Page 156 of A Sanctuary from Shadow
My gaze locked onto it, every fiber of my being itching to grab it. To take it. To eat it. To have it plant itself inside me and grow within my body like an unstoppable vine. To become nothing more than a vessel for germination.
“Remember what I told you,” Pete whispered as I gawped at temptation itself, which sailed on a breeze wafting my way. “About the worst entrapment curses.”
I stopped breathing when the curse seed paused just inches away. My reflection in its golden shell looked crazed with both yearning and fear. It peered back at me, hovering—waiting for me to give in. Not that I could, with Pete locking me down like a pro-wrestler.
Eventually, the seed realized that I’d somehow resisted its allure, and the damn thing got angry—started raging in convulsions. Next thing I knew, the burning itch I felt was in my veins. I was about to experience the hell my father endured when he’d been compelled to touch a curse seed.
“Christ!” Pete swore when he saw I was going to freak the fuck out. His shadow tethers constricted around me like restraints on a violent criminal. He gasped for forgiveness when he shoved my face into his forearm, silencing my agony, for fire ants were eating me from the inside out. I’m sure I hurt him back when I bit into his flesh. His salty blood welled in my mouth as I fought to claw off my skin and tear out my hair.
“Just hold on, Shorty,” Pete begged while I bawled. “I promise I’ll not let you go. Just hold on until it stops.”
Goddess,pleasemake it stop! PLEASE!
I couldn’t say how long the torture lasted. I wasn’t in my body for all of it. There were times I was back in Daddy’s bedroom, battling bogeybats and watching him die. Then others when I stood in the cabin on Avalon Green, reliving Briar’s expressions of not-quite-loving me. Moments where I knew I’d be butchered for a hearty Fomorian feast. And times where I mewled in a meadow of wildflowers, alone in a foreign world.
I was half present when Pete gritted a curse of shock. The blood rash had strengthened my urge to submit to the seed, and my warrior’s skin was helping it. Yet somewhere in my barrage of suffering, I clung for dear life to Pete’s voice.
The sound of which towed me into brighter flashbacks of a night spent in camaraderie beneath a colorful midnight sky, where a piano melody bonded me with the dashing rake smirking at me over a pair of Bicycle playing cards. Where he’d broken the dam of my pent-up despair with the power of laughter. That same rake then grew smug as he spoke harsh truths to me, brandishing a bottle of ketchup intimating,Who knows you like I do?
No one, replied my soul as I knelt in a storm, the rake gazing past it. To me.
If we go down, we go down together, he brogued over the whipping wind.
Yes, I clung to Pete. And that painful itch I couldn’t scratch retreated like a wounded animal in the face of him.
The curse seed, admitting defeat, dropped to the loam, a dead thing.
Pete breathed a fervent oath as my body loosened in his stranglehold. My ribs ached from his unfettering tethers, cold sweat saturating my clothes. Pete, too, dripped like a soda bottle, hissing at the puncture wounds I’d made in his arm. My canines must’ve been hella sharp.
“It’ll be fine,” Pete assuaged my dismay. “You clean your teeth more than is holy, Shorty. I doubt you’ll poison me.”
I wanted to argue that even the cleanest mouths harbored bacteria, but that’s when I registered the general commotion happening in town. At the break of dawn, even cities were quiet, so the shouts, wails, and screams for mercy were well out of place.
I wasn’t the only one in Humwater Dell to be visited by an entrapment curse that morning.
“Please, sir, I beseech you witheverythingI have. Set her free of this!”
My arm hairs stood as I met Pete’s horrified stare. Was that Rye’s voice, so ragged and desperate?
“Shite!” Pete rushed to peer through the brush enclosing our hidden camp. His shoulders stiffened at whatever he saw.
Seized by some commanding instinct, I brushed Pete aside to see what was happening with my own eyes. The town square teemed with beyns of every race, organizing themselves in straight lines like automatons. More were unwittingly joining them.
Shit on a shingle! Is that what that curse seed would’ve done to me?
Most of the beyns were youthful and lovely. Several were ten years from elderhood. More than a few were in mid-puberty. All of them were still in their bedclothes, and none of them spoke as the team of armed Dananns I’d seen at the tavern last night, now all dressed in the uniform of their profession, chained them together with glowing ropes.
I searched for Maggie in the ranks but couldn’t find her. The cursed were too numerous.
The keening we’d heard came from the beyns’ loved ones—ceylas, parents,children. At least the ones who’d seen what was happening. The rest would be shattered to wake and discover a family member or friend had been cursed and taken as they slept.
“Please, sir!” Rye entreated, breaking my heart. He wore only a pair of breeches, his intricate navy wings flapping double-time beside one of the bustling slavers—a disheveled Howlite. “You can’t turn Maggie slave! You’ve known her for years!”
“Aye!” Howlite snarled, spinning on Rye and stopping him short. “And this is how my decades of friendship and patronage are rewarded? I’m attacked in my private chamber, my entire year’s earnings burnt to cinders! Tell me,friend, how long have you and yon ceyla been sheltering abolitionist foes under my nose?”
I jerked toward Pete, jaw hanging.
Sure, I understood why Howlite would be angry about what I’d done to him. He wasn’t that far off, deeming me an abolitionist who’d weaseled her way into his room to deprive him of riches and make a point. Whether that was my original intent when I’d met him, that’s what I’d wound up doing. But never in a million years would I have guessed he’d blame and seek to punish anyone else for my behavior. Let alone a whole fucking village!
