched Wes walk away.

  How could he? After everything they’d been through, all the ways he’d stuck by her side despite the Order and draugar and the rest… how could he abandon her now?