Once Bitten (Cursebreakers, Inc. #4)

Chapter 1

Wren

Little Bird,

I don’t know if you’ll ever get this. I don’t know if writing this is even smart. But I can’t leave without trying.

I’m sorry for breaking our promise.

We should have left when we had the chance. Flown away and never returned. You were right but I was a coward. I’m still a coward. You were always so much braver than me.

There’s so many things I want to say. So many things I couldn’t tell you that I should have that may have changed the course of our fate.

But now it’s too late. He’s waiting outside the door and I know he won’t let me come back.

He’ll take me far, far away and he said you’ll be gone too. They already have something in mind.

I don’t want to imagine a life where you’re not there. I used to count your breaths as you slept and now I won’t even know where you are. It kills me. You always said I was a crybaby and I guess that’s true. Now I can’t stop.

Forbidden relationships always end in tragedy, after all. I was too na?ve.

All I can do now is what I’ve always done.

Protect you as best I can.

Even if it has to be from a distance.

I hope I can get this to you somehow. One day. I won’t stop trying so you at least know that I didn’t want to leave you. I would have chosen forever if I could.

Your Teddy.

Little Bird,

My hand can’t stop shaking as I write this.

You were there. Right in front of me. Not a dream or a figment of my imagination this time.

I know it was real because I can’t forget the look on your face. The hurt. The one thing I never wanted to cause you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’d write it a million times if it would heal some of the damage. Maybe the letter I wrote all those years ago can, or maybe it’s too late.

I don’t know what to do.

I can’t believe you were so close. All this time you were just an hour away. Just a city over. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

How cruel fate’s tricks are.

All I wanted was to sprint after you. It took everything in me not to but…now it seems like you have others to do that. A family. Just like we always talked about.

In all my dreaming, our reunion never looked like this. So static and cold. But the time between us seems insurmountable and we’re strangers now.

Wren.

That’s your name now.

At first it hurt to hear it. You’ve always been my little bird, so calling you anything else is foreign and unwelcome. I’m selfish. Holding on to that version of you like you’re still mine. Like I have any right.

I hope you claimed that name for yourself and you don’t resent it, that it was your choice when so many others were taken from you.

But quietly, more selfishly, I hope that when you chose that name you thought of me, even fleetingly. That you’re still a little bird…even if you’re no longer mine.

I have so much more to say but I don’t think I should bother you any longer. This letter was the least I owed you and I’m sorry I couldn’t get it to you sooner.

I’m sorry for a lot of things.

In my world the sun used to rise twice. Outside of the window and in my arms.

Now it doesn’t rise at all.

That was, until I saw you again.

I hope my brief presence in your life again wasn’t an eclipse.

Still your Teddy.

“Are you still my Teddy?” Wren whispered, dashing the tears from his cheeks before they could hit the paper.

It was already too worn. It hadn’t left his grip since he’d received it, too scared to open it, yet unable to let it out of his sight.

The midnight hours he usually spent haunting the halls of their house or venturing out into the woods were now a ritual. A veneration and a wake all wrapped up in one. His stitched heart didn’t know whether to hope for healing or bleed out.

He didn’t know if he ever would have opened it if he hadn’t gone back to Nexus.

And now he couldn’t close it.

“Teddy!” was chirped with a melodic avian whistle. “Teddy bear!”

Wren froze, ice running down his spine and crystallizing him. He could barely react as Blu hopped onto his knee with twitching wings, as if searching.

“Teddy. Where’s Teddy?” the bird parroted, like they were back to that fateful night, before Wren had stopped saying that name. Before Blu had stopped repeating it.

“Teddy’s gone,” Wren whispered.

“Gone,” Blu chirped, nudging his shaking hand with his beak. “Don’t cry. Can’t sleep.”

The soft click of a door made Wren’s breath hitch and he hastily stuffed the note into the neck of his oversized hoodie next to the warm body of a slumbering snake he had named Noodle, and gave Blu their hand signal to stop talking.

He glanced over his shoulder through the darkness and caught Midas’s tall shape silhouetted against the dim, amber light from the hallway.

Wren couldn’t see his dark eyes, but he felt them on him, his heart slamming against his rib cage at the thought of what he might have seen or heard.

He looked away, down at the expensive coverlet where Blu had hopped off to nestle in a crease in the fabric with his feathers puffed up and his eyes closed.

