Page 11 of The Cursed

“I don’t even stand a chance, do I?” I asked, grinding my teeth together. I’d known there was a slim possibility of escape when I made the deal, but his assurance and casual ease made a pit sink in my gut.

“Only a fool would dare to underestimate you, my love,” he said, leaning toward me as I shoved off the tree and sprinted into the wood line.

I didn’t dare look behind me to see if he’d followed, unable to hear anything beyond the pounding of my own heart and desperation filling my veins. As I ran, I waited for the familiar sound of him following behind me, for the sound of his rapid footsteps as I leapt over a tree root and kept going.

I rounded a fallen tree, glimpsing the clearing behind me for a brief second before I spun forward and focused on the path to escape.

Where the devil had once stood was empty.

Gray was gone.

7

GRAY

Willow ran, sprinting through the trees. The feeling of her magic washed over me, her connection to the land pulsing through the forest with a strength I hadn’t felt in centuries. Susannah’s daughter had possessed magic like this, that deep connection that went further than anything I could offer.

This was the magic of love. Of mutual respect that came from a symbiotic relationship, which could never be taught. Willow was one with the earth around her, in a way that would have been a tragedy to have taken from her.

Which was why I never would have followed through if she had chosen to reject our deal.

I might have kept her locked away in a room on the upper floors of Hollow’s Grove and sealed off any windows so she couldn’t escape, but I couldn’t have taken this part of her away.

Not knowing just how severely it would have broken her. Where others might have wanted to control the fire in her veins, I only wanted to watch her learn how to embrace what it was to burn.

I strolled through the woods, keeping my pace casual so as to give her a fighting chance—or the illusion of one. Her wrath would reach an all-time high when shethoughtshe could make it.

When victory was just outside her grasp, I would snatch it away from her.

Willow needed to know that I was her only home. That her future started and ended with me. I would tolerate nothing less than an eternity with her by my side, guiding her along the path she’d always been destined to walk.

I listened, hearing each and every branch crack as she ran over it. Listening to the leaves rustling at her feet and using them to place her. The Cursed kept their distance as I walked among them, having learned their lesson previously when they came upon the corpses of their dead. The witch was mine, and I would not allow them to hurt her for the crimes of her ancestor.

Immersing myself in the place that Willow felt most at home, I tried to sink down into that part of the magic that I’d shared with her ancestor. Even recognizing the call of the magic, the love that Willow felt for the earth wasn’t what resided inside of me. The love she had was missing from my very being.

Perhaps it was because I’d spent so many centuries separated from it, unable to touch any of my magic. But to me, it was a tool to be used.

For Willow, it was a part of her—a part she would miss every day of her life, for if it was lost.

A smile drifted over my face as I continued on my path. I ran my fingers over a leaf, feeling it crumple beneath my fingers while I waited for the Witchling, who would have felt that loss as if it were her own.

Feeling her approach the center of the woods, I ran forward. With the same speed I’d used that day in the woods outside her childhood home, I easily sprinted through the trees. I quickly passed Willow, standing in the path she would need to cross if she wanted to reach her freedom.

Freedom that did not exist for her.

Leaning my back against a tree, I waited for the witchling to reach me. For the moment her hope dissipated into nothing. She’d unknowingly come to the perfect place for our final battle, a clearing where the sun drifted through the canopy of trees to illuminate the ground in soft sunshine and warmth. I enjoyed the feeling of it on my skin, the comfortable warmth that was so at odds with what this body remembered in Hell.

How long had it been since I truly felt the sun?

A figure appeared in the distance, walking toward me slowly as if she didn’t want me to hear her. She knew how keen the hearing of a Vessel was, but Willow had no understanding of my abilities in this form. She was very much a witch who liked to know her opponent before a battle, but in this, she knew nothing, and it showed in her awkward gait. She made far too much noise as she stumbled through the autumn leaves on the forest floor, shuffling toward me. The changes in her body were evident with how she struggled, and I knew it would take her some time to learn to control her newfound strength and what that meant for completing the simplest of tasks.

If she wasn’t careful, she could crack her teeth when attempting to brush them. She could snap a pen when she simply tried to grab it.

It wasn’t until she walked into the sun shining through the trees above that I realized what the clever, deceptive little witch had done.

The creature, which was not my wife, had been crafted from fallen branches, and she’d somehow managed to bind them together, spelling them to shuffle forward on two tree stumps for legs. She’d tied grass to the head, mimicking her hair from a distance, but as the sun landed on it, it shared none of the shine of her deep raven tresses.

The noises I’d heard had been this thing stumbling through the woods without eyes to see, animated only by the blood she’d smeared along the bark to share her magic.

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