by Deanna Chase
“What’s the matter?” Corrine held Maribel’s gaze as she struggled to her feet, swaying a little before squaring her shoulders. “Let’s go talk with the lonely lord. Unless of course there’s some reason you think that would be a bad idea?”
Maribel pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.
“See?” Corrine jabbed a finger at Maribel. “You know he’s a monster. Deep down, you know.” She tugged on Maribel’s arm. “Come home with me.”
“No.” Maribel faced Corrine, putting her determination in her face and stance. “No, I do have faith in him. He’s not a bad man, and he wouldn’t hurt you, not now that he knows how much you mean to me.” Heat pulsed in her head, a warning that bringing Corrine to Daman was a mistake, that it would be pushing him too far. He was so angry already.
He is a good man. I know he is.
“Corrine?” she asked slowly.
“What?”
“Can you undo what you did? Lift the spell so he can shift form again?”
Corrine opened her mouth, then closed it. The skin around her eyes tightened and she wouldn’t meet Maribel’s eyes. “I don’t know.” She snapped a twig off an overhanging tree branch. “My powers aren’t that strong…”
“Will you try?” Maribel asked, trying to keep her voice calm despite a flash of irritation. What, does magic require too much effort as well as farm work?
Corrine stared down at the twig as she turned it over in her hands. “Maribel…do you like him?”
“Do I…” Maribel dropped her gaze to the ground, trailing a finger through the dirt and fallen leaves. Her stomach flip-flopped in a strange and not altogether unpleasant manner. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I think you do.”
There was no accusation in Corrine’s tone, no underlying heat. In fact, she sounded oddly detached. Maribel didn’t look up, focused on the ground, the small sticks and stones scattered around her.
“Does he like you back?” Corrine pressed quietly.
Part of Maribel desperately wanted to confide in her sister. After all, wasn’t this what sisters were for? Hadn’t Corrine always been her confidant, the one she came to with everything? Well, until they’d moved to the farm. Until Maribel had emotions she had to hide from Corrine, emotions that would have only upset her.
She’s not really your sister.
Maribel crushed that thought as soon as she had it. Corrine was her sister, in every way that mattered.
“Talk to me,” Corrine prodded. She settled down on the ground next to Maribel and put a hand on her knee. “Please.”
Maribel cleared her throat and started arranging some tiny pebbles in a circle. “I think he does. But…” She hesitated. “It just feels like there’s too much between us. Too many misunderstandings.”
“You mean about me.”
“That’s part of it,” Maribel admitted. “I didn’t believe you were capable of something like that. I didn’t trust him when he told me it was you.”
The twig snapped in Corrine’s grasp and Maribel pulled her attention away from her pebble circle. “Are you okay?”
Corrine’s smile was strained, but she looked away before Maribel could analyze her expression further. Corrine grabbed her bag where she’d dropped it and pushed herself to her feet.
“Well, misunderstandings are a problem. If you like him, and he likes you, then you need to clear the air.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’ll try to lift the spell.” She dropped the pieces of the twig and started to brush her hand off on her skirt. She stopped with her fingers above the velvety material, then noticed that it was already filthy from her earlier fall. She pressed her lips into a thin line and brushed her hand off.
“But if I’m going to do this for him, then I want him to do something for you,” she continued. “He has to be honest with you about who he is and what he’s done. I don’t know if the rumors I heard were true, but I remember clearly enough him kidnapping me. If there’s a chance that he took others without their permission—perhaps others who were too afraid to tell him they didn’t want to go—then he needs to make that right.”
“I don’t understand?” Maribel stood to face her sister, the excitement swirling inside of her at the prospect of ending Daman’s curse tempered by sudden confusion. “What do you want him to do?”
“Ask him about the changelings he’s relocated, make him take you to them so you can see for yourself if they’re happy. Then there won’t be any secrets between you and you can see where this might go.”
“I…suppose that makes sense.” Maribel wrung her hands in front of her, glancing from her sister to the manor. “Let me go ahead and tell him you’re coming.”
She’d expected Corrine to have a ready retort, something about how Daman wouldn’t need a warning if he was really the good man Maribel claimed he was. To her surprise, Corrine simply nodded.
“Go ahead.”
“Well, I’ll help you get there first. You can wait in the gard—in the kitchen.”
Corrine didn’t comment on her slip. Maribel didn’t meet her eyes, the memory of the Rose of the Mist too strong. Why Maribel had wanted it. What had happened because of it.
What Corrine might do with it if she had it.
Maribel tried to squash that last thought, grinding it as viciously as though it were a beetle going after her precious garden, but the memory of it remained. You were wrong about her, a voice whispered. She did cast that curse. What else has she learned from dear Mother Briar?
“You go on ahead, I can make it the rest of the way myself.”
Maribel’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. “Really?”
“I walked all the way here, didn’t I?” Corrine said. Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Yes you did.” Maribel took Corrine’s hand in hers, holding it to her chest. “I’m so proud of you.”
Corrine gently but firmly extricated her hand from Maribel’s grasp. “Yes. Well, you’d be surprised how much I’ve managed in your absence.”
