Betrayal in the Cursed City

Chapter 1

The sun is setting over Astera, and I am dying.

“It’s about your brother…” My voice is garbled by all the blood pooling in my mouth.

Deacon—all hulking, demonic, six foot six inches of him—drags me through grime and snow to hurl me inside his club.

I land hard and my body shrieks in pain.

Another bout of hacking results in a gory splatter of red on Fever Dream’s polished concrete floors.

Baz follows Deacon inside, as silent and looming as a shadow, his dark hair hanging mournfully in front of his face.

He looks wary of me—violet eyes flitting back and forth between my crumpled, shivering body and his menacing boss.

A baby-faced bartender leans over the bar with interest, fangs jutting from his mouth at the sight of my blood.

An elegant, bronze-skinned acrobat peers up from her stretches on the raised dais where the DJ equipment stands.

“Speak,” Deacon commands. His pale eyes fixate on the sizzled flesh of my back—the place where I carry the deadliest spell known to man.

“The Brood…” My lungs crackle with each word. “When Reid—”

“What’s all that noise?” When I turn toward the voice I find Ward, the handsome werewolf bartender I met a week ago, coming out from a swinging door behind the bar. He’s holding a dishrag and a bottle of gin. His earthy green eyes widen at the sight of me. “Snow White?”

Deacon ignores him. “What happened to my brother, Vivienne?”

At that Ward straightens, leaves the bottle and rag on the bar top, and stalks over to Deacon’s side.

“He’s at the docks,” I wheeze. “Finn, the High Thane’s son, has him. Please, they’re going to—” I cough again. Dim lights and Grecian columns and the lofted ceiling swirl around me. “They’re going to kill him.”

A curse rips from Deacon, the sound rumbling through the club like an earthquake.

Despite my best efforts, I cower at the fury rippling off his broad shoulders and stern jaw.

“Heal her,” he commands. I’m not sure who he’s talking to, because my sight has faded into bursts and splotches.

When I can no longer hold myself up, I slump to the floor.

Before consciousness slips away from me, I’m lifted by ice-cold hands. From the weak hum beneath my skin, I know it’s a deviant, but I’m too depleted to squirm away.

“Don’t let any Brood in tonight,” Deacon growls.

“Not until we return. And nobody breathes a word of this outside these walls, yeah?” Quiet murmurs of agreement.

“And for the love of Christ,” Deacon barks to whoever is holding me.

Baz, I’d guess, from the vampiric chill of his skin.

“Don’t let her bleed all over the lounge. ”

With that, two sets of feet file outside before the massive front doors swing closed with a hideous thud.

“Will they save him?” I don’t care what happens to me. But Reid, but Reid—

I don’t hear Baz’s response. Only the rushing of my desperate heartbeat, the shimmering twinkle of the syrabraxa below my skin, and the gentle thump of club music. Something warm and wet brushes my lips, and an endless void swallows me whole.

I awake like a thunderclap. Snapping upright, gasping for air, clutching at my chest in awe that I am whole and I am breathing.

Amid the darkness, it takes me a second to figure out where I am—sitting atop a still-made bed, the room lit by city lights through a softly draped window.

It’s some kind of luxurious guest room within Fever Dream.

Then the pain hits. A wicked throb down my spine. Like I slept funny but for the better half of a millennium. I try to stretch my neck and back to no avail. In fact, I think I make things worse.

And then, the memories…

Reid. Body bruised and bleeding. Crimson claws bared, already dripping with gore. Facing off against Finn and his men so I’d have a shot at survival. So Penny could have a shot at survival.

“It’s time I pay for my sins.” That’s what he’d said to me. With that look in his eyes. Acceptance. Self-sacrifice. As if his death would be a fair trade for simply being what he is…

If he died for me—if he died feeling he deserved to—

The heartbreak is enough to sever me in two.

But I force it down, deep within some sealed-off corridor of my soul.

Reid is alive. He has to be. Deacon is more formidable than any demon I’ve known—to have the kind of power he does without ever joining the Brood?

To have taken so many hunter souls that he can scent them?

And I may have been slipping away from consciousness, but I know I saw real fury on his face when I told him the Brood had his brother.

I have to have faith that he can put that rage to good use. That he can bring Reid home.

The thought of who Deacon will have to face—the High Thane and his sadist son—bends the pain in my back into something different. An insistent charge. Enough that I climb from the bed as if urged to do so, panic still warbling in my heart.

