Page 79 of The Prince's Curse

Chapter 18

He came for me!

The house she’d lived in for most of her life was shaking, under attack by vampires, filled with the smell of magic, and she was grinning like a silly schoolgirl at the thought of Julian Alcott coming to rescue her.

Focus! she scolded herself.

Sure, she’d sort of beaten him to the punch, but it was still a nice thought.

Through the walls, she heard Lux’s panicked voice saying, “Ms. Voss, we have to go now. Shea can track her down, but we can’t lose you. The hunter has the car ready for you.”

Somewhere else in the house, someone was cursing furiously in what sounded like French, while someone else shouted, Someone’s leaving!

She had a job to do, and she was going to do it. Gritting her teeth, she pulled Kova after her, but he stopped abruptly at the door to Tante Mina’s workshop. His lips curled back in a grimace as he recoiled. “Her magic protects it,” he said. “Please hurry.”

Leaving him behind, she dashed into the workshop, where the air still smelled of tea with honey, her aunt’s light perfume, and the musty decaying smell of Mina’s magic. And mixed into it was something she almost missed at first.

Her blood.

Frowning, she approached Mina’s workbench and found several corked vials of thick red. Uncorking them bowled her over with the scent of dhampir blood—her blood. Had she drawn blood while Scarlett was unconscious? The deviousness of it paled in comparison to the sense of violation.

She had to laugh at herself. If Julian’s insane story was true, then the woman who’d raised her, becoming almost an adoptive mother, had not only been lying to her for her entire life, but had magically engineered her death not just once but at least six times through dark magic that tethered her soul and forced her to reincarnate again and again.

And she was upset about some stolen blood?

Priorities, Scarlett. She didn’t know what Mina intended, but she didn’t intend to leave the option. She grabbed the vials, then yanked open the refrigerator in the corner of the room. There she found several mixtures inside, but no more blood.

Her stomach churned as she closed the door. Kova’s voice startled her so badly she yelped. “Unplug it. Make sure she can’t use any of it,” he said.

She nodded and pulled the big appliance away from the wall before unplugging it. Then she surveyed the shelves. Where the hell did she even start? The shelves were heavy laden with books and journals. Several large leather-bound books lay open on the workbench, and she froze when she saw one that was propped up on a stand, a red ribbon laid between its pages.

Her head swam as she approached. For a split second, she saw those terrible black tendrils again, slithering across the walls, over the pages, and a voice whispered in her ear.

That’s not for you, little one.

Gritting her teeth, she went to the book and started flipping the pages. That strange voice hissed in her ear again, and she whipped her head around to find that no one was there. Still, there was an unpleasant sensation of crawling over her skin, and she was sure that she would look down to see spiders skittering across the pages.

With shaking hands, she turned the pages back and forth. Something urged her forward, and then a single word caught her eye.

Brigitte.

There in Mina’s neat hand, that name again. Written beneath a strange geometric drawing, surrounded in paragraphs of scrawled cursive German that she didn’t understand. That name, the one Julian told her she’d borne—no, not her, the woman who looked like her—the one that his lover had carried.

And pinned to the page with a little sewing pin was a lock of red hair, coiled neatly and tied with a red ribbon. Her throat closed off as she bowed her head to sniff at the page. Amidst the smell of old paper and Mina’s perfume was Scarlett’s scent. And stranger still…the faintest hint of Julian Alcott, as if he’d touched the lock of hair.

Panic swelled up in her chest as she reeled back from the page. Confusing images swirled through her head, red eyes and tangled spiderwebs and broken bones and dripping blood and flames and then it was all too fast, too loud, too bright to comprehend. She pressed her hands to her face, gasping for air.

“Scarlett!” Kova said sharply. “Look at me.”

She couldn’t catch her breath. This was too much. She was losing her fucking mind, that was what was happening.

“Scarlett,” he said again. “Just like when we went running in the woods. You have to breathe.”

Closing her eyes, she tried to focus on a blank screen. These dreams, fears, memories, whatever they were…they existed only in her mind, or at worst, somewhere in the past.

When she opened her eyes, her heart still raced, but she could see clearly again. She closed the spellbook and held it close to her chest. “What else?”

“As much as you can carry,” Kova said. His head snapped around suddenly, and he said, “Julian, wait?—”

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