Page 84 of WitchCurse
CHAPTER27
Nick
Everything happened so fast. Isn’t that how all the stories went? I’d fought hundreds of battles before, usually with fae monsters at least ten times my size. Most had been slow, mindless beasts looking for the next meal. TheHuntbeasts were only different because they stung with cold. Every claw that landed, or fang that punctured skin delivered an icy blast that chilled me to the core.
Was this the infection that had taken Toby before Kiran bound him? It was like freezing acid, biting and intense, bringing rise to numbness, and a lingering chill that creeped through my veins. I slashed through batch after batch of the beasts, more monsters flooding in like they had a portal somewhere where they could hide all these things. It was impossible to dodge every attack. I was one man facing an army of beasts.
Kiran tore through them in his kitsune form with ease, but he was running out of steam. The blight returned with a vengeance, creeping up his side, making his back left leg completely useless. I wasn’t certain he noticed it yet, as he was fighting like a wild thing for all our lives, that leg dangling while he bounced on the other three. He didn’t bother with his glamour. I could see the spread of death sliding up his fur, devouring him even as he moved like it didn’t affect him at all. He hurt. I felt every slash as if it were my own, keeping the bond between us open wide so he could take whatever he needed from me, even if it eventually meant the end.
Where was Toby? Was he among this rabble ofHuntmonsters? Most were the bug type I knew from Underhill, but then the wolves poured free from a portal the witch queen opened behind them. I searched for him, trying to make my way up as Kiran was close to the sidhe. He wanted them all dead, even pulled a blazing fire from deep inside that melted everything it touched. That had taken most of our shared strength. And then I saw Toby a second before his jaws wrapped around Kiran’s throat.
NotToby.
His human and even the wolf buried deep. This was hisHuntform, layers of ice blanketed over it like a shield. The heat burned away several layers but they seemed to melt and reform, and its eyes glowed with Kiran’s power as I realized I felt how deep that drain went. Not directly into the sidhe, but they pulled it through Toby. Using him to spin it into something they could use, not caring that they seemed to be burning him out while they did so, killing us all. Toby and Kiran flew backward off the platform, landing in a heap of fighting limbs and I lunged through the mess of remaining wolves, slashing them in half as stars began to pop around my vision.
Kiran was losing. He could pull more energy from both of us, kill us all and maybe gain a few seconds of strength, but it wouldn’t be enough. Those last remaining ties were too strong. I wondered at the glow of wriggling magic, if this is what Toby thought of as strands. They did sort of look like string, if string could ripple and shimmer with magic like strangely illuminated DNA strands. There were a dozen of these things wrapped around Kiran, and another dozen around Toby.
Could they be severed? We’d dug out the other curses, these had been tied deep, but what if we cut the strands? Would the sword help at all I wondered as I launched myself across the distance? Not into their battle, which they were both losing, the puppet of the beast fighting beneath the heat of Kiran’s fading flames, but to where the strands were stretched taught. I aimed the sword at them, knowing it was meant to cut down gods and not magic, but surprised when the first few snapped, string vanishing, and a gasp heard from above us.
I raced to slash the rest, cutting Toby almost completely free and severing a few of the ones wrapped around Kiran before I was met with another sword and found myself staring up at Zephyr. Cutting off his food supply made him finally join the fight? Bastard. His full fae form intimidating in size and the breadth of his shoulders, but I knew his fighting style. It was burned into Kiran’s memory and our bond. I had trained for this day, to rip that nasty monster of Kiran’s nightmares apart. I tore the last of the energy from our distant sanctuary, feeling our tiny realm collapse and slammed it into Kiran. I wrapped a wave of healing around myself to keep me moving, and threw myself into battle against the beast of beasts.
Either he was faster than my shared memories with Kiran led me to believe, or I was slower. I parried the first half dozen hits but he caught my right shoulder on one, sword slicing through the armor as if it were not even there, sliding back only after I smashed his hand away, or else I would have lost my entire arm. I struggled to hold my sword, catching it with the opposite hand, but I’d never been a great left-handed fighter.
The bond between Kiran, Toby, and I sputtered, the strength fading, the wolf still not letting him go, and there were rivers of golden blood pooled around them. The darkness wrapped around the wolf in layers. Maybe that was why he was still being controlled? Was it the same darkness that Kiran stored?
Zephyr grabbed me by the throat, lifting me as if I weighed no more than a child, strangling me. Darkness popped in bursts around my sight, and I swung my sword up with an awkward swipe, hoping to catch him, and was stunned when it went into his shoulder, and slid all the way through him.
His expression was a little comical, shock, horror, pain, and then he began to crumble, not unlike theHuntwe killed had. His grip released me and I sank to my knees, landing in a splatter of golden blood. Not Zephyr’s as he wasn’t seelie sidhe, and that was the point of all this wasn’t it? The dark court seeking power, feeding on a creature of the light court like leeches.