Something in Corrine’s tone urged Maribel to examine her more closely. Corrine had always sounded tired, weary, and more often than not, a touch afraid. Now there was…a certain steel in her voice. Maribel wondered exactly how hard life had been for Corrine since she’d been gone. And what effect it may have had on her older sister.
How well do you really know her now?
Maribel shoved those thoughts away, near desperation clutching her chest until she could hardly breathe. It was too much, she didn’t have the energy to think about that now. First she would clear the air between her sister and Daman. Then she would figure out what her sister’s revelation meant for her.
Chapter Twelve
The knock at his door echoed in Daman’s ears. Every muscle in his body went taut, leaving him standing in the center of his room, body vibrating like a tuning fork. The rage he’d given into, the primal need to destroy, ebbed, but did not immediately recede. Like a lingering lover, it trailed hands across his mind, plucking at chords and whispering promises of its return.
The doorknob turned.
Pain made itself known as the haze of fury took its obliviousness with it, adrenaline dying to a trickle and leaving him to suffer the delayed consequences of his temper. He had barely enough time to register that his hands were bleeding from several jagged cuts and everything in his room that could have been shattered had been.
Then the door swung open.
“Daman?”
Say something, you idiot! The voice screamed inside his head, but Daman had no words. He had screams, shouts, bellows of rage and ragged howls of pain, but no words. And even if he’d had the words, he didn’t dare speak them, not yet. Not when they would drip with sibilance. A reminder of why Maribel should not be here.
She stepped inside despite his lack of a response. Calmly, she surveyed the room, blue eyes dancing over the carnage with neutral consideration. No judgment. Something inside of him loosened, sobbing with
relief. She hadn’t gone, hadn’t fled. She was here. With him.
Finally she met his eyes. “I don’t want to leave.”
He couldn’t move. His gaze wouldn’t leave her, wouldn’t wander away for even a second for fear she was a figment of his fevered imagination. Blood trickled down his hands, warm and wet. He clenched his jaw, waiting for her to notice. Maybe if he pictured the disgust on her face now, it wouldn’t be so painful when he saw it.
“You’re right,” she continued, casting her gaze around the room as she spoke. She stepped to a painting barely clinging to the wall, trailed a hand over the shredded canvas. “I was using you. Caring for my sister was hard, doing her work was hard. Harder still was feeling guilty any time I started to feel good. After all, it would be cruel to rub my pleasure in her face.”
She lifted the scrap of canvas. Daman held his breath as she saw the picture revealed with the tatters in place. It had been a gift by one of the more artistically gifted changelings he’d helped—a painting of him in his human form. She’d said he was the perfect subject, given his ability to remain completely and utterly still, regardless of what form he was in. She’d joked that she could have crafted a sculpture with that kind of time. Maribel gazed at it and part of him searched her face for some sign of wistfulness, the look of a woman seeing something she wanted more than what she had.
Maribel dropped the shred of canvas as if the painting held no charm for her. Daman’s breath came back in a rush.
“As long as you forced me to be here, I could do whatever I wanted. And there was no guilt because it wasn’t as if I’d had a choice.” The corner of her mouth quirked up. “The fact that you don’t exactly live in a hovel helps too,” she admitted.
A joke? She’s joking?
Daman raised a hand to his head, probing for injuries. Maybe not a dream. A hallucination? Had he struck his head at some point in his rampage?
“I don’t know how much of what you said, you said to try and scare me away, and how much was sincere.” She plucked at her dress, brushing away a bit of dirt. “Actually, I guess I’m not sure how much I know about you is really you, and how much of it is a result of the curse that was laid on you, being trapped in that form. I know you said you’re equal parts beast and man, but you also said being stuck in this form had consequences for your temper, so—” She stopped, shook her head. Finally she met his eyes. “I want to find out.”
“Find out what?”
He managed to choke the words out past the sudden tightness in his throat, sending a brief thanks to whatever gods were listening that there had been no ‘s’ sounds for his forked tongue to trip over.
“I want to get to know the real you.”
Daman flexed his hands, remembered the blood, and slowly forced himself to move to the ruins of the bedsheets. He pulled a large swath of the material from the floor and cleaned his hands as best he could.
“You mentioned… The cursse…” He closed his eyes and counted to ten. “How do you intend to get to know the real me when you admit yourself that the curse makes that impossible?”
Maribel held her breath. “My sister has promised she’ll try to lift the spell.”
Stone. Cold stone, frozen stone. Ice. Lake, an icy lake. A cold stone at the bottom of an icy lake, frozen over. Dacian winters. Cold, cold, cold.
Daman struggled to hold on to the imagery, thought of anything and everything to combat the heat that tried to blaze to glorious fury inside of him. The temper was back, tempting, familiar. Hot.
No! I will not give in, not again. Not when she came back.
“Your…ssiss—” He stopped, swallowed, and started again. Cold. Dacian cold. “Your…sister…is here?”
Slowly, so slowly, Maribel nodded. “She is.”
His chest was heaving and Daman realized he was breathing too hard. He closed his eyes, counted to ten. Then twenty. Then thirty. At three hundred and two, he opened his eyes. “She says she will lift the cursse?”
