The Last Unforgiven: Cursed

by Marina Simcoe

  She tensed, alarmed, when he parted her knees. “Even there?”

  “Especially here,” he assured her, dipping his head between her thighs.

  His confidence returned to him as he made her moan louder, skimming every red tendril of her arousal. His world seemed to have found its balance once again. Swirling his tongue around Olyena’s most sensitive spot as she shuddered with the orgasm he gave her, Raim fed off it all.

  “Don’t ever leave me, Raim . . .” she murmured sleepily afterwards, snuggling into his side. “Stay here, with me. Always.”

  LYING IN THE DARKNESS of the cabin—Olyena curled against his chest—Raim longed for the true and familiar sense of contentment, which had escaped him tonight.

  ‘Stay,’ she had said. And everything in him wanted to obey her call.

  Over time, Olyena had become his home, his beacon—the woman whose requests he longed to fulfill.

  An ordinary human, whose orders he was unable to disobey.

  The thought sent dreadful chill up his spine.

  They had closed the shutters for the night. The soft amber glow of the pendant on the cord around his neck was the only source of light inside now.

  He mechanically moved his hand to the soros stone, wrapping his fingers around the familiar smooth surface, warm with the heat of his body.

  ‘It reminds me of who I am.’

  Except that he had forgotten it lately. Wrapped in Olyena’s soft body and tantalizing emotions, he had forsaken everything.

  Gremory was out there, maybe still in need of help. Incubi had often been burnt, decapitated or maimed when captured. What if Gremory was being tortured this very moment as he lay cuddling with a human in here?

  The Council election was but months away. There was still a lot to do for Raim to have a shot at the position of Grand Master. Yet, here he was—softened by a female, lured in by her emotions that seemed to be incredibly potent to combat the Incubi hunger, but at a price.

  He had been weakened.

  By a mere mortal . . .

  Raim’s chest tightened with longing, so intense it seemed able to tear him apart. Only, he no longer was capable of telling who or what this feeling was for—the woman at his side or the loyalty to his kind that, until now, had governed all his actions.

  Carefully, so as not to disturb her sleep, he freed himself from Olyena’s embrace. Avoiding so much as a glance at her, he rose from the bed. His mind, however, immediately supplied the image of Olyena in slumber. He’d watched her asleep enough times for the picture to firmly embed itself in his brain.

  Soft, warm, her hand under her cheek, she would curl into a ball like a kitten, as if making herself smaller helped her feel more secure in her most vulnerable state. Only when they started sharing the bed, did she uncurl, stretching herself along his side, as if wanting to touch as much of him as possible during the night.

  Getting dressed quickly, he held the scabbard with the sword in his hand for a moment, then placed it on the table. Leaving it was a pathetic attempt to protect her, even if he was no longer physically with her. Before opening the door outside, he took off his amulet, too, and put it next to the sword. This was just an impulse that he had no desire to analyze.

  Shoving the door open, Raim left the cabin, without saying goodbye.

  He couldn’t possibly wait for when she awoke. If he faced her, he knew he would bow to her will and stay with her for the rest of her life, forsaking all others. And when she would be inevitably gone, in a few short decades—all humans died, sooner or later—there was simply no way of telling what he would become then or how he would be able to face the rest of eternity, without her.

  Instead, he fled in the middle of the night, like a coward, while she slept.

  Olyena was wrong, there absolutely were things he was afraid of. And she was the biggest one of them.

  Chapter 14

  FOR ONCE IN HIS LIFE the pain of hunger was not the most excruciating thing for Raim to bear. Every step he took away from the small cabin in the woods and from the woman peacefully sleeping in it twisted in his chest with agony.

  Her energy was strong and potent inside him, making him feel he could make it all the way to the Empire without having to stop once.

  Yet not knowing how to bear this pain all the way to the Base, he took a turn East, heading in the direction of the village first.

  “GET UP,” RAIM SQUEEZED through his teeth, grabbing the sleeping man by the scruff of his shirt and pulling him out from under the down-filled cover.

