Theo nods, his fingers still pressed against his forehead.
“And for now?—”
I don’t get the chance to finish. A hideous burning sensation bursts through my chest. It’s fast and harsh, fluctuating in intensity. It feels like bubbles of scalding heat are popping beneath my rib cage. I hunch forward, but it doesn’t help. There is nothing to do but feel the shocks of heat and heave uselessly for breath.
“What the fuck…” Beatrice groans and slumps against the table, her head thumping as it meets stone. She’s passed out, and Milas isn’t far behind her. He moans incomprehensibly, hands wildly clutching his chest and stomach.
Whatever is happening, we’re all feeling it.
“Do you…” I say. It takes every ounce of my conscious effort to get those two simple words out. I want to know if the others recognize this blistering heat. I am certain I’ve only felt it once before, twenty years ago. I was sure I’d never feel it again.
As with the first time, the pain stops suddenly, moments after I decide I’d rather die than feel it. We are all left choking for breath, and by the time I’ve straightened, Theo is already fleeing for the doors. He thinks this pain comes from the sun. He wasn’t yet turned when the witches attacked twenty years ago. He doesn’t understand…
“The curse,” I spit, still gasping. I look at Oskar, who has one hand to his throat and the other tight on the table’s ledge. “Oskar, has it ended?”
“I don’t think so,” he whispers. He rubs his chest, eyebrows dipping low. “But something happened. Somethingbig.”
Hours later,long after the burning sensation has faded, I remain alone at the courtyard’s stone table. I dismissed the others and sent most of the parchments with Oskar. Now, I have only curse-related texts spread before me. Years’ worth of symptom tracking and a variety of theories and failed attempts at freedom. It’s pathetically little information, most of which I memorized long ago. I read it again anyway, searching for answers while I wait for Cora to arrive.
I smell her long before she appears in the courtyard. Witches reak. It’s a defense mechanism, and a damned effective one. Their blood is magicked to smell of death: rancid and foul, like they’ve gone rotten. They taste even worse.
“Sebastian,” Cora says. She sashays across the cobblestone, rolling her eyes as she passes my statue.
She’s a scrawny little thing, but her features are big. Large eyes, thick brows, puffy lips. Her black hair is slicked into its typical high ponytail, fastened so tight it pulls at her forehead. Her brown eyes survey me as she approaches. She looks unimpressed, as usual.
“Cora.” I rise from the table. She’s written a few of these texts herself, and she’s read the others nearly as many times as I have.
“Your followers are nervous,” she tells me.
“I know,” I say. “Any chance you know what this means?”
Cora is the only witch willing to be in my presence. She’s somewhere around thirty now, but she was fifteen when we met. She’d been sentenced to death for practicing dark magic, and only a chance encounter withme(of all things) saved her life. Unlike her own kin, I do not fear her darkness.
Cora has lived here ever since. She’s given six sunwalker spells and invaluable insight to her people’s ruthless curse. She pretends it’s to repay me. I pretend to believe her. We both know it’s because she hates her people as much as we do, because her heart is as black as ours.
“It could be many things,” she says. She reaches the table and sits opposite me, crossing her skinny legs. She’s wearing a simple black frock, buttoned to her throat, and thick tights. Like all her clothing, this ensemble is loose and ill-fitting.
I lean against the ivy-covered stone behind me, mostly to escape her pungent scent. Once again, Cora knowingly rolls her eyes.
Despite her small size, she exudes confidence and ease. I could kill her before she realized I moved, but she doesn’t show an ounce of fear. Probably because she knows I’d be a fool to kill our best—and only—witch ally.
“The witches cursed you to burn in the sun,” she says after a long pause. “It’s a difficult spell. Hard to conjure, harder to break. As some of your followers can attest, the curse remains true.”
Cora pulls the stack of parchments toward herself, skimming until she finds the one she wants. It’s the first piece she wrote for me: a breakdown of the curse, as much as her childhood self understood it. And it was…heavy. It required power from multiple familial lines, human and animal organs, and the very life of their beloved leader. Walter Pruce gave his life—willing or unwilling, depending on who tells the tale—to seal the sun curse. He was the last of the formidable Pruce line, and according to Cora, only his blood can undo what’s been done.
“It has to be something with the seal,” I say. Without meaning to, I press a hand to my chest. “The only other time we felt that burn was when they sacrificed the leader. He died, the curse sealed, and weallfelt it. Now we’ve all felt it again…”
“I wonder…” Cora says. Her words fade as she starts to read, thick brows scrunching toward her nose.
She reads the text once. Twice.
Eleven times.
So many times that the sun sets, darkness falls, and the manor awakens. My followers call to each other as they leave in droves, laughing and scheming. Soon enough, the Echo will be crawling with vampires, out for a long night of fucking and (likely failed) feasting. Unfortunately, the Echo has long learned to stay indoors once the sun falls.
“Cora,” I say finally. It’s been hours of silence, and I can’t bear to read these texts a single time more. “I am a patient man, but you have to give mesomething.”
“Walter Pruce,” she says without looking up.
