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“You summoned me?” Shado called from behind me.
“What do you know about the Tartarus Cuff?”
“The what?”
I stepped aside and pointed at the contents of the box. “Viktor left me a gift. It’s called the Tartarus Cuff. According to his letter, it’s made from an old fae metal, and it’s supposed to suppress my powers.”
“You want to suppress your powers?” She frowned. “We have a shapeshifter to face.”
I nodded. “I get that. I just need to know if it works. I need to know that there’s hope for me after all this is over.”
“What do you mean? Of course, there’s hope—”
Tears gathered in my eyes. “My great grandmother’s powers drove her insane. She killed herself just before Myra’s eighteenth birthday.”
Shado crossed the room in three hurried steps. She tugged her sleeves down over her hands and grabbed my wrists. “Rebekah Devereaux, I promise you right here and right now, I willneverlet that happen to you. No matter how bad it gets for you, I’ll take care of you. I’ll bring you back from the edge. We’re family. You’re my blood. I won’t—”
“Thank you, but please stop. I don’t want to cry.” I shook my head and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’ve cried enough. I need todosomething.”
“What’s that?” Shado asked. Her tone drew my attention away from my pity party. She wasn’t asking what I meant, she was referring to something else.
I opened my eyes and followed the line of her hand. She pointed at a sliver of manila poking out from the top of the lid. “Oh, I forgot about that. He said there were notes from my training in the box.”
“I’ll let you grab it. I don’t want to get shocked by any spells. That didn’t look fun.”
I chuckled and pulled the folder from the box. The papers inside shifted, nearly spilling out, but I caught them and laid them out on the edge of the table. Each page was covered in Viktor’s chicken scratch. The dates began a few months after I’d moved in with him. There were notes about my aversion to touch. There were notes about my nightmares and lost time. I flipped a few pages, and then I saw it:Testing the cuff has proven marginally successful.
“I’ve worn the cuff before,” I said.
“Well, that’s good. You clearly survived it.”
I nodded and read the rest of the page. “After about twelve hours it suppressed the curse completely. I was able to have a semblance of normalcy, but then something happened. It doesn’t say what. After a year passed, he removed it. He wanted me to learn control—I don’t remember any of this. I’ve never seen that cuff before.”
“Viktor was a crafty bastard. He probably made you forget it, so you wouldn’t ask to wear it again. Dealing with a burden is always easier when you don’t think you have a choice. If you’d known there was a way out, you would have begged him to make it stop, and he would’ve thrown a violent fit.”
“That’s very true.”
“What if it doesn’t work? What if something goes wrong?” Her eyes scanned the pages I’d discarded.
“I have to try,” I said.
She exhaled a shaky breath. “You’d give it all up if you could, wouldn’t you? Not just your gift. You’d give up magic.”
“I’d do anything for him.”
28
Taste Test
Enchanted objects are dangerous. Big or small, you can never be sure what they do until you touch them. Approaching the cuff, I instinctively summoned a wisp of telekinetic energy to lift the cuff from its cushion. I willed it forward and it evaporated the moment it touched metal. I hung my head and groaned.
“What’s wrong?” Shado asked.
“The cuff is meant to suppress magic, sonaturallyit won’t let me touch it with magic.”
“Oh. Do you want me to pick it up?”
“No, I’ll do it,” I said.
