“I see that look you’re giving me,” Samantha told him. She turned away, so he couldn’t see her face as she worked. “I’m not going anywhere. We’re going to see this through. Together.”
“Stubborn witch,” he managed to grumble.
She laughed, the sound of her tears slipping into her voice and making it waver. “I’d rather be a stubborn witch than a bad one.”
Once she was finished, she helped him onto his feet. They leaned into one another as they walked through town, each keeping the other standing. The first fight was over, but the war still had not been won.
Ciaran did not know if they would make it through this. He kicked himself for bringing this fight to Samantha’s doorstep. Had he been a smarter man, he would have lured the demon far, far away from this town. Instead, he’d let bitterness cloud his judgement and turn him into a fool all over again.
Now, he stood to lose this woman that he’d fallen head over heels with. He knew she felt the same or she wouldn’t have fought so hard to save him back there. She could have done it to force him to fight alongside her, to fix what he’d done again, but he had seen her panic. There was no denying that he’d finally found the right witch.
Chapter Fifteen
“Do you feel any different?” Samantha asked, her arms around his middle so she could feel his heartbeat.
Ciaran didn’t respond, silence stretching across the long moment. His fingers played along her arm as if he couldn’t get enough of her. They’d barely separated since the pavilion. It’d been such a close call.
After the fight at the pavilion that no one seemed to see, they’d slunk away and sought solace at a small motel. Little, green and yellow cabins welcomed them. While the cabin they were assigned wasn’t Carver manor, it was nice to have a place to lay their weary heads.
The world was fighting against them and both were drained from the earlier battle. They’d hit the narrow bed, each releasing a sigh. Hers had been filled with frustration while his was more a sound of relief, as though he could breathe easier with the threat of the inbetween removed from his curse.
Samantha felt bad that she hadn’t removed the raven form, but she needed him to be strong while they finished this. His healing capabilities would keep him alive, and that was all that mattered.
“If the demon hasn’t already used your feather, then it shouldn’t have the same effect anymore.” She tucked her face against his ribs, trying to ignore all the other what-ifs that spun through her mind.
Unfortunately, Ciaran gave them voice. “He most likely used it already. Even if he hasn’t, the feather was disconnected from me. There’s a chance it still had the same magic. He could still open the portal.”
Samantha’s stomach churned. She knew he was right, that he was telling the truth for the sake of preparedness, but she didn’t want to hear it. She wanted to believe that the small feat, the small battle they’d barely won, had defeated the demon and that would be the end of it.
Her family was known for being strong. The women were infallible, but Samantha felt small and weak. Sure, she’d managed to change her great-grandmother’s curse, but what else could she do now? She didn’t know how to face down a demon. Any resources that would have told her what to do were locked in the manor.
Ciaran squeezed her tight. “We’re going to win.”
“Halloween might be a week away, but the veil will be thinnest at the height of the full moon. That’s in a day or two. We don’t have much time left.”
Somewhere along the line, Ciaran had slipped between damnation and into something akin to a fated lover. She feared what would happen if they didn’t fail. If they won, then he would have a new lease on life. Sure, he was still a raven shifter, but the curse that had taken his mind was gone.
He could go on with life. He could do things he’d never considered before.
Samantha would go back to Carver manor and to her life. Alone, most likely. Her neighbors would continue to give her strange looks and avoid her like the plague. She would be stuck with the same, broken car because the demon stole her chance to win the haunted house contest.
She didn’t realize that she’d tightened her grip on Ciaran until he said something. She pulled away sheepishly. It shouldn’t have been this difficult. If she could only bring the words to her lips and ask what he wanted, then she wouldn’t have this constant worry.
Ciaran watched her with confusion. She knew she was making him worry but didn’t know how to tell him what was bothering her.
“When was that contest?” Ciaran asked, instead.
