Moon Cursed (Sky Brooks Series Book 5)

by McKenzie Hunter

  Josh hesitated, his gaze fixed on Chris. I moved closer to him and touched his arm. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

  We’d been in the library for nearly twenty minutes, and I kept splitting my attention between the book in front of me and Josh’s neck, which bore the marks of Chris’s fangs and was blush red.

  He worked hard at avoiding eye contact, and that just made me even more suspicious about his interaction with Chris.

  “I have three spells that I think might work. You can go through your book, but you probably won’t find anything in there. Those are weaker spells. It will have to be something strong. Look for spells that have words like transfer, soul, and capture.”

  Oh, I see we’re going to pretend that thing with you and Chris didn’t happen. Okay.

  “But we don’t want to do that. We want to reverse it.”

  He nodded. “We will reverse it.” Then he hesitated. “Reversing spells are darker. You may have to do it and then you’ll have to link Kalese’s heart to you.”

  He had to notice my terrified look and realize I didn’t want to be linked to another strong magical being.

  “It’s not the same as hosting Maya. Kalese is your life source, she’s the source of both of your lives. You can’t live without Maya, and Maya can’t live without Kalese.” That explanation made it a thousand times worse, but once again, with limited options, I couldn’t really say no.

  I liked magic, and I had mastered dark magic—or rather I’d prevented it from mastering me—but the darkness lingered each time I used it. Each time it opened me up to more, and I easily saw how people could succumb to its allure. Forbidden and different, it tapped into a side of me that was raw, inhibited, and unencumbered by morals, rationality, and reason—there was a certain freedom in it. As I waded in the liberation of it, so did Maya, pushing the boundaries of her existence, waiting to be given free rein over a body that she seemed to want to claim as her own. Once I’d thought she was a benign spirit; now I knew she was much more. I didn’t want to keep giving her opportunities because I wasn’t sure when she would come out the victor.

  “There isn’t anything going on between us,” Josh said, looking up from his notepad once he caught me staring at him again.

  A doubtful moue quickly formed on my face. “Are you sure you two don’t have something going on?”

  His lips quirked into a smile as his brows rose. “Well, Sky”—then he did air quotes—“the ‘something’ you are talking about is a very purposeful act. I’m usually pretty active and quite involved during those times, so I can assure you that nothing is going on between Chris and me.”

  They might not be sleeping together, but there was something going on.

  “Are you trying to make your brother jealous?” I kept my eyes on the book. He remained silent until I looked up.

  He considered me and the question for a long time—so long that I wondered if he was speculating about it as well. “No,” he finally said. I felt like he was being honest. There weren’t very many secrets between me and Josh, but since he’d joined Ethan and Sebastian as a keeper of the pack’s skeletons, he’d seemed more comfortable with lies of omission and keeping things from me. He might not have been trying to make his brother jealous, and he definitely didn’t have the same aversion I had to feeding vampires.

  Magic was ambiguous no matter how much you knew about it because there wasn’t a master key to it. Tre’ase magic was different from witch magic, and each spell was like looking at a lock and choosing a huge bunch of keys, hoping one was close enough to unlock it. As Ethan, Sebastian, Josh, and I stood next to Logan, who was immobile, we felt the abstruse nature of magic more profoundly than ever. Because he was unable to use magic to maintain his human form, we were faced with the actual monster that we’d dealt with. That Chris had dealt with. The demon that we’d made a fuliginous deal with.

  “I don’t like it,” Ethan finally said, looking over at his brother. “You are going to play with Sky’s life each time to ‘see’ if it works.”

  He was right. We’d had two failures already, and discovering whether or not an attempt had worked was the hardest part. They had to take him to the brink of death, and in turn me, too. I wasn’t in a rush to keep doing it. There was a laundry list of things I would have preferred to be doing.

