Page 98 of A Game Cursed and Deadly

I fist my hands, and my extended claws dig into my palms, breaking skin and making me bleed. “Not nice?”

“Okay, it was vicious,” she concedes. “But it’s done, Tei.”

I flip around so fast I almost knock my little witch off her feet; at this point, there’s nothing human about me — just eight feet of ink-black monster, eyes glowing red, fangs showing in a snarl.

And yet, Esme doesn’t cower. She barely blinks. The same woman that ran from me so fast the first time I so much as showed her a claw stands her ground, looking downright unimpressed by my display of strength.

“I’m not scared of you.”

That anger, that righteousness inside me deflates. “You were once.”

“I was, when I was afraid of everything touched by the Beyond. Before I understood that it touched me, too, and it’s a blessing, not a curse. So no, I’m not scared of you, princeling. How could I be, when I…” She sighs, shaking her head.

I’m desperate to grab the next words out of her lips, drag them out into the open, into the space between us, into my own mouth. But the silence between us hangs, heavy and loaded. “You what?”

She shakes her head, like whatever she was going to say is gone now. Instead, she lifts herself on her tiptoes and grabs my face in her hands, bringing me down until our foreheads rest together. “I’m not scared of you. And I promise you, Tei. I’m going to break the curse.”

chapter 47

the witch’s feast

esmeralda

Turns out, knowing how a spell works and being able to use it are two very different things.

I’ve been attempting the soul shard spell for days with… extremely poor results. In hindsight, I should’ve expected it — this was Isabel’s opera magna; she had so much power, so much knowledge, by the time she put this together. I’m a two-month-old witch, and while I may be her direct ancestor, I can’t compete with years of training.

Tei rubs circles on my back, ever the patient instructor, as if our clock wasn’t literally hurdling toward untimely demise. “You’ll get there.”

The latest failed attempt at trying to turn a piece of his soul, his favorite human song, into a trinket, sits in front of us as a misshapen glass bauble. We’ve been picking innocuous shards, the smallest of pieces, just to test out the spell, and still I’m failing. Even if I could make a trinket out of them, it’d still be only half the battle in breaking the curse until we understand what the missing trinket is meant to be. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep the tears at bay.

His hands climb from my back to my shoulders. “Hey,” his voice calls extremely close to my ear, making goosebumps erupt on my flesh. “I can smell your frustration, and we’ll have none of that, understood? This will take a while to get right. It took Isabel months to curse me.”

I groan; I can’t help it. “We don’t have months!”

Tei’s hot lips land on my neck, laying open-mouthed kisses there. “All I mean is that it’s okay if the first attempts are not a success, and that we should keep trying.”

“At this rate, we’d need years. It doesn’t matter how many souls I shepherd in my free time, a million goodwill marbles won’t be sufficient to match Isabel’s power.”

His lips pucker in a grimace against my skin. “Maybe not; but knowledge and stolen magic weren’t the only powers Isabel possessed.”

I turn around, and Tei envelops me in his arms. “What do you mean?”

“You know how when you eat a soul’s life force, you get a surge of power?”

I nod, waiting for him to continue.

“That’s because that power comes from the Beyond. And do you know what other power comes from the Beyond?”

I swear I try to keep myself from doing it, but the eye roll just escapes me. “Get to the point, drama queen.”

Tei flicks my nose. “Mine, you ungrateful witch.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I say, rubbing my smarting nose.

“Just like you can gain power from the Beyond by eating a soul’s essence, you can gain power from it by feeding from one of its creatures. Our blood carries far more power than a human soul… especially mine. Isabel far preferred this way; I can’t recall the last time she shepherded a soul, as a matter of fact.”

I blink a few times, as if that could help me absorb the information. “So are you suggesting I… feed from you?”