I struggled to maintain any grasp on our stuttering lifeforce, both Kiran and Toby settling down as if willing to die. They were tired, beaten down until almost nothing remained, lost in darkness and nightmares. I understood their pain, but we had started something important, and I didn’t want it to end yet. I’d always been the one holding us together, only losing it briefly in Underhill right before we escaped. Most of that was rage, which I buried deep, not willing to burn Kiran with the lash of my anger. He didn’t deserve it.
I had always thought of that rage as something dark, evil? Not unlike the attack of the wolves on my family when I was a kid. Those memories still nestled deep in my mind, despite how much I tried to pretend they had faded.
Was it rage I’d seen in those days? The wolves as they launched themselves at my mom, ripping her apart, hadn’t blazed with anger. Rather, I recalled a lack of emotion from them. We meant nothing. We were food. Not unlike how the fae treated us. Wasn’t that the root of the evil? And wasn’t I tired of being someone’s fucking food? I wasn’t that kid anymore, crying over cookies and lost in a world that had no use for me. I’d made myself a warrior to protect Kiran, and began to build a home here in the new world. The rage always festered below the surface, me as unwilling to release it as Kiran had been to free the darkness he thought of as insanity.
The light court was color, that’s what Toby had thought as he looked at strands of magic, and the deadHunt,were black and gray, fading. But life was a cycle. Light and dark. Happiness and pain. And I was fading fast, darkness rising. The hag was headed our way, angry because Zephyr was dead? I wantedherdead. She had been the reason Kiran had lost control and ate his way through all of Underhill, corrupting an entire world with madness. Was that all that remained in the darkness I wondered? I stared into the solid wall that kept that pool of power buried within Kiran. He seemed to be willing to take it to his death rather than unleash it again.
Madness? A lack of emotion? Insanity? I felt a little insane at that moment. Facing the loss of everything I’d only begun to build. I wasn’t self-sacrificing. If Underhill had taught me anything, it was that survival sometimes meant doing shit that would make me a villain.
So be it. For my guys, for the baby world, and for Sebastian and Liam who were trying to create a home, I turned and slammed into that barrier, piercing it as if it were in the physical world with thegodkillersword, and watching the shield splinter first. Channels crackled outward until I felt the entire thing shatter and darkness poured free. It rushed at me, and I thought for a second that I would be obliterated by the power because it burned hot. An inferno of rage, which sought a connection with my own, bringing rise to a pool of power like I had never experienced before. Rather than fighting it, I welcomed it, gave my own anger to it, and let it all spill over.
The darkness latched on to the storms inside Toby, and the nightmares of battles within Kiran, ripping them to the surface and sending them outward through me. Not a nightmare or mind magic at all, but a strength of some sort of monster.
I rose above them all, enlarged to giant size, feeling as if every part of my being were on fire. It was part pain, part release, and all heat. This is what the stories of kitsune had made me think of, fire, like a volcano, and magic beyond comprehension. Until Sebastian had changed in Underhill, I had thought they’d all been an exaggerated game of telephone, with the story changing into something larger and more insane with each telling. Now I wondered how much had actually been left out of those tales.
The fae gaped at me, horrified, turning to run, even that hag bitch he called mother. But I swept the sword out, slashing half of them to bits as if it were a wood-chipper instead of a sword, and lunged for the rest. Not to eat them as they had to us for centuries—we didn’t need that filth—but to send them all into oblivion.
It had been Kiran’s greatest wish after all. Kill the monsters of his past, achieve freedom. I would give him that with my dying breath if possible.
The magic of therealmflickered, and chaos ensued as everyone tried to get away. But I’d always been good at using Kiran’s magic, and this felt familiar. The darkness was filled with the rolling strength of it, and I wove a barrier around the space, trying to close them all in while the world within that mortal warehouse exploded. I ripped the magic from every beam, brick, and stone left inside, pulling all the power free and cleaving out the last ties that wrapped Kiran and Toby up in curses.
Their bodies and souls were dark, and I grieved, thinking somehow, I had survived their end. Which meant a slow and painful death for me. Sooner was better than later, as I longed to join them in the beyond, not wanting to exist in this world alone, but finding comfort in the thought that maybe they were together.
I was the darkness, a whirlwind of wild angry magic, devouring and destroying everything it touched. Would we rage through the world tearing it all down? My heart ached even as I smashed through the rest, until the walls shattered, the fae were gone. Some vanished through a door, the rest turning to ash beneath my touch.
I lost track of who survived and who didn’t under the weight of the power. The black wave of it continued to change me, not unlike Sebastian’s metamorphosis. But I had no Liam to pull a baby world from me, and none of us would want one birthed with this level of malice anyway. Everything in me felt like destruction, and I thought briefly of the story of the god who had rained down floods and ripped his land to barren nothingness once his baby and lover had been taken from him. I understood his madness, and poured that insanity down on everything. The darkness, pain, and magic coating it all, suffocating life, and drawing it inward like a disease corrupting all it touched.
I launched myself through the ceiling, tearing it down, and letting the abyss gather. A million of those shadows Kiran was fond of eating glowed in the dark, as though they’d covered the building. Helping hide the magic. I reached out to sweep them up, not eating them as much as absorbing them, and trying to shove the magic into the bond which was dark and silent, taking the darkness myself to add to my own psychoses.