  The purpose of Raim’s visiting a human dwelling this time was not to invade people’s dreams but to yank them out of them.

  “What . . . Who? How dare you!” Kasimir staggered to his feet, wildly blinking the remnants of sleep away.

  “Who else was with you that day?” Not loosening his hold, Raim gave him a hard shake.

  A high-pitched shriek cut through the air from the other side of the bed. “Who is that, Kasimir?” Kicking her feet, the woman scooted all the way to the headboard, cowering under the thick, puffy quilt.

  “Get your hands off me!” Kasimir batted at Raim’s arm holding him. “I swear I’ll get your head chopped off this time, you filthy witch-fucker.”

  “I’ll be the one doing the chopping tonight,” Raim gritted through his teeth, dragging the struggling and kicking man out of the bedroom and to the front door.

  Another high-pitched wail came from the narrow bed placed by the large river-rock stove. “Oh, good people, what is happening!” The wrinkled face of an elderly female peeked from around the stove as she screamed at the top of her lungs.

  “Dragged out from his own bed!” Kasimir’s woman rushed out of the bedroom, wrapping a large colourful shawl around her shoulders as a number of other people, male and female, staggered into the common room from all possible nooks and crannies inside the house. “By this leshy here!” The woman pointed at Raim with both hands.

  Ignoring the noise and commotion, he kicked the front door open, shoving Kasimir into the yard. The rising sun had barely touched the edge of the dark sky. Raim had marched through the night, covering the distance to the village considerably faster this time.

  With a last glance around the room, Raim swiped a large butcher knife off the table then walked outside, towards Kasimir.

  “Who else was with the witch that day?” he demanded, grabbing the man by the throat and shoving the knife under his nose. “She said there were three.”

  It had taken him awhile to figure out that Kasimir must have been involved in what happened to Olyena that day in the woods. Unfamiliar with interactions between humans, Raim didn’t immediately interpret the signs the day he came to the village with Olyena to trade her gold. The emotions he spotted in both in reaction to each other—especially Olyena’s paralyzing fear and resentment towards this man—only started to make sense when he went through them after leaving the cabin earlier tonight.

  Then the certainty had settled in—and with it a blinding rage rose.

  “Who else was there,” he hissed, shoving the blade until a thin trickle of blood squeezed from the human’s skin, dripping down Kasimir’s lip and into his mouth.

  The inherent arrogance of the human turned to genuine fear the moment he tasted his own blood.

  “Stoyan . . .” he sputtered the name.

  “Who?”

  “Stoyan, my cousin, the blacksmith . . .”

  “And? The third one?”

  “Ratco, his brother-in-law—”

  “Lead me to their houses.”

  “They live in the same one. Stoyan is yet unmarried.”

  “How convenient.” Raim grabbed the scruff of Kasimir’s shirt again. “Lead!” He shoved the man ahead of him.

  Tripping down the street, Kasimir kept blubbering, “Listen, what’s in it for you? Let me go. I’ll pay you. I’ll give you the gold she traded and more.”

  Raim ignored his whining, prodding him with his knee to his side. “Where to, now?”


  The human meekly gestured at another large house, a few doors down from his.

  The lights were on inside, the narrow strips of it filtered through the cracks between the wood shutters, fighting the greying sunrise.

  Someone rushed Raim with a pitchfork the minute he kicked in the door. Leaping back a step, Raim let the teeth of the pitchfork embed into the wood of the door, then ripped the handle out of the hands of the man who had attacked him.

  Tossing Kasimir to the floor, he pointed his new weapon at his attacker.

  “Stoyan?”

  “No . . .” he muttered, weakly.

  “I’m Stoyan.” A tall, broad man stepped into the lit area in the middle of the common room. “Leave my in-law alone, outsider.”

  The sudden thought of how much larger the male was compared to Olyena’s frail shape made Raim’s insides churn. He swayed on his feet from the sickening feeling.

  “This here is Ratco then?” he bit out, diverting his attention to the one who had attacked him with the pitchfork.

