Chapter 94 A Curse
The old man stared at her.
"Your mate," he said coldly.
"Yes."
He looked at Maddox against the wall. He looked at Grace. He said, in a tone that contained a considerable amount, "This same thing happened to your mother."
He didn't elaborate. He just pressed his lips together, raised his hand, and moved his fingers then said a single word in a language Grace didn't know.
Maddox blinked.
He blinked several more times in quick succession, the rapid recalibration of someone whose senses had just returned all at once. He straightened up from the wall and looked at the shop around him, at the overturned display and the scattered objects, and Grace and the old man looking at him from across the counter.
His eyes settled on the old man.
"What did you do to me," he said. His voice was very level and very controlled.
"It has worn off," the old man said. "No lasting effect."
"You blinded me and cut my hearing and took my sense of smell." Maddox came off the wall and moved toward the counter. "In what situation does that not count as an attack?"
"In the situation where I thought the woman you arrived with was being held against her will," the old man said, meeting his eyes without backing up. "Which is a reasonable thing to think when a wolf walks into a town with a young witch who looks like she has been sleeping in the same clothes for several days."
Maddox stopped.
He looked at Grace.
Grace looked back at him with an expression that was asking him to let it go.
Maddox looked at the old man for another moment and then he looked at the shop around him, at the state of the display he had walked into, and the things on the floor, his jaw worked once.
"Are we any closer to what we came for," he said to Grace.
"Yes," Grace said. "He knew her. He has something she left for me." She moved toward the window display. "He thinks there's a way to find her."
Maddox looked at the old man with the measuring expression of someone suspending a judgment rather than releasing it.
Grace reached toward the necklace in the display.
The moment her fingers made contact with the chain, something went through her hand and up her arm, not painful, not electric exactly, but present. Specific. Like the object recognising something in her. She picked it up and held the pendant in her palm and looked at the stone, the movement inside it slowed and then stilled, as though it had been waiting for something to arrive and it had arrived.
She closed her fingers around it, bringing it to her chest.
And then the floor came up.
There was no warning. No dizziness first, no narrowing of vision, no sensation that something was wrong before it was wrong. One moment she was standing with the pendant in her closed fist and the next she was going down and Maddox was moving but not fast enough and the floor received her at full weight and she did not put her hands out to catch herself because she was not conscious when she hit it.
The seizure started immediately.
Something was happening inside her that the outside had no control over, and Maddox was on his knees beside her in a second and the old man was around the counter faster than a man his age had any right to move.
"Turn her," the old man said. "On her side. Now."
Maddox was already doing it, his hands on her shoulder and her hip, turning her so she wasn't on her back.
"Hold her there," the old man said, moving to the shelves behind the counter with focused speed and producing a smooth piece of polished wood from a drawer, something worn with age and handling. "Her mouth. Open it."
"Don't touch her mouth," Maddox said.
"If she bites through her tongue she will bleed out on my floor," the old man said, not looking at him, already moving back around the counter. "Open it or I will."
Maddox got his hand to her jaw and applied careful pressure and the old man slid the wood between her teeth and her back molars and Maddox moved his hand to hold it in place and kept his other hand on her shoulder keeping her on her side as he looked at her face.
“What did you do?! You must’ve done something to her!”
The old man ignored Maddox and crouched at her head.
He reached out to put both hands on her temples.
Maddox's free hand shot out and closed around his wrist before contact was made.
"If you touch her head I will rip your arms off," Maddox growled, baring his fangs.
"Then she will die," the old man said, looking at him directly. "Whatever is happening to her is happening inside. I can read it if I make contact. I cannot help her if I cannot read it. You can stop me and watch her die or you can let me do what I know how to do." He held Maddox's eyes. "Choose."
The seizure was still moving through her. Her hands had curled and her breath was coming in shallow uneven rhythms, like her body was working hard on something other than breathing.
Maddox released the old man's wrist.
The old man placed both palms against Grace's temples gently, closed his eyes, and went still. The stillness lasted perhaps ten seconds and then his eyes opened and he pulled his hands back and his face was not the expression of a man who had found something minor.
He sat back on his heels and looked at Grace's unconscious face and then up at Maddox.
“What? What is it?”
"Someone has placed a curse on her," he frowned.
Maddox stared at him. "It seems very recent." The old man's voice was careful and measured and carrying something underneath it that was not quite fear but was close. "It went active when she touched the necklace. The necklace might have been the trigger."
Maddox looked at Grace.
She was not waking up. The seizure had stilled but the unconsciousness remained, her face slack and her breathing shallow, and the pendant had rolled from her open hand and was lying on the floor of the shop catching the light from the window, the stone inside it dark now and still.