Midas shut the door, plunging them into darkness before a small side lamp was flicked on, the reds and golds from the stained glass hitting the walls and ceiling.

It wasn’t enough to fill the room with light, and Wren was grateful.

He listened as Midas rustled around his room, removing his leather jacket and shoes before slipping into a simple pair of black silk pajama pants and a matching robe.

He left the robe tie hanging, leaving his tawny chest bare, and Wren caught sight of the spiderweb of scars that traveled down his neck, left over from his accident.

He didn’t know which of them had the other beat on the scar count these days.

Midas slipped onto the stool at his vanity, reaching behind him to let his hair down.

It fell with a glossy bounce, shimmering onyx waves that made hair models (and Taylor) jealous.

He reached for his hairbrush, but fumbled the thick wooden handle slightly, making it spin into a nearby glass bottle of cologne and causing a domino effect of vanity chaos.

Midas’s brow furrowed and he curled his hand into a fist.

Wren frowned as he watched him stiffen and stay that way, vibrating slightly as he stared straight ahead at the mess. Midas was particular, but he wasn’t uptight and prissy like Hart, so the reaction was strange.

“You okay?” Wren signed into the mirror.

Midas’s eyes flicked up at the movement and Wren repeated the sign again.

“Fine,” Midas signed back, straightening and shaking his hair over his shoulders like nothing had happened.

Wren continued to frown as he watched him tidy up, meticulously putting everything back in place and not allowing any items to touch. He took up his hairbrush and began brushing.

Wren watched the hypnotic movements, scooching back to lean against the headboard with his knees drawn up and his arms lying across them. Noodle shifted, slithering up his chest a little.

This was familiar. He couldn’t count the number of nights he had spent like this with his eyes burning from lack of sleep. It wasn’t enough to tug his heavy eyelids closed, no matter how much he wished, but it was enough to switch his brain off for a short while.

He could feel Noodle breathing against his stomach, warm like a water bottle after absorbing his heat. And digging into his hip…the letter.

His fingers twitched to touch it. To trace the curve of every word. Teddy had always had the prettiest writing, unlike Wren’s scribbled notes.

No.

Not Teddy.

Damir.

How could he be the same after all this time?

Wren’s mind hadn’t stopped spinning since he’d seen him again. His whole perception of what had happened had completely shifted on its axis.

He didn’t notice Midas rounding the four-poster bed and settling on the other side of him until the mattress shifted. Wren didn’t turn his head, but glanced at him from the corner of his eye behind his silver-white braid of hair.

“You read it,” Midas signed simply.

Wren swallowed hard. “Read what?”

Midas rolled his eyes.

“Hey. If you can lie, I can too, Mr. I’m Fine.”

Midas let that sit between them for a while before he responded. “It’s a headache. That’s all.”

“From an object?”

“Yes.”

“Painkillers won’t work on this one?”

Midas grimaced and leaned back against the headboard, mirroring Wren, then he sighed. “Not this one.”

Wren hummed in sympathy. Neither of them were complainers. Fix had to follow them around with thermometers and bandages whenever they weren’t forthcoming, fussing over them like a mother hen.

It was a little easier to breathe now Liam was on the scene. Fix’s boy kept his mothering tendencies focused elsewhere. But it was still hard to slip anything by him.

“Are you going to write him back?” Midas signed into the quiet.

Wren’s heart stuttered in fear and his breathing picked up.

Midas glanced over at him with that deep, assessing gaze. Wren couldn’t meet it, just kept staring at Midas’s fingers instead.

“He’s probably waiting for a reply.”

Was he? Was he obsessing over every word and look that had passed between them in that short time like Wren was? Was he breathless every time the mail was delivered, only to feel such sinking disappointment that he wanted to crawl into a hole just so he could breathe again?

“I remember him from Nexus.”

That made Wren finally look up. Any pretending was out of the window, his face an open book. “You do?” he asked, signs as small as his voice would have come out.

“Gossip gets around, and he was popular. Most people at least knew of him. I remember no one was surprised when he ended up in interpersonal curses,” Midas said. “I think Hart recognized him too, when he first turned up.”

Wren fidgeted with his braid for a second. “They would have taken the same classes, even though they weren’t in the same year.”

Midas read his lips before flicking his eyes back up. “I also heard stories about this feral kid who used to follow him around.”

Wren’s hand stilled.