Shadow's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  “The particulars are vague, but if memory serves, there was a drag hook involved. Must have been baited to catch fox.”

  Her body stilled, her breath catching in a ragged gasp as she clutched the rag, eyes locked on the gash with new intensity. “Fox . . . or wolf?”

  He lifted her chin with a finger, forcing her to meet his gaze. “It was a coincidence, Callista. That’s all. I should have been paying closer attention. Now that I know the lands hereabout are well guarded, I’ll be more careful.”

  “Being careful would mean staying close to the wagons and staying human,” she scolded.

  He gave a bleak smile, his pleasant fuzziness fading as if it had never been. But that was always the way. He could run from the ruin his life had become, but it always caught him up in the end.

  “I’m not human, Callista . . . not completely,” he answered.

  He covered her hand with his own, felt her soft skin, her fingers trembling. Lightning licked along his blood, shooting southward to his groin. There were only inches separating them, inches that closed as he leaned toward her, waiting for her to pull back, to stop him, to run for the safety of the wagon and lock the door behind her. She did none of those things. Instead, she swayed toward him as if strings holding her taut had been cut. Her lips parted, a sigh escaping as he kissed her brow, her temple, her cheek. He turned over her hand and kissed her palm and the underside of her wrist where her pulse fluttered.

  “Psiyo kr’ponelos toro.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I called you a tall, cool drink of water. Something I’m in desperate need of right now.”

  “Come inside. I’ll pour you a glass and tuck you into bed.”

  Now, there was a loaded suggestion fraught with possibilities, all of them out of bounds. But, Mother of All, he was more than willing to indulge. Already he was rigid as a tent pole. “I think I’ll just sit out here for a bit and, uh . . . whittle.”

  She folded her legs beneath her, a clever smile on her face. “Then I’ll keep you company.”

  “Is this your friendly way of keeping me sober or keeping me safe?”

  She cocked her head with a quick look of amusement. “Too late for both tonight, but we’ll reset the clock and begin fresh from now.” She paused, the smile dying. “Why do you drink so much, David?”

  “It keeps me from thinking . . . or feeling. At least for a little while.”

  “But don’t you pay for it afterward?”

  He shrugged. “A price I find tolerable. Besides, I could guzzle a trough and it would barely affect me. It’s one of the so-called advantages of my shifter blood. A head like a rock.”

  A dimple quirked a corner of her mouth, her eyes bright with laughter. “You said it, not me.”

  He drew a deep breath. The gash on his chest stung, but it was the throbbing between his legs that nearly brought tears to his eyes. He’d desired women before but never like this. Never with such a visceral yanking of every heartstring in his body. It made no sense. She was pretty, but not beautiful. She was smart, but no bluestocking. She was funny, but hardly a drawing-room wit. So, what was it that made him want to reach out and hold on with both hands? Her courage? Her patience? Her artlessness? Her smile?

  “Are all Imnada like you?” she finally asked, breaking into the endless spin of his thoughts.

  “Do you mean incredibly virile or breathtakingly dangerous?” he asked with a rakish arch of his brows and a sly curl to his lip—a move that made the typical women of his acquaintance flutter their eyelashes at him in blatant invitation.

  Callista laughed and tossed a pebble at him. “Odious man. How about exquisitely conceited?”

  The curl of his lip broadened into a genuine smile. “Guilty on all counts.”

  An owl called from a nearby tree and sheep murmured in the pens behind them. He leaned back, a hand behind his head, and watched the crackle and dance of the flames. He’d done this earlier, but damn if Callista wasn’t better company than Sam Oakham.

  “I just mean that you seem so much”—she paused as if searching for the right word—“so much more than normal humans, or even the Other. Larger than life almost, as if you know a secret the rest of us don’t. As if you possess some great knowledge none of us can even fathom.”

  “Perhaps we once did. It’s said we were here long before the Fey. We don’t have their magic, but we tend to be faster, more agile, quicker to respond to danger and quicker to heal when injured.”