Her heart hit her feet. She licked her lips while trying to summon the strength to push her feelings aside and answer his question. When she looked up, she caught a glimmer in his eye. It was a glint of something daring, matching the smirk on the corner of his lips.
She sucked in a breath, the answer suddenly coming to her. “It was tomorrow.”
Ciaran laughed. “I think you have one hell of a haunted house. It has a real-life demon and maybe even a portal straight to hell.”
She smacked his shoulder playfully. “You aren’t as funny as you think you are.”
He caught her wrist and pulled her atop him. The heat of their bodies mingled and wrapped her in a sense of comfort. She knew it was temporary, but she wanted to bask in it.
“When this is all said and done, I want to take you on a proper date.”
Samantha paused. Slowly, she looked up at Ciaran.
“What’s so odd about that?” he asked, defensively, while his hands moved up and down her body.
It was almost as if he was invested in their relationship. She told herself he only wanted her for what she could do, because she could strip away the rest of the curse still.
He touched her chin and gently tilted her head up, so she had to look him in the eye. “If you think I’m going anywhere after this, then you’re wrong.” He swallowed before continuing. “I think I was meant to live in Carver manor, but I was there too soon. It wasn’t Imogen that I was supposed to be with. What happened back then, the curse she placed upon me, it brought me here. To you.”
Samantha didn’t want to cry, but the tears flowed down her cheeks against her will. It was strange, loving her great-grandmother’s secret lover, but Samantha wasn’t going to let him go.
“Like I said, we need to go on a real date after this. What do people do on dates, now? Is dinner and a movie acceptable?”
She nestled her head on his chest and smiled. “Yeah. I think that’s acceptable.”
“Or, we could go hiking and find all the prettiest waterfalls. Is that romantic?”
“Not if you decide you’re going to fly every time we reach a difficult part of the trail.”
Ciaran laughed. His ribcage rumbled beneath her. She held onto him and he held onto her. The fight ahead of them felt unwinnable. She was just a woman who’d dabbled in tarot cards and attempted to brew a few potions here and there. She wasn’t fit to face demons. Nothing in her early lessons prepared her for what was about to happen.
Though, she had a secret weapon in her arsenal. Samantha had kept the feather she used in the spell earlier, the one that had severed the portal that followed Ciaran. It had great power, the last of Imogen’s curse still. With it, she could open and close portals between the veils.
It would take time to use, time in which she would be vulnerable, but she trusted Ciaran to have her back. Yet, she didn’t know how to tell him she still had it. She didn’t want him to think she would try to sew the curse back onto him. Samantha would never betray him like that, but she didn’t know how he might feel about the curse still lurking in her back pocket.
***
The sun beamed over the bed, making Ciaran throw his arm over his eyes. Pain flared in the front of his head, slowly fading. He threw his feet to the floor as the events of the past twenty-four hours came back to him. The world seemed to tilt back and forth. It shook around him as he tried to find his footing among the mess they were
in.
When he looked back at the woman sleeping beside him, at her softly pouting lips and her wild curls, he remembered why he was still there. A tether stretched between them. Ciaran had met other shapeshifters, those born of natural magic in their family. Each of them had a mate in this world. The mate filled in the holes in a shifter’s life.
Though he was not a shapeshifter in the way they were, Ciaran couldn’t help but wonder if he, too, had been granted a mate. Their whirlwind of a relationship, how easily they fell in love through a time of horror, should have spoken volumes.
Instead, Ciaran’s head buzzed. The rattling sensation in his mind drove him mad. No matter how he shook, he could not rid himself of it. Finally, he stood and strained to listen, to find what it was that was giving him such an unsettling sensation.
The cabin was small. Ciaran could spread his arms and nearly touch the walls, which meant whatever it was, it was close. He looked up and down until his gaze rested upon Samantha’s coat. When he reached for it, his hand tingled as if touching something poisonous. His stomach lurched.
