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The guy on the gurney wasn't breathing right.
I mean, he was breathing. Sort of. But every inhale rattled like someone dragging a fork across concrete, and the exhale came out wet. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth, black under the ambulance's red interior light. My partner, Marcus, was busy trying to keep the rig steady through downtown Vesper City's potholed streets, which meant I was alone back here with a dying man and a curse I could see crawling under his skin.
Yeah. I said curse.
Most people can't see them. Most people think the shimmering black lines that snake up his neck and disappear under his collar are just shadows, or maybe tattoos if they're feeling generous. But I grew up with a mom who could pull curses out of people's chests like loose threads, and apparently, I got stuck with the same party trick. Lucky me.
This one was bad. Real bad. It moved like it had a mind of its own, pulsing in time with his failing heartbeat, spreading thin black veins across his jaw and up toward his temple. I pressed two fingers to his wrist. Pulse was thready, rapid. Skin cold and clammy. Textbook shock, except for the part where a literal curse was eating him from the inside out.
"How's he doing back there?" Marcus shouted from the driver's seat.
"Define doing," I muttered, grabbing the penlight from my pocket. I shone it into the guy's eyes. Pupils unequal. One blown wide, the other a pinprick. Not great. I clicked the light off and leaned closer, trying to get a better look at the curse's entry point. Somewhere on his torso, probably. They always started at the heart or the gut, depending on what kind of nasty someone wanted to stick in you.
His shirt was already cut open from when the bystanders found him. Gunshot wound to the left shoulder, through-and-through, but that wasn't what had him circling the drain. The curse was. It coiled around his ribs like a snake made of smoke and bad intentions, and every few seconds it pulsed brighter, like it was feeding.
"Ev, we're two minutes out," Marcus called.
Two minutes. This guy didn't have two minutes. The curse was already creeping toward his heart, and once it got there, game over. I'd seen it happen before. The body just... stopped. No dramatic death rattle, no final gasp. Just a light going out.
I should've let it happen. That's what you're supposed to do when you're a paramedic. Stabilize, transport, let the ER handle the weird stuff. But the curse was whispering now, and I hated when they did that. It wasn't words, exactly. More like a feeling that pressed against the inside of my skull, cold and insistent.
Let go. Let him go. He's already gone.
And then, because the universe has a sick sense of humor, it used my brother's voice.
My hands were moving before I could think it through. I pressed my palm flat against the guy's chest, right over the curse's center. My mom used to say you had to pull them out slow, like defusing a bomb. But I'd never been good at slow. I shoved my will into the curse, hard and sharp, and told it to get the hell out.
It didn't want to go.
The curse thrashed under my hand, and the guy on the gurney convulsed, back arching off the thin mattress. His eyes snapped open. They were brown. Dark brown, almost black, and fully aware. He stared straight at me, and for a second, I forgot how to breathe.
Then he grabbed my wrist.
His grip was strong. Too strong for a guy who'd been half-dead ten seconds ago. His fingers dug into my skin, and the curse surged up my arm like an electric shock, cold and furious. I gasped and tried to pull back, but he held on.
"Don't," he rasped. His voice was raw, shredded. "Don't pull it out."
"Are you insane? It's killing you!"
"It's supposed to." He coughed, and more blood spilled over his lips. His eyes didn't leave mine. "You pull it out, it spreads. You understand? It spreads."
I didn't understand. I didn't understand anything. The ambulance hit a pothole, and we both lurched to the side. His grip on my wrist loosened, just enough for me to yank my hand back. The curse retreated, coiling tight around his heart again, but it was watching me now. I could feel it. Like it knew I could see it.
"Who the hell are you?" I demanded.
He didn't answer. His eyes rolled back, and he went limp again. But his chest was rising and falling, steady now. The curse had stopped spreading. It just sat there, wrapped around his heart like a sleeping dog.
Marcus slammed on the brakes. "We're here! Help me get him out!"
The ER doors were already open, a trauma team waiting with a gurney. I helped Marcus transfer the guy, rattling off vitals and injuries on autopilot while my brain tried to catch up with what had just happened. The doctors took over, wheeling him through the double doors, and then it was just me and Marcus standing in the ambulance bay, the city's neon lights buzzing overhead.
"You good?" Marcus asked, giving me a look.
"Yeah," I lied. "I'm good."
He didn't believe me, but he didn't push. That's why I liked Marcus. He knew when to let things go. We restocked the rig in silence, and I tried not to think about the way the curse had used my brother's voice, or the way the stranger's eyes had locked onto mine, like he'd been waiting for me.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. Text from Nora, the clinic owner who paid me under the table to do the kind of spellwork the council made illegal twenty years ago.
One line. No greeting.
*The council's looking for a man with a shadow curse. If you picked him up tonight, dump the paperwork.*
I stared at the text. Then I looked back at the ER doors.
What the hell had I just saved?
My shift ended at six a.m. I didn't go home. I went to the hospital's records room instead, because I'm an idiot who can't leave things alone. It took me twenty minutes to sweet-talk the night clerk into letting me "double-check" the intake forms from my last call. Another ten to find the guy's file.
No name. No ID. No insurance. Just a Jane Doe number, except he was definitely not a Jane. Someone had written *gunshot wound, stable, transferred to ICU* in hasty shorthand. Nothing about the curse. Of course not. Normal people couldn't see it.
But someone knew. Nora knew