Shadow's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  “And if I know this dream?” she asked. “If I’ve seen this future and don’t believe it?” She leaned close, her breath hot against his ear. “What’s the use of visions if they can’t serve as warnings? If you can’t change the truths they reveal?”

  He’d but to turn his head and her lips would be on his. Instead he held still. He could be strong. He could refuse the seduction. None would believe St. Leger the rakish bed-hopper would turn away a woman, but this wasn’t just any woman. And this night would spell the beginning or the beginning of the end. “I won’t hurt you, Callista. Not ever.”

  “Then that is the truth and the dream is just that—a dream.”

  She retreated, and for a moment, he thought she meant to leave him there, alone on the bed, his body shuddering with unspent desire. Instead she straddled him, the gown around her hips. She pulled the combs one by one from her hair, letting it fall like a cloud around her shoulders, then she reached behind her with one arm to slide loose a ribbon. A shoulder lay bare. Another ribbon and the bodice spilled open. Where the hell had this wanton come from? He’d known experienced mistresses with less tongue-tying pillow moves than this. She took his wrists, guiding his hands to her breasts. He couldn’t help himself. His palms cupped them, his fingers traced the delicious curve of them, his thumbs grazed her nipples until they blossomed beneath his touch and she gasped.

  “I don’t want you to see me”—his voice shook and then broke—“see me fail under the draught and the curse. To wait and watch as I die.”

  “The truth at last. You’re frightened. What happened to ‘the wolf doesn’t hide and the wolf doesn’t run’?”

  She rocked against him before sliding onto his shaft. Inch by inch, she took him within her tight, wet heat. It was his turn to gasp, his body jerking up as she arched, taking him deeper, harder, her muscles closing around him. Spasms of pleasure and fear and pain and desire hit him like a mountain storm, his body driving up into her over and over as he groaned his release.

  “The wolf,” he panted as he spilled his seed within her womb, “is a craven.”

  16

  She’d asked for a quiet spot and a close-faced servant had showed her to this small summerhouse. Looking around, she wondered if he’d acted out of kindness or spite. The paint was peeling, the roof had more holes than a sieve, and weeds sprouted from between the floorboards. But it was quiet, with only birdsong and a constant breeze rustling the ivy that twined its way up the posts and over the railing.

  The bells stood abandoned on a rickety, leaf-strewn table while Callista sat in drowsy contemplation of the wild expanse of lawn, populated only by a dozen sheep and a boy set to watch them.

  She’d gotten as far as tracing the patterns, shattering the air with the ring of the first bell, and seeing the way open before her.

  Then fear stopped her cold.

  Fear and dread of what she might discover. Of what she might unleash.

  “You say you mistrust what I have told you, and yet you hesitate. Perhaps there is some small part of you that believes.”

  Callista had not heard Badb’s approach. Hardly surprising, though after their last talk, she thought the Fey might have wreaked enough havoc for one lifetime.

  Apparently not.

  “The Fey are known to speak in riddles and half-truths when it suits them,” Callista answered. “The old stories are full of examples. You could have some hidden reason for making me doubt myself and my ability.”

  Badb shone pale as milk in the sunlight, but for the dusky rose of her nipples beneath her cloak of feathers and the snapping black of her eyes. “I’ve lived among your kind long enough that I’ve learned to speak plainly and in words of few syllables lest I be misunderstood. St. Leger is right to worry over the man Corey’s intentions. Lord Arawn in his arrogance has always believed his realm impregnable. He has never understood the threat the daughters of his seed could be, should they choose to wield their true power over the shadows. The grel are not the worst of Annwn’s creatures that would rise up at the chance to hunt among the living.”

  “I would never offer Victor Corey such a weapon. I would die first and the door would be closed to him forever.” The kneeling woman and the upraised knife.

  “What is it about you humans?” Badb’s pearly white teeth were bared in an angry grimace, the feathers of her cloak upright and rustling. “You are so gallant and so childish with your noble vows of sacrifice. Do you truly know what it means to swear such a vow? Or to live with the folly of it ever after?”

