Page 64 of Cursed Touch
Noises boomed around them as Brandy called back, “Car?”
“What the hell is going on?” a woman asked, her phone in hand as she recorded the mess.
Carter met Brandy’s eyes as she raised one hand in the air.
“No, wait! I think I can help,” a woman called.
Everything became muted once more as Brandy froze the café and hurried toward him, with the woman in tow. “What’s wrong?” Brandy asked, her eyes flitting nervously toward the woman.
At that moment, he did not care if every human in the city witnessed him heal, so long as he could make Vanessa better again. “It’s not working,” he stated, emotions clogging his throat.
“Did the lycan do that?” the woman asked, cementing she knew about their supernatural world.
Carter nodded.
The woman pinched her lips and looked around. She spotted something in the open cooler, and he watched her run to it and return with a bottle of spring water. She twisted the cap and tipped the bottle over Vanessa’s growing wound.
“Here, now get her to drink some,” the woman ordered.
“I’m not sure that’s going to—” Brandy gasped as he poured the water into Vanessa’s mouth. “What the hell is in that water?”
He had heard his sister clearly, but he was too focused on Vanessa to ask any sort of clarifying questions. Indeed, the wound on her chest began to heal, and within seconds, her lids fluttered again.
With her recovery, all his other senses came online.
Chapter 29
“She needs to drink more,” a woman ordered, and a bottle pressed against Vanessa’s lips.
She did not know what was happening. Was she in hell? Heaven? Some other alternate reality for witches’ mates?
One minute, she was looking at her phone and waiting on her croissant sandwich while Carter went to look for Brandy, and the next, she was being ripped open. The painful memory had her touching the skin, now raised and wet, as she swallowed another mouthful of water.
She pushed the bottle away and sat up. Brandy, Carter, and the woman stared back. It was the woman Vanessa had noticed when she and Carter had first entered because of the flower in her wavy hair.
“Are you okay?” Brandy asked.
“Sweetheart, how do you feel?” Carter asked.
The woman offered Vanessa a kind smile as she replied to the others. “What happened?”
“You didn’t sense him when he came in. I didn’t think he’d attack with all the humans here, but he didn’t seem to care.”
“Who are you?” Brandy asked.
“I’m Mia,” she said, absently glancing at the still room. “We should probably do something abouthimbefore you risk shorting your magic.”
Mia’s beauty was ethereal and made Vanessa think of mystical beings like sprites, pixies, and nymphs. Energy pulsed from her the same as it did from Carter and Brandy, something Vanessa was beginning to notice and assign to witches. She was not sure when she started feeling the distinction, but there, on the floor of Brandy’s café, half lying on Carter with Brandy and Mia kneeling at her side, she knew the difference.
Mia offered Brandy a hand after rising to her feet. The woman smirked when Brandy ignored her hand and rose.
“No offense,” Brandy muttered and brushed past Mia.
Through Carter, Vanessa had learned that his sister was one of the most powerful witches around—if notthemost powerful. Mia probably sensed it, but she did not show any signs of being bothered in the slightest over the fact.
The lycan’s face unfroze, his bloody claw still outstretched. “What the—”
“No more fucking games. You just came into a café filled with humans and attacked her,” Brandy snapped, one hand pointing at Vanessa as her face remained focused on the lycan. “Why? And don’t you give me some sort of bullshit answer, because contrary to popular belief, I can do this all fucking day,” she said.
