Filed To Story: Cursed Legacies Series Free PDF by Morgan B Lee
Please, not right now,” she gasps, sounding strangled.
“What’s happening?” Everett demands sharply, crowding closer as the temperature around us plummets. “Maven?”
Silas cradles her face and tries to catch her eye, his eyes wide. “Is it that you can’t breathe? Baelfire?—“
Before he can even finish the order, I rip open the front of her dress, desperate to help her get air into her lungs. But it’s useless. All it does is show us that there is nothing visibly wrong with her perfect chest. The jagged, pale scar between her breasts is unmarred.
“I’m fine,” Maven tries to insist, but the strain in her voice is pure agony. She clenches her teeth and tries to bat our hands away but suddenly goes limp.
“Maven?” I shout, my dragon beating on the inside of my head as horror overwhelms me. “Maven!”
Silas pulls out his bleeding crystal and slashes it deeply across his palm. The red flare of blood magic, combined with more smell like burnt copper, fills the dim hallway, illuminating the harsh planes of his face as he tries to heal her chest. I hold my breath, staring at my gorgeous mate motionless in my arms.
For the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours, that horrible image comes back to me: my mate lying in a pool of blood, the scent of her tinged with poison and pain.
No, no, no, no
?
—
While I’m still spiraling, Everett swears and takes Maven out of my arms before rushing down the hall.
“Where are we taking her?” I demand, keeping up. If it didn’t feel like my entire world just turned sideways, I would beat the hell out of him for holding her when he’s the last person in a never-ending line of people she wouldn’t want touching her.
“To the healers,” he mutters. “Because Silas is fucking useless.”
Silas scowls as he catches up. “I don’t understand. My magic absolutely refuses to work with her. It’s almost as if?—“
He cuts off, looking like a train of thought has taken him to a dark place. I don’t bother asking what his new theory is because I’m too busy noticing how pale and cold my mate looks.
A minute later, I burst through the double doors and stride into Everbound’s lengthy infirmary. Hundreds of years ago, when this castle was first built, it was a chapel devoted to the gods. Now, gone are the pews and priests. Instead, the intricate purple-and-white stained glass windows serve as a backdrop for dozens of empty sickbeds, counters filled with spell ingredients and medicines, and two chattering casters dressed in white. They jump in surprise as we walk in.
Everett is cradling Maven like he’s afraid the air around us will hurt her, and I notice the frost climbing up to his elbows. He’s losing his shit over this, just like the rest of us, which makes no fucking sense.
“What’s going on?” one of the healers chirps in surprise.
“Heal her,” Silas demands as Everett lowers Maven onto one of the sickbeds, adjusting the blanket with shaking hands to cover her naked upper half. “Now.”
The healers exchange glances but quickly gather around Maven to look for signs of injury. Their proximity to my mate sets off my dragon’s temper, and he lashes out against my control, wild and savage.
Mark her. Claim her. Covet her.
I grip the side of my head as splitting pain rocks through it, trying to fend off the shift he tries to force. The stupid lizard doesn’t understand that now is not the fucking time to pin Maven down and mark her as mine. I really need to kill something before he strong-arms me into crossing her lines even more than I already have. Or worse, if he forces me to shift when I’m too close to her and she ends up getting hurt.
When the agony of refusing a shift finally recedes from my muscles, I see one of the healers reaching towards Maven and snap, “Don’t fucking touch her. She doesn’t like to be touched.”
“We have to check her vitals. I promise we’ll be very careful with her.”
That promise doesn’t help. I’m still filled with distress when the healer checks for her pulse, a frown pulling at his lips. He then leans down as if to press his ear to her chest, which has my dragon seeing red.
But before the healer can make contact with Maven, the Nightmare Prince emerges into existence beside us, grabs both healers by their necks, and vanishes in the blink of an eye. So do they. And when Crypt reappears from Limbo, both healers are dead. One still has his eyes frozen wide open in acute horror as if before he died, he saw shit that broke him. The other looks like he was slashed to threads and bones.
