AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What’s the price you’re paying?”
“If I can’t do it, I forfeit my life.”
Marta swears, lowering her face into her hand. “Why would you ever agree to such a thing?”
Esme looks to me. “He offered me a bargain I couldn’t refuse.”
At that, Marta’s head whips up. “A bargain?”
She looks between us again, and something snaps into place, because her eyes light with recognition, and in a sudden move she’s standing, the feet of her chair scraping against the tiled floor, and backing several feet away from us.
Or rather, from me.
“Acuran,” she uses my kind’s name in my own native tongue like a whip against my skin before snapping to Esme. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Esme rolls her eyes, and I fight back a grin at her reaction. “Yes, the terms and conditions were quite clear, thank you.”
Marta shakes her head with force. “His kind cannot be trusted. They’re monsters, Esmeralda, and not just because of the way they look when they aren’t hiding under a pretty facade. They have no scruples or morals, and certainly no feelings. You’re nothing more than a pawn to him.”
“Enough,” I thunder, slamming my fist on her little table, making it rattle. “You know nothing about me or my kind, witch. You certainly know nothing about what Esme means to me.”
Marta ignores me, instead scurrying to our side of the table to grab my little witch and pull her away. She holds Esme’s hands in hers in front of their chests. “Stay here. Come meet my grandmother. She’ll know a way to rid you of this curse.” Then she reaches forward to smooth Esme’s hair back. “Your grandfather may have abandoned us, but you’re still family. You’re first-born blood. If I let you die, the strongest branch of our family dies with you.”
Marta must know how to read minds, because she’s just given Esme the key to all her hopes and dreams. And though I don’t believe her grandmother could severe Esme’s involvement in the curse, I wouldn’t blame my little witch if she wanted to try. Void, if it meant her life was saved, I wouldn’t mind trying myself, either.
But to my surprise, Esme shakes her head. “I appreciate the offer, but I need to do this. We’re so close to the solution… I just need the family grimoire.”
Marta lets Esme go and starts pacing her minuscule kitchenette. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
Esme laughs. “Yes, I’ve come to realize that.”
“He’ll never feel anything for you. You could save his life, give up your own for him, and it still wouldn’t matter.”
I’m about to interject on her conjectures, but Esme beats me to it. “I don’t need his gratitude or his debt. I just need to do this.”
What does that mean, little witch? I desperately want to ask her, get into that head of hers and pluck the answers out, but I can’t. Esme’s been a wall of smoke since the first time I tried. And even if I could, I want the answer from her lips, not her mind.
Marta sighs and walks to her couch, slouching down on it as if all the fight has gone out of her. “Even if I wanted to give you the family grimoire, I can’t. We don’t have it.”
Esme’s eyebrows rise. “Who does, then?”
“Curse the Beyond if I know,” Marta says with a humorless laugh. “Back at the turn of the 20th century, when the family matriarch died, there were three heirs. Our great-great-great-grandmother was the oldest, and supposed to become matriarch, but her two siblings tried to kill her, so she fled with her husband and children. According to the stories I’ve been told, it was sudden, because they left everything behind. Including the family grimoire.”
Esme follows Marta’s lead and also sinks down on the couch.
“Our family has been split into separate branches since then. The youngest branch of the family died out in the fifties, when the daughter passed before having children; the middle branch is still out there, but they’ve been damned with nothing but sons.”
Esme looks like she’s about to ask a question, but Marta answers it before it leaves her lips. “I don’t know which one of them had the grimoire, or what they may have done with it since. Believe me, I searched for it.”
“Can you at least tell me where our ancestor fled from? That’s the last place the grimoire was seen in, right?” Esme asks.
Marta nods with a sigh. “It was over a century ago, but yes. Nobody has seen the grimoire, or admitted to it, at least, since Ginebra Parella left Barcelona.”
And with that, my stomach sinks to my feet, and I’m truly convinced all of this, from sending a witch as a challenger to drawing us back to Spain, is nothing but another way for Isabel to torture me.
With all the places in the world, it had to be the wretched city?
chapter 39