“Yes.” Maribel’s throat worked as she swallowed. “She says she will try.”
Try. Cold, cold, cold, cold.
“I will…be down to greet her…in a short while.”
The words snagged on his tongue, on his fangs itching to come down. He could hardly see through the blackness eating at his vision, the fog that threatened to swallow him as every ounce of willpower rushed to battle the temper raging inside its cage. He thought about trying to smile reassuringly, but quickly abandoned the idea. He didn’t want to know what a smile from him would look like right now.
Maribel’s eyes examined every line of his face. He waited for her to tell him she would leave if he hurt her sister, to say something, some threat, some promise, if he slipped up. Some reassertion that her sister meant everything to her, and Daman would never compete with that.
She didn’t say anything. Instead, she nodded once and left, closing the door gently behind her.
A tremble took over Daman’s body. It started in his hands, traveled up his arms. In a minute his entire body was seizing, rattling his brain.
The witch is here. The witch is here. The witch is here.
A loud cry tore from his throat and he whirled around, lashing out with his tail and shattering the remains of a heavy oak table. Splinters flew everywhere like miniature shrapnel. Daman struggled to draw in air, scrambling for his mantra, trying to hold the words in his head long enough to meditate on them. He reached for the winter imagery again.
“Thisss isss not promisssing,” a voice said from above him.
The mantra and imagery kept slipping away from him, dancing out of reach like will o’ wisps over a bog. “I’ll tear you in two,” Daman choked, glaring at the cuelebre hanging from the wall sconce.
The little serpent tapped the unlit candle with its tail. “Jussst an obssservation.”
“You saw the witch?”
The cuelebre nodded.
Blood pooled in his mouth as Daman’s tongue flicked against one of his fangs. The taste of copper crackled over his nerves, ignited the part of him that yearned for battle, for vengeance. His voice dropped an octave. “And it is the ssame one?”
Another nod.
“I’ve wanted to get that witch here for sso long.” Daman twisted the scrap of material in his hands, claws kneading in slow, stabbing motions. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend it was the witch’s neck he held. “All the hourss I’ve sspent planning…” His eyes flew open and his muscles bunched as he tore the piece of bedsheet into smaller shreds. “But now… How I am to have my revenge when—”
“When you’ve fallen in love with her sssissster?”
For a moment, Daman wished he had the ability to breathe fire as he could in his full wyvern form. “I never ssaid I wass in love.”
“I can sssee. I have eyesss.” The cuelebre tilted its head. “Did you think you were being sssubtle?”
Daman lashed the floor with his tail, surging forward with all the speed at his command. The cuelebre had apparently expected the attack. This time it managed to dart out of the way in time, glittering slender body shooting through the air a hair’s breadth ahead of Daman’s claws.
“Temper, temper,” the cuelebre chided him. “You’ll have to do better than that if you want the witch to lift her curssse.”
“Sshe will never lift the cursse!” Daman flexed his claws, forked tongue slithering out as he gauged the distance between him and the cuelebre.
“Do not underessstimate Maribel’sss influenccce. Ssshe believesss that you are sssuffering. Ssshe will do whatever isss in her power to help you.”
Maribel. The sound of her name flowed over him like a cool breeze against heated skin. Tension flowed from his muscles and Daman gazed back at the door as if he could still see her standing there. She came back.
The thought echoed in his head, soft with wonderment. He would never have expected it, never have believed it. It was too good to be true.
He stiffened. Too good to be true. It was too good to
be true.
“If the witch ssent her here, sshe could be lying, ssetting me up to ssee me ssuffer.”
“You are already sssuffering. What sssenssse doesss it make to go through all of thisss in an attempt to increassse your misssery?”
“Or sshe could be trying to win my favor, to ssucceed where the witch failed.” Daman eyed the pile of threads that had once been part of the bedsheet. His claws still ached with the need to destroy something.
“If that isss her intention, the witch will cccertainly not help her. You know better than anyone that the witch would not help anyone elssse attain that which ssshe desssiresss.”
That was true.
Maybe she does care for you.
He carded a hand through his hair, dancing his claws along his scalp. The press of sharp points helped distract him, cleared his head. He turned his attention to his surroundings.
Everything was destroyed. Furniture had been reduced to splinters, fabric rent to shreds. The windows were no more than glittering dust and jagged fragments. Chunks of ceramic and jade spoke of statues and vases that were no more. The room looked as if it had been devastated by a storm the likes of which the world had never seen. Maribel had seen it all, had known that the storm had been his temper, the wanton destruction the result of his inability to deal with that anger any other way.
And she wants to stay.
“If her motives are not what she claims,” he said slowly, gaze dancing over the carnage around him, “then she is either very brave, or incredibly foolish.”
“It ssseemsss to me that the two often go hand in hand.”
Daman inclined his head in acknowledgement. He took a deep breath through his nose and let it out his mouth. “If the witch does not, or can not, lift the curse… Do you think Maribel will stay anyway?”
The cuelebre flew off the wall sconce and draped himself over Daman’s shoulder. The show of trust was not lost on Daman.
“I think Maribel isss going to be watching both of you very closssely. It will be very important that you do not lossse your temper.”