Chapter 98 Sleeping Beauty
“What do you mean cursed?”
Maddox was on his feet and the distance between him and the old man closed faster than the old man had apparently anticipated because he took a step back before catching himself.
“Who cursed her?” Maddox said. “You said the necklace triggered it. Did you put something in that necklace? Did you—”
“I told you the necklace belonged to her mother,” the old man said, and his voice was sharp but not defensive, he did not have time for the accusation and needed it moved past quickly. “Julia would never place a curse on her own daughter. The necklace might have had nothing to do with it.”
“Then who?”
The old man put his hand on his chin.
“Who did it, old man!?” Maddox yelled.
“Bastian. Call me Bastian. And, I don’t know yet.” Bastian was already moving, crossing the shop floor toward the door at the back. “What I know is that curses take time to solidify after activation. If we are early enough there may be something we can do.” He pushed the door open and looked back. “Carry her and follow me.”
Maddox didn’t move immediately. “Follow you where.”
“To save her life,” Bastian said. “Which is something I suggest we prioritise over your suspicion of me.”
Maddox looked at Grace on the floor. The seizure had stopped but the unconsciousness had not, and her breathing was shallow. He crouched and lifted her, one arm under her knees and one behind her back, and she was lighter than she should have been and completely limp, her head falling against his shoulder.
He followed Bastian through the door.
The back room was not what he had expected from the outside of the shop. The shop front was narrow and modest and by the logic of the building it occupied should have had a back room to match. The room he walked into was neither narrow nor modest. It was easily half the size of the shop floor again, lined with shelving that went to the ceiling, books and jars, and objects arranged with the density of a space that had been accumulating its contents for decades. A stone platform sat in the centre, long and flat, the surface worn smooth with age, resembling something older than anything in the shop front had any right to be.
The room should not have fit in this building.
Maddox looked at the walls and understood. Hidden with magic, expanded beyond its physical dimensions, invisible from the outside. Which meant Bastian had been operating here at a level that the modest shop front was designed specifically to conceal.
It was night now and there was a circular window in the far wall that let in the night sky directly, the moonlight falling through it in a clean shaft that landed precisely on the stone platform, and Maddox stood in the doorway with Grace in his arms and felt something that he did not often feel.
Chills.
He carried her to the platform and laid her down on it, her head toward the circular window, the moonlight across her face, he straightened up and looked at the room and then at Bastian who was already at a shelf pulling things down with the focus of someone who had done something like this before.
A thought had been sitting at the back of his mind since they had walked into Veyra that morning and he brought it forward now because the room had given it context he hadn’t had before.
Veyra had a barrier. He had known this before they arrived, had known it the way he knew most things about the world Grace was only beginning to understand, through Matteo, through years of information absorbed because information kept you alive. The barrier around Veyra was old and specific, built to keep wolves out entirely. You could not walk into this town unless you had a blood connection to it or were brought in by someone who did.
He had walked in with his hand on Grace’s arm.
She had not done it consciously. She had not known about the barrier, had not known what she was bypassing, had simply walked into the town because the town was where she needed to go, and the barrier had moved for her. Not because she’d forced it. Because she was connected to this place at a bloodline level deep enough that the barrier had simply recognised her and made way, and he had slipped through in the gap she made without trying.
That was not normal. Even among witches with genuine blood connections to a town, bypassing a barrier without training, without awareness, without any conscious application of ability, was not something that happened. It meant the bloodline was not just present but significant. It meant that whatever Grace was, she was not a small version of it.
He had not told her this morning because she had been looking at the town with an expression he hadn’t wanted to interrupt, the expression of someone feeling a connection they had been denied their whole life and was finally standing inside it. He had let her have the morning. He did not regret that.
He looked at her lying on the platform in the moonlight and regretted several other things instead.
“Why are you helping us?” he said.
Bastian was at a lower shelf now, pulling out a book that looked really old. “I’m not helping you,” he said, without looking up. “I’m repaying a debt to an old friend.”
He said the last two words and glanced at Maddox with a forlorn look, and Maddox watched his face and saw what was there briefly before Bastian pushed it away. The softening around the eyes. The particular quality of a man reaching into a memory that still had warmth in it.
Old friend. Maddox understood what that phrase was standing in for.
He looked at Grace on the platform. If he had not known with complete certainty that her father was Matteo, if he had not been there the day Matteo had crouched down beside a grave and placed a baby girl in front of a crying child and said her name, he might have looked at Bastian’s face and come to a different conclusion. But he knew. Matteo was her father. This man’s feeling for Julia was its own thing, separate from that, and whatever it was had kept him holding onto a necklace for twenty-three years in case the daughter came looking.