  “And yet there are so few of you left.”

  “We bleed. We die. In the end, disguising what we were was the only way left to us.”

  “We’re taught to hide our gifts as well. We learn early how to mask our talents and pass as nonmagical Duinedon.” Was it a trick of the flames or did she shudder, her gaze growing distant, her face heartbreakingly sad?

  “Or make money from them?”

  Her eyes snapped to his face with a noticeable wince of her shoulders. “That was Branston’s idea, though it never made him the fortune he imagined it would. We always seemed to be one step ahead of constables and moneylenders as we traveled from town to town and fair to fair.”

  “No wonder you knew how to escape Corey. It wasn’t the first time you’d slipped the net.”

  She made a small gesture, as if shaking off this uncomfortable train of thought. “Enough about my disreputable family. What of yours? Is there a gaggle of equally imposing brothers and sisters out there?”

  “No. No one.”

  She waited. He could feel her held breath, her expectant silence.

  Once remembered, Mother’s words seemed to haunt him with their truth: “The wolf does not run and he does not hide.”

  He’d been doing both for the last two years. Hiding from his past. Running from his fate. It had availed him nothing but exhaustion.

  “When my parents died,” he said, his throat tight as the words moved like boulders up from his chest, “my uncle was technically in charge of my well-being, but he was an infantry lieutenant and barely around. When I told him I wanted to join the army, he was pleased as punch to arrange my commission. He died later in Portugal.”

  She drew her knees to her chest, the flames picking out the hollows beneath her eyes and the kind set of her mouth. “It sounds lonely.”

  “The clans never allow one of their own to be alone. The bonds are too strong between kin and holding. And each of the five clans is in constant communication through our krythos, disks that amplify our pathing far beyond their normal range.”

  “And you said you possessed no magic.”

  “They’re not magic, or not as the Other define it. I can’t explain the krythos. They just have always been.”

  His hand still unconsciously reached for his far-seeing disk, though less so now than in the first terrible weeks after he’d destroyed it with a well-aimed swing of a hammer, gratified at the lovely crunch of shattering glass. Unfortunately, it had been a short-lived satisfaction. Much like whisky and women.

  And even those two palliatives were losing their efficacy.

  A lot like the damned draught, come to think of it.

  “Between the bloodline ties and Gather law, even the lowliest orphan is surrounded and supported by family and clan. No one is left behind,” he added.

  “No one but you.”

  He reeled as if slapped, the breath knocked out of him in a gasp, which he transformed to a quick bark of cynical laughter. “Me? I’m constantly in company. Either at my club, parties, dinners, balls, breakfasts, salons, luncheons, and shopping. You name it. I’m surrounded by people.”

  She ran her hands one over the other down her braid in a nervous gesture, eyes locked on his face. “Sometimes that’s when we’re the loneliest.”

  He rolled up and onto his feet. Strode away from the fire, though there was nowhere for him to go. Hell, he wasn’t even wearing a shirt. But leaving ended the conversation, or at least this conversation. He didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want
to think about what he’d lost, only what he’d found.

  “David?”

  She had come up silently behind him. Or rather, he’d been so deep in thought and hazy with gin fumes, he’d not have heard a cannon going off in his ear.

  “Come to bed.”

  “If I didn’t know any better, Miss Hawthorne, I’d say you were trying to seduce me.” He tried for scoundrel, but it came out sounding more like wronged virgin.

  She backed up a step, though her gaze never wavered. “You’ll have a good sleep and things will look better in the morning.”

  Did she speak for him or for herself now? There was meaning hidden behind her expression. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Couldn’t read her eyes, but it was there. A shadow of trouble.

  “A tried-and-true remedy. Unfortunately, it’s never worked yet.”

  “There’s a first for everything,” she said with a brisk cheerfulness.

  When he looked again, the shadow had vanished behind a teasing smile. Perhaps he’d imagined it. Perhaps seeing things was the first stage in going blind drunk.

