Page 115 of Unraveled
The contents of my stomach curdle as Morla’s glamour falls back, revealing her fully to me for just a moment. She thinks I’m going to die here.
“Why curse all the fae if you only hate him?”
“Hate is such an ugly word, and I didn’t hate him for such a long time. Quite the opposite, darling. But if he refuses to be mine, then he will be no one’s.” Skylar’s eyes turn manic, the glamour keeping her looking like him shifts, and for another moment her beautiful face is revealed to me again.
I reel back. “You’re crazy.”
“He makes me so,” she growls, and takes a deep breath to calm herself. “You know what happens to those of us bonded to the fae?” She doesn’t wait for my response. “We can’t ever move on, we’re always tethered to them. They, however, couldn’t care less if we—their tributes—are killed. If we never return home.”
Something tells me Morla has a hard time controlling her temper, much like earlier when she shot Kyle. So I remain silent.Perhaps she won’t kill me, and waiting for her to leave is my best option.
“Was he able to tell you about the curse?”
“No.”
She laughs, like my ignorance about it is music to her ears. “Even if he could, he doesn’t know all the details. You see, the curse is simple. After what I did to him, and what the hybrids did to his kingdom, I was sure he would grow to loathe our kind. So I added that only a hybrid could break it. Of course, it was unlikely he would allow one so close to him again.”
“Is that why you wove your roses into the curse? So they’ll send you a signal when a hybrid is nearby?”
Morgana came to me not long after I touched the roses for the first time. She sent me to die out in the halls that night.
“Yes.” Morla’s cocky expression falters before she schools her features. “I’ve been dying to know more about you, Mia. When you broke into this building during the last blood moon, you had your amulet like any sorcerer does. I didn’t expect you to be a hybrid or I wouldn’t have had you help us.”
Skylar had been curious about my necklace the night we met. My father told me to never take it off, to let no one see it. Perhaps being protective about it allowed me to sell the lie better.
“Why hide behind your glamour and your gunpowder? Why did you even need my help if you’re this powerful hybrid?” As soon as I speak, I regret my choice of words. Goading her is the wrong move.
Her lips peel back, and she snarls as she levels her pistol on me. She fires, and my ears ring with the loudness of it all. I jump back. My heart collides with my chest, but there’s no pain. No bullet.
“Pity.” She ticks her tongue, looking at her pistol with a frown. “I guess I truly can’t kill you. It must be because your soul is connected to Ash, as mine is.”
So that’s why she tried to use me that night to harm him so her people could plug him into their machine. I wonder if she tried when she came to my chambers in the castle as Morgana.
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t matter,” she says, more to herself than me. “It’ll all be over by the end of the night.”
My head throbs as I work to put everything together with my sluggish mind. “So you broke the man you supposedly loved. Congratulations. That makes you the worst person in the world.”
“He played me like a fool and made me believe there was a future where I could be more than a so-called friend of the unseelie prince. But he made sure I understood how I, the hybrid, wasn’t good enough for him. I was shoved aside, unable to form connections with anyone. Our kind, the hybrids, hated me, even after I cursed him. To them, I will always be the fae king’s whore.”
So she hid under Skylar’s glamour.
“Ash has nothing against hybrids,” I say. “That’s not why he didn’t think you were good enough for him. If you ever loved him, please stop this. You don’t have to hurt him, Morla.”
“Youwouldthink that, wouldn’t you? He choseyou.” She spits as she speaks, and her saliva spills like poison down her chin.
And to think I felt jealous of this woman when I learned about who she was back at the Crossroads. I thought she was powerful, and I wasn’t.
But I am good enough, even when I struggle to handle my magic. Not only for him, but for Irene and my father. I never needed to prove myself, and Ash showed me that.
“You probably think you won, but you didn’t, darling. You see, I also wove a caveat into my curse. If Ash falls for the hybrid who loves him, then she’ll die.” Morla is looking at me with such triumph it makes me sick to my stomach. “That blackness consuming your skin is his love, killing you.”
“No.” I hug my arm to my chest. My mind is quick—but my movements are slow. “That happened when I removed Nera’s curse, not because of you.”
I wasn’t about to tell this woman I absorbed the curse and every time I close my eyes I see its black face. Morla doesn’t need any more fuel for her madness.
“Do you think that’s how the curse works?” She laughs prettily, loads one more bullet and spins the barrel of her gun. “I crafted the spell myself, and if a human or hybrid is affected by it, they turn into monsters and die within hours. But your curse is different from the rest, isn’t it? It’s likely that when you saved Nera, it made Ash admit his feelings for you.”
Ash and Finley told me they’d never seen anyone reacting to it this way before.
