Page 32 of A Curse So Vile
“Please—”
Another whack came down, followed by another. Brenna huddled in a corner, exhausted from her loss of blood.
“Foul—”WHACK!“Dusklander—”WHACK!“Sorceress!”WHACK!
“Enough!” Cole yelled, grabbing the staff and tossing it to the floor. He gestured to the bed. “Dori, look!”
Dorthea turned and faced Fiona, who was standing on her feet, a wide grin on her now full face.
“I feel better, Dori! Brenna made me better!”
Dorthea glared at Brenna. “But that’s impossible!”
“Let me explain!”
“Do so quickly,” Dorthea hissed.
“I come from an ancient bloodline. While we are human, we are also something else. Something ancient. We call ourselves Denithians.”
“What does the even mean?” Dorthea snapped.
“A baby born with the blood of the Den will be different from a typical child. Some have more abilities than others, depending on how pure the Denithian blood is. If the child is from two natural born Denithians, they would possess several abilities. If one parent is from the Den, they would have some. Even just a drop will see you immune to poisons and the like, and that is what is rendering Fiona immune to the curse. My own father was powerful in the blood, whereas my mother was weak.”
“What is Fiona now?” Cole’s voice trembled. He was afraid, and Brenna couldn’t fault him for that.
“She’s exactly who she was before her curse, with a little extra. She’s going to want to consume more meat and even blood, but she will always be your Fiona.”
Dorthea wrinkled her nose in distaste, but her anger had quelled.
“I’m hungry,” Fiona’s tiny voice rose from across the room, where she had begun eating dates and nuts. Soon, she’d need more.
“What happens now?” Cole asked. “Am I supposed to just bring her back to the Heartlands like this?”
“You can’t.”
“Just try and stop us!” Dorthea interjected.
Brenna exhaled a sigh, exhausted. “We’re taking Fiona to the Den as I had originally planned. We have to.”
Cole and Dorthea exchanged looks. They didn’t trust her.
“We have no other choice..”
Dorthea’s lip curled up in disgust. “How are we supposed to trust you with what you’ve done to Fiona?”
“I saved her.”
Dorthea looked at Fiona again, her face a mixture of confusion and pain. “What right did you have to do this without asking?”
“If I’d asked, you might have said no, and this was something I felt I had to do.” She looked to Cole. “When we started out, I didn’t care about Fiona, I only cared about myself. I thought that maybe there was some way you could help me and I was buying myself time. But then…I don’t know. I felt I had to save her, and this was the only way I knew how.”
Cole’s face twisted in shame. She’d exchanged one problem for another, and she wasn’t even sure it was the right thing to do.
“And if we decide we’re not going with you to this…to this, Den?” Dorthea asked.
“You are welcome to leave, but Fiona will be traveling with me. And if you think you have a choice in that, you’d be dead wrong. You do not know what I can do, and trust me, you don’t want to find out.”
“If you think threats are going to get—”