The Cursed Fae (Accessory to Magic Book 2)

by Kathrin Hutson

  ‘Oh, sure.’ The bank snorted. ‘This little trick might’ve worked just fine for you back in the clink, witch. But I’m not some disfigured changeling trying to strongarm you for extra commissary snacks. We’re in this together!’

  Despite that extra nugget of memory the damn bank tried so hard to bring to the forefront of her mind, Jessica let herself smile softly as she sank into the mattress of her own bed in what was now her bedroom above the lobby of Winthrop & Dirledge.

  They were in this together, true. But that didn’t mean she had to take orders from anyone. She was done with that.

  For the first time in years, Jessica dreamed of her life before her five-year prison sentence shortened down to one year and parole, before Mickey and Corpus, before Mel, before she’d ever used her own power to its fullest and most horrifying potential.

  The images were blurry when she first moved through the back alleyways of her memory. Cracked streetlamps flickered in the darkness as she ran, her boots crunching down on the broken glass from the shattered windows of the apartment buildings on either side. Screams echoed between brick walls, growing fainter and more lost the farther she made it down that seemingly endless alley, though Jessica never really left those screams behind. She couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried or how far she pushed herself.

  When she reached the end of the alley, she had to stop for breath, steadying herself with a hand against the brick wall. A hand covered in blood that wasn’t hers and a thick black sludge that most definitely was. The product of her magic that had come from within her at her darkest moment and would rise again and again until she was later forced to remove it herself.

  The bitingly frigid air on that dark winter night whipped down the street, stinging her face, making it perfectly clear how hot her own body was and how desperately she wished she could get rid of all of it.

  A deep, rumbling growl rose from the space between the burning apartments at her back, building into one long, piercing howl that chased after her with the rest of the screams.

  Jessica spun around to see the cloud of silver mist catching up to her. Faces roiled within the magic—those belonging to her next-door neighbor Bill with the four cats, Mr. and Mrs. Hammerty across the hall, sweet Annabelle with her wide and curious eyes. And Mark and Eveline. Her parents. From before Jessica was even Jessica as she’d known herself for the last ten years.

  “I will find you,” the cloud hissed. “Wherever you go, whoever you seek to help you, you can never outrun your fate. I will—”

  Jessica knew it was a dream the second she raised her hands to shield herself from the icy shards of silver mist blasting down the alleyway toward her. It had to be a dream, because her own power tied so intrinsically to the blood within her veins should have appeared. It had appeared that night, blooming from her outstretched hands and crashing through the shimmering mist as she peppered the brick walls and what remained of the lights mounted on them. She should have heard the deafening crack as the walls split and trembled beneath the force of her magic, as the exterior lights shattered and threw sparks against the darkness, as the one face within that cloud she never truly saw contorted and screamed her name before it was gone.

  In the dream, Jessica only felt the sting of so many icy silver shards slicing into her flesh, piercing her through with a cold so unbearable it grew into a searing heat.

  She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Jessica!’

  She lurched out of bed with a raw gasp. Her head spun, and the room spun with it. “Shit!”

  Her hand darted up toward the glass pendant that felt like it was burning through her chest, and she jerked it away from her flesh with a hiss. “What?”

  The bank was silent for a few seconds, then made a sound in her mind like it was clearing the throat it didn’t have. ‘Finally. Took you forever.’

  Jessica tried to calm her heaving breath and blinked away the horror of the nightmare she thought she’d gotten rid of forever. At least, that was what the Peddler had told her. “You tried to burn me awake?”

  ‘Well when screaming in your head, flicking the lights off and on, and rattling the bed around didn’t work, yeah. I went with the last resort.’

  She sighed and hesitantly touched the pendant with her other hand. It was cool again, so she dropped it against her chest. “Don’t tell me sleep deprivation is part of the job too now.”

  ‘Ha. Good one. Hard to be sleep-deprived when you’ve been sleeping for the last fifteen hours—’

  “What?” Jessica rolled over toward the round nightstand and blinked at her alarm clock—6:34 a.m. “Jesus. How did that happen?”

