There’s no two ways about it. I’m cursed.
Hence the reason I’m stuck in yet another basement, eyeing the scowling faces of my three stupidly handsome protectors. The three men who are bound to protect me.
Who also happen to be three guys that hate my guts.
I’m late to the job, so late that I show up to a room which is empty apart from their grumpy butts. I look around the basement. It's pretty dark and more than a little grim, but since we’re below one of the city’s municipal buildings, it’s still a lot nicer than my apartment.
It’s not difficult considering I live in a real shithole.
“Nice of you to show up, Manon. Turns out you aren’t needed,” Nico says. “Or wanted,” he adds in a barely lowered tone, because he’s a real prick like that. Particularly as he was the one to text me the location with less than an hour’s notice and I had to make a mad dash across the city. Traffic was grid locked thanks to an incident on the road—some kind of protest from a bunch of angry witches, which the Beta team were dealing with—so I wound up running the last couple of miles.
That’s typical Nico, though. A misanthropic dickhead who can count the number of people he tolerates on one hand. Surprise, surprise, I’m not on that list. He can also do some frankly terrifying stuff to people’s brains, which makes me grateful we got the protection bond in place, or I probably would have been ‘persuaded’ to walk into traffic a long time ago.
“What happened?” I try to control my breathing so that I’m not panting like a dog. Shame I can’t do much about the fact there’s sweat dripping all down my back and my feet are burning in my boots. My outfit is all black and a mix of leather and denim, good for defending myself against wayward blades and whatever nasties we’re fighting, but not exactly the thing to wear while sprinting through the streets.
They don’t bother answering, instead turning to the door to head out again.
I haven’t quite caught my breath when another feeling takes over my body. A full-body tingle, so strong my skin is practically vibrating.
“Hold on,” I say.
Remember, I said I was cursed? Well, this is reason number two. I have an actual curse, a living thing inside of me that flares up whenever I’m around someone’s physical pain.
That’s not all, the thing inside me also likes to eat that pain. It gulps it down like it’s a tasty treat.
I’m like a quarter demon or something. Not sure on the specifics, since none of my family stuck around long enough for any chats on my ancestry. It’s not all that uncommon for people in this city to be something other than human, ever since they tried to build an underground station back in the late sixties to fix up Stoneraven’s terrible transport system. Turns out that not all old cities suit having a load of underground works going on. There were a lot of ancient burial grounds dug up, plus a good ol’ fashioned portal into another world.
It wasn’t like they dug straight through into Hell or anything, but they did somehow make a hole big enough for demons and other non-humans to make their way through from one of the Underworlds.
Stoneraven is a bit of a dump and it always has been. But it got worse after the portal opened and all the Supers started treating it like a port, never sticking around for too long but ruffling plenty of feathers while they’re here. It’s a small place, barely big enough to be called a city. We have a lot of empty buildings, a lot of violent crime, plus a lot of Super/human tension going on.
These days there’s maybe eighty percent of the population that are straight up human. A lot of the incoming Supers took one look at this place and moved as far away from the hellhole as they could get. There are even fewer hybrids, like me and Nico, since it turns out humans didn’t take too kindly to anybody that is Other coming into their city, mostly because they were shit scared of the lot of them. It led to a lot of unrest over the years and is the reason that me and the guys have the job we do.
The guys are the Alpha team of Stoneraven.
The routine goes like this: someone (generally human) makes a complaint about a Super who is causing trouble, sometimes they’re chewing too loudly or something, or disturbing them because they stick to a different sleep-cycle. Sometimes they’ve abducted their grandmother or are making a necklace out of the bones of kittens.
It’s a real mixed bag.
Anyway, most of the time another team comes in to check it out and then we’re sent along to make sure that the problem goes away. Pretty often, the Supers aren’t all that eager to be moved on and Nico has to use his powers of persuasion on them. If that doesn’t work, the other two get to flex their skills. Cass can destroy any creature of the shadows without even blinking—that’s vampires, wraiths, ghouls, even some types of demon. And August, well, August can tear down walls with his bare hands, so he can just as easily tear a Super apart if that’s what the situation calls for.
I’m the resident healer and pain-eater. When I came to the guys and bound myself into their protection three years ago, I also bound myself into working with them.
Inside this basement, which doesn’t seem to have seen any action at all, my skin is tingling like crazy and the thing inside my chest is reaching out to take the pain away.