  Josh sighed heavily, rolling his eyes from his brother to get another look at Logan and the heart that Logan had magically linked to himself, pulsing inside its jar as though it was still in a body. My survival was housed in that jar, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence in me. At my request, we’d tried other spells, ones that Josh could do, and they had failed. Josh was right about the spell we needed to use. My ability to convert natural magic to dark magic had led him to believe that I would be able to mimic Logan’s magic to unlink it.

  He swiped my hand with the knife, then Logan’s, and finally his, and we joined hands and said the invocation to link us. I said a separate one to link me to Logan. I felt the strong influx of gritty, ancient magic and tried to detect the nuances that made it different from dark magic and natural magic. Logan’s magic had parallels to dark magic, but it was different, too, in its ancientness. It awakened something in Maya, a familiarity, an affinity, a connection.

  I tightened my hand around Josh’s, and he gave it a reassuring squeeze as I laced our magic around Logan’s magic, mimicking it as closely as I could before performing the unlinking spell. The words flowed as they had before but became increasingly stronger, poorly controlled. More words, unfamiliar to me, spilled from my lips, in the same rhythm as my own which I had practiced for hours before doing the spell. Dual spells occurred at the same time as Maya rode my words as if they were her own. It was different: a combination of dark magic, natural magic, and ancient magic. The temperature in the room dropped, and frost coated my words as I spoke them. I kept going, trying to get mine out, hoping to prevent the others from passing. A brisk wind battered at my skin. I increased the pace of speaking to prevent the other spell, to no avail. When the spell ended, I opened my eyes, and Ethan, Sebastian, and Dr. Jeremy were on the ground. Logan wasn’t just still, he wasn’t breathing—dead.

  Josh snatched his hand from mine and went to his brother to check his pulse, nodding when he found one. He checked the others, and they were all alive as well. It took me a moment to realize that I was, too. Logan was dead, but the heart still beat in the jar, and I was alive. The room had returned to its normal temperature, but goose bumps covered my arms; they had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the spell that I had become an unwilling executor of. I quickly walked over to Dr. Jeremy’s desk, grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled everything I remembered about the other spell, which wasn’t much. Spoken in a language I was unfamiliar with and that I suspected predated any language that I possibly could be familiar with. Just minutes after I’d transcribed everything I could remember, everyone had regained consciousness.

  “What the hell was that?” was the first thing out of Sebastian’s mouth as he stood. “What language was that?”

  “Faerie, their original language. It’s old, very old,” Ethan supplied.

  All eyes turned to Ethan, but he didn’t offer anything more. I wasn’t sure if he had more. What we knew was that during an unlinking spell, Maya had performed one of her own, but we didn’t know if my spell or hers had killed Logan. If hers wasn’t the deadly one, what was the spell for? If it had been her spell that killed him, why did she want him dead? Had she been doing it to protect me—to protect us?

  CHAPTER 9

  The next day I sat in the library, looking over the words I’d written out. I’d spent nearly an hour looking at them and the many books in front of me and had the same amount of information—nothing.

  Logan was dead, I was alive. That should have been cause for elation, but it wasn’t. The ancient magic that I’d felt and used was a heavy shawl that I couldn’t shrug off. Had it been an act of benevolence to kill Logan, or was ther
e more? I stared at the paper where I’d jotted down a hurried transcription after the incident, and it didn’t make any more sense to me today than it had yesterday. Faerie language was ancient, but it couldn’t be completely unrecognizable. All languages were derived from another, so I just had to figure out which language was the root of Faerie.

  I didn’t know of any faes that could help. Logan had once called them diminutive and pathetic descendants, spurious offspring of their powerful antecessors. As a result of interbreeding with humans, they were no longer a force to be reckoned with, as they had once been. Faeries were the closest things to gods in history of supernaturals. Their preference was to mate with other Faeries; witches were a close second to preserve their strength, power, and the stranglehold that they had over the supernatural world. They were feared more than revered, and that had eventually led to their fall. For years, they had been hunted and killed, and even the children weren’t exempt for fear of another takeover. That continued to bother me—infanticide that doomed a person before they had ever been given a chance to prove themselves. It was a safety measure the witches had adopted as well, and it didn’t sit well with me.

