Page 115 of Blood and Trouble

“And there was something in her eyes,” Ava continued. “A soullessness. An emptiness.”

“If she’s dealing with a blowback from a blood curse, she’d be rotting from the inside out,” Leander explained. “The pain would be unbearable.”

“Marx smelled horrible,” Sol cut in.

“And his blood was black,” Maeve said. “Blacker than I’ve ever seen in a vampire. I was coughing the shit up for days afterward.”

Bridge nodded. “That sounds like a curse gone wrong.”

“So what does she want with me?” Ava asked.

“She’ll need someone from the bloodline to counter it,” Bridge said, “to reverse whatever damage has already been done.”

“Can she do that?” I squeezed my hands into fists, unable to contain my rage. She’d have to kill me to get to my mate.

“Depends on how far she’s willing to go.”

“This is ridiculous,” Guin interjected, rolling her eyes and rubbing a hand over her face. “Why does it matter what spell she’s trying to do? We need to go in there, guns blazing, and burn the place to the ground.”

“Guin’s right,” Ren added. “They’re fucking up our packmates. Rituals, spells—we’re wasting time speculating when we should be planning.”

“We should know what we’re up against,” Bridge argued. “If I say the wrong words or pull on the wrong magic, I could make it worse. Knowing she’s dying means she’ll be distracted and desperate. We can use that.”

“Almost there,” Mill cut in, typing furiously. “Poe, Ren, can you be any more specific? Any other directions?”

I tried to yank on the connection to Lycan, only to have it scald my mental strings. “No. I can’t reach him. He’s in bad shape. We have to hurry.”

“We would have known if there was some kind of curse on our bloodline,” Maeve said. “Surely, Mother would have said something or warned us somehow. Someone would have reached out to tell us.”

“Would they?” Aquila argued. “You didn’t even know you were shifters until you started hanging around with us.”

Dread wormed into my chest, dragging my heart down to my knees, and I realized it was coming from Ava. She froze and opened her mouth, that icy fear bleeding through our connection.

It was the same sense of grief and panic I’d sensed in her dreams, something of her but not belonging to her. It slid into her again, the wheels churning in her mind, something clicking into place, and it devastated her.

“Bridge,” Ava said, clearing her throat. “What do you know about magical dreams?”

CHAPTER 26

Ava

Bridge blinked owlishly at me. “Come again?”

“I…uh…” I cleared my throat and ran my hands through my hair. “I’ve been having these wild nightmares. Since my transition. I thought it was stress or my new shifter side sorting itself out.”

“But?” Bridge asked.

“But when you said this might have happened before, something clicked into place.” I pressed my palms against my thighs to hide the shaking. “In the dream, there’s a witch. She tells me no magic comes for free, but the cost will be devastating. I do it anyway.”

Poe took my hand and gripped it tight, trying to send comfort down our bond. Little good it did. This had been weighing on me for weeks, but with Lycan’s agony still writhing inside him, I didn’t want to put him through anything else.

“And then I changed,” I said. “On a new moon, and I didn’t change back.”

The room went quiet. Everyone stared at me. Even Mill stopped typing.

“The new moon?” Bridge asked.

“Are there any shifters that change on the new moon?” Sol asked.