Claimed: Faction 3: The Isa Fae Collection

by Heather Hambel Curley

  “Unless it is exceeded by mine.” Tobias cocked his head at the tall, cumbersome Ralf. “Take the young master to his room and be sure he stays there.”

  It was like a vision; it didn’t even register in my brain as being real. I saw Ralf grab Asher, pulling him into a bear hug and dragging him out of the room. He was squirming, fighting against the larger, thicker man.

  Geoffrey pulled me up by my wrists, his large hands clamping down over the the lacy cuffs. Pain exploded through my body like shotgun aiming into a watermelon: it radiated throughout my body. I could feel it in my lower back and my head, through my spine and through the bright, white pulses of light that obscured my vision. Everything around me was spinning, my body was swaying.

  As I sank into the dark, rolling fog around me, I heard Asher screaming my name.

  Wren.

  Wren.

  Wren.

  Twenty-Five

  When I opened my eyes, I saw stone.

  I struggled into a more upright position and immediately drew my knees to my chest. Wherever I was, it was cold. It wasn’t just the kind of cold that chilled the skin or sank into the bone like I’d felt the moment we were dragged into Serata. This was different. This ice ripped into my core, into the black heart of my soul. I was alone here.

  But I wasn’t. There was something else lurking in the shadows.

  It looked like a plain room hewn out of rock. To one direction, was an iron gate; closed to the point the bottom edges sank into the stone below, and to the other, a sealed, wooden door. The only light in the room came from a solitary torch next to the door.

  My entire body hurt, my head was throbbing. The backs of my hands were covered in dried blood, no doubt from when Geoffrey jerked me up from my seat.

  God, why couldn’t people just regard me as a person? As a real creature? If he’d asked me to follow him, chances are that I would have—if not to just keep this kind of injury from happening again.

  From my position on the ground, I could barely make out markings above the iron gate. The threshold of the gate lead to an inky blackness, almost like it was a pool of darkness instead of a passage to a different location. I dragged myself closer to the gate. The stones were well-worn, as if they’d been in places for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

  The markings were mostly unfamiliar, but I understood it well enough: Be ye dead, our arms are open. Be ye living, thy passage is forbidden. Thou will find hell beyond this gate.

  I slid back against the rock face, pulling my knees up to my chest. It did little to warm me. What kind of place was this? Was this the catacombs where they wanted to keep animals because, if so, that was bullshit. I knew time had passed, maybe lots of it, but for whatever reason they’d plopped me down here? What the fuck did they think I was? Bait?

  Letting my hands fall limply to my sides, I exhaled the breath from my lungs. The half-groan, half sigh of defeat was warm against my legs; the skirt was too flimsy for much comfort in a pit like this: a walled entrance to some kind of void, some kind of waiting room for death.

  None of this made sense. If they hated me so much, why not just ship me back to Earth? Let me fight my way through radiation and half-mad survivors. Or send me back to the auction house. Why torture me this way?

  I shivered, tugging the top layer of my skirt up over my shoulders. My exposed skin was starting to sear with pain from the cold, like a jacket that was too tight. I knew why they were keeping me. They had to—I was just a resource for them, something they could use up. My life, my energy, that they craved, was the only reason I was still alive.

  For now.

  I heard a door slam from somewhere nearby. The light film of frost covering the rocks seemed like it threw sound in all directions, like the sound could very well be just on the other side of the gate, or a mile deeper in the catacombs. This miserable place. God, I had no sympathy for them. Let their world die—let it take me with them. I was sick of the pain and isolation and this damned cold.

  The wooden door to one side of the cell rattled against the frame. I stared at it. There was knob or latch on the side of the door, so whatever was out there evidently had an advantage. Or, at least, another way to control me.

  It shook again and this time, was followed by the rusted, mechanical shriek. The door swung outward—

  Asher.

  I blinked; my eyelashes felt heavy. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m bringing you back upstairs.” He cocked his head towards the exterior hallway. “Come on.”

