Awaken the Curse
Authors: Alexa Egan
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Don’t forget to click through after
AWAKEN THE CURSE
for an exclusive sneak peek at Book One in Alexa Egan’s dark and sexy Imnada Brotherhood Trilogy
DEMON’S CURSE
Available from Pocket Books January 2013
Chapter 1
WALES, JANUARY 1814
Katherine was exactly as James remembered. Same trim figure. Same thick foxy mane pulled into a sloppy chignon. Same scattering of freckles across a nose just a tad too snubbed and eyes the inviting shade of good cognac. And her lips . . . they were just as full, pink, and disastrously kissable as they had been five years earlier. Only her guarded gaze and defensive posture revealed the changes time had wrought. Once, there had been nothing hidden between them. They had been passionately in love—or so he’d believed.
She leaned over him, her eyes flicking between his face and his bare shoulder, and for a moment they were back in her father’s garret in Oxford, enjoying a few stolen moments together.
“Hold still,” she murmured, “this might hurt.”
He frowned. He didn’t remember her ever issuing such a warning during those sweet interludes when—bugger fucking all! A sharp pain lanced up his arm and straight to his brain. He jerked against the hands pinning him down as he stifled a scream behind clenched teeth. Closing his eyes, he counted backwards from ten. Made it to seven before the world collapsed into darkness around him.
Someone shook him awake. “Lord Duncallan? Can you hear me?” He blinked up into her face—again. “I’ve finished stitching,” she said. “You can sit up if you’re not too dizzy.”
He reached across to feel at the swath of bandages wound tight around his upper arm, and five years screamed past in a single bone-aching throb of his shoulder. He was in the godforsaken wild Welsh mountains. It was snowing like the bloody Arctic. He’d been ambushed on the road. And the topper to this perfectly horrible day bent over him, worry hovering in her eyes.
Unconsciously, he fumbled for his amulet, the chain sliding through clumsy fingers before he found and clasped the silver disk. A talisman he’d reached for over and over since they’d parted. Catching her staring, he dragged his hand away. “How did I get here?” His voice came croaky, his throat sore.
“You don’t remember?” She glanced across him to an old, stoop-shouldered woman seated at his other side. “Did you give him too much laudanum, Enid? I told you not to empty the bottle down his throat.”
The woman bristled. “I gave him the same dose as I take myself, miss, and it’s never done me no harm. I’ll go down and make him some good mutton broth. That’ll do for him.” She raked him a long, steady gaze through slitted eyes, her whiskered chin wobbling. “You’re lucky Cade was nearby to fright the nightwalkers away, boy. We’d have found naught but bones otherwise.”
She shuffled out the door, leaving him completely and terrifyingly on his own with the woman who’d ripped his heart from his chest and ground it beneath her dainty heel—Miss Katherine Lacey.
“Nightwalkers?” he asked stupidly. As sparkling repartee went, it lacked, but he was flat on his back and at a decided disadvantage. It was the best he could do.
With his good arm, he shoved himself up against the pillows of his narrow bed to glance around at the sloped ceilings and spindly cast-off furnishings of an attic. No wonder he’d been fantasizing. The last time he’d seen Katherine, they’d been in a chamber eerily similar to this one. Of course, they’d been engaged in pursuits rather more enjoyable than first aid, at least until her father arrived unannounced to break up the moment. Did she realize the similarity as well? Was that why she nervously fiddled with the basket of medical supplies and refused to meet his eye?
“Don’t mind Enid,” she finally answered, turning an empty bottle round and round. “She’s not happy unless she’s conjuring bogeymen.”
He tried concentrating on her words, but a lump on his head the size of a cannonball beat like a bass drum. Instead he focused on the all-too-familiar way Katherine had of perching upon her chair as if she might disappear at any moment, the feathery red curls beside her ears, the flush of her dusky skin. “So, how
did
I end up here?”
She finally met his clouded gaze with one as wintry as the air outside. “Cade found you. You’d a deep slash to your upper arm, but you’re lucky it wasn’t worse. I have
some
healing magic, but I wouldn’t trust your life to it.” She jerked to her feet, busying herself with clearing up, skirts swishing as she moved efficiently around the room.
He cast a worried glance toward the open door, the maid’s humming audible as she lumbered down the creaky stairs. “You didn’t do it while she . . . I mean, she didn’t see you while you were . . .”
