Page 13 of Curse of Darkness
The enormous warlord has spent every spare waking hour with his twin brother since Lysander was returned to us.
I feel his grief. It matches mine. We’ve both lost the person we loved most in the world, and there’s some comfort in that. Baylor doesn’t push me. He never speaks of what happened, he never insists I need to pull myself together. He understands that I just want to be left alone to pretend I have some sort of semblance of life still beating in my chest.
Does the same crushing weight fill him too?
“He spoke this morning,” he continues. “He’s beginning to put sentences together.”
Sentences are good. Sentences are proof there’s a rational mind locked within that creature.
“What did he say?”
The knife pauses. “He… wanted to know who the girl was. The one who was crying in the yard the other day.”
The words lock me in place.
It hasn’t been easy bringing Amaya into my life.
She’s my daughter, but she’s still a stranger in so many ways. I’m not the one who sang to her or taught her how to hunt. I’m not the one who dried her eyes, or patched her bleeding knees. I’m not the one who kissed her goodnight as I drew the covers over her every night.
No. That was Old Mother Hibbert, and now she’s dead.
Because of me.
Because she took my child off an old stone altar in the forest and raised her as her own.
Because she loved her when I couldn’t.
The hardest moment of this entire ordeal was telling Amaya that Old Mother Hibbert had been killed by the creatures who kidnapped her. I think some part of her had known, but to wonder about it is different than hearing it stated. Those words nailed any of her last hopes in a coffin and buried them. She’d wiped her gleaming eyes, her lip quivering, but she’d nodded abruptly.
And then she’d said, “I want to be alone.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth.” Baylor’s golden eyes meet mine. The twins aren’t fae, even though the form they wear is. I don’t know exactly what they are. Shapeshifters of some description, wearing faces that look like mine, with the same slightly tapered ears. But while you might mistake them for fae, there’s… something that makes your blood run cold when you look at them.
It’s like being trapped in a cage with a pair of wolves.
Handsome wolves.
There’s always a hint of their former heritage in their eyes. A wildness. A hunger. The howling of an ancient moon…. Once upon a time Baylor was one of the hounds who served the Grimm One, and I can still see it in the vicious glint in his savage eyes. “I told him that we’d managed to rescue Amaya. We managed to fulfil his final mission.”
A snarl comes from the cage, and a muscle in Baylor’s jaw twitches as his gaze cuts that way. “I told him that his prince sacrificed his life in order to save her….”
“How did he take it?”
Baylor’s face closes down. “As expected.”
As expected. I momentarily close my eyes.Badly, then.
Lysander paces, his lip curling as those hot amber eyes lock upon me like he’d spring at me if there weren’t a row of bars between us.
It breaks my heart that my mother did this to him.
Ever since the Mother of Night broke the curse that kept my memories locked away, they’ve been coming back to me.
Lysander was my friend once.
And then my mother took him, and she warped him with her magic, and every day she killed him even as she wore my visage and taunted him with my intention to betray Thiago. Every night, when he arose from death, he had to face the promise that I was sent to lead Thiago to his doom.
