Filed To Story: Cursed Legacies Series Free PDF by Morgan B Lee
Gods on high, no wonder I’m in the lead, even fictitiously. Anyone would think I was a playboy and these idiots had never had a real relationship in their life, even though the reverse is true.
“They’re her favorite because they look like—” Baelfire cuts off with a huff. “You know what? I don’t have to fucking explain it to you. And if you don’t know where she is, then…” He trails off, glancing sideways at Silas. “He’s about to attack your wall.”
I look over in time to see Silas dig the crystal into his hand, lifting it as he glares at the wall with a vengeance. What the fuck is wrong with him?
“Si. Hey. Focus,” Baelfire grunts, shoving Silas’s shoulder and taking a swift step back when Silas whips around, features twisted into a vicious snarl. “Remember what I said? I won’t, and the rest of us won’t either.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about, but that’s not surprising. Whenever we were forced to spend time together as children, I was typically the odd one out. They’ve never understood how my life—how my family
—works, or that my snubbing them was for the best. I excluded myself whenever I could, and there was no point explaining my reasons for it when they were so quick to call me a stuck-up dickhead.
When I saw that they would be in my quintet, I actually hoped things might eventually change.
But if I want things to improve between us…then for now, I have to keep icing them out—at least until we’ve all bound our hearts to Maven. Until then, there are just too many things that could go terribly wrong.
Baelfire mutters something else to Silas that I don’t catch, and finally, the blood fae snaps out of it and drops his bloodied crystal onto my desk, ignoring the way I wrinkle my nose in disgust. He slumps into the chair across from mine, rubbing his face as if he’s exhausted.
“I’ll only ask one more time,” I say coldly, glaring between them. “Why would Maven need to be healed?”
“Some asshole burned her during combat training.” Baelfire looks down in regret and anger at the dead flowers in his hand…which I still don’t understand. “And then I went and made her day a hundred times shittier. Fuck, I just have to find her.”
Before I can ask what he’s talking about, yet another person knocks on my ajar door. But this time, it’s a faculty member asking me to cover for Professor Haagen, who is apparently too busy helping investigate the burning pyres to teach his afternoon class.
“Professor Haagen is in the House of Arcana. Why would I teach casters potion crafting when I don’t have that ability?” I point out dryly.
“I—it would be more to supervise than anything,” the mustached lurch says quickly, glancing nervously at the glaring legacies in my office. He’s equally uncomfortable with how I’m staring, judging by the sweat rolling down his forehead when he turns back to me. We’re not the most welcoming group. “It’s a lab day, so they’ll just be crafting potions from grimoires and getting ready for the First Placement…where, you know, they’re allowed to use anything they’ve crafted in class to try to survive?—“
“Other teachers from the House of Arcana could supervise.”
Besides, I didn’t come here to actually teach lessons. I don’t mind being a professor, but there were much bigger reasons to station myself at Everbound University. I don’t plan on building a rapport with other instructors, not when the majority of them followed me around asking for an autograph during my first week here, claiming to be huge fans of my modeling, with one going so far as to show me a photo reel of their favorite photoshoots of me.
It was cringey and awkward.
The lurch wilts, looking ready to retreat, but then Silas fixes him with a stare that makes the man shiver. I get it. All blood fae have unnerving red eyes, but his are somehow worse.
“You said potion crafting?” he asks, sounding far too calm in comparison to nearly losing his shit a few minutes ago.
“Y—yes.”
Silas glances at me. “Maven takes Haagen’s potion crafting class.”
I should still pass on it, but my mouth opens before I can control it. “Fine. I’ll cover for him. Now get out.”
The faculty member disappears, shutting the door gingerly behind him as if he’s afraid that breathing wrong will set one of us off. Which honestly might not be too far from the truth.
Baelfire has perked up. “That’s Maven’s next class? She’ll be there, then. I’m going with you, Snowflake.”
Gods on high, I hate that nickname. I also hate him and the rest of the Decimus family.
But the gods must know something I don’t, and I’m not about to insult them by freezing to death someone in my own quintet. Not even if it would be super satisfying.
Less than thirty minutes later, I’m eyeing Professor Haagen’s potion crafting classroom, which is smaller than many of the vaulted, amphitheater-style rooms at Everbound. This one, in contrast, is just a room with one wall made of glass looking out over one of the fields leading to the forest. It’s filled with tables set with many beakers, cauldrons, and other shit casters will need for potions. The opposite wall from the window is lined with shelf upon shelf of bizarre potion ingredients—everything from dried mosquito sacs to hawthorn berry oil to tiny jars of ectoplasm.
