Page 64 of Too Cursed To Kiss
He lay there as I yelled at him. “What the fuck? After all this, you had to choose now to die?” I wanted to beat at him with fists that weren’t in any shape to beat.
He couldn’t be dead.
He couldn’t be. It wasn’t fricking fair. I had gone through all this stupid shit, and now I’d be in prison with no hope of ever getting out, and Wald would still be dead. He had to be not dead or passed or whatever they called it.
Britannia’s body was closer to the door. I’d gotten this far. I could make it there, right? Every fiber of my beingscreamed,No, you can’t do it, Harlan.Give up. It’s over.But I wasn’t giving up on him.
I picked up the marble, and on my third attempt, I stuffed it into my jacket pocket. Agatha’s voice echoed in my head, but I couldn’t move my one working arm across my chest or take the jacket off to check the other pockets. It was probably minutes, but it seemed like an hour before I made it to Britannia.
Britannia’s makeup looked too perfect for it to be real, but she wasn’t breathing. With any luck, she was finally dead or passed or whatever, although that probably meant Wald killed her. For almost a second, I wished she wasn’t. She’d helped Wald before, and maybe she could do something for him. Britannia wasn’t bleeding, or at least there wasn’t blood around her. She’d changed, and her fricking dress had ridden up. Besides the pink garters, she was wearing pink panties with the wordsEat Melabeled in black across her crotch. Bile rocketed up. I screeched with the retching, and it made it worse, choking me with the searing gorge. It was fucking fitting I vomited the remains of the burrito into her hair.
Britannia sat bolt upright and shrieked like a banshee. “What the hell? Did you just throw up IN MY HAIR?” she yelled, clawing at it as if deciding where it would have to be cut off. She kicked me in the stomach with her bare foot, and I doubled over, collapsing on the broken wrist. The air whooshed out of my lungs, and I lay groaning, unable to discern which part hurt the most. My wrist had swollen to double its normal size, and I’d probably cracked a rib or two. It was a miracle that somewhere in the battle Britannia had lost her stilettos. They would have done even more damage.
Britannia finished pawing out the worst of the chunks, then got up. She walked over in ripped stockings and crouched down to wipe her hands on the bottom of my dresslike I was a human dishtowel. She scowled, then moved to Wald, dropping to her knees beside him and covering his lips with hers.
I needed to get there and had no idea how the hell that was happening. I rolled sideways and managed to raise a knee. Crawling was my only hope, but crawling with two damaged hands was impossible. I ended up doing the side-scuttling thing again to get to them. Britannia had her tongue down Wald’s throat, and her hand was down his pants.
I stiffened, shaking with anger and gasping for breath like my lungs had stopped working again. Was she really raping a dead man? With this family’s history, I was not about to second-guess what was possible or likely. Next time, I’d make sure she was dead.
“What the… fuck… are you… doing?” I rasped out between four extremely labored breaths.
She looked up at me but didn’t stop kissing him. A minute later, she pulled her tongue out of him, and my eyes saw what the brain was racing to catch up to. Her bright pink tongue was like five feet long, I guessed, or like an entire tin of roll-up candy. The forked end emerged from Wald’s lips, and it hissed at me before disappearing into Britannia’s mouth. Wald’s eyes snapped open.
Holy crap, he was alive.
I might let Britannia live.
“There, are you happy now?” she asked, getting up, brushing her disgusting hair back, and walking around the dead Devlyn. She picked up the family album.
“You can’t take that,” I rasped.
She gave me a maddening smirk, took the album, and left us there.
I guess asking her to heal me was out of the question.
I snuggled up to Wald, buried my nose in his leather jacket, and closed my eyes.
Safe.
Iwoke up in a car, half sprawled across the backseat. My ribs smarted as I sat up, but they were no longer cracked if they had been before.
Wald was driving. My heart soared. He was alive and well, and I was with him. I smiled like someone had brought me two dozen almost-black, red roses.
There were trees on either side of the highway. It might be afternoon. I rubbed the back of my neck, then looked down at my hand, shocked I could move it at all. The bruise on the wrist bloomed in a spectacular red and purple, but my ability to make normal motions was incredible. Had it all been a dream? I looked down, and the dress was encrusted with dried burrito. There were healing spots on my gashed leg. No, all the shadowy-demon-wizard-monster stuff had really happened.
“Where are we going?” I asked, stuffing my wrist, which should have been in a splint or cast for weeks or months, into my pocket like it had never been damaged.
“I’m taking you home.” Wald replied.
“Your place or mine?” I said, giddy with the fact that he was alive, I was healed-ish, and in my hand was the ring. I held it up in the rearview mirror, and he almost drove off the road, swerving back into the lane at the last second. If the ring wasn’t cracked, the sunlight made it almost pretty.
“Where did you get that?” he snapped.
“Agatha put it in my pocket when I was in the bubble with her.”
He paused. “It’s dangerous to have that in your pocket. Do you still have the marble?”
I nodded.
