Page 25

Running, coughing, the booms and screams of the city continuing around us. My brain seemed to lurch from side to side, the dreaminess dissipating.

Good. Dreaminess didn’t get to apply right now.

Silvanus paused at the top of a street famous for its diners and cafés. Pickle Avenue, every building built from yellow brick and iron, their roofs flat. A pedestrian street with a tiny garden in the middle, now smoking in the aftermath of a fire.

The vampire’s eyes scanned the dark.

“Do you…” Ugh, my throat scratched with each word. “Do you see anything?”

Water, where are you?

He didn’t say anything, carrying me toward Molly’s Diner. Hal used to come here for breakfast, loving the bacon rolls with a side of fries and too many cups of coffee to wash it down with.

I couldn’t help but miss Hal. Yeah, he’d screwed me over, but we were besties and lovers at one point. He’d been there for me after Pearl died, the pair of us sharing that flat at Aidan Temple, Weatherby. Laughing together, talking into the late nights, getting down to business when we were horny.

Oh, well. Those days were dead, along with so many others. Now I had this present, pining over a man I couldn’t admit anything about, feeling so many types of ways, trapped in the endless torment of desire.

Dammit. There I went with the self-pity while the city I’d called home for years fell around me.

“In here,” he said, breaking the lock on the diner’s door.

An alarm went off, but he smashed the flashing panel with his fist, silencing it.

I coughed some more, the werewolf healing inside me getting to work.

Silvanus put me down in a booth. I went limp on the burgundy leather facing the white painted ceiling, hearing a memory of Hal’s laughter as he bantered with the owner.

What would happen to him when Aidan finally left his body? Would he still be alive or would all the violence inflicted on him come to obliterate him properly without the deity’s power rebuilding him?

“Why am I here?” The mermaid demanded.

With a head full of cotton wool and a chest being put through its paces, I managed to roll onto my side.

“Marie?” Elio rasped. “What is this?”

Marie. So that was her name.

The mermaid started sobbing, the two of them close to my booth.

“Marie?” my brother said again.

Brother.

Mer.

The curse.

My labored breaths got worse. Anxiety locked me in a chokehold, too many things firing in my brain. Too much pain, too much confusion, too much of everything.

The crystal dagger appeared in my right hand in a puff of silvery smoke. I held it up. The blade was pure crystal, the hilt decorated in thin filigree silver swirls, a heart-shaped crystal sparkling above the silver cross guard.

“I hate you,” I told it.

The weapon’s tip glinted, as if to acknowledge me.

I had no control over it, the damn thing popping up whenever it wanted, or when danger was about. Protecting me even if I couldn’t die.

Yet.