Magic Bleeds (42 page)

“Yes.”

“It’s not enough.” Jennifer looked at the bodies laid out on the snow.

“No. I wanted to kill her, but she stopped me.”

We both looked at the woman. She sat cross-legged in the snow, her spear on her lap. Four werewolves watched her.

“Naomi was twelve,” Jennifer said.

A year younger than Julie.

The alpha female turned to me. Her eyes were wet. “I hate you for killing her.”

Welcome to the club.

A caravan of Pack Jeeps entered the parking lot.

“It hurts and you want to hurt someone, and you don’t care who,” I said. “Because hurting will make you feel better.”

“Yes.”

“It won’t. I killed dozens of fomorians after Bran died. It didn’t help.”

“I’m not you,” she said.

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“We’re all human,” I told her.

An arm wrapped around me. My heart tried to leap out of my chest. Curran pulled me to him and kissed my forehead.

“I’m going to put a bell on you,” I told him. “That way I’ll have some warning.”

He peered at my face. “Are you okay?”

“I killed Brenna and Jennifer’s little sister. And the Dingo. Other than that, I’m great. Everything is lovely.”

“Right.” He looked at Jennifer.

She sat frozen.

“The cars are here. Load your people up. Daniel is waiting for you at the Keep.” He turned to me. “Can you walk or should I carry you?”

I’d be damned if I let him carry me anywhere. I pushed to my feet. My legs wobbled a bit but held. We walked side by side to the Pack Jeep. He opened the passenger door and I got in. He gave some final instructions and we were off.

THE KEEP WAS MADE OF STAIRS. AND MORE STAIRS. And then more stairs.
Just keep
climbing. Onefoot after the other.
Brenna’s bite on my thigh burned. My lungs had shriveled up to the size of golf balls.

I would not collapse on the damn stairs. The higher we climbed, the more people stopped and looked at us, and I would not faint while half of the damn Keep watched.

“One more floor,” Curran murmured.

I clenched my teeth.

Step, and step, and step. The landing before his private hallway. Made it.

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The door barring access to Curran’s quarters swung open. Derek held it ajar from the inside.

Curran turned to the small group of shapeshifters that had trailed us. “Leave.”

I blinked and the stairs were deserted. Our escort had vanished at a record speed.

Curran picked me up.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Nobody is going to see you. Your reputation is intact. It’s just you and me.”

I looked at Derek.

“He didn’t see anything,” Curran said, carrying me through the door.

“I saw nothing,” Derek confirmed and bolted the door shut.

I put my arms around Curran’s neck and let him carry me past his gym and bimbo room up another staircase all the way to his rooms.

“Where to?” he asked.

On the left a living room waited with a large gray sectional sofa. Up ahead was the door to the bedroom.

On the right was another door.

“Bathroom,” I said.

He carried me through the door on the right. An enormous bathtub took up most of the room.

Hot water. Heaven.

“Do you mind if I take a bath?”

He lowered me to the floor gently. “Can I get you anything?”

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I shook my head and began to strip. He waited to make sure I made it into the tub and left.

I sat and ran the water so hot it was near boiling. Even with the water up to my collarbone, the tub still had a foot and a half of space left.

Sometime later Curran walked in, carrying a glass of water with ice. He sat by the bathtub and put his hand on my forehead.

“You have a fever.”

I shook my head. “Brenna bit me.”

Venom’s poison must’ve been very potent. The Lyc-V virus would’ve multiplied in record numbers trying to counteract it, making the shapeshifters go from zero to complete loup. Loups were contagious as hell and I’d got a walloping dose of Lyc-V from Brenna’s saliva.

“It’s nothing major. My body will burn through it in an hour or two.”

Curran nodded.

I probably shouldn’t have said that.

I took the water and sipped. “Why is everything so large?”

“The tub is sized for my beast form.”

I smiled. “Do you take baths as a lion?”