  “Do not take your impatience out on her, Badb. She is not to blame for your plight.”

  Another visitor. So much for quiet and out of the way. Callista’s solitary summerhouse was busy as a London thoroughfare. Lucan pushed through the overgrown shrubs, his steps oddly silent for such a large man. He offered her a bow as if he were a knight and she a great lady. She supposed at least the knight part might be true, but she was no lady. David had made sure of that.

  “No, she is not to blame. You are,” Badb snapped, her cloak aswirl, the black feathers purple and indigo and silver in the morning sun.

  “I did not force you to honor your oath,” Lucan answered gently.

  High spots of color flashed in Badb’s cheeks. “You did not force me to keep my promise, but you knew I would. I had no choice.”

  “You are more worthy than you know, Badb.” His unfathomable gaze passed over Callista’s bells to rest on her face. “There is always a choice, my lady.”

  “Corey would have me unlock the gates of hell,” Callista answered. “The world would be helpless against Arawn’s creatures.”

  “It cannot happen once you are among the bandraoi on Skye. None can scale those walls.”

  “And what happens to David when I leave?”

  “He stays here,” Lucan said. “He works to make peace between the shapechangers and the Fey-bloods. He dies. As you have your path, he has his.”

  She had been walking the path marked out for her by others her whole life. First as her mother’s acolyte in the ways of necromancy. Then as Branston’s mummer’s monkey, dancing to his tune. And in death, paths were her lifeline, where she risked losing herself forever with one stray step. When would she ever have the chance to forge a trail of her own?

  “What if I choose to stay with David and not travel on to Skye and my aunt?” Callista asked.

  “As paths have forks, so, too, can you make the choice to take a different turning,” Lucan replied. “But there are always consequences to our decisions. Joining the sisters of High Danu would offer you protection, instruction, and a chance to heal the rift within your house. You could rise in the ranks of bandraoi, in time perhaps become Ard-siur and rule Dunsgathaic yourself. Death would be as easy as stepping between rooms in a house, and the creatures there no more dangerous to you than biting fleas at your ankles.”

  “And if I don’t choose to go?”

  “Danger, treachery, and a heart’s greatest sorrow,” Badb said. “I have seen it. You have seen it.”

  “That doesn’t mean I believe. My gift is one of necromancy. The only knowledge of the future I have is that offered by the dead. Snatches of moments handed to me like crumbs.”

  “It is well known that Fey magic works in uncharted ways when it comes in contact with the shapechangers,” Badb replied. “The Imnada are not of this world, perhaps not even of this plane of being. This disparity has always been their greatest strength as well as their greatest vulnerability. Perhaps St. Leger is affecting the mage energy within you and this gift of prophecy is a product of this strange warping and shifting.” She shrugged with a ruffle of feathers. “Or perhaps it is as you say and there is nothing to these dreams but cobweb and moonlight and you have nothing to fear in what you see.” Her black eyes crackled. “But dare you take that risk?”

  “You will go to Skye, my lady,” Lucan interrupted, his voice never rising, but still the command was unmistakable. “You will lose yourself in study. You will
become a true daughter of death. In time, the memory of these few brief weeks will fade, and you will learn to be content.”

  Knots twisted her stomach, her skin cold as she met his black gaze. “Content? You were imprisoned out of time for a thousand years and more. Did you grow content? Did your memories fade?”

  He bowed his head, his look contrite. “Nay. They shone pure as eldritch steel and trapped me tighter than the silver chains the Fey bound me with as they sent me to my doom. And no passing of years ever dulled them.”

  Callista touched each bell in turn: Key, Summoner, Blade. Within the curved and polished silver bowl of the metal, she saw the distorted reflection of her face, the columns of the summerhouse, the shimmering green of the trees. She opened her heart, seeing deeper, using her mind to push into the power running and rippling under her skin. A daughter of death, Lucan called her. And so she was. Her powers were inherited from Arawn and passed down through his human lover and the daughter she bore him; diluted over the centuries but never disappearing. Power that offered her life, death, and the answers found within both worlds.