Katherine raised one superior eyebrow. “Casting spells? What do you take me for? I sent her downstairs for supplies. Four times. She remains oblivious to the fact I’m Other. Unfortunately, she’s convinced I’m a scatterbrained flibbertigibbet and a pain in the rump instead. I’m not sure which is worse.”
He settled back. “Ask the chap in Shrewsbury who was murdered a few months ago. All he’d done was sell a few love potions—that actually worked. Tensions are running high between the Other and the nonmagical Duinedon right now, Katherine. Any Other with sense is lying low until the worst blows over.”
“If I’d known you’d do nothing but scold when you got here, I’d have told Cade to leave you in that snowbank,” she muttered.
“I’m only trying to look after you.”
The raking glare she gave him could have peeled paint from the walls, had there been any. “I don’t need looking after, Lord Duncallan, least of all by you.”
“Fine. Get yourself strung up by a bunch of narrow-minded, superstitious Welsh sheepherders,” James mumbled. “See if I bloody care.”
So far, this trip was turning out to be a catastrophic failure. He tried shifting his arm to a more comfortable position, but his gut rolled up into his throat and he almost passed out. Obviously Katherine’s healing magic ran short of deadening raw nerve endings or calming queasy stomachs. If only
his
Other gifts ran to the curative. Even a bit of accelerated healing would be nice so he could fall asleep and wake tomorrow with nothing more than a scar to mark his injury. Alas, the Fey blood running in his veins tended toward illusion. No help at all unless he felt the urge to conjure himself a surgeon and thus avoid Katherine’s future ministrations.
He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and closed it again. The conversation seemed fraught with invisible tripwires. Any hasty word could explode in his face, but the silence was even worse. It only emphasized the difference between then and now and how much he’d truly lost. He stared out the window as if he might see into the past, to the way things used to be between them, but there was nothing but swirling snow and endless night.
“What happened to you out there?” Katherine finally asked quietly, braving the tension-filled quagmire. “Do you remember anything at all?”
James closed his eyes, trying to pull memories from a mind blank as a slate. Why was it he could recall every tearstained look and shouted warning from their disastrous parting in Oxford but couldn’t remember a damn thing from a few hours ago? “I recall leaving Trefriw this morning ahead of the weather,” he said, gathering his thoughts. “Your father’s letter sounded urgent. I was anxious to hear what drove the professor to write after so many years.”
He watched for her reaction, but she did nothing more than tighten her hands around a cloth as if she were wringing a neck.
If he were being completely honest, he’d have admitted it hadn’t just been the professor’s letter that had brought him to Wales. No, it had it been the outside hope he might see Katherine again. Flaunt his new position. Show her all she’d given up when she’d tossed him away. Petty—yes. But how often did one lose everything only to return to the card table sporting the winning hand?
“The storm moved in, and I lost my way. By sunset, I’d regained the road, but a few miles past the crossroads, I heard a god-awful howl and someone or something charged me from the trees. I don’t remember anything else.”
Fear hovered in her eyes, and she glanced toward the window. “Thank the gods Cade found you. Even without the gash to your arm, you might have frozen to death. It’s snowed every night this past week.”
That name again—Cade. It had never occurred to James as he plotted his vengeful reunion that Katherine might have married. For some reason, he’d thought she would be here waiting for him . . . trapped in time like a bee in amber. “Your”—he almost choked on the horrid word—“your husband saved my life.”
She spun around, eyes wide, pink flushing her cheeks. “Cade’s not my husband. He’s our servant. I’m not . . . that is . . . I never married.”
“None who measured up?” he said, not able to keep the bitterness from his voice and disgusted at how happy the news made him. “I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be, my lord,” she snapped, “unless you count arrogance, lechery, and dishonesty as qualities worthy of admiration. I do not.” By now her cheeks were scarlet, her gaze hot. “Though perhaps that’s how one behaves among the high company you keep these days.”
The high company he kept? Ha! If she only knew the truth.
He fit into his unexpected position of Baron Duncallan like a square peg in a round hole. Not that he hadn’t tried to fill his elder brother’s shoes. It had been easy at first. He’d still been reeling from her betrayal and halfway to drunken, womanizing sot when he’d received word of Andrew’s untimely death and his ascension to the title. But neither James’s heart nor his liver had accepted his complete descent into debauchery. Refusing to let Katherine’s faithlessness unravel him completely, he’d climbed from the hole he’d dug, shedding mistresses and drinking chums as he went.