I take a step toward the guys. “Did one of you get injured?”
Again, I don’t get a reply. Nico continues yacking on about some bar or club he’s been to or is planning to go to, but at least they all hold in place to let me check them over.
I skim my hands over theirs, trying to work out the source of the tingling. Nico glares at me the whole time, and I get a small nod of acknowledgement from August.
Cass barely acknowledges my presence. He never does. He’s a lot like a zombie, dead-eyed, disinterested. It’s ironic, considering his special skill is that he can light up a room with the markings that cover his skin; he can bend light and create illusions just as easily as he can fry your retinas and leave you blinded.
“Something else is here,” I tell them, flashing my phone’s torch to all the darkest corners of the room and confirming it to be empty. “They must be in pretty awful shape for me to feel it through the walls, unless they’re invisible or something?”
It takes some nudging, but eventually Cass breaks out of his stupor for long enough to blast the entire room in a pure white light that would apparently pick up anyone that was cloaking themselves.
It’s empty.
I stride around the room and it’s not until I reach the back wall that the feeling intensifies. Feeling around with one hand, I use my torch with the other, since Cass isn’t exactly offering his services. In fact, the only one of them who isn’t holding up the wall, showing a complete lack of interest, is August, who comes up right behind me.
“So you got here, and the room was empty like this?” I ask him. “Do you know what we got called out for?”
He just grunts. Luckily, by now, I’m pretty good at interpreting the various noises August makes instead of deigning to engage in conversation. I glance up at his gigantic frame—he has to be six foot six, and he’s built to bring down entire cities and tear through hordes of warriors. It’s a bit like talking to a mountain. A very tall, sexy mountain.
“There’s like a hatch-type thing down here in the wall,” I say, giving it a little flick with my booted toe. “I can’t make it budge, though.”
August doesn’t hesitate to put his foot against the metal hatch and kicks with a show of brute force. The hatch doesn’t stand a chance and goes flying with a screech of metal on metal.
“Thanks.”
He just grunts again.
The space is only just big enough for me to fit through, so I crawl through alone. It’s on my hands and knees that I come face to face with the reason for my curse freaking out on me.
“Fuck.” I gag at the smell and the taste in the air, before raising my torch since it’s dark as hell in here.
“See anything?” August’s gravelly voice travels through from the other room.
“Yep.” I stuff my sleeve into my face to try and stifle the smell. “Wraiths have been here.”
Fucking wraiths. We don’t deal with them all that often, but when we do, it’s always nasty.
You know those juicers where you push an orange’s flesh into them and give a little squeeze and out comes all the juice? Yeah, that’s what wraiths do. Except instead of an orange, it’s a person’s body. They absorb everything they can from living flesh in order to feed.
I know, I know, I’m not happy with that imagery either.
Nor am I happy about the sights and smells in this room.
“There have to be twelve bodies in here,” I call through to August. We’re too late to help most of the bodies littering the floor. But the fact that my skin’s still tingling shows there’s hope for at least one person here.
I see the woman curled up on the dirty floor and I also recognize the state she’s in. The wraiths must have got halfway through draining her and then just stopped. Maybe the guys interrupted her, or maybe they just decided that they were full.
She looks dehydrated, malnourished, and absolutely terrified. From the look of total fear on her face, I can tell there’s no way I can do this alone.
“Manon,” August calls. “You got a live one?”
I head back over to him, keeping my voice low. “Yes, but there’s no way she’ll let me near her without calming her down first.”
“Can’t shove her through this hole either,” he rasps. As much as he looks like a sexy mountain, he also sounds a bit like one, too. His voice has this whole gravelly tone to it, and whenever I’ve heard him laugh, it sounds like two huge boulders being pushed together.
Not that I should be thinking about any of that. But in this job, you need to compartmentalize a lot of the horrible stuff we witness, and that means my mind is in about ten different places at once.
I nod at August, realizing he’s waiting for me to respond. What he’s said is accurate enough. I haven’t even thought about how I might cart her damaged body out of here.
“Hold on,” he says and there’s the telltale slam of a body against the brick. Whether it’s August’s fist or foot, I can’t tell. “Might want to move back.”
He’s surprisingly gentle for a berserker. Over six and a half feet tall and built like a brick shithouse, enough that he could tear down walls with his bare hands. But he’s always been the least dickish of this band of merry assholes, not just because he speaks a lot less than anyone else. August is definitely the nice one of the group. Unless he’s in the middle of a fit of rage, but even then, you can’t take it personally if he tries to bring a building down on your head when the red mist descends. He’d do the same to anyone.
