Filed To Story: Cursed Legacies Series Free PDF by Morgan B Lee
Selfish incubus! another snarls.
“You must have had a reason,” Maven prompts in Crypt’s memory.
The prick has the nerve to fucking smile. “Must I have?”
Of course, he is so cavalier about ravaging my childhood in one blow. How could I ever have felt sympathy for this sociopathic murderer? Madness seeps deeper into my skull, darkening my paranoid, irritated thoughts until I sway, ears ringing.
When the ringing fades, Crypt is already speaking again.
“—keeper of Silas’s parents’ quintet was a wolf shifter with a sickness. The kind of perverted sickness of the mind that I hunt down at every chance. He enjoyed taking advantage of children, especially the children of powerful legacy families.”
…what?
He’s lying, a voice snaps in my head.
You know how non-fae are, lying whenever they please. He knows nothing.
You would have known this if it were true, another voice assures me.
I want to interrupt Maven and Crypt and insist that can’t be true, but…the voices are wrong this time. Crypt can get inside people’s heads through their dreams and psyches. He would have seen more inside the subconscious of my parents’ keeper than I ever could have witnessed or guessed.
And what reason would he have to lie, in a private moment like this?
“…and when I was in his dreams, exploring his psyche to find the best ways to unravel him, I realized that he had his eye set on…” Crypt trails off, clearly reluctant.
Maven is undeterred. “Set on?”
“Decimus.”
My keeper’s shocked expression mirrors my own as, at long last, I finally hear Crypt explain why he killed my relatives. How he did it. How he has no regrets and only targeted the ones involved in revolting practices before the rest destroyed each other or themselves as a result.
The voices in my head are screeching in fervent denial, refusing his every candid word and making it difficult to focus. But one thought floats out of reach of the tempestuous muck inside my brain: for once in my life, I understand Crypt.
Because had I known what he knew then, and had I been capable of protecting the others from something so wretched when we were all so young…
I understand.
I would have done what he did.
You’re just as hopelessly wretched, a plate-sized spider whispers in agreement as it crawls past in this memory. Either that’s a figment of my mind, or…no. I’m almost certain one was real, this time.
“Crane would never believe me if I told him that,” the Nightmare Prince finishes, drawing my attention again. “He’s much more comfortable hating me for it, so I’ve never bothered explaining.”
“If Baelfire was eight, you would have been…thirteen?” Maven checks.
“Something like that.”
And I was nine.
Nine years old and completely unaware. After my parents’ keeper killed himself, my parents’ quintet kept a united front in public even as they splintered in private. My world inverted. Gone were the proud parents so focused on our family name and my potential future as a favorite of the Immortal Quintet. Instead, their curses slowly returned to center stage. My father went mad, my mother grew uncontrollably violent, and it escalated day by day until they slaughtered each other in front of me.
I blamed Crypt for all of it. I loathed him.
It was your right, voices in my head insist.
He killed us.
He deserves to suffer here. Don’t you dare set the bastard free. He should rot in
?
—
“You decided ignorance would be easier for me to bear,” I finally say aloud, cutting off the voices in my head as I take a chance on this version of Crypt.
It pays off.
The rest of this memory fades like mist on a warm day, but the Nightmare Prince remains, becoming more solid. He’s the version I’m here for.
But when his attention moves to me, I see the same inhuman emptiness on his face that I remember so well from our childhood.
I asked my parents about it once. My mother, a vampire, quietly explained that while it’s not common with modern legacies whose more monstrous instincts are much more evolved, siphons can occasionally completely numb all “non-essential” emotions. She said it would be second nature for a half-monster like the DeLune bastard to choose his monster side, silencing whatever human sentiments he could otherwise be capable of.
At the time, I took it as further proof of his horrid qualities.
Now, it couldn’t be more obvious that he’s simply trying to dull the same agony I have felt for six seemingly endless months. We’ve all mourned Maven differently—but once again, I understand him.
Crypt considers me without care. “Here to kill me, Crane?”
Do it! Kill him! He’s never been weaker! the voices screech in my head, so loudly that I cover one of my ears to see if that will help.
“
Nach. No,” I amend in English.
“Pity.”
The memory-like landscape around us shifts until we’re abruptly standing in the headmaster’s office at Everbound. This is that godsforsaken image of Maven motionless on the ground with Pierce plunged through her heart.
When Crypt sees me flinch at the raw, cruel memory, he smirks in the most inhuman show of amusement.
“It gets worse each time. You’ll know that soon enough since you’re stuck here now. There’s no escape.”
I meet his eye. “On the contrary, I’m here to get you out.”
Except I’ve lost focus, so it comes out jumbled and half Nether-tongue.
“Such articulate company to entertain me for an eternity in purgatory,” he drawls, staring numbly down at our motionless keeper.
Maven.
Perhaps thinking of her will make him shake off his numbed siphon state.
“She’s back,” I say, picking the correct words as carefully as possible. “Maven. She’s alive.”
The incubus has no reaction as he continues to watch the horrible scene before us.
“I can’t lie,” I remind him.
“What use are lies when you’re mad enough to believe anything?”
Determined to force him to feel something, I push harder.
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.