In the end, his books had saved him. He’d returned to sobriety and his interrupted studies with a renewed thirst for answers. He thought he’d exorcised his demons. Thought he’d put his sojourn at Oxford—and Katherine—behind him. Then Professor Lacey’s summons arrived, and what had he done? Dropped everything to gallop neck or nothing to the wilds of Wales.
Pathetic.
“Just remember, Lord Duncallan,” she said, body straight as an arrow, hands fisted at her sides, “you are my father’s guest. Not mine. Don’t presume on our past relationship. That ended long ago.”
“Not that I anticipated a tender reunion, but you might at least pretend to a hint of softer emotion. I am an invalid, after all.”
Apparently unconvinced, she continued to shoot daggers at him.
He sighed. “You’re right. I didn’t travel over two hundred miles to dig up old treachery. You made it very clear then how you felt. There’s nothing more to be said.”
He found himself once again reaching for the disk hanging at his throat, temper barely in check. Only the throbbing in his shoulder and the ache in his head kept him from giving as good as he got.
Katherine lifted her chin, those damned pink lips parted as if she might speak.
“Maybe it’s best if you summon the professor,” he said, swallowing back his anger. “I’m surprised your father has allowed you to tend me unchaperoned. As I recall, his parting words were ‘Come within a mile of my daughter again, and I’ll cut your heart out with a dull spoon.’ ”
The sudden whitening of her face, the troubled look in her eyes, the overlong pause. It didn’t take a genius to realize something was very wrong. She slumped back into her chair. “I can’t. He’s missing. Father went out three days ago and hasn’t returned.”
* * *
He’d kept it. All these years the amulet she’d given James had hung round his neck. Not only that, but she’d been completely right in thinking that the symbols etched there matched those on the obelisk. Of course, had she known Father would write to James asking about it, she’d never have opened her big mouth.
She closed her eyes, drawn back to the day she’d found the amulet in the strange little shop in London. The stuffy, scented air and dusty, overcrowded shelves. The Merlinesque bearded shopkeeper muttering to his pet crow. The odd, stomach-swooping dizziness when she’d first held the shimmering charm in the palm of her hand.
“I don’t like it, Miss Lacey.” Katherine’s eyes snapped open, the memory dissolving into Enid’s frowning face as she yanked closed the thick bedchamber curtains. “First the professor goes missing and now His Lordship’s ambushed and left for dead on the road. The nightwalkers are on the prowl, I tell you.”
“You’re jumping at shadows. Lord Duncallan must have been attacked by brigands looking for a few easy coins. That’s all.”
“Mm-hm,” Enid grunted, clearly not convinced.
“Or perhaps a wildcat down from the higher peaks in search of dinner. We’ve been through this before. There’s no such thing as nightwalkers.”
Enid’s expression showed her skepticism as she helped Katherine undress. “You go on believing that if it makes you feel better, miss. I know different. The creatures are out there. My old granny saw one once while she was after a straying lamb. A great slavering beast that changed to a man before her very eyes. She hid and made not a peep or else it would have torn her limb from limb, but she never forgot and she was never quite the same after.”
Katherine had heard this story and dozens like them from Enid and countless others over the last few months. Stories of ghostly shapes moving within the heavy mists that sprang up without warning. Travelers going missing, never to be seen again. Strange sightings of enormous wolves running beneath the full moon, their cries echoing from ridgetop to ridgetop.
The indigenous folktales had brought Father to Wales. His research into the native beliefs sent him tramping from homestead to homestead, gathering accounts from the locals.
“It’s amazing how these myths survive, Katherine,” Father had said, shoving his spectacles up his nose as he crouched over his papers. “It’s been over a thousand years since the Imnada shifters walked among us. Over a thousand years since the clans made their refuge in these mountains. Yet the legends carry on from generation to generation.”
The more her father heard, the more he became obsessed with the nightwalkers, transcribing story after story and evaluating them against what was known about the shapechangers—which was almost nothing. A small number of ancient texts and dusty narratives. A cache of scrolls found in a forgotten archive. An illustration in a tattered grimoire. Scattered relics, all that was left of a once powerful race.