  Thinking of Olyena made Raim weak in the knees. He called on his rage again, using it as a shield and a weapon.

  The shorter man grabbed on to the teeth of the pitchfork Raim pointed at him, as if hoping to stop them from piercing through him. He nodded quickly. “I’m Ratco . . . What do you want?”

  “I want all three of you.” Keeping his glare on Stoyan, Raim grabbed Kasimir by his throat again.

  “You should have heard her moans and screams,” the human in his grip croaked in protest. “I swear she liked it—”

  Raim’s fingers tensed, cutting the man’s air supply off. With an effort, he forced them to relax a bit, lest he kill Kasimir at once—too easy a death for him.

  “Out.” He shoved him back into the yard.

  Just like Kasimir’s house, this place had been filling with people way too quickly for Raim’s comfort. He needed an open space to minimize the risk of a sudden attack. He had to keep a distance from all of them, except for these three.

  Ratco didn’t make him say it twice. Whimpering, with his gaze fixed on the pitchfork, he scurried to the door. Raim caught him by the shirt before he escaped.

  “You too,” he ordered Stoyan, who crossed his arms over his chest, glaring back at him defiantly.

  Raim cursed under his breath, without letting go of Ratco, he dropped the pitchfork and grabbed Stoyan by his shirt. The larger male staggered with a strangled noise of surprise as Raim shoved him to the door, not holding back his strength. The linen ripped in his fingers when Stoyan dug his feet into the floorboards, trying to resist.

  With another filthy curse of barely contained rage, Raim seized Stoyan’s arm and tossed the male out of the door.

  Stoyan brayed like a mule when he hit the ground, then rolled in the dust clutching his now dislocated arm.

  Kasimir crouched on the ground when Raim stepped into the yard, dragging Ratco behind him and holding the butcher’s knife in his other hand.

  “Go away!” Kasimir sobbed, attempting to escape on all fours. “I swear I’ll never come near that bitch ever again.”

  “I know you won’t.” Tossing Ratco aside, Raim hooked the toe of his boot under Kasimir’s ribs, rolling him to his back. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  He knelt by the blubbering man, pressing him into the dirt with one hand against his chest. “I’m the one doing the chopping tonight,” he reminded. Lifting the hem of Kasimir’s shirt with the tip of the blade, Raim shoved the man’s knees apart with his boot and sliced the human’s shrivelled cock off before he could peep a word of protest.

  It happened too fast for anyone to prevent it. Yet as soon as the blood gushed into the dust of the yard floor, and Kasimir’s wild bellowing ripped through the early morning, the whole village seemed to come to life.

  Someone from the stable area tossed an axe at Raim. He caught it in the air, leaping to his feet.

  With a growl, Stoyan rushed him. Gaze unhinged, injured arm cradled to his side with the other one, he lunged at Raim, aiming to ram him, to crush him with the sheer force of his body mass and his rage.

  Raim’s own anger ran ice cold, and therefore was more deadly. Stepping out of Stoyan’s way, he swung the axe, chopping off the man’s injured arm and sending him to his knees.

  With a deafening roar, the wounded man hit the ground, clutching his bleeding stump, and rolled in the dirt that was quickly soaked with his blood.

  The air erupted in screams, people rushing to the injured men on the ground, women wailing, children starting to cry somewhere in the distance.

  Ignoring it all, Raim focused on one noise out of the cacophony of thousands—the panicky bellowing of Ratco as he dashed for the gate in a clear attempt to escape the fate Raim had come to bestow upon him.

  “Pathetic human,” Raim grunted, leaning back before tossing the axe Ratco’s way. The weapon turned and twisted through the air, but the blade sunk in just the way Raim had intended—deep and clean, cracking the man’s head in two all the way to the base of his neck.

  “You demon! Be you cursed forever!” Kasimir’s woman cried, dropping into the dust at her husband’s side. “Look what you’ve done to him.”