  If it were up to the witches, Ethan would have been killed because of his magical ability, and now I wondered if that was why he was hiding whatever it was, beyond the dark fae ancestry I knew of.

  The books that I had pulled out were of no use, and I found that searching Google didn’t seem to be of any help, either.

  “It must be very important,” said a newly familiar voice. Cole was leaning against the door frame, a cup of coffee in hand. A smile flitted across his lips as he regarded me with intrigue. He wasn’t in claret today but instead wore a white button-down that made his eyes look more silver. He appeared more relaxed and comfortable in the jeans he had on today than in what he’d had on before. His gaze swept over the books and scattered papers on the table.

  I shrugged. “Research.”

  “Well, it sure has your attention. I’ve been at the door for over six minutes and you didn’t notice.” The part about him just standing at the door watching me without making his presence known was creepy enough; imagining the number of faces he must have seen and the sounds of frustration he must have heard added to my embarrassment. I was sure he’d heard a couple of choice words and variations of fuck as well.

  “That had to be interesting,” I said, feeling warmth creep up my cheeks and over the bridge of my nose.

  That coaxed a grin from him. “To say the least. It was fascinating.”

  “You’re back, why?”

  “Another meeting. I will probably stay for a couple of days until it is resolved.” He was about to say something when he stopped and looked over his shoulder, and the gentle smile that had settled on him vanished. A few moments later, Josh and Ethan moved past him.

  “What are you doing here?” Josh asked. I turned the paper toward him, and he looked at the scribblings and frowned before he went to the bookcase. He scanned some of the titles and pulled a few off the shelf.

  “These should be of more help than the ones you have.” The depth of his knowledge never ceased to amaze me. It was so easy to be distracted by the body art, eclectic shirts, and wayward smile that just didn’t seem interested in much. The white t-shirt with Bazinga scrawled across it didn’t help. I laughed and gave his slouch hat a pointed look. When he didn’t immediately catch my derision, I made a face.

  “Really?” He glanced at my hair. I’d come into the library with a ponytail, and somehow in my frustration, I’d fidgeted with it, taking it down and putting it back up while trying to focus on my task and not my hair. I was sure it was a pile of disarray.

  “It’s not that bad,” Ethan said, and then he leaned forward and kissed me. A gentle, sensual, commanding kiss that would have easily led to more if there weren’t other people in the room. When he pulled away, I panted softly against his lips.

  “Okay, I guess this is my new hairstyle?” I joked.

  He laughed and glanced at the door where Cole had been. Probably made uncomfortable by the display, he’d excused himself.

  Josh rested against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest, his face branded with an amused scowl as he studied his brother. “Next time, why don’t you just whip it out and pee on her leg to mark your territory?” He pushed himself up from the wall, grabbed a piece of paper and a marker off the small desk in the corner, and wrote something on it. “Let me help you out, brother. Here, Sky, why don’t you carry this? Better yet, pin it on the front of your shirt so my brother doesn’t have to mark you with his lips anytime another man’s around. It will save us time.”

  Ethan looked at the paper and then glared at his brother, who based on the half-cocked grin was quite amused with himself. A mischievous glint sparked in his eyes. On the paper in big letters was written, “Ethan’s. Don’t Touch.”

  Ethan rolled his eyes dismissively and frowned.

  “Should I make another, bigger so they can see it at least ten feet away? I’ll make sure she has one that she can pin to her back as well. We want to warn the locals.” Josh’s lips tightened as he suppressed his laughter when a growl of irritation radiated in his brother’s chest. Wolfy was not amused.

  Ethan glanced at his watch. “We have a meeting,” he said, ushering his brother out the door rather roughly.

  “No need to manhandle me, I’m just trying to be helpful.”