  She saw those generations of women, faces melding and merging through time, down to her, clear, bright, and startling. But she also sensed the shades of those not yet born—dimmer, faded, and ragged as an old cloak. Daughters not yet conceived. Seed not yet spilled. She was the linchpin between these two lines. She was the hinge upon which her house’s fading hopes rested.

  Callista squared her shoulders, placing a hand back upon Key, as if anchoring herself among women past and future.

  “I’ve made my choice.”

  * * *

  David found Callista in the Addershiels library, curled in a chair by the window, head buried in an enormous book. He didn’t enter at first. Instead he leaned against the doorframe and regarded this surprising, miraculous woman who’d burst into his life like cannon fire, turning him upside down. Making him feel again. Making him love as he’d never loved before. As he watched, she licked a finger and turned the page, her brows scrunched in thought . . . or confusion. Hard to decide which.

  He cocked his head, hoping to read the spine, but her skirts were in the way and all he managed was Th . . . Nur . . . oire. Hardly helpful. This much was obvious. It was no romantic novel or swashbuckling adventure, not unless the hero had just died or the heroine had run off with the cabin boy. Callista wore a three-furrow frown, and he could almost hear her teeth grinding. Beyond that, she seemed relaxed, her hair bundled hastily up in a bun, one foot bare, the other dangling a slipper.

  “Do I have a carrot sprouting from my ear or a boil on my neck?”

  He smiled. “What gave me away?”

  Her eyes met his over the top of the book, glimmering with laughter. “You’re not exactly unobtrusive when you enter a room, and your stare is like being struck by lightning or smashed by a falling piano.”

  Straightening from his post at the door, he took a seat on a nearby couch. “I’m not sure whether to be pleased or offended by that comparison.”

  “Pleased, I think. It had the women of London fawning over you.” Her glimmer brightened to a giggle, which she quickly smothered. “Poor Lady Fowler with her etchings. I almost feel sorry for her.”

  “You needn’t. Hearts never entered into it. It was a game to her . . . a quick thrill . . . a way to relieve the tedium of her days and the loneliness of her nights.”

  Her gaze dimmed. “For both of you.”

  He didn’t respond. There was no need anymore. Callista understood the depths he’d reached and had not shrunk from him in revulsion or fear. His horrors had been laid bare and she’d not run. Her courage and compassion still shocked him, but it was the laughter they shared and their comfortable familiarity that bowled him over. He nodded toward the book in her lap, letting the moment slip away.

  “Is this what you’ve been up to while I’ve been laid out like Egypt’s last pharaoh? Raiding Gray’s bookshelves?”

  “All your stories about the Imnada intrigued me, and I was curious about Rinaci and Edern. Did you know he took the shape of a boar twenty-five feet tall with teeth as long as daggers?”

  “Yes, and when he roared in anger, the trees bowed before him and the skies cracked with lightning. There are a thousand tales of Rinaci. Each more unbelievable than the last.”

  “Do you believe the afailth luinan a legend with no truth behind it?”

  “It sounds like madness . . . my blood able to save a life? To close a wound? I can only wish I possessed such a power. Do you know how many friends and comrades I lost to French guns on the battlefield? Loyal soldiers I could have saved?”

  “You said your grandmother believed that every legend bore a grain of truth.”

  “My grandmother was a dreamer. She believed the ancient sagas of the ships that rode the stars on waves of light and fire, bringing the clans to earth. She honored the N’thuil, voice and vessel to the crystal Jai Idrish. She respected the wisdom and the guidance of the shamans of the Ossine. And, thank the Mother, she didn’t live to see the splintering of her people and the ultimate shaming of her grandson before the Gather.”

  “But the way you speak of her, it’s clear she loved you. Surely she would have stood by you. She wouldn’t have turned away when you needed her most.”

  “The avaklos, those shapechangers who reside outside the Palings, are always suspect, their allegiance to the clans always under question. It would have pained her, but Gram would have done what was necessary to uphold the family’s honor. She would have obeyed the laws, no matter the cost.”