  ‘Beats me. But for real, I can’t just let you sleep on the job. It’s almost time to open up shop.’

  Monday. It was 6:34 a.m. on a Monday morning, and Jessica had just slept away the rest of her weekend.

  She pushed herself off the bed and nearly fell onto the floor when her legs apparently forgot how to hold her up. Hissing, she caught herself with one hand on the mattress and the other on the nightstand, almost knocking the table over in her haste.

  ‘Yeesh. I don’t remember you drinking yourself into a coma yesterday. What’s wrong with you?’

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  Righting herself on shaky legs, Jessica ran a hand through her hair and gave herself a moment to settle down.

  But she wasn’t fine. Not even a little. Because that dream shouldn’t have made it back into her head at all. The Peddler had sworn on his decrepit mother’s head in his decrepit shack in New Mexico that Jessica would never remember what she’d done or what had been done to her in turn. That she’d be safe as long as the memories were gone, floating out there somewhere in the ether.

  ‘You had a creepy old dude remove your memories?’ The bank tsked. ‘I don’t know what the hell you were thinking, witch, but that’s just—’

  “I was thinking about staying alive, okay?” she shouted.

  Saying it out loud like that brought snippets of that night racing through the forefront of her awareness. The screams. The fires. The shattered glass. The faces.

  Slowly, Jessica removed her hands from the furniture and turned around to stare at the closed door of her bedroom. “Okay, bank. I think we have a serious problem.”

  Chapter Four

  ‘You think we have a problem?’ the bank parroted. ‘Um…besides the fact that you think you’re about to lose your mind?’

  “I’m not losing my mind.” Jessica stormed toward her dresser, the strength returning to her legs with every step. “Am I talking out loud to a bank that talks back in my head? Sure. But I’m not crazy. Not losing my mind.”

  ‘Then what’s wrong with you?’

  Beyond being swindled into signing a contract that made her the owner of Winthrop & Dirledge Security Banking two weeks ago and everything else that came with it? The simple answer was that Jessica had paid the Peddler to remove those parts of her mind just like she’d removed her own magic with the Shattering spell.

  The complicated answer was that, unlike her magic hanging out in the rusted tin box in her underwear drawer, those pieces of her mind were apparently starting to return.

  ‘Okay, hold on.’

  Jessica stripped off her clothes, ignoring the bank’s confusion because it was way less overwhelming than her own.

  ‘Why can’t I see what you’re trying to hide?’

  Jerking open the second and third drawers, she blindly pulled out the first fresh shirt and pair of jeans her fingers touched. “I’m not trying to hide anything.”

  ‘Well, yeah. Usually, I’d say you can’t keep anything from me if I really wanna see it, but I can’t… There’s no…’

  “Please don’t tell me my missing memories have something to do with your ‘can’t talk about the Gateway’ malfunctions. ’Cause I really don’t think I can handle that right now.”

  ‘What? No. I’m just bamboozled.’

  Jessica rolled her eyes at th
e weirdest use of the word “bamboozled” and slipped the new shirt on over her head. “That makes two of us.”

  ‘Hey, are you gonna grow a pair and tell me what the hell’s freaking you out so much that you can’t even put your pants on the right way?’

  She froze and looked down at her right foot stuck through the leg of her jeans, with the zipper and top button facing her. “Shit.”

  After quickly righting the situation and stepping into her pants correctly, she hopped around and pulled the waistband up over her hips. “I’m fine.”

  ‘Yeah, you said that before, but I’m not really buying it.’

  “Well you saw my dream. Go ahead and guess. I really don’t have to spell it out for you.” She snatched her old jeans off the floor to pull her phone from the back pocket, which she then slipped into her current jeans with a lot more force than necessary. This was not how she preferred to start her days. Ever. Getting out of prison and making a fresh start was supposed to have taken care of all that.