It’s a comforting thought.
Who needs a demolition expert when you’ve got a berserker on your team? It takes a staggeringly short amount of time for him to widen the hole until it’s big enough to fit through without having to get onto my hands and knees.
“Shit, man. What if that’s a load-bearing wall?” Nico’s voice is raised to a yell.
“It is.” But by the sounds of it, August doesn’t give a shit.
“We could have the entire building come down on us, not to mention the city won’t be too happy if we destroy the building.”
“Gotta get her out. Need light.”
I take a step closer to the hole in the wall, since the situation could do with sentences that include over two words in explanation and clearly Nico hasn’t been paying attention to what’s going on.
“Shit, Manon, don’t creep around in the shadows like that. Your face gives me enough nightmares as it is.”
“Fuck you, Nico,” I reply as easily as breathing. It’s almost a catchphrase at this point. “I need you to work your magic and calm a very frightened woman down. Can you shut your mouth for five minutes and help me?”
“Not if I’m ‘working my magic’. Need my tongue for that.” He waggles it at me like a fucking lech, showing off the piercing that is one reason he’s nicknamed the ‘silver-tongued devil’.
I roll my eyes and give an exaggerated shudder. “Save it. Please. She’s hurting.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m on it. Could do with some light, though, Cass?”
We step into the room and, thankfully, Cass only lights up a portion of it with soft light, so we’re not faced with the full horror of what’s down here. The last thing we need is the poor woman seeing what she’s been surrounded by and getting traumatized even further.
Nico hunkers down an arm’s length away from the woman, speaking in a low, honeyed tone. I can’t hear any of what he’s saying but whatever it is does the trick. Within a couple of minutes he gives the nod and I take my place beside the woman, sliding my palm against her bare forearm. My curse flares into life as our skin connects, and it begins to feed on her pain, slowly drawing it out of her body and into my own.
There are plenty of reasons I don’t flaunt my curse, not least because it’s pretty intimate. I feel the moment it hits her system, and she slumps with a faint sigh. While I’ve never felt it myself, I’ve had enough people describe it to me. It’s a shot of morphine, of pure joy, a wave of gentle comfort taking away every bad moment that’s come before.
I’m basically an opioid in human form.
I know that for a lot of other demons; they get energy from extracting from others. But most of them deal with the big five: anger, fear, sadness, joy, and lust.
For me, it’s a little different. It actually takes energy away from me to take away the pain, and even more energy if I have to repair any damage while I’m there. But I just can’t help myself. The curse inside me is always ravenous, and I get weirdly twitchy and uncomfortable if I don’t take it.
I suppose you could say that my curse needs feeding.
Time passes with my skin connected to the woman’s. Closing my eyes and gritting my teeth, I can feel the familiar pull in my chest, like I have strings inside of me that are being pulled taut and plucked by invisible fingers.
Once the pain is all eaten away, I move on to the things I can do to heal her. It’s not much. I can knit a broken bone back together, or fix internal damage, but I can’t do anything against dehydration, and I can’t give this woman her flesh back. Pulling myself away from her for long enough to glance up at the guys, I see August is keeping guard over me while I’m in such a vulnerable position. I catch his eye and then Nico’s and shake my head.
“I don’t think there’s anything I can do,” I whisper.
Even though Cass is meant to be our fearless leader, we all know that Nico is the one who makes most of our decisions, like he has ever since Cass checked out three years ago.
“Okay then.” Nico meets my eye and for a second, I see a glimmer of something more than hatred and disdain. He then turns away and does his thing with the woman, persuading her brain that her body no longer needs her heart to beat.
See, like I said, he can do some pretty scary stuff.
August helps me to my feet and steadies me as I wobble slightly on shaky legs. And for a moment, it feels like we’re all on the same side.
Then Nico turns back to me, and I can see that the shutter has come down over his eyes. They’re back to being ice cold.
For a moment there, I got carried away and let myself feel like I was part of a team. But his expression is enough to school me that I’m not welcome here. The guys might be bound to protect me, and I might be technically a part of their team, but that’s not because they want me here.
We’re bound together, yet they hate me. Wish I could say that I feel the same about them.
Told you I was cursed.