It all happened so fast that I’m still processing. Everett looks equally stunned, but Silas snarls, “What the fuck are you doing? We needed them to help Maven, you psychotic bastard!”
Crypt kicks aside one of the corpses, his face murderous as he stalks toward Silas.
“No, what are you doing? Where’s your overdeveloped sense of paranoia when we need it? She told me to let no one heal her. It wasn’t a polite suggestion, Crane. She must have a reason to avoid the healers here, so I don’t fucking trust them. You shouldn’t have, either.”
“I wasn’t trusting them. If they made a wrong move, I would have killed them just as quickly,” Silas seethes. “But now look at her. She’s not breathing, Crypt—she has no godsdamned pulse! My magic refuses to interact with her, so what are we going to do now? Did you think of that before killing people who could have potentially helped her?”
I go numb. Maven isn’t breathing. She has no pulse. Which means…
“He made the right call,” a gentle voice says, interrupting their furious argument.
We all look over as a familiar white-veiled figure steps forward, entering the old gothic chapel from a concealed entrance near the old pew. I blink at the sight of the prophetess who was at the Seeking, realizing she must be one of the people from Galene’s temple that Iker Del Mar had mentioned would be here.
What was her name again? Pay-Pay? Pie?
“Prophetess Pia,” Everett greets her, his tone formal but guarded. He glances at the dead bodies on the floor. “About this?—“
She waves off his concern with an elegant, white-gloved hand. “As I said, your incubus made the right call. I fear they would have learned something about your keeper that would have been reported to the Immortal Quintet right away. Now, step away from her. I will take it from here.”
It’s odd not to see her face under all that white fabric. But even though I’m wary as hell about this mysterious prophetess, my inner dragon goes uncharacteristically quiet and calm as she approaches, as if he has no problem with her being around our mate.
Fine. I’ll trust the asshole’s judgment for now. But if she harms a single fucking hair on Maven’s head, there will be one more corpse bleeding on the ground.
Pia laughs lightly, her head turning in my direction. “A guard dragon, are you?”
Fuck.
She’s a mind reader—or a seer. Something like that.
The others must come to the same conclusion because Silas grips his bleeding crystal tighter, and Everett stiffens. The Nightmare Prince’s eyes narrow as he watches Pia sit on the bed beside Maven, her hands hovering over my mate’s chest but making no contact. A faint light radiates around Pia’s hands, but otherwise, there’s no obvious magic happening.
“You have no aura,” Crypt notes in a precarious tone. “Every living thing has an aura.”
She doesn’t reply, moving her hand over Maven’s head. We all watch in tense, perplexed silence. Finally, Silas rounds the bed to see Maven’s face better, and his brow furrows.
“You said the healers would have learned something about her and reported it to the Immortal Quintet. What did you mean?”
Pia’s tone is gentle. “You already have your suspicions about her nature. And the incubus is much closer to the truth.”
My gaze darts to Crypt. “What the hell is she talking about? What do you know?”
Crypt doesn’t even acknowledge my question. Clearly, he’s not about to tell us anything.
Silas studies Maven at length before speaking slowly, hesitantly. I can practically see the gears turning in his paranoid head.
“She has no heartbeat. She didn’t earlier, either. And when I was trying to heal her of the poison, I found a bottle of nightshade root powder in one of her pockets. That substance is all but impossible to get—the Legacy Council has made it entirely illegal. Why would a human-raised atypical caster go to the trouble of getting that?”
The question hangs in the air as Pia finishes healing Maven and straightens. I stare at Maven hard until I see her chest rise and fall, and relief hits me so hard that I have to sit down on one of the other empty beds.
Thank the gods. She’s breathing.
Silas rubs his jaw as he goes on. “The dagger we found in Headmaster Hearst’s office was made of adamantine.”
“So?” I ask.
“Do you know how rare that metal is? It’s what the weapons of the most powerful shadow fiends that make it into the Divide are made out of. Legacies don’t use adamantine, and no one in the mortal world knows how to forge it, so how did that dagger end up in that office?”
I pull a face, but Everett seems to be catching onto whatever I’m missing because he abruptly looks even paler than usual.
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.