Reid, Reid, Reid—

I force myself not to think of his churning, deep-sea-blue eyes, but instead to focus on my bare feet and how they press into hardwood.

I take a steadying breath and wonder where my boots have gone.

The room smells like fresh linen and clove.

The bedside table is spare—just a vase of white roses, a wooden clock showing the wrong time, and two guttering taper candles in sleek glass holders.

I scan the couch, the desk, and the glittering city through the window. The moon is barely visible in the sky.

The new moon—the only time the High Thane can use the censer he stole from the Windsor and protect himself from the syrabraxa’s madness—has passed.

My heart climbs into my throat. They have a month before the next one.

A month to track me down. The aeon girl who carries the High Thane’s diabolical will inside her body.

I tamp down the rabid urge to flee, to put distance between myself and the Brood. I’m not going anywhere until Deacon returns with Reid.

In the bathroom I flick on the overhead light only to stagger back like a vampire in sunlight. With a little dimming, I’m able to take in my reflection—

Not at my best would be the understatement of the calendar year.

I’ve clearly lost a lot of blood. I look paler than usual, which means practically translucent.

But pastiness and bags under my eyes—even sticky, blood-coated hair—have nothing on the medley of half-healed bruises, cuts, welts, and fresh scars scattered along my body.

It’s amazing I’m not dead. Deacon Graveheart must employ one damn fine doctor.

I stare into my own eyes to prepare myself for what’s next.

The gray of a wolf’s coat, I think. That’s what color my eyes are.

Predator gray. Early-morning-without-a-lick-of-sunshine gray.

Tough-bitch-who-almost-died-but-didn’t-and-isn’t-vain-enough-to-give-a-shit-about-what-she’s-about-to-see gray.

Turning gingerly, I study the skin beneath my torn tank top.

Despite my best efforts to steel myself, breath flees my lungs.

One long, jagged scar, like a road carved into a cliffside, gouges from the knot at the base of my neck all the way down to my tailbone.

Pink flesh the color of underripe fruit.

It’s tender to the touch, and when I strain to look closer, I swear I can see my veins pulsing weakly beneath the skin.

“It’s kind of badass,” a tentative voice says. A deviant, my aeon senses tell me.

I spin, hands moving for my daggers before I realize they’re no longer strapped to me.

“Where are my daggers?” I ask. “Is Deacon back? Where’s Reid?”

The deviant standing in the bedroom doorway is a smaller, soft-cheeked man—the eager vampire from behind the bar.

He closes the door and raises his hands in the universal sign of I come in peace.

“Stag’s not back yet. Your daggers are with Baz.

He didn’t want you waking up all high on his blood and trying to mandoline everyone.

” The vampire pulls out my cell phone and waves it at me. “I was just told to bring you this.”

Baz gave me his blood? To heal me? Revolting. But also, that explains how the gaping wound on my back is already a scar. And how I’m alive, I guess. “You went through my phone?”

The vampire shrugs. “Stag’s orders. Had to make sure your lymantrian overlords weren’t on their way here.”

I wonder if this vampire even knows that if I called for help from Harker, nobody would come.

That the Elders—the highest governing body of the Lymantrian Order—have strict, mysterious rules about letting Deacon and his club stand.

Rules I plan to either make sense of or obliterate, once I save Reid. And myself.

It’s even less clear why the Brood leaves Deacon be. I study the neck of this vampire in front of me to confirm what I already know—none of Deacon’s deviant bartenders, bouncers, or dancers carry the Brood’s brand on their necks, and yet per Reid, the place is safe from the High Thane’s clutches.

In fact, this vampire is freshly turned.

I should have known the minute his fangs popped out at the sight of my blood like a pimply teen getting too excited in health class.

Hardly a threat. If Deacon’s not employing an army of highly trained killers to keep the Brood away, why do they maintain their distance?

Another question to answer once I’m holding Reid in my arms.

Music pulses at a low decibel beneath our feet. I wonder how high up we are to barely hear Fever Dream’s Saturday night crowd at…whatever time it is. “How long was I out?”

The new vampire shifts on his feet. “It’s almost four in the morning.”

Shit. Not good. Hours since I got here and no sign of either Graveheart brother. Somewhere wound tightly inside me, panic swells.