  Jessica darted into the bathroom across from the bedroom door, ran her fingers quickly through her hair, then gargled with mouthwash because she seriously didn’t have the time for even a half-hearted teeth-brushing. The last thing she needed was to be caught off guard by clients banging on the front door she still hadn’t unlocked after opening hours. Again.

  When she jammed her feet back into her gray Converses and reached for the handle of her bedroom door, the bank’s voice filtered slowly back into her mind, quiet and weak and almost trembling.

  ‘What dream?’

  “What?”

  ‘You said I saw it. But I didn’t.’

  Her hand froze around the doorknob. “Well maybe you just can’t get that deep down in my psyche—”

  ‘No, I totally can. Like that fun little jaunt through your vivid imagination Friday night. You know, the dream about the strip club and—’

  “Stop. Just stop.” Anything that made her think of Mickey and what he’d all but ordered her to do was off-limits. Not that she hadn’t drawn a line in the sand with that one anyway.

  ‘Well that’s my point.’ The bank filled her mind with a tremulous sigh. ‘So what dream are you talking about? And why didn’t I see it?’

  “I don’t know.” Jessica forced herself to turn the doorknob and jerk open the door. “The question you should be asking is why the Peddler’s memorywork backfired eight years after the fact.”

  ‘Okay, fine. I’ll bite. Why?’

  “If I knew, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to find that somewhere in my head too.”

  ‘Or you had that removed with the rest of your weirdly enticing past.’

  Right. Because Jessica had totally known when she was sixteen years old that six months after making parole—years down the line in her future—she’d have to hide her past even further from a sentient bank hanging out inside her head and had planned accordingly.

  ‘That’s sarcasm.’

  “That’s private.” She hurried down the stairs, her stomach growling, and paused on the lower landing before the staircase turned ninety degrees into the back hallway. A flicker of green light pulsed in the corner of her vision, and she turned to look slowly up at the second-floor hallway.

  The damn dungeon door was glowing again.

  ‘Wait a minute…’ The bank sounded just as curious as Jessica felt. ‘You’re not a scryer.’

  “Seriously? That’s your grand revelation?”

  ‘No. That’s me thinking out loud in your head.’

  When the Gateway’s metal-studded door didn’t act up again, Jessica rolled her eyes and hopped down the last two steps before heading across the hall and into the narrow kitchen at the back of the building. She opened the fridge and pulled out an energy drink, her mouth watering before she’d even cracked the tab.

  Whatever the bank thought it had figured out, it couldn’t know anywhere near as much as she did about her past, that dream, the things she shouldn’t have been able to remember as a fully grown witch now trying to reinvent herself for the second time. That was the weirdest part. Until she’d been launched out of sleep by the pendant threatening to sear a magical hole in her chest, Jessica hadn’t realized she’d already done this once before.

  She threw her head back and gulped down a quarter of the energy drink, trying to bury the inconsistencies again.

  ‘Serious inconsistencies,’ the bank mused. ‘You paid a Peddler to take your memories without any idea you’d end up here, with a new name and a new calling and me.’

  Grabbing the last banana from the counter beside the sink, Jessica left the kitchen and took off down the hall toward the front lobby. “I don’t know why this is such a surprise for you.”

  ‘Hey, I spent almost fifty years connected to a witch who could see the future. You’re not the only one doing some readjusting here.’

  The bright overhead lights clicked on by themselves when she reached the end of the hall, illuminating the freshly renovated lobby of Winthrop & Dirledge that didn’t look anything like it had the first time she’d stepped through that front door almost two weeks ago. Jessica stopped behind the scuffed but recently uncluttered desk at the back of the lobby and gulped down more energy drink. “You’re not making any sense.”

  ‘Tell me about it. Your brain just turned into one cloudy, scattered mess.’

  “I’m not scattered.”

  ‘No, but your memories are. And if you didn’t get them sucked right out of you to hide them from me… Who are you hiding from, witch?’

