11
The Guardian Curse
Melody
I slam into the ground, my breath ripped from my chest. Blair, Aris, and I scatter across unforgiving concrete.
Concrete.
The human world. The portal threw us back into the human world.
My fingers scrape the gray pavement, grit digging into my skin. I blink as the stench of garbage hits me, sour and heavy, and I, with my half-fae senses awoken, catch the faint scuttling of rats weaving through scraps. An alley. A restaurant’s trash container looms beside us.
I shove myself to my feet, dizziness making the world sway.
And I feel it—the absence. My magic, I still have it, I still feel it burning inside me, but I can’t access it.
Fae can’t wield magic here. Caryan once told me that.
Only angels can. Fae can harvest it from other magical creatures and decant it into some kind of vessel, like a flacon, to use it to hide their faeish appearance, like their sharp ears, but they can’t summon it.
I twist my head to look at Blair, but Aris and I are alone.
“Where’s Blair?” Fear squeezes my heart, that we somehow left her behind. “I saw her falling with us. A second ago, she was still next to me.”
“ The portal probably transported her somewhere close by,” Aris soothes me. “She will be alright. But we need to get going. I know about Lyrian and his henchmen, the wolf shifters dwelling in the human world.”
Aris’s voice is dead serious as he brings up my past, and for a second, I gasp. He knows. He knows my past. About Lyrian and how he locked me away. Caryan probably shared it with him over the bond they had. Caryan, who can see everything a person has lived through when he drinks their blood.
I try not to feel betrayed. Naked. I would have told Aris myself sooner or later, but having it thrown into my face….
I swallow down the ugly cocktail of emotions when Aris continues. “It’s possible that they know about our arrival. Some artifacts can sense a portal, even in the human world. We need to run. Quickly.”
He’s right. I force myself to my feet and scoop him up into my arms.
“I can walk,” he protests.
“This is a city, and you’re still in your baby-dragon form. Can you shift here? Like turn into a dog?”
“No. I have no inherent magic. I draw wild magic from the air or soil, but there is none here, so I can’t,” he answers begrudgingly.
He’s heavy, his weight pulling me down, but I hold him tight, wrapping my jacket around him to cover his dragonly body and face.
“If humans see you, you go slack, and I’ll pretend you’re a stuffed emotional support animal, alright?
” I wait for his grunt that I accept as his agreement.
“Oh, get over yourself. With my medieval-style dress, stained like this, I probably look like a lunatic,” I shoot back, then I run, tumbling out of that alleyway and into the fray of cars and lights and people.
Headlights hit me, and I stagger back, my eyes, with their night vision, having trouble adjusting to the sudden impossible brightness.
Hells, I’ve never been in a city. Lyrian kept me on his property, in an area I won’t even be able to find on a map, because he never told me where we were.
I could only make a vague guess, because I knew the name of the next tiny town, but honestly, once I looked it up, I found at least five towns with the same name on various continents.
Honking startles me out of my stupor, while exhaust and fumes assault my senses.
Shit, I never realized how loud it is. How much the human world stinks.
Smog. Iron. Detergents. Perfumes. Growing up at Lyrian’s, in the seclusion of the valley he owned, surrounded only by greenery, nothing could have prepared me for this.
But now it breaks over me like a feverish deluge.
Cars are racing past. People are bumping against me.
Noise. I feel my heart racing. My head is swimming from panic.
From too many sensations. I have the vague feeling of Aris pressing himself against me.
He nudges me with his cold snout. I get it.
We’ve got to move. Now. I force my legs to take steps.
To walk. My gait feels wonky, though. Uneven.
Or is it the world? Everything is just too much.
Fuck, where am I? I have no idea where to go.
“The woods,” Aris says into my head, probably hearing my wild thoughts.
“I think we are in Seattle. Or Portland. I can sense the poles. I have been to the human world before, although it was a very long time ago. A lot has changed, but the woods around the city will still be intact. We will hide there, cover our tracks. They will be looking for us in the city.”
I nod. The woods sound like a solid plan. Soothing, quiet. I just need to get there.
I fall into a jog, clutching Aris tightly to my chest. He’s damn heavy, but hells would I show it after what he did for me.
I weave in and out between people, swimming through a sea of auras that makes it hard to differentiate traffic lights, or car lights, or all the other things from them.
