“I’m making conversation.”
Felix flicks his eyes to me in question. We did sleep together, but only a few times. And the sex was nowhere near as good as the sex is with Lucas. Nothing from my past even comes close in comparison. “So this curse,” he starts and suddenly stops scanning Lucas with the crystals.
“What is it?” I’m perched on the coffee table, and all annoyance over Lucas being a jealous idiot fades away. My heart skips a beat in my chest, and I reach for Lucas’s hand.
Felix sets the crystal down and looks at me, brows furrowed. “If it is indeed the curse that I’m thinking of, then this is bad. That particular curse must be seen into completion. I’m sorry, Callie, but there is no way to stop it.”Chapter 12“No.” My fingers close around Lucas’s hand, nails biting into his skin. “I don’t accept that.” I blink and ignore the ringing in my ears. I refuse to accept it. Lucas isn’t going to be in this half-alive, half-dead state forever.
And he’s not going to die.
“Can we reverse it?” Lucas asks.
“I’m afraid not.” Felix trades the crystal for a pendant on a silver chain. The sand is washed away from under my feet and a wave is about to crash down and drag me out to sea. I can’t breathe.
Not without Lucas.
“I recognize this curse, but not in the way it’s been cast. It is indeed necromancy, but the few other times I’ve come across it, it’s been cast differently. This…this is reversed.”
“What do you mean?” I whisper, hardly able to talk without crying.
“This curse slowly kills parts of the body, causing the victim to rot from the inside out. But they’ve…they’ve…” He holds the chain over Lucas’s chest and closes his eyes, getting another read on the curse. “They’ve combined it with a different spell, complicating things even more. They’re bringing him back to life slow enough to kill him.”
“I know,” I say as tears fall down my cheeks. “There has to be a way to stop it. To reverse it and make him undead again.”
“There’s not.” The pendant starts to spin, and a wave of dark blue energy sparks around it. Felix opens his eyes and looks at the pendant, reading whatever the hell it’s telling him. “But there’s a loophole.”
“What is it?” I ask, teeth chattering together.
“The curse can be transferred.” Felix looks into my eyes.
“Transferred?” I echo. “What do you mean?”
“The curse is designed to work until it is done and has an element I’ve only seen once before. Whoever cast this curse is watching somehow. They might have a poppet or a candle, something that lets them know how things are progressing. If we can transfer the curse from the vampire into another host, then…”
“Then Lucas will be okay and the casters will think their curse killed him, buying us time to figure out who cast it in the first place.”
“In theory.” Felix gathers the chain in his hand and gets a book out of his bag. “I’ve come across the curse—not in reverse like this, of course—only twice before.” He flips through the book and then hands it to me. I glance down at his notes. “As you can see, it’s quite complicated. And dark,” he adds as a warning. “Transferring it can be just as dark.”
“That doesn’t bother me. I’ve done dark before.”
His lips twitch into a smile. “How dark?”
Having frequent conversations with Uncle Lucy is pretty damn dark, but Felix doesn’t need to know about that. “I’ve raised the dead.”
“A resurrection spell? Damn. Color me impressed, Martin—I mean, King.”
I give Lucas’s hand a squeeze. “So what are we waiting for? Let’s do it.”
Felix’s brow furrows. “Callie…it’s a complex spell that I’ve never seen executed properly. The first time…both the cursed and the host died. The second time, the witches trying to transfer the curse got hit with a lesser version of the same curse. And then they all died, too.”
I swallow hard. Dying won’t save Lucas.
“Callie is a very powerful witch,” Eliza rushes out, too concerned about Lucas to realize she’s bluntly complimenting me. “I’m sure she can handle it.”
“I did hear how you took out that demon and saved your coven,” Felix says, getting something else from his bag. It’s a small bag, much too small to be holding everything that’s come out of it so far. Once this is over, I’ll have to ask what spell he used for that. It would really come in handy when I pack for vacation again.
“Lucas helped,” I say, and tears start to sting the corners of my eyes again. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it if it weren’t for him.”
“I heard that, too.” He unscrews the lid of a jar of black salt. “News travels fast through the covens.”
I nod and rub my thumb in circles on Lucas’s palm. “Let me see this spell.”