Students begin filing into the room, and several stop to gawk openly at me sitting at the front of the classroom behind Haagen’s desk. Their reactions range from mild surprise at seeing an elemental professor in a House of Arcana class to the long stares of legacies who still see me as a supermodel.
Ignoring all of them, I study the contents on Haagen’s desk. He’s a bit of a slob, having left a banana skin to brown next to a pile of crinkled papers smeared with food of some kind. But I pretend it’s something important I’m reading until she walks in.
And just like the first time I saw her standing on the stage at the Seeking, my heart almost stops.
Maven’s dark eyes arrest mine for barely a heartbeat, but if she’s surprised to see me in her class, she doesn’t show it before walking to a table at the back of the room. She also has no reaction to the fact that Silas is already at the table waiting for her, his eyes tracking her every move with a possessiveness that would make anyone else flinch.
Baelfire is sitting at the table next to them, and the raw emotion on his face when he sees Maven makes me wonder what the hell happened earlier between them. He tries to say something to her, something I can’t hear, and extends the bouquet of dead flowers.
Maven ignores him completely, just watching me like all the other students.
But her gaze is not just like the other students’ stares, not for me.
No, knowing she’s watching me has my nerves twisting into knots and my heart doing double time. Frost prickles across my palms, which I tuck into my suit pockets as I finally stand and address the class, pointedly not looking at her because the last thing I want is to fucking blush in front of a bunch of grad students.
“Professor Haagen had something else come up. Today, you will be?—“
“Is it the investigation?” one of the students at the front cuts me off, eyes wide. “Is he helping clean up the corpses? What happened? Do you guys know if it was humans who did it?”
Voices explode across the classroom as legacies throw in their two cents, all talking over each other.
“As if humans could kill one of us, let alone four!”
“Didn’t you see the way the corpses were dressed? They were supposed to look like the Immortal Quintet! Isn’t that so fucked up?
“Why didn’t anyone see them setting all that up?”
“Oh, relax! It was probably just someone pulling a stupid prank?—“
The moment my patience runs out, the temperature in the room plummets sharply enough to crack the glasses of a mage in the front row, who yelps. Two light fixtures also shatter. Ice climbs up the walls while students draw in surprised gasps, the air pluming in front of their faces, huddling in on themselves and looking at me with wide eyes.
Most elemental students I teach come from highly religious, devout families and would never bring shame to their last names by speaking out in class like that. They’re too respectful and too aware of their own self-images.
Apparently, the House of Arcana is far more lenient.
“The next person to interrupt me will get to enjoy feeling their toes snap off due to frostbite,” I say calmly, flipping open the old grimoire on Haagen’s desk as an excuse not to look at my keeper just to see what her reaction to this might be. “Now. As I was saying, today, you will craft anything that you think will be useful during the First Placement.”
There are three Placements at Everbound. First Placement is a test at the end of the first semester for all legacies, matched or unmatched. It tends to be brutal and often results in several students’ deaths, but the actual test changes from year to year. It’s hard to tell what it could be, so any amount of preparation is useful. Second and Third Placements happen next semester among quintets to cement our rankings, active service assignments, and future careers.
After six years of waiting, I’ll finally be participating in those.
Students exchange glances, but no one else speaks out of turn. I can hear Baelfire snort derisively at me in the back where he is completely unbothered by the cold, as dragon shifters always are—but Silas quickly slips out of his dark wool Chesterfield coat and offers it to Maven.
Damn it, she must be freezing. I’m an idiot. I’m tempted to apologize solely to her, but after she says something quietly to Silas that makes him scowl and set the coat in front of her on the table, she looks back at me and…smiles.
Smiles.
My stomach flips. I swear on everything holy that she is the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on.
And now I know I’m blushing because my ears feel warm.
Looking away quickly, I try to unscramble my brain, but at least the other students have taken initiative and are now collecting potion ingredients from the shelves on the wall, whispering amongst themselves as they shiver and get to work on their potions. Some of them are still ogling me in the way I’ve forced myself to grow accustomed to, but mostly class is on a roll, and all I have to do now is not make a fucking fool of myself.
Which proves to be impossible when Maven approaches the desk where I sit.
Today, she’s in a black sweatshirt with sleeves that go well past her hands and dark cargo pants that are far too big for her tucked into steel-toed combat boots. Her rich dark hair hangs loose around her, framing her face as she quirks a brow at me.
“Well?”
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