Immediately, he threw open the coat. He rifled through all her pockets, thinking that the demon had perhaps sabotaged them. Instead, he found a familiar shape. Ciaran pulled a black feather from Samantha’s inner-coat pocket. A familiar magic hummed around it, reaching for Ciaran like a child separated from a parent.
He dropped it. The feather fell like a rock to the floor.
Samantha was still sound asleep. She didn’t see him reach for the feather with a trembling hand.
Why did she still have it? More importantly, why hadn’t she told him about it? Ciaran felt the stab of betrayal in his chest. While Samantha had freed him from the worst part of the curse and left him with the raven he’d become accustomed to, she still carried the curse.
He was tempted to fly it out to the ocean and watch the salty waters tear the curse apart. Ciaran did no such thing. He placed the feather back into Samantha’s pocket and saw himself out of the cabin. Outside, he breathed deep and tried to release the fear that assaulted him. It lingered, seated deep inside him.
His love for Samantha tried to smother it, but it seemed the fear was too strong. Ciaran didn’t know the first thing about relationships. His first one had been with a witch, already married and with children. It had been a disaster, of course. After that, over the hundred hears of his curse, Ciaran had not bothered to let himself become attached again.
A mixture of bitterness and fear had kept him apart from the world. He did what he could to make sure he always had stability when he returned from the inbetween, but because of the unpredictability of the curse, he wanted nothing to do with society.
The door behind him creaked open. Samantha appeared, her jacket thrown over her shoulders. His eyes dropped, to the pocket where the feather was still hidden, but Samantha didn’t seem to notice. She reached for him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Without thinking, he reached and placed his hand over hers.
There was something between them. That much was sure. It was a bond forged by fate, but that was not enough to make a relationship. Those took work on both ends. They took communication, he figured. How else would they understand each other?
He pulled his hand away from hers.
Samantha’s face crumpled. He knew she could feel the distance growing between them. He wished he could blame it on the demon, but it wasn’t that. It was the secret she’d kept from him.
“When did you plan on telling me?”
Immediately, her face fell into an expression of guilt. He watched her bite her cheek, the bit of skin indenting. He wanted to reach for her, to pull her into his arms, to shake the truth from her. Ciaran managed to sit and patiently wait for an answer.
“I didn’t want you to think that I was planning on cursing you all over again,” she said, her voice low and apologetic.
It twisted his heart. Her intentions had backfired. Ciaran took an involuntary step back, eyes stuck on the feather.
“I kept it as a weapon,” she went on. “I didn’t want to throw away something we could use.”
“You’re ruthless,” Ciaran muttered. He dragged his hands over his face. He could still hear the hum of the feather in her pocket. It dragged along his mind and left him ragged. He didn’t know how much more of it he could take. “Next time, trust me. Hiding the feather…well, it seemed like maybe you did want to curse me again.”
He knew he was too trusting. She could have said anything, and he would have believed it immediately. Samantha could have been lying, though his gut told him she wasn’t. It told him to put his faith in her, and so he did.
Ciaran looked up at her and found the somber truth in her eyes. They were wrinkled with guilt, glassy with shame. Samantha only wanted to win this war. The budding relationship that flowered in the midst of it needed work. It seemed neither knew exactly what they were doing in this regard.
“What now?” Ciaran asked. He was eager to spread his wings and put some space between himself and the feather in her pocket. He was, perhaps, even more eager to see this done.
The demon had a whole night to do whatever he wanted in Carver manor. He didn’t know what kind of tools and magics the demon must have found under that roof, or what he could have done with it by now. Surely, he had replaced the hounds they’d banished to the inbetween.
***
Samantha wasn’t sure how they would get the element of surprise on the demon again. The streets were filled with people as she made her way back to Carver manor. Parents had zombie-like eyes and cups of steaming coffee in their hands while children shrieked with delight and fear. Adults without children were jumping and laughing, some of them slipping flasks between hands before they went into the next haunted house.