“Sometimes. The wolves found one of their own in the basement of the Wolf House. He attacked them on sight. Did Jennifer tell you that?”

He was trying to help me with my guilt. “She was a bit busy. I’d killed her little sister and she was trying to hold it together.”

I did what I had to do. I had no choice. We both knew it. Even Jennifer knew it. But knowing that didn’t
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make any of us feel better.

“Do you need to be somewhere?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I scooted over to the side. He stripped his clothes off and slid into the tub with me. I leaned against his chest, with his arm around me, and we sank into the hot water.

“Where is the old lady?” I asked.

“In a loup cage downstairs. Any idea who she is?”

“Nope.”

I closed my eyes. I’d dumped some foaming stuff into the tub from one of the bottles I found sitting on the edge and now it smelled clean and soapy, like Irish Spring. For all I knew, he used this stuff for his mane and I had just exhausted a month’s worth of his shampoo.

Of course, with my luck, we were sitting in a tub full of his flea dip.

Curran’s skin was warm under my cheek. I could sit like that forever.

“It won’t last.” The words escaped before I had a chance to think about it.

“What won’t last?”

“You and me. Us. Even if we win this time, something else will come along and ruin our lives. Eventually I’ll lose a fight or you will, and it will be over.”

He pulled me closer to him. “Something else will come along. When it does, we’ll kill it. Later, something else will show up. We’ll kill it, too, and then we’ll go home.”

I grimaced. “And climb a million stairs trying not to collapse.”

“I don’t do collapsing.”

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“Of course not. What was I thinking . . .”

His voice was rock-steady. “We don’t live in a safe world. I can’t give you the white picket fence, and if I did, you’d set it on fire.”

True. “Only if I ran out of kindling.”

“Or needed some hardened wooden shards to drive into someone’s eye.”

I stretched my legs. “You don’t actually burn wood to harden it. You turn it over the fire, so it soaks up the heat but doesn’t char.”

He growled low in his throat. “Thank you for that little nugget of wisdom.”

“You’re welcome.”

His arm stroked my back. “There are only two things that can screw this up for us: you and me.”

“Then we’re doomed for sure.”

I had to tell him about my aunt. I just couldn’t get myself together to do it.

“My father was the best fighter I ever knew,” Curran said. “Even now, I’m not sure I could take him.”

“We have that in common,” I murmured.

“We lived on the edge of the Smoky National Park, in the mountains. I don’t know if it was North Carolina or Tennessee. Just mountains and the four of us. My dad, my mom, my younger sister, and me.

My parents didn’t want to deal with any shapeshifter politics. We’re older than most shapeshifters.

Different.”

Worry crawled up my spine.
The First were there first,
Erra said in my head. “What happened?”

“Loups,” Curran said. His voice was devoid of any emotion. “Eight of them. They caught my sister first.

She was seven and she liked to climb trees. One day she was late for lunch. I went looking for her.

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Found her up in a maple about a mile from the house. I thought she fell asleep and called out. She didn’t answer, so I climbed up, right into their trap. They strung a silver wire and it caught my throat, like a noose.”

He leaned back, exposing his neck, and I saw a pale hair-thin line across his throat.

“As I flailed, trying to keep from suffocating, they wrapped me in silver mesh. I remember hanging off the tree, burning up from silver poisoning my skin, and I could finally see Alice. They had eaten her stomach and her eyes and her face, all the soft parts, and leaned what was left on the branch to snare us.”

Oh, God. “How old were you?”

“Twelve. My dad was next. He’d tracked me down by scent and he came into the clearing roaring.”

The loups were stronger and faster than People of the Code. Eight against one, even Curran would have no chance.

“My father killed three,” he said. “I watched the rest tear him apart. I learned then that you can’t survive on your own. You need numbers. After they ate, they went after my mother. The wire on which I hung cut through the branch and I fell. By the time I got free, she’d stopped screaming.”

I shifted closer to him. “And then?”

