Free Awaken the Curse by Alexa Egan

and expectant but bright as stars all at once. He lost himself in those eyes, and when the icy wind blasted through the chamber, smashing his magic like a fist through a mirror, his gaze held those eyes as if gripping a last tenuous lifeline.
    A second wave of magic burned its way along every nerve ending, leaving him screaming as the pain lanced his skull, the shock wave sizzling down his spine until he curled, retching and gasping for air. Oblivion reaching with tentacles to claim him.
    “James!” Katherine’s shout followed him down into a great tunnel, her hands holding him together lest he break into a million pieces. Her beautiful golden eyes shimmering against the encroaching dark.
    A voice spoke to him from the spinning blackness. You should have listened, Fey-blood. He has come for the disk.
    *   *   *
    Dream fast became nightmare.
    Katherine struggled into her dress and boots. Gathered her coat back onto her shoulders. Blinked back tears at the destruction of James’s mage-spun chamber. It was as if the past few hours had not occurred. Their confessions erased as if they’d never been. A tenuous future unraveling like thread from a spool. She swallowed the panic swamping her limbs and curdling her insides. Fear would only kill her faster.
    James lay on his side, one arm stretched toward the dying fire. She checked his pulse as she dragged a coat over him against the cold of the barren stone and icy puddles. He wasn’t dead. She had not lost the two men she loved the most on the same day.
    “I know you are within, mademoiselle. Bring me Lord Duncallan’s disk.”
    Monsieur d’Espe? The chevalier was behind this vicious attack? Were he and Cade working together? Or was there more going on than she and James had surmised? “Come and get it!” she shouted back, every ounce of false bravado strengthening her shaky voice.
    “His Lordship is a stronger mage than I gave him credit for, though still weak in many ways. He has made it impossible for my physical form to cross the warded threshold, though even he could not keep out my magic.”
    “Then unless your magic can take this disk from me, you’ll just have to leave empty-handed, because I’m not bringing you anything.”
    A chuckle scraped knifelike along her bones. “I have your father. If you do not want to see him in pieces, you will do as you are told. Isn’t that right, Professor?”
    Another familiar voice called over the wind. “Do as he says, Katherine. It’s not worth your life.”
    “Father? Is that you?”
    Hope arrowed through her and a great weight seemed to lift from her chest. Father still lived. Cade had lied about his murder. She caught back a swift breath, her relief tempered by fear. Father lived, but for how long unless she turned over the disk to d’Espe?
    “Mademoiselle Lacey? Are you prepared to let your father die over a little piece of metal? I had not thought you so coldhearted.” D’Espe’s question oozed against her skin, making her shiver, and she knew what she must do.
    “Don’t believe him. It’s a trick.” From behind her, James’s voice came threaded with weakness, his face blanched white as bone.
    Her eyes darted from the darkness beyond the flickering light of the dying fire to James and back. “I can’t let my father die. I can’t turn my back on him when he needs me.”
    James fought to stand, his back braced against the wall of the chamber as he pushed his legs into his breeches, every movement painful to watch, his jaw clamped, his teeth drawn back in a grimace of agony. “You can’t give him the disk. You can’t let him open the tomb. Not if he’s right. Not if it’s a source of Imnada power.”
    “My patience wanes, mademoiselle,” d’Espe called, a steel edge to his velvet voice. “I know Duncallan carries the disk on him. Bring it to me. Now.”
    She shook her head in anger and confusion. “I have to do as he says. I have to save my father if I can.”
    James straightened, eyes grim.