She wanted a sip of one of those flasks, just enough to drown out the buzzing nerves in her head. Once this was all over, she was treating herself to a very strong drink. That was her trade-off as she marched toward her own house.
Ciaran circled overhead. Small children pointed up at his raven form with awe. Teenagers pretended to hoist imaginary guns and shoot him from the sky, leaving a sour taste in the back of Samantha’s mouth. She ignored it and pushed forward.
The front door to Carver manor was wide open. Her stomach flipped. Sulfur filled the air around her. Samantha stood and watched, screams piercing the air from inside the house, and she realized people were going inside but not coming out.
Immediately, she darted forward.
As soon as she passed the threshold, Samantha knew she’d made a mistake.
Samantha disappeared. He felt her disappearance like a punch to the gut. It dropped him from the sky, causing a hard landing behind the manor. He shook himself, loosening his shoulders as he took in his surroundings.
Screams filled the air, sharper than the screams from other houses. The scent of fear soured the air and added to the hellish smell around him. The low growls that approached were becoming familiar.
“Good doggy,” Ciaran muttered at the prowling hellhounds, more out of irony than any real attempt to soothe them. They were monsters with one-track minds.
Before they could leap, Ciaran found his wings and shot into the sky again. Distantly, he could hear someone, a child’s voice, pointing out the massive bird swooping to land on the tower of Carver manor. He wanted to yell at them, to tell them all to go home. What was disguised as a haunted house was something far more nefarious.
Ciaran coasted toward the window of the tower office. The window was ajar, just enough for his bird form to hop through, where he fell onto the floor with human hands and knees. The thud was heavy, and while Ciaran cringed, it was swallowed by another shriek down below.
When nothing strange happened, he slowly pushed himself to his feet. Still, he felt the strange absence of Samantha, as if she’d simply stopped existing. He flexed his hands, clenching and unclenching his fists as he crept toward the door. It eased open at his touch.
Shadows crawled along the
walls, skittering like small monsters. Crackling laughter filled the twisting hall. He knew that if he reached out and touched one of the darting shadows, he would find something solid beneath his hand—something that would most likely bite.
The demon had opened a portal. Guilt slammed into Ciaran’s stomach. While they’d been sleeping, the demon had been hard at work. Now he was using Caver manor and the contest as a guise. The guilt shifted inside him. It turned from cold to hot until his veins started to boil.
One of the shadows cackled and raced toward Ciaran. He slid his foot back, hand darting out as it leapt from the wall. He caught the creature just as it revealed a mouth full of tiny teeth. Its long tail lashed through the air while it snapped and snarled at him.
The tiny demon was only one of many unleashed into the halls and rooms of Carver manor. Ciaran wondered, as he snapped the demon’s neck, what else was wandering the corridors. It didn’t take him long to find out when the wall beside him wavered.
Wallpaper peeled away and a mouth split with a wide grin. A long tongue licked sharp teeth. Ciaran jumped back from the wall as the tongue lashed out at him. It snapped, barely missing him. He didn’t know how the thing in the walls worked, so he found his wings and flew down the stairs.
Boots hit the floor in the living room. He saw the couch where he and Samantha had given in to their desires. It was ripped, springs and stuffing bursting from every hole. Ciaran could not think about it long because something slammed into his back. He crashed to the floor, the room spinning around him,
Hot breath washed over his face and boiled his skin. Before he could even think to fight back, Ciaran realized something. The house was empty. The only things walking through the manor were demons.
Where were the humans?
Ciaran brought his elbow back and slammed it into a soft spot. Whatever hit him reeled back in pain, giving him the room to roll away. Once he was on his feet, he saw the demon, human form now shed in favor of the truth, clutching its eye. The demon was everything humanity feared. Too long, too thin limbs led into crooked and sharp fingers. A too wide mouth split to reveal rows of sharp teeth and a thin tongue.
The Raven Curse Page 9