“I ran. They chased me, but I knew the mountains and they didn’t. I lost them. They set up camp at our house. For about four months I lived on my own in the woods, trying to get stronger, while they tried to catch me. I’d come up the crags to watch their camp, waiting for an opportunity to pick them off one by one. Never got it. They were always together.

“In the fall, Mahon found me. His cousin made money guiding hunting parties into the mountains. The loups found one. Left nobody alive. Mahon took it personally and brought twenty shapeshifters with him, most family, some from other clans who owed him a favor. I watched them comb the woods for four days before I let them see me. Mahon offered me a deal. If he gave me a shot at the loups, I’d come with him out of the woods. I agreed.”

“Did you get your shot?” I asked.

He nodded. “I got one of them. Bit his neck in half. It was my first battle kill.”

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Mine was at ten. Voron had paid a street tough half a grand to kill me. I killed him instead and I was sick after, and then he brought out the second guy.

Curran’s eyes looked into the distance. “People think I built the Pack, because I’m the guy who has the welfare of all shapeshifters in mind. They’re wrong. Everything I built, I did so that when I mate and have children, nobody can touch my family.”

“That’s why you stabilized the clans. No infighting.”

He nodded. “That why I built the damn castle. I fight for them, I deal with their petty politics, I make them play nice with the Order and PAD and every other asshole with a badge. I do it all so my children won’t have to see their sister’s half-eaten corpse.”

My heart squeezed itself into a tiny painful ball. “And here I thought you were only pretending to be insane.”

Curran shook his head. “No, I’m the real thing. Paranoid, violent, not happy unless things are my way.

Right now I’m back in that damn tree watching loups feed on my father. I promised myself I’d never feel it again, but there it is, right there. I built all this so I can protect you. I need to know that you want it. I need to know if you will stay.”

I sat up straighter. “There are some papers in the pocket of my jeans.”

He reached for the jeans and fished out several torn book pages, folded into a small square. I’d ripped them from a ruined book after Erra trashed my place.

Curran unfolded the pages.

The first showed a tall man in a cloak marching down the road to the city. Tendrils of smoke, made with short ink strokes, stretched from the man outward, like a foul miasma. Before him animals galloped through the fields, cattle, sheep, oxen, horses, dogs, all caught in a terrifying stampede. The caption below it said,
Erra thePlaguebringer.

Curran looked at it for a long breath, wet stains spreading through the paper from his fingers, and dropped it on the floor of the bathroom.

Second page. The same cloaked figure walking through the street as people fell before it, their faces disfigured by boils. He discarded it, too.

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The same figure with seven others crouching in the fog before him.

The fourth page, Erra again, depicted as a man, laughing, his arms held wide, as a temple burned behind him.

“Erra,” I said. “Drawn as a man, but really a woman. Over six thousand years old. Roland’s older sister.”

Curran was looking at me.

I swallowed. Breaking twenty-five years of conditioning was a lot harder than I thought.

I pointed to the page. “What do you see?”

“An enemy.”

Thank you for making it that much harder, Your Majesty.

I had to say it. He put his cards on the table and he had a right to know what he was getting into.
You
can’t smelthappiness out of a lie. The world doesn’t work that way.

I unclenched my teeth. “I see my aunt.”

It took him a moment. Understanding flared in his gray eyes. Yep, he got it.

“She won’t stop until she or I are dead,” I said. “There is no place I can hide, and even if there was, I’m not running. You saw what she does. If I don’t fight, she’ll go after everyone I’ve ever known. She’s my family and my responsibility. It’s to the death now.”

My throat was so dry, my tongue turned into a dry leaf in my mouth.

“If I lose, I die. If I win, Roland will want to know who nuked his sister. Either way I’m screwed. There are consequences to being with me. This is one of them. By my presence, I’ll endanger you and your people. I know I said things before about wanting warmth and a family, but the truth is that I’m alone for a reason. Once we’re together, you and everyone you know will become a target.”