Page 51 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion (Tales of a Monstrous Heart, #2)

I was still smiling when he kissed me. Soft and consuming.

His fingers slipped beneath the edge of my jacket, finding a strip of warm skin just above my trousers.

A low needing sound escaped me as my hands slid into his dark hair.

Fingers curling into it at the nape of his neck to keep him closer.

Listening to that wild desire coursing through me.

‘ Fucking ancestors deliver me ,’ came the terse tone of Gideon. The human equivalent of throwing icy water over a flame. Breaking us apart.

‘Can we not?’ he demanded with a disapproving frown from where he loomed in the doorway. His own leathers making him an imposing figure, his blue eyes almost luminous.

Alma stood at his elbow, hiding her own smile behind her hand. Her petite form looking compact and deadly in her dark leathers she’d borrowed from William.

‘Let’s get this terrible idea over with so I can have a moment’s peace.’ Gideon shot Emrys a final warning glance before he moved into the shelves towards the Portium door.

Thankfully my embarrassment of being caught once again with Emrys was short-lived as the Portium door threw us into the middle of an overgrown wood.

There was a little girl who lived in a magical house. With wild roses curling up its side and a stone path that wove like a snake into an enchanted wood.

The story my mother created sang into my memory. How easily I’d forgotten it as I stood on the remains of that winding path.

‘I think you’re losing your touch, brother,’ Gideon muttered, wiping a thick clump of dirt from the side of his boot on a half decayed oak trunk that lay in our path. ‘There’d better not be any mud pixies out here. Nasty little bastards.’

‘I’m certain you’ll be in fine company then,’ Alma added, dryly. Earning herself a glare.

‘This is the right place on the map,’ Emrys replied, looking up at the moon as if the pale disc of it could offer any answers. The ruined doorway we’d emerged from appeared to have once been an outbuilding. Maybe a gamekeeper’s cottage.

There was nothing but the path before us, and ivy that tangled around my boots. A thick fog curling around the withered trunks.

The Greymarks had sold their ancestral home.

The family was rife with debt and their heirs seemed to have a tendency to be drunkards or get themselves killed.

The small house hidden in this wood had no value.

It’d been left to rot in an old lord’s will.

A place they used to hide their mistresses in their grander years.

A place they’d dumped my mother to forget about the sin of having a daughter and not a son.

‘Alma?’ I asked, watching as she turned, chin tipped up as if scenting something on the wind. A shudder moving through her as if resisting the urge to change.

‘It’s faint.’ She frowned, moving forward into the mist. Her hands clenching and relaxing at her side. Unease in the tightness of her shoulders as the wind disturbed the few dark curls that had freed themselves from her bun.

We followed past the gnarled trunks and strange shifting shadows. What alarmed me most was the silence, not even the call of night creatures. I swallowed down my apprehension, kept my focus on Alma’s leading pace until the dark sharp outline of the house could be seen through the thicket.

She stopped, glancing over her shoulder, green eyes practically glowing in the darkness like a wolf’s on the hunt. Her cheeks marked with a ripple of short feathers as if in warning. ‘I think this place is cursed.’

‘You know what they say about visiting cursed places.’ Gideon released an irritated sigh, stepping gracefully over another scattering of rubble hidden beneath a patch of brambles. ‘It’s like stepping in shit – you carry it with you.’

The wind gave a sharp howl as if to emphasise his point, making me thankful for the protection charm stitched into the leathers, so the cold couldn’t penetrate.

Yet, a creaking noise reached my ears. A clatter like a hollow windchime as I took another step.

Only to hear a sharper crack beneath my boot.

I looked down to see bone instead of a branch. Too large to be from an animal.

‘Kat.’ Emrys’s voice was soft with caution behind me, but it gave no warning as I looked up. To see odd shapes strung from a great oak’s branches. Strips of fabric and the clatter of bones in the strong wind.

Traitors of the crown swing. They rot and dance in the wind. A warning made of marrow, a cautious tune as the birds peck at their bones.

All remaining members of the Greymark line had been hanged by the King. I knew that from Council records. Yet seeing it was different. Hanged in punishment for losing his bride. Even the children of distant blood who held that name were guilty. Because a mad king wanted the Greymark name dead.

