Page 50 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

“Unfortunately, yeah,” Evangeline said, opening her eyes and looking at me. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot, her pupils dilated. The curse was progressing faster and faster. “They’re blueprints for the Eldoria sewer system. There’s an entity that lives down there. I’ve had to deal with her before, and it was fucking ugly.”

“You know what we’re going to be walking into, then,” I said.

Evangeline looked down at her hands. On one forearm, a jagged scar was barely visible on her pale skin, bisecting several of her freckles. “Yeah, you could say that,” she said. “I guess we’re going to have to pay a visit to Nanny Murk.”

17

EVANGELINE

Everything was fuzzy and sort of distant as our cab wended through the streets of Eldoria. I wasn’t sure how much was the curse spreading through me, and how much was my body suddenly deciding to remind me just how late at night it was. Pothos was a comforting weight on my shoulders, and he dug his sharp little rose-thorn claws into the meat of my good arm whenever my eyes started to drift closed.

I was barely aware of the car coming to a stop. My whole back throbbed, the pain radiating out from the wound on my shoulder. I felt sluggish and dazed, like I was trying to fight off anesthetic.

Gabriel said something to the driver. The part of my brain that never stopped working helpfully told me that our driver was a werewolf male, late forties, with wavy, graying hair, and a tattoo of wolfsbane on his forearm. The details floated around in my head vaguely, not connecting in any way. Gabriel passed the guy a wad of cash and ushered me out of the car, steering me gently by the arm.

The cool air outside the car was a relief, but as soon as I stood, my head began to swim. My vision grayed out for a moment, and when I came to, Gabriel was holding me up. He looked grim and pale in the harsh glow of the streetlights.

Without saying a word, he scooped me into his arms. I was too out of it to even yelp in surprise. The most I could manage was a disapproving grumble. Pothos didn’t seem to mind, since now he was being carried by two people.

I got a vague impression of looming dark buildings and dew-slicked greenery, and then I was inside. The hallways blurred past—Gabriel was running as fast as he could. He set me down on a hard surface with a jolt, then he was muttering to himself, bolting around the room with vampiric speed that would’ve been almost impossible for me to follow even if I could make my eyes focus properly.

I slipped in and out of consciousness, brought back into awareness by strange smells and sensations before fading out again. A sudden shock of cold. A rough texture pressed against my back. A pungent, herbal scent.

I tried to focus on my breathing. Having dealt with enough desperate situations like this, I knew staying conscious was important. Pothos was helping, letting out gravelly little purrs and sticking his cold nose into my ear whenever I started to slip away.

Gabriel’s wonderfully cool hands were pressed against the fever-hot skin of my shoulder. His voice was a quiet rumble behind me. The pain got worse and worse, so bad that I was letting out pained, animal noises through clenched teeth. Then, suddenly, it disappeared, like a balloon that had been inflated until it burst.

I let out a ragged gasp of relief, sagging back against Gabriel’s touch. I was distantly aware of cool, gentle fingers brushing the hair off my sweaty forehead.

“Curse is gone?” I managed.

“Yes,” Gabriel told me. I was leaning half against him, and I could feel the rumble of his voice where my good shoulder was pressed to his chest. “Now you just need to rest, Evangeline.”

I held out a wobbly thumbs-up. “Okey-dokey,” I said. Before I could reflect on the fact that that was probably the first time I’d said okey-dokey in my adult life—maybe ever—I was asleep.

I woke in an incredibly soft bed, with crisp white sheets. Hospital? No, that wasn’t right. The bed was too comfortable, and there was no telltale scent of hand sanitizer, or the background noise of medical equipment, and nurse shoes squeaking on linoleum.

I squinted at the room around me. The furniture was all dark wood and aged leather. Dark wallpaper made the place feel cozy, but in a way that verged on claustrophobic. Gold-framed paintings of dark forests and stormy seas hung on the walls. On one wall, purple velvet curtains had been pulled mostly closed, leaving just a strip of daylight peeking through.

A dark head was pillowed on the bed next to me, face-down against the brocade bedspread. Gabriel had pulled a chair over to the bedside and apparently fallen asleep, tilting forward onto the edge of the bed. One of his hands was resting on the bedspread, close to where mine had been. Even though his hands were bigger and broader than mine, it looked oddly delicate splayed out on the bedspread, as though he’d fallen asleep in the middle of reaching out.

Sitting on the curve of Gabriel’s bent back was Pothos, looking deeply pleased with himself.

“Good job, buddy,” I muttered to him, scratching one of his fuzzy green cheeks. “You’ve got him pinned. He’ll probably never figure out how to escape.”

Pothos purred, kneading the soft pale skin on the back of Gabriel’s neck. Gabriel let out a low mutter, but if there were any actual words involved, they were completely muffled by the thick bedspread.

I slid out of the bed, stretching and popping my back in three places. I stretched my shoulder gingerly a few times, but it wasn’t painful. It felt better than it had before I was stabbed.

The thick rug muffled my steps as I walked to the window and slid the curtains open. The sun was high in the sky, and I guessed it was early afternoon. The view outside was of a small garden hemmed in by tall hedges. What the garden lacked in space, it more than made up for in complexity. The flower beds were bursting with color, and it looked like someone had laid down a labyrinth out of pebbles in one of the few patches of empty ground. The glass of the window had a telltale greenish reflection, meaning it had been enchanted to only allow people to see out, not in.

There was a rustle of fabric in the room behind me, and I turned to see Gabriel blinking owlishly at me. Pothos had abandoned his perch on the vampire’s back and was now curled up on my abandoned pillow, enthusiastically licking his own butt.

“How do you feel?” Gabriel asked. His voice was still rough with sleep, his hair falling over his forehead in loose curls. I thought about how his hand had looked lying on the bedspread next to mine, and I swallowed hard.

“Better,” I said. “Great, actually.”

“And you can…?” he asked delicately, wiggling his fingers.

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