  “The first time we kissed, you jumped a mile and tried to clobber me,” he said. “How far we’ve come in a few short weeks.”

  She linked arms with him, nudging him toward the wagon. “We have, haven’t we?” she said, casting him a sideways glance that seemed to drag his heart right out of his chest.

  Dark turned darker as they entered the wagon. He tripped over a trunk, a stool, and a bag before she wrestled him down onto the bunk, pulled off his boots, and upended him onto the mattress.

  “You’ve done this before. I can tell,” David said.

  “Branston enjoys his grain-based pleasures too.”

  “Brilliant. You’re comparing me to your horrid brother.”

  “If it’s any consolation, you’re heavier, but at least you don’t sing.”

  “Thank you . . . I think.”

  She grabbed a blanket and a pillow.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I’ll sleep by the fire tonight.”

  He shoved himself up against the head of the bed. “You can’t do that. I can’t take your bed and leave you to sleep on the cold, hard ground. What kind of gentleman do you take me for?”

  “I hadn’t taken you for a gentleman at all.”

  “Fair shot.”

  “I’ll be all right, David. You forget, I lived this life before. It won’t be the first time I’ve slept outdoors. I enjoy it actually. I’ll watch the stars and listen to the breeze.”

  “And freeze your ass off. Sleeping outdoors is terribly romantic in theory, damned uncomfortable in practice.”

  “And how does one of London’s most eligible know that?”

  “Creature comforts were in short supply between Portugal and Paris. And humble army scouts rarely rated them.”

  “You’ve never been humble in your life.”

  “Sleep in here. I don’t bite. I don’t snore. And I’m housebroken.” She continued to hesitate as he held an arm open for her to curl against. “This is only because you’ll fall on the floor otherwise,” he said. “This bed was built for pygmies. Trust me.”

  “You had me up until the last,” she replied, but she joined him, curling into the crook of his shoulder, though other than that slight submission, she remained uncomfortably wooden.

  David lay still, breathing through his nose in an effort to ease his discomfort and keep his hands from traveling. His cut hurt, but it was a dull pain, easily managed. The greater pain was the one burning along his nerve endings.

  This was madness. Callista was no different from countless others—faceless, nameless strangers he’d pleasured and left behind. Why did he restrain himself? Why did he not use every persuasive weapon in his arsenal to peel away her proper exterior? Why did he lie here like a lad with his first hard-on and no idea what to do about it? Did it come back to that damn friend thing again? She was not a friend. Never would be.

  He had never wanted to peel his friends’ clothes off one delicious inch at a time. Nor had he had the insane urge to kiss his friends senseless. Friendship was definitely not making every drop of blood in his body flee southward, leaving him woozy and reckless . . . or rather, more reckless than usual.

  Damn it, he was just about at the point of hating his new so-called friend when . . .

  “It’s funny, but the closer I get to Scotland and my aunt, the more I question if that’s what I really want.” Callista rolled over so that she faced him, her breasts pressed against his bare chest, her legs sliding long and lean against his own. So much for wooden and awkward. She must have taken him at his word and decided he was harmless.

  He didn’t feel harmless.

  “A little late to be second-guessing your future, isn’t it?” he said, though his voice sounded rough as if he’d been running hard.

  “You once accused me of exchanging one prison for another, of hiding from life. But maybe that’s only because I didn’t see any other choice. I couldn’t imagine any other future.”

  “What’s happened to make you change your mind?” He felt himself holding his breath, terrified of her answer and yet willing her to say it just the same.

  She motioned around her. “All this.” Her expression softened while hesitation flickered in her eyes. “I’ve never known anyone like you, David.”

  “You mean a shapechanger?”

  “I mean a brilliant, amazing man who makes me feel like anything is possible,” she whispered, caressing his cheek, the taut line of his clamped jaw, “that I have choices and that my future is up to me.”