  I shifted on the ground, trying to use my elbows to pull myself up the wall. It didn’t work; I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Did they decide I’d paid my debt?”

  “They left.” He sauntered into the room and slid his arms underneath mine, pulling me to my feet. When I looked up, his eyes were wide. “You’re frozen.”

  “It’s not exactly a sauna down here.” The warmth of his body was intoxicating; I pressed against his muscular flank and gritted my teeth together. Walking out of the cell and into a semi-warm annex was enough of a physical shock to my body: I trembled.

  He tightened his hold around me, closing and securing the catacomb door with one hand and then guiding me up a spiral, stone staircase. My brain was spinning circles in my head, the constant curve and upward effort made my knees shake. Ugh, no, don’t throw up, Wren, not now.

  “Sometimes he forgets you’re different. He could probably sit down there for three days and never feel the cold.” He rubbed my arm with his hand, pressing his warm flesh to mine. “He’s pigheaded.”

  I turned my face towards his chest and sucked in a sharp breath. He smelled like musk and cinnamon, a strange but not unattractive scent. “You must take after him.”

  He chuckled, guiding me through a narrow passageway. “I think I’m more bitter like my mother.”

  Bright light seared my corneas. We’d stepped through a panel hidden in the dark, wooden moulding in the Great Hall. Asher nudged me forward, guiding me back to the room where this all started: the Piano Room.

  Well, that’s what I was calling it anyway. This mansion, this ridiculous house, was too sprawling and maze-like to be easy navigable, especially when I spent most of my time staring at Asher’s ass as he led me around. It was a puzzle palace; like the the rooms and halls and corridors just sprouted to life as they pleased. Maybe they did.

  He waited until I dropped to my knees in front of the fireplace and then whipped his fur vest off, draping it over my shoulders. As I stared at the flames, trying to edge as close to the logs without catching myself on fire, I could tell he was watching me. Waiting.

  I nuzzled my face against his thick vest. It felt like a hug of comfort around my body and, for the first time in…Christ, longer than I could remember, I felt at ease. I said, “I still don’t like you.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “You probably still hate me.”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  Well, he wasn’t wrong. I held my hands closer to the fire; the sudden movement triggered a flux of pain across my forearms. A thread of blood streamed down my wrists—God, could it get any worse? Could I just shove my hands into the fire and cauterize the wounds; let the trauma seal off the pain?

  Asher touched my elbow and stooped down beside me. “I can take those off if they hurt you.”

  I almost choked. I recognized that phrase, I’d heard it before; in my mind, I’d heard the words and the same, mirrored concern. I’d told myself it was Avi’s voice, the memory of his rock-solid demeanor. Was it second sight? Impossible; Mother had it until the Division shattered her ability. Soleil never developed it and I—I, of course, was useless.

  I swallowed hard. “They’re insufferable.”

  “He’s convinced that you’ll bring down the house or some shit. Overthrow him from his perceived place of power.” He smirked. The expression quickly melted away and he took my hands in his, examining my wrists. “It’s a barrier stone. It blocks your energy and
stores it in here, in the stone itself. See? It’s red now. I bet when they put it on you, it was clear. Or black; it depends on what faction it came from.”

  I stared at him. Every time he smirked, I could see a dimple on his cheek; I saw a person I liked a hell of a lot more than the sullen, scowling little prince. It made me suspicious. “Why are you doing this?”

  “You’re bleeding. It’s hurting you and I don’t want to see that.”

  “Fair enough, but unless something happened while you had me locked in the freezer, you’re the same man who earlier said I disgusted him and you didn’t want me.”

  He touched his fingertip to the bloodstained lace. “Well, I don’t. Do you want to be here?”

  “No.”

  “Same thing. They control me because they think they can. Did they ask me if I wanted to buy a soul to source energy from? No. Did they ask if I wanted to marry out of necessity or love? No—and they only made you do that because this faction still outlaws slavey. You and I have to be married, otherwise, the Ascendancy can just come and take you.”

  “The who?”

  “The Ascendancy. They’re…I guess they’re like a human government. They make the rules. They enforce them.”

  “They hand you your life’s plan when you’re born or some shit? On a neat little card, with everything prepared in advance?”

  He snorted, obviously holding back a laugh. His fingers worked across the stone; he pressed the pads of his fingers to either side to try and adjust the mechanism. “Something like that. They determine what our roles are. What we should focus on as we grow and contribute to society.”

  “I sat down with a school counselor when I was a junior in high school and took an aptitude test. I was good with art and bad at everything else. I picked what I wanted to do with my life and then my father told me no.”

  “What’s high school?”

  “A form of torture. They put all the teenagers from the same town in one big building and, daily, teach them things that turn out to be useless when we become adults. Like algebra. Still haven’t used that.”

  “Education is important here. I went to boarding school until I was seventeen.” He flicked his eyes up to mine and paused, almost like he was studying me for a reaction. “Were you happy on earth?”

  His voice was soft, mumbled almost like a low purr, and had a tone to it of genuine wonder. He wasn’t mocking me; he wasn’t scowling or annoyed; he was curious. “I don’t know what it’s like to be happy.”

  The inner workings of the cuff popped; the stones fell harmlessly to the ground. My wrists throbbed. Circular purple and grey bruises colored my forearms like water color paintings and there were patches of dried blood on m skin—but I didn’t see any wounds. Mentally, I could still feel the wedge of pain between the conglomerate of bones making up my wrist, but visually there was nothing there.

  Asher scooped up the lace cuffs and tossed them into the fire. The flames hissed. “The pain will pass.”

  “I thought there’d be a mark…like a whole bored into my skin or something.”

  He shrugged. “It’s just magic. I thought you were a witch, that this kind of thing was common for you.”

  “I’m a witch. My sister is; my parents were. We had a coven and could trace our lineage back to the original witches on the American continent, those who came over to Jamestown and who fled Salem.” I looked away from him and down at my hands, cautiously flexing my wrists in a circular motion. “But I’m not…I’m not, like, this great sorceress or something. If your parents wanted that, they should have bought my sister.”

  He squatted next to the fire and grabbed a poker from a brass stand on the hearth. The muscles in his arms glided under his skin; he was poking the logs, sending sparks scattering up into the chimney; he rested his arms on his legs. “What can you do?”

  “I can move things with my mind.”

  He was silent, like he was waiting for me to keep going. But, there wasn’t anything else to say—that was my big reveal. That was the straight shit, the honest, most blatant answer I could give him. “Telekinesis. Um…and, sometimes I think I have second sight. Not actual good second sight, but sometimes I can hear things before people say them. It’s not very special. Now, my sister—“

  “It’s more than I can do.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He shrugged, his eyes focused on his own movement as he replaced the poker on the rack. “You can do more than I can. Your people call us immortals and, I don’t know if it’s true, but I can’t move things with my mind. Fuck, I barely move things with my hands without knocking shit over.”

  “What’s the difference between fae and humans?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  He was scowling again and I looked away, instead focusing my attention on the gorgeous, dark wood piano. It was tucked back in a corner of the room, an odd little nook where the walls were made of mirrors. This was the most interesting room in the house, with its selves of books and the beautiful, baby grand sized piano. I wanted to spend hours or days in that room, huddled by the fire; my hands touching and examining Asher—I mean, the books.

  The books, I wanted the books.

  “You can play it if you want.” He shrugged again, sinking back on his heels and turning his head just enough to look at me. His eyes were intense. “They aren’t home.”

  “Uh…who aren’t home?”

  “Mere and Da: my parents. I think they were taking Geoffrey with them; they wanted one last run to Defiance before the storm closes the mountain pass. Supplies. Weapons.”

  I flexed my wrists back and forth. There was residual pain, but I’d grit my teeth and push through it if it meant I got to play the piano. Digging my elbows into the patchwork ottoman beside me, I hoisted myself to my feet—and almost fell over. My feet tingled and pulsed, it was like the boots were squeezing my feet too tight.

  And I fully planned on ignoring it. Each step hurt more then the previous; I knew if I didn’t grip the couches and chairs as I shuffled by, I’d face plant. Of course, I couldn’t just narrow it down to being cold. I was hungry, tired, sore, and miserable. It was everything.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’ve been better.” I took another shaky step forward. Easy, Wren, left followed by right. You can do this. “Do you get storms like this a lot? I mean, this bad?”

  “No. They’ve been getting worse, though, and now that…well, now that things are affected by the portal, the brutality of this one likely will be the worst we’ve seen.”

  “Aren’t you fae used to it though?”

  “We tolerate it. Nobody thought it would last this long.”

  The moment I sat in front of the ivory and black keys, every ache and worry melted away. It felt like home—not the world or the building, not even the company. I’d lost who I was a long time ago, but as I sat on the piano bench, I’d never felt more alive. This was were I belonged; this was what I’d wanted to do before my father demanded I give up ‘trivial’ hobbies and focus on my education; before I watched the world end. And end again.

  I pressed my thumb into middle C. I knew I was grinning like an idiot and I didn’t care in the least. There was no need for sheet music or the steady tic-tock of a metronome. It was like hugging an old friend or flopping face first into your pillow after being away from home for a week. My fingers glided across the keys: Bach, Beethoven, a little Chopin. I played from memory, from the happiest times of my childhood; from that locked away part of my heart that regretted giving up music, of losing Vaughn.

  He was staring at me. “You’re quite good.”

  I didn’t expect a compliment; I was playing for myself, not for him. “Thank you.”

  “Was this what you did? Like, as a trade? Uh, a job?” He wrinkled up his nose like he was searching for the right words. “I have no actual knowledge of how Earth works.”

  “I took lessons when I was a kid. I wanted it to be my career, but I gave it up.”

  “Why?”


  “Because my father made me.”

  He chuckled, standing from the hearth and instead crawling up on the black horsehair couch. Resting his arms on the back, he said, “Maybe we have more in common than I thought.”

  “When the Division happened—that when the world of man ended, as far as we were all concerned—my father dragged us away from our home and into the woods. We had a coven…a, uh, group of witches, and they called him one night. Told him to leave.” I abruptly changed to a darker, more morose piece: Moonlight Sonata. “I still don’t know if complete isolation was what the coven meant, but that’s what he did. Just a log house he built with his own hands; we were forbidden to use our powers and had to ‘live off the land.’ We grew our own food, we fetched water from the river. And the entire time, he acted like that was the place that would save us: his little nature homestead. Then, when the world ended for a second time, he and my mother died in that log house.” I shrugged. “My sister and I survived because we’d gone into town. His biggest fear. And it saved us.”

  “I think my parents biggest fear is death. Our world is dying, I mean, it’s fucking obvious. Serata used to be a haven, a paradise, but there’s an energy crises. It’s across all the factions now and, eventually, once your world dies, ours will too. I don’t think the slide in that direction can stop, not now that your people suffer the effects.”

  “Effects?” I looked up from the piano keys and at him. He was tugging on his lower lip, almost thoughtfully; his green sea glass hued eyes had taken on the tone of moss. “What?”

  “Radiation poisoning. The fact your atmosphere rains down death.” There was an intensity in his face, his gaze, as if now that he’d started talking, he couldn’t stop the flow of words. “It started happening long before your Division. Cancers, cirrhoses; a diminishing population.”

  “That part’s a myth, trust me.”

  “I once had seven brothers and two sisters. I’m the last of my family and, once I’m gone, our name will die, too. My father is the last of his line, my mother was one of three girls. I watched them all die. My older brother, Judah, asked me to end his suffering. He pleaded, he begged me to stop the pain.”