Twice, I almost get run over by a car. My new fae reflexes be damned when my other enhanced senses make it all the harder to concentrate.
But I run on, fueled by the panic that floods my system, as vivid as it had been back then, with Lyrian.
We only slow a little when we finally reach a kind of industrial area.
Somewhere on the way, the traffic became scarcer.
Instead, the smell of chemicals, iron, and oil intensified until I can feel a headache coming on.
Factories. That’s what must be on the left and right, towering over the deserted street.
There are no more people around. The area is dead out here, full of dark corners and niches and wide, yawning streets fenced by high brick walls and windowless buildings.
I allow myself to walk slower, to catch my breath.
We’ve been running for almost an hour straight.
I know it’s nothing for a fae, but I’m only a half-fae, and my lungs burn and every muscle aches. I’m exhausted.
“Just a minute,” I say to Aris after I put him down next to me.
His head snaps around, his ears perk up. A second later, he’s hurtled into a dark alleyway by a white blur, and before I can react, I’m thrown against a brick wall. My head collides with the stone, and my skull rings. I taste blood in my mouth.
Fae. Fae who smell like wet dog. A sound slices through the air.
A howl. Another follows. And another. Wolves.
Shifters. The air hums with the sound of claw against concrete, moving closer.
Panic claws up my throat as the man behind me buries taloned hands in my hair and slams my head against the wall so hard pain sings through my cheekbone.
“Asshole.”
I react out of instinct and training. I strike, bringing my elbow back at the fae still pinning me to the wall. He spits blood and stumbles back. I follow up with a kick to his ribs. They crack, and he drops on his ass.
Aris.
I hear him fighting behind me—his snarl colliding with the unmistakable growl of wolf. Fuck. We’re dead. The night splits with the sound of something much bigger growling. Something like a wolf, but…
A giant of a man, bald-headed and muscle-bound, barrels toward me.
A new kind of terror fuels me. I slam my open palm into his face, just enough to make him back off before I bolt toward the alley.
“Aris!” I scream. He’s cornered by two massive creatures—wolves, but somehow upright. Their bodies are hairy, their heads a weird fusion of wolf and fae. Sharp claws protrude from their hands, and their snouts are filled with jagged teeth. They’ll kill him. And I can do nothing. Not without magic.
I prepare to throw myself at the first one, ready to kill with my bare hands, when something grabs me and hurls me aside, as if I weigh nothing.
I hit the ground hard, fabric scraping and ripping.
My head jerks up the moment I recover—and all I see is silver glinting in the dirty streetlight before disappearing into the fray.
Growls. Then whining. The sound of slashing that makes my stomach churn.
My heart squeezes with hope when Blair stops her death-dance long enough for me to see her true form—not just a blur of white hair and silver claws.
She’s found clothes, human ones—but she’s never looked less human.
Blood covers her white hair and most of her long-sleeved white shirt.
Something that looks like intestines falls from her clawed hands when she opens her fist. They hit the ground with a disgusting, wet thud.
I scramble to my feet just as she kicks the guy next to me hard enough that I hear his skull crack. I watch with a strange mix of awe and horror as she digs her claws into the throat of the fourth —the one I kicked in the ribs, still half-transformed, all-steroid wolf-man.
“What the hells are they?” I gasp as he gurgles blood and slumps down, blood spurting from the fatal wound.
Blair glances at her claws, lips puckering as if she just broke a nail rather than massacring four wolf-men.
She’s so unfazed, so detached, I swallow hard.
Maybe I should get used to this. To killing. To being fae.
“Wolf shifters. Modified by dark magic,” she spits, as if the words themselves are poison. Then her shocking amber eyes snap to me. “We’re even. Caryan was right—you’re like a puppy without magic.”
Her comment stings, more than I’m ready to admit. Maybe because she’s right—and I hate that. “Oh yeah? Fuck you.”
“A thank you would do just fine, you little brat.”
“As you said—we’re even. Last I checked, you were ready to sell me like a piece of furniture.” I scramble to my feet just as Aris walks out of the alley, unharmed, whole. All I want is to tug him close and never let go. But I pause. His tongue rolls out to lick blood from his chin—as if he just....
“Do not look at me like that.”