I didn’t know he hanged them here. Didn’t know they hung here still. Yellow skin sticking to bleached bones. A warning to all others who let valuable possessions slip from the King’s grasp.

‘Why would anyone be loyal if that’s how they treat their lords?’ Alma asked, as fur rippled over the skin of her throat visible above her leathers.

‘Lord Grey isn’t up there,’ Gideon added darkly. ‘He was murdered before the rest of his house.’

Alma went still at that, but I kept my expression blank. Even as my magic churned uneasily in my gut. As if it remembered its part in that tale.

My father had killed Lord Grey. Killed him for what he did to my mother.

I could never imagine it. Not when all I knew was the soft patience of my father.

A warrior who loved as easily as he laughed.

How the same being could have committed such a vicious act.

It had been reported in the Council files.

The brutality of it, and yet there was no surprise in me.

No, because given the chance I knew I’d do the same.

Every fact about my blood and the family I’d been connected to I’d had to learn from dusty tomes filled with lies. The House of Grey was cruel and dark. Its wealth and prestige built on greed. On the abuse of the fey they indentured.

Fey that had raised my mother in servitude. Fey she had loved as her family. So my mother ended this house. She’d cleansed the world of its poison and she’d destroyed herself in the process.

The derelict house before me made the heat of my magic bite ruthlessly into my palms. So small, steeply pitched with a white facade left to crumble and black half-timbering.

Alma moved up the stone steps, her clawed hands cutting through the ivy to reveal the door, a chain across it.

Thick and rusted. Strung between the chain were saints’ charms, left to corrode.

Markers that a worshipper had lived here. Had been found unworthy.

‘I can fit,’ Alma huffed, dusting down her trousers.

‘You’re not going alone. Not if there’s a compendium in there.’ Emrys’s voice left no room for argument. ‘We don’t know what such dark magic can summon when left unsupervised.’

I thought she’d bristle at the hint of a command, but the softness of his voice seemed to put her more at ease. One single nod as she considered that thick rusted chain hung with those saints’ charms.

‘Here,’ I offered, moving up the steps. Deciding to let some of my power out, to chase away the tension of containing it. Hoping to soothe its hunger with a small offering. To settle my magic.

I took hold of the chain, allowing the flames to twist between my fingers, catching on the dry ivy clinging to the wood.

Those flames raced down the chain and up the side of the door.

I poured more and more, until it glowed deep lavender enough to become nothing but molten liquid against my palm, dripping to sizzle on the cold stone ground between my boots.

I pulled back as the flame continued to consume the dried foliage. Illuminating our small gathering as Gideon lifted the heel of his boot, ready to slam it against the door but, before he could, a lock creaked from inside, and it opened as if pushed by the wind.

Only for the rotten wood to break from its rusted hinges, collapsing inward in a cloud of dust that sent myself and Alma a few steps back. Emrys remained where he was, darkness slipping between his fingers as Gideon’s aether crackled in his palm.

‘If you keep trying to use that leg like a weapon, the incantations on it won’t hold up,’ Emrys cautioned as he considered the gloom beyond.

‘Yes, please inform me what other uses a metal leg has, Emrys?’ Gideon hissed back, face weary as the soft blue light of his magic chased the shadows from the door’s archway. Making it no less unwelcoming.

‘It’s in there,’ Alma’s voice echoed across the cracked tiles of the entryway.

Nothing but dank, stale air greeted us. A bitter coldness that was too familiar.

In a blink I was looking at those Fairfax ruins.

Where the caymor had dwelled. A creaking sound echoed through the dark, making my heart climb further up my throat.

The wishing stone fluttering against my breast as Alma moved into the gloom.

All I could taste on my tongue was decay. All I could hear was the echo of something scuttling. The drip of distant water. So similar to those tunnels beneath Fairfax. I halted for a moment, chest too tight with the panic of it.

I felt Emrys’s warmth down my back, how his hands cupped my elbows in comfort. Bringing me back.

‘What is it?’ he asked, those dark eyes slipping over every inch of my expression as if he could sense the barest change in me.

‘Nothing,’ I lied. Unable to explain. How strange it was to stand in a place that had caused my mother nothing but pain. Somewhere she never intended me to be – yet we’d been guided here all the same.