“Take her trousers off,” Bastian said, moving toward the platform with a jar in one hand and the book in the other.
Maddox looked at him, immediately frowning.
“The curse travels through the body,” Bastian said, meeting his look directly. “I need to see how far it has progressed. The trousers are in the way.”
Maddox reached down and removed Grace’s jeans, folded them without thinking about it, and set them at the base of the platform.
Then he saw it and his hands went still.
From both feet, running upward along her skin, black lines spread in the pattern of veins, darkening the skin along their path, precise and slow and absolutely unmistakable. They had reached her knees. He stared at them and something ripped through him that he had no interest in naming.
“Bastian.” His voice came out different from how he’d intended. Lower.
“I see it,” Bastian said. He set the jar and the book down on a side table and leaned over Grace’s legs and looked at the lines and his expression did not reassure Maddox at all. He straightened up and pressed his lips together. “This is bad.”
“Tell me what it is,” Maddox said.
Bastian moved to the book and opened it, he found the page he wanted and paused because he needed a moment before speaking. He looked at it and then looked at Grace and then at Maddox.
“It is a sleeping curse,” he said. “Forbidden. Old. The kind that is forbidden specifically because of what it costs to cast.” He looked at Maddox directly. “Once these veins reach her heart, she will not die. Her heart will keep beating. Her body will continue to exist.” He paused. “But she will be in a permanent dream state. No consciousness, no waking. A corpse that breathes.” He held Maddox’s gaze. “And it cannot be reversed once the heart is reached. There is no counter, no antidote, nothing. It simply cannot be undone.”
The room was quiet except for the faint sound of Grace’s shallow breathing.
“You know the story of Sleeping Beauty?” Bastian said.
Maddox looked at him.
“Aurora,” Bastian said. “The princess with the spinning wheel.”
“That’s a fucking fairytale.” Maddox’s frown deepened.
“Not all fairytales are just fairytales. That story came from somewhere, the way all stories about magic come from somewhere. This is that curse. The original version.” He closed the book. “It is not solved by a kiss. It is not solved by love or sacrifice in the romantic sense. It is solved by the one specific thing that can counter a forbidden spell, which is a stronger life force applied against the life force of the one casting it.”
“The necklace,” Maddox said. “The necklace was the trigger. You said—”
“The necklace did not cast this,” Bastian said firmly. “I will say it as many times as necessary. Julia made that necklace for her daughter. A locator. A gift.” His voice tightened. “This was cast by someone who hates her enough to risk their own life force in the casting. Someone who knew her.” He paused and something moved across his face. “In the past, this curse was used by spiteful people against those they envied. Against lovers primarily. So the person they wanted could not be with the one they wanted, could not age or grow or live, and would simply lie forever while the world moved around them.”
“I don’t care about the history,” Maddox said. “Tell me how to stop it.”
Bastian looked at the veins on Grace’s legs. They had moved while they were talking. They were at her knees now.
“The price is steep,” Bastian said.
“Tell me.”
Bastian looked at him. “It costs a life. To counter a forbidden spell you must put a stronger life force against the one casting it. If the counter is stronger, the curse breaks and the caster bears the consequence. If the counter is weaker—” He stopped.
“Both die,” Maddox said.
“Both die,” Bastian confirmed. “Grace and whoever offers their weaker life force as the counter.”
Maddox looked at Grace’s face in the moonlight. Her expression was completely still, completely blank, the expression of someone who was not there. He thought about the day she had walked into his uncle's, her father’s house, and looked at everything with those eyes that missed nothing. He thought about the way she had run toward a camp full of rogues and police because he was there, which was the kind of thing a person did when they were fully, completely, irreversibly themselves.
He thought about Matteo crouching beside him at his mother’s grave and showing him the little baby while saying her name.
“Use me,” he said.
Bastian looked at him for a long moment. “You don’t know who is casting the spell.”
“No.”
“If they are stronger than you, you die and Grace dies with you and nothing is accomplished.”
“I’m stronger,” Maddox said.
“You cannot know that without knowing who—”
“I’m stronger.” He said it again and this time it was not an argument, it was simply a fact he had decided was true and intended to hold onto regardless of what opposed it. He looked at Bastian and felt something settle in him that had nothing to do with certainty and everything to do with will. His reason for being alive had not yet been accomplished. There were things he had not yet done, people he had not yet protected, a promise made in front of a grave that had not been kept. His will to live had a weight behind it that he could not imagine any witch’s spell outpacing.
The veins were on her thighs and still moving.
Maddox bared his teeth and felt his fangs drop and looked at Sebastian across the stone platform.
“Now use me,” he said, and his voice came from somewhere low and absolute. “Before I rip your throat out.”