  Pressing both hands to his crotch, blood soaking his shirt, Kasimir howled in pain, his high screams intermingling with strangled groans.

  “Judging by his moans and screams,” Raim replied calmly, “I’d say he likes it.”

  Tossing the knife into the dirt at her feet, he turned to leave, but someone else leaped at him, swinging a fist at him.

  Trying to defeat a demon with his bare hands.

  What a fool.

  Raim caught the man’s arms, squeezing his wrists as he stared into his eyes. Reaching deep inside, he never even bothered with the man’s many emotions. Instead, he searched for his life force, draining it at once as soon as he found it.

  Lifeless, the man’s body hung limply in Raim’s hands before he let it go, dropping the corpse at his feet.

  He swept the yard with his gaze then, pausing it on the terrified faces of the onlookers.

  “The woman in the woods is your goddess,” he addressed them all. “Worship her, protect her from cold, hunger, and outsiders, lest I return and make your heads roll.”

  “Filthy, pathetic humans,” he muttered under his breath in disgust, as he made it along the street and into the valley, past the last dwelling of the settlement and the tall fence that surrounded it.

  The excruciating pain that had wrecked him since the moment he left Olyena’s bed was still there. Only now he believed he had brought it under control by drowning it in a river of blood.

  Chapter 15

  OLYENA

  She woke up to the familiar sounds of the forest outside and the commotion of the chickens in the lean-to coup. Before the awareness of the reality fully returned to her, she stretched, patting the mattress next to her, then stilled as the feeling of loss sliced through her anew.

  He was gone.

  It’d been a week since that morning when she first discovered that Raim had left her—in the middle of the night, without even saying goodbye, just when she started to hope he might never leave at all.

  All of that hurt, but finding herself alone again, after she had tasted the comfort and safety of having someone in her life, hurt the most.

  A scurrying noise and some muffled voices on the other side of her door caught her attention. They didn’t terrify her the way they did the first time she heard them, the day after Raim left.

  Fighting the all-consuming sadness that threatened to overtake her, Olyena lowered her feet to the dirt floor and grabbed the piece of wool fabric she used for a shawl. Wrapping it around her shoulders, she padded to the door.

  A large basket waited for her on the other side—a loaf of bread, a clay pot of butter or maybe sour cream tied with a piece of cloth, some root vegetables, and even a coil of sausage were in it.

  As she had expected, no one was around. Only the sound of rustling
in the undergrowth in the distance revealed the direction in which her secret providers were departing.

  “Thank you!” She yelled towards the noise then heaved the basket as the rustling faded into the trees. Whoever delivered the offering clearly was not interested in having a conversation.

  Fingering the cloth on the butter pot, she recognized the weave of it. The material was identical to the one she had traded for in the village last time to make a tunic for herself. The goodies in the basket definitely came from the village.

  Olyena didn’t know for sure why the open hostility of her people suddenly changed to bringing her gifts—twice in the past week—but she had a strong feeling that it had something to do with Raim’s departure.

  The thought of him resonated painfully in her heart.

  Shoving the door aside, she brought the basket in and set it on the table. Even being here, in her own home, no longer felt the same. Whenever she turned around, she still half-expected to see Raim sitting there, gazing at her with his one good eye the colour of ice in the river in the winter.

  His scent still lingered on her pillow. The curved sword of his hung on the hook by the door. And his amulet was around her neck. It had lost its wondrous glow now, dull and listless like a piece of amber she once saw someone bring to the market from the far north.

  She should have tossed all Raim’s things into the creek the moment she realized he had left. But she kept them, used them, wore them, as if through them she could bring him closer even if he was no longer with her.

  Not wanting to stay another minute inside the cabin she had shared with Raim, Olyena packed some of the bread and sausage, putting the rest of the food away. She then grabbed his sword, slinging it over her shoulder. Both strong and elegant, the weapon reminded her of Raim even more than the amulet. Having it on her brought some of the sense of security she used to have when Raim was around.

  Her gaze falling on the empty basket, she grabbed it before walking out of the door.