Filed To Story: Cursed Legacies Series Free PDF by Morgan B Lee
Waiting gives me time to plot.
I know the room’s general layout thanks to my study of the interim headmaster’s office. He’ll enter, and I’ll wait for him to sit. I’m sure he’ll be keyed into dozens of protective magic wards on the room, but that’s where the rest of my magical store will go—to disabling them.
Once I can slip in unnoticed, he will sense me and try to attack. As a mage and a member of the Immortal Quintet, Hearst is a highly formidable target. In fact, he’s known as unkillable, thanks to a rare amulet he bonded his soul to which he always has on him. He can wield ridiculous amounts of magic, but he’s no match for me in physical combat, especially when I have the element of surprise.
And once I stab the amulet with the nightshade root powder that nulls its powers, I’ll end him and be done with it.
Inside the office, I hear the faint sound of a door opening and closing.
They’re relying on you. Don’t fail. You were literally made for this.
Carrying out this hit is a stepping stone to fulfilling my blood oath. There’s no backing down, now or ever.
I breathe deeply, clearing my head of anything that could distract me from the next few fraught minutes. Placing my right palm against the wall behind me, I silently release the holds on the dark magic that is stored inside my veins. It seeps out of me slowly, corrupting the existing spells, wilting all existing wards so gradually that it won’t tip off Hearst until it’s too late.
At least, it’s not supposed to. But I tense when I hear him shout inside the room.
My throat tightens, and I stop breathing, waiting for him to throw open the balcony doors and unleash hell on me. But there’s just a tiny garbled sound that I can’t understand, and it goes completely silent again. An odd feeling sinks into my gut—a feeling I’m very used to.
Death. Someone just died nearby.
My curiosity mounts until I quickly slip in through the balcony doors since this room has no more magical protection. I’m silent as I slide out of the drapes and step into the large, ornate office, but the scene in front of me makes me freeze.
Headmaster Hearst is supine on the floor, dead, with his eyes unfocused on the ceiling. Blood is quickly pooling around his head, which has a gaping hole in it somewhere. The amulet hanging from his neck is shattered, seeping a dark red liquid.
The unkillable mage is dead.
But I didn’t do it.
What the fuck?
Before it can sink in that someone else just killed my target, my ears pick up on the soft whoosh of something at me, and I dodge on instinct. A gnarly-looking sword embeds itself into the headmaster’s desk, and I whirl to face?—
Surprise hits me square in the gut.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
The lion shifter makes no sound as she withdraws another sword from her back. She’s dressed similarly to me, a cloak half-obscuring her face—but it’s definitely Kenzie’s face.
Which makes no sense.
Her expression is unlike anything I’ve ever seen on her normally cheery face, dark with undivided focus tracking my every movement. She moves toward me smoothly, but something about it is off.
This entire situation feels off.
But I don’t waste time with more questions since she’s clearly about to try to kill me.
When the sword swings toward me, I roll to the side and withdraw two plain knives from their hiding places. “I don’t have to hurt you. I’ll leave. Just tell me why you did that.”
I nod toward the dead mage, but she ignores him and lunges toward me. I’ve seen Kenzie fight before in combat practices. This is entirely different.
It’s brutal.
Momentarily taken off guard by the way she knocks aside one of my knives and simultaneously lands a kick to my upper thigh, I stumble back. It buys her time to take a swipe at me, and I hiss when the sword glides smoothly through the flesh of my stomach. An alarming amount of blood gushes from the long injury at once.
Kenzie tries to capitalize on my pain, leaping forward again.
She doesn’t move like Kenzie.
The feeling that something is off magnifies as I cartwheel away from the attack, my stomach on fire. My eyes snap to her face again just as her hood moves slightly. And that’s when I get a clearer look at her eyes.
Oh.
This isn’t Kenzie at all. It’s a changeling.
It’s odd, running into this rare monster here, of all places.
My moment of hesitation evaporates, and all my training kicks in at once. The next time it moves for me, I counter it smoothly. For a moment, we’re caught in a silent, deadly dance as the creature tries to angle the sword to nick me again, and I block and avoid its every attempt.
Killing it would be easy, but I need it alive for questioning. If it’s wearing Kenzie’s face, then it already got its hands on her. Which means she might be in danger.
Or she might be dead.
That thought sends anger through me, and I bury a dagger in its arm, forcing the changeling to drop the sword. It clatters loudly to the tiles, but I don’t have time to worry about someone in the faculty hall overhearing us right now.
It swings for me, but I duck and grip the arm over my head simultaneously, using the creature’s momentum to send it crashing to the floor. Before it can right herself, I straddle it, ignoring the agony curling through my system from my gaping stomach wound, and pin its other arm to the ground using a silver dagger from my boot. I cover its mouth to muffle its scream.
Its voice is Kenzie’s, too. That pisses me off.
“Where is she?” I hiss, ripping down my nose and mouth covering.
The changeling struggles beneath me, trying to dislodge its pinned arm as it glares up, a disturbing mirror image of Kenzie. Except for the pupils. That’s one giveaway of a changeling—slightly square pupils. Most people don’t know to look for that, but this is not the first time I’ve crossed paths with this kind of monster.
Someone knocks on the office door, and Mr. Gibbons’ voice calls out, “Headmaster? Are you in there?”
Shit.
I go still while muffling the face of the creature. It bites my palm deeply, drawing blood. As if that would get me to release it. When it feels my blood ooze into its mouth, it starts to choke on the liquid and thrashes in a panic while I smirk quietly down at it.
But I don’t hear anything else from Gibbons, and soon I withdraw my hand, trying to wrestle the monster off the floor quietly.
It puts up a fight, which is inconvenient because I’m starting to get lightheaded from blood loss. When it manages to dig an elbow into the gash across my waist, pain ricochets down my spine, and everything goes blurry for a moment as my body briefly goes into shock.
And in that moment of weakness, I can’t fend off the creature as it grapples at my chest, drawing out the dagger that was just visible in one of my concealed pockets. I’d had it at the ready to take out the headmaster, but all at once, the adamantine infused with nightshade powder penetrates my chest—aiming for my heart.
I can’t stop the cry that escapes my lips when the ice-like agony explodes across my body. My veins bulge and thicken beneath my skin with a sensation like a thousand needles pricking every inch of them. The nightshade root powder makes it unbearable.
Suddenly, I’m lying flat on my back beside the dead headmaster, unable to breathe or move as my life saps away. My blood pools onto the tiles beneath me.
It’s the exact scene from my last episode.
The changeling stands over me, and just as my vision blurs, I see the creature’s eyes and hair darken. Its face morphs slowly, changing from Kenzie’s, and just before nothingness claims me, I’m looking up into my own face.
And then I’m gone.
CRYPT
The only thing keeping me semi-insane while I search for my missing obsession is fantasizing about how I’ll kill Frost if she’s as hurt by his words as I suspect she might be.
First, I would break his mind, of course. He deserves to suffer intensely, keenly. Just as I am, the longer I float through the void of Limbo without any trace of Maven’s aura or any hint of her existence in sight.
What if she’s crying somewhere, alone, thinking we were only interested in her for sex?
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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.