  So maybe she didn’t like this friend designation any more than he did. Still, he found himself clasping her wrist before she could rouse him more fully. If that were possible. “I don’t sport with maidens, Callista. Only women who understand the game.”

  But, oh, how he wanted to make an exception to that rule. He wanted to taste her on his tongue. Make her scream. Feel something besides tired and sore and frustrated and guilt-ridden and lonely and bitter. Wanted to fill his heart with an emotion other than rage.

  “So it’s just a game to you?” she asked.

  “Up to now, yes. With you, I fear it would not be.” And wasn’t that the whole damn problem? The blasted dream that haunted him, offering the glimpse of a happiness that could be before a brutal end. Horrible and yet heartbreakingly tempting.

  “I’m willing to risk it,” she murmured, her words hardly more than a soft breath against his cheek.

  But you’re risking me as well, he wanted to say. Instead, he cocked her a practiced grin, turning his back on the last tattered vestiges of his principles. Friend? He’d show her his definition of friend. Hadn’t he told Oakham that Callista was a grown woman who could make her own choices? A small, tired voice at the back of his head told him this was wrong, he was wrong. The louder, more demanding bits of him drowned it out.

  David murmured in her ear as he drew her against him. “Who am I to refuse a lady?”

  * * *

  Laughter bubbled up inside her. Only a few short days ago, she had worried about the repercussions of visiting David’s bedchamber. Now here she was poised to hand him her maidenhead without hesitation. And yet, rather than running, she pressed closer, her stomach tangled in a million knots and her skin prickling with lightning.

  Maybe she was hysterical.

  Or shamelessly wicked.

  She wouldn’t admit that it might be a result of her journey into death and the vision revealed there. That meant she had to face the truth, and she wasn’t quite ready to do that yet. Facing it—rolling the possibilities around in her head—cemented it in reality, and she couldn’t acknowledge that she might be running straight to her own death.

  If only she’d seen the figure behind her, some hint of form or glimpse of a face. But the shadows had obscured him and she’d not learned to wield her powers well enough to illuminate the hazy half-seen images the spirits offered.

  Cor
ey? Branston? Eudo Beskin? Or some as-yet-unmet adversary?

  Would it be tomorrow? Next week? Ten years from now? No way to know.

  Questions that would keep. After all, death held no terrors for her. It was a landscape she knew too well. Tonight, it would be enough to feel the bone-melting heat of David’s kisses and the strength in his arms as he held her close.

  His heart beat steady beneath her palm, so different from her own wild fluttering. And why not? She knew his reputation. She’d seen Lady Fowler’s greedy stare and Sally Sweet’s bold advances. No doubt there were half a hundred women who could say they’d been pleasured by David St. Leger.

  “I don’t sport with maidens,” he’d claimed.

  But he would have her here in this cluttered, smelly wagon surrounded by Big Knox’s spinning plates and juggling sticks. She felt as jumbled and topsy-turvy as any of them. Tossed upside-down until she was dizzy with stomach-plunging excitement.

  His face was lost in the wagon’s impenetrable gloom, but she could see the clean line of his jaw, and his eyes glowed like ice in the dim light. David was beautiful. The hard planes of his body, the muscled perfection of his chest, the strength in his arms and the sharply chiseled angel face. And for tonight, he belonged to her.

  For an instant, he froze, his eyes cloudy with some indefinable emotion. “You play with fire, Fey-blood,” he said, his voice shaky, almost angry.

  “I thought you’d say I baited a wild animal,” she answered, trying to sound worldly despite her dry mouth and clammy palms.

  He gave a sharp snort that could almost have been laughter. “That too.”

  “No one need ever know.” He was so warm. The cool air raised gooseflesh on her arms, while he wore naught but a pair of breeches and still sweat damped his skin. “It will be our secret.”

  “You’ve traveled alone with me over hill and dale unaccompanied but for a rabble of traveling carnival players, that’s all the knowing anyone will need.”