Page 5 of Deceiving the Cursed Beast
There was a ripple in the shadows where his voice had come from. At first I thought the movement was a shadow itself, then I noticed the details. Four legs. A tail.
He was right; I felt no temptation to scream. I clapped a hand over my mouth, stifling my laughter.
Three
Felix
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“Go ahead. Laugh.” I sighed.
When I first woke up after Cecily cursed me, I hadn’t understood what had happened. I couldn’t sit up; my arms and legs felt all wrong. Then I glimpsed the fur. What I could remember of her curse made me fear the worst, but the truth was even more embarrassing. I wasn’t a fearsome beast.
I was a fluffy, black cat. There were patches of white fur on my front paws and at the base of my throat. I was a tad larger than the average house cat, but nothing out of the ordinary.
“It was an exceptionally poorly worded curse,” I told Isabel, who was biting her lip, but not laughing in my face.
Under normal circumstances, I’d be distracted by watching her teeth sink into those pink lips. Isabel was pretty in the best way, all round and soft with the types of curves that starred in my dreams. Her hair was a rich chestnut brown and cut in a short style that framed her face, with none of the ridiculous pins and ribbons most women insisted on. I didn’t even mind her sharp tongue. In fact, I enjoyed it.
But circumstances were far from normal right now. Though I noticed her, I didn’t have room for thoughts about anything other than my current predicament.
“What did he intend to do?” she asked, her voice choked. “Try to make you more cuddly?”
“She,” I corrected. “She intended to turn me into a beast. Something about me being heartless and wanting outsides to match insides. I’m not sure how it resulted in this.”
“Heartless? I would have gone with amoral.”
The tip of my tail twitched. Cecily's accusations hadn’t bothered me. Though I understood Isabel’s anger—I was even enjoying riling her to some extent—I wasn’t keen on being seen as amoral. I had crossed a line signing that contract with her father, but it had been necessary. In the two months since I was cursed, I hadn’t come close to figuring out how to reverse my condition.
Then Edwin Cardh tried to sneak into my castle. He told me a sob story about having two daughters waiting for him back home—conveniently forgetting to mention their ages—and I recognized the names. I was a duke with a blood-tie to a node locked to truth-magic. Isabel and Sofia were mages with truth powers in the closest town to my castle. I had heard about them for years. When I went to town, someone inevitably pointed the twins out to me.
Everyone assumed that any woman with truth-magic must be of interest to me. Given what had happened with Cecily, I’d rather avoid dealing with another truth-mage entirely, but I needed one.
Getting Sofia out to Rose Castle had been too great of an opportunity to miss. I couldn’t just invite her. Not without a contract already in place guaranteeing her silence. It wasn’t my transformation that needed to be kept secret, it was what that transformation portended. Cecily had used my node. Only people with Truthholder blood should have any access to the node. If the blood-lock had weakened—or even broken—then that was a much bigger issue than me spending the rest of my life as a cat.
It would be the start of a second round of node wars.
So, while I felt guilty for using a legal technicality to bring Isabel to Rose Castle, if there was any chance she could help me figure out what had happened, I had to take it. She probably wouldn’t be ableto reverse the curse, since she wasn’t a truth-teller like Cecily, but she was still a mage.
“Amoral is a bit harsh,” I said, pretending her indictment didn’t really bother me. “I simply have different priorities than you.”
“Like prioritizing your life over mine. Speaking of which, I need to get back to mine as soon as possible. What exactly did my father bind me to do?”
“Everything in your power to help me until my curse is broken.”
“Please say he didn’t.” Her shoulders slumped and her voice lost its resolve. “He wouldn’t—”
She choked on the next word. The entire hillside was under a truth-telling enchantment. I was immune to the magic, but Isabel couldn’t say her father wouldn’t sign such a vague contract, exchanging his daughter for his own freedom. He would. He had.
She coughed, squaring her shoulders once more. “I want to see this contract.”
“Certainly. I’ll have Marc pull it for you tomorrow morning. For now, why don’t you get settled in your room? I can prepare a supper tray for you. I’m sure you are tired after walking all the way from Leort.”
She didn’t ask who Marc was, or how I could prepare a supper tray, and I was surprised to find I wanted her to ask. Perhaps she really was tired from her journey. Or perhaps learning just how horrible the terms of the contract were for her was one disappointment too many.
She held out a hand, palm up. “Lead the way, Your Grace.”
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