  “The laws are wrong, then, and should be changed.”

  “You sound like an arrogant lordling I know who thinks just because he wants something badly enough he can make it happen.”

  “And why not? That’s how dreams are realized.”

  “Because it’s as much a fantasy as Rinaci and Edern. Wanting isn’t enough.”

  “That’s when you have to work and fight for it.”

  “Has Gray been whispering in your ear? I feel as if I’ve had this conversation before.” He rubbed a hand over his face and the back of his neck. “You ask me what my grandmother would have done had she been faced with my crimes. Gray lived that situation. His grandfather is leader of the Imnada, but he spoke not one word as his grandson was handed over to the Ossine. The years of war hardened Gray, but it was the Duke of Morieux’s denunciation that transformed him.”

  Her gaze drifted to his shoulder and the scarred flesh she knew lay beneath his shirt. “How”—she ran an agitated finger up and down the edge of the book—“how did you survive such an atrocity?”

  A question with no easy or comforting answer. His muscles tightened to knots, his back twitching with a ghost pain as real as the red-hot iron that burned his mark away. “Survival was the punishment, Callista.”

  “Lord Duncallan says that if Beskin catches you, it could be the death of the Imnada rebels. That you know too much.”

  He laughed. “It’s rare that I’ve been accused of too much intelligence, but I suppose it’s true. The answer is simple; don’t get caught.” His smile faded. “Or kill Beskin first.”

  “You barely survived . . .” Her words faded, but David was well aware of his shortcomings during his last confrontation with the Ossine.

  He would not make the same mistakes again. He would not flinch. He would rip that damned silver sword from the bastard’s hand and bury it in his chest hilt-deep.

  “Eudo Beskin has been a blight on my soul for two years. It’s time I repaid him for his tender mercies.”

  Her gaze wandered over his face as if seeking some answer; her breath quick, her body trembling. “And Corey? My brother? You can’t face them all alone. ”

  “The wolf doesn’t hide, Callista. It hunts or it dies.”

  “But it’s impossible. How can there be peace when so many on both sides are unwilling to look beyond a hatred going back millennia?”

  “Simple,” he answered, meeting her ste
ady gaze. “One person at a time.”

  * * *

  That night, when sleep refused to come and the dark seemed fraught with restless shades, she knew exactly where she was going. Rising from their shared bed, she tugged on a heavy, quilted robe. It dragged the floor and the sleeves fell down over her hands, but it was warm and smelled of David. She cast one last glance at his sleeping form twined within the blankets. The dying fire illuminated his muscled frame, brightened the gold of his hair, carved deep lines into his face. His normal sun-bronzed skin seemed faded and washed-out, but just looking at him sent butterflies banging around her insides and squeezed her heart. Turning abruptly, she left his room for hers.

  This bedchamber was twice as large and three times as elegant, but devoid of the memories of love-damped skin and soft, shuddering moans. There was nothing here but fine furniture, expensive curios, and her own uncertainties. Before she could change her mind, she took down the box from the top of a high cabinet, lit a single candle, arranged the bells before her, and then, among the flickering, crawling shadows, she read each and every letter from her mother to her lost family, beginning with the first effusive explosion of excitement and hope through the years that followed until the last few notes, just as crammed with anecdotes and news about her life, but the happiness had faded. Nothing left but grief and resignation.

  “She loved you. Surely she would have stood by you. She wouldn’t have turned away when you needed her most.”

  Her words to David echoed back at her from the high ceilings and dark windows. When she spoke, had she been referring to his grandmother or to the Armstrong family, who’d cut off their wayward daughter as completely as if she’d died? How could her aunt have done this to her only sister? How could she have abandoned her with nothing? Not a word? Not a hope?

  Callista folded the last letter and traced the first symbol. The notes of Key rang pure, shattering the gloom, cracking the barriers between one world and the other. An icy wind rushed forth, riming the table-top, frosting her breath, and curling against her bare toes. She wrapped the robe more tightly around her, touched each bell in quick turn, and stepped into death.