  Josh winked at me as he went out the door but twisted to avoid his brother. Then he poked his head in again. “Don’t forget to put on the sign,” he said loud enough for Ethan to hear.

  “No one thinks you’re funny,” Ethan snapped from down the hall. Josh laughed and followed him, his laughter drifting.

  I held the katana, becoming familiar with the weight and the blade. I swung it in a figure eight to get my arm warmed up and then switched arms. Sebastian always pushed being proficient with both arms. He was, and he often preferred using two weapons at the same time. Show-off. Slicing the blade through the air was more therapeutic than I’d thought it would be. I’d spent an hour going over the books Josh had given me and still hadn’t been able to figure out anything from the other spell. Part of me wanted to talk to Maya. The idea that I had been conned into keeping her made me feel foolish most of the time, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized her offer not to share my life with me was a hollow proposition. It wasn’t her choice. She couldn’t just pack up her bags and leave, and death wasn’t really an option. A spirit shade didn’t die when the host did, it died when the Tre’ase that had created it did.

  Practicing in the gym was my only option, because trying to hear anything at the door of Sebastian’s office was absolutely pointless. Apparently, I now had the reputation of being “nosy.” The moment they knew I was near the door, I could expect either Ethan or Sebastian to poke their head out to ask me if I needed anything. Sure, I need to be part of the meeting. Can you help me out?

  Nothing good could be happening when all the Alphas in the country were having another meeting—secrecy wasn’t an option, in my opinion. I realized that they carried the burden of whatever befell their respective packs and had the responsibility to keep them safe. In return, they expected loyalty and allegiance to the pack and for no one to question the man behind the machine.

  In theory, it worked. Members didn’t question the manner in which an Alpha achieved something, they just knew that it would be handled. My only experience with pack life was of Sebastian as Alpha, and the man behind this machine was more than gifted at navigating the politics of the otherworld. The gradations between making someone an enemy or an ally were things he’d mastered, and yet I wanted to know what went on. I wondered if I was the only one who felt that way or if others were better at hiding it. Maybe they just didn’t get caught as many times as I’d been, trying to pull the curtain back to get a glance at the people who were helping the machine to run.

  I lunged, thrusting into my imaginary opponent, and retr
eated. The sword whipped through the air, making injury-inflicting strikes. I went over the many sessions I’d had with Sebastian, trying to recreate my losses and changing the final scene when I hit the floor and had a blade at my throat or some vital part of my body. I moved, shifting my weight, jumping back, and wielding my weapon with the expertise that he demanded, each time hearing his stern voice giving instruction on how to defeat him, and yet I still couldn’t. I made a half-turn, a defensive move to avoid being hit, and then delivered one that should be fatal.

  I stopped midexecution when I saw Cole standing at the door, a smile feathered across his face. Once again, I found myself under his watchful and assessing gaze.

  His approach was slow, the agile movement of a cautious and efficient predator. Through the years, I’d learned to assess their strengths and deceptions; that way, becoming prey was less likely. I returned his smile.

  “Sebastian or Winter?” he asked as his eyes moved over the length of the blade. “Who trained you, Sebastian or Winter?”

  “Sebastian.”

  “Ah, then you must be quite skilled.”

  I knew there was some skill to sword use, but I still couldn’t help but revert back to my initial belief: swing it and hit something soft, and your opponent’s day got a lot worse. “It’s a sword, just swing and hit. There’s bound to be some damage.”

  He chuckled lightly. “True. But what I saw wasn’t just mindless novitiate techniques. I see why it’s your weapon of choice.” I didn’t correct him by telling him my weapon of choice was a knife. I was better with one, but fighting with a sword did have its advantages, one being it allowed distance to use not only the sword itself, but also weaponless combat moves like kicks, punches, and strikes if necessary.

  He moved over to the wall of swords, going over them until he came to another katana, which he picked up.

  “Come on, let’s play.”