  She had no idea. And until twenty-five minutes ago, she’d had no idea she was hiding anything at all.

  ‘That’s not exactly true, though, is it? You’re still trying to hide tons of stuff from me.’

  “No, I just don’t want you digging through my head to find your favorite new conversation starter. There’s a difference.” Jessica pointed at the front door with its frosted-glass window. A yellow light illuminated at her fingertips, echoed by a similar flash within the front door as the lock turned and the bolt slid out of the door to open up shop. She flicked her hand toward the metal sign hanging in the window, and it flipped over from Closed to Open.

  ‘Don’t worry, witch. The longer we do this, the deeper I’ll be able to dive. I’ll figure it out.’

  Yeah, that was exactly why she was worried. Nobody paid to have their memories stripped for no reason at all.

  ‘But you were a kid. From what I’ve seen over the last few millennia, I’m pretty sure adolescent magicals haven’t changed that much. Or humans, for that matter.’ The bank tittered. ‘You sure you didn’t just get your heart broken and made a stupid decision to help you move on?’

  “Do I look like someone who’d strip herself down over a teenage crush gone wrong?”

  ‘I don’t know. You removed your magic after one too many heists gone wrong.’

  Sure, but she remembered exactly why she’d done it. And just how agonizing the Shattering had really been.

  ‘Yeah, no kidding. There’s a reason that spell’s reserved for—’

  “We’re not talking about this right now.” Jessica snatched up the banana and broke open the peel at the stem with a vicious snap. “You woke me up for work, didn’t you?”

  ‘And you’re awake. But I gotta tell ya, witch, this missing-memory mystery is a heck of a lot more exciting.’

  “And you’ve reached your alliteration quota for the day. Thanks.” She took a massive bite of banana and chewed angrily, which was far less satisfying with a squishy piece of fruit. Beef jerky would’ve gotten her point across a lot better.

  The bank’s laughter crashed starkly through her head. ‘Oh, sure. Ripping dead flesh between your teeth is so much better than what you could do before you stuffed your real power inside a box in your underwear drawer.’

  “Shut up.”

  ‘Make me.’

  A shadow flickered across the frosted window in the front door, and Jessica washed down her angry banana with more energ
y drink. Time to get to work.

  The metal crow dangling by its thin chain reaffixed to the top of the door stretched its wings and let out a shrill caw. The tiny silver bell tied to the crow’s legs jingled and clacked against the glass when the door opened. Jessica smirked.

  ‘Nothing like that caw and bell, right?’

  Requiem bastards thought they could just break it down and take the place for themselves.

  ‘Not on our watch.’

  The magical who stepped through the front door of Winthrop & Dirledge, however, didn’t look nearly as amused by the jingle. Honestly, he looked like he’d just stepped through the wrong door.

  Jessica couldn’t tell exactly what he was beneath all the layers of stained rags draped around his body, covered by a large, puffy red coat with a slit along the side spilling down feathers as he moved. He shuffled away from the door when it closed behind him with a soft thump, and the bell jingled again. Then he froze, staring around the lobby with wide, bright-blue eyes surrounded by dirt smears. His unruly beard and mustache were stained with dirt too, showing the barest hint of what would have been its natural blond color if he’d bothered to bathe.

  A shiver wracked the bank’s newest client, followed by a puff of feathers spewing from the ripped jacket when the magical patted down his chest with a scowl. “What is this?”

  “Welcome to Winthrop & Dirledge,” Jessica said, trying to smile politely even as the first sour whiff of rank trash with an undertone of body odor hit her. And the guy hadn’t even made it more than three feet inside.

  ‘It’s times like these that make me appreciate my lack of organic senses.’

  Don’t.

  If the bank kept it up, she didn’t know if she’d end up trying to plug her nose or burst out laughing.

  The scowling magical whipped his head toward her and sniffed. “So you’re the one who got the job, huh?”

  Jessica spread her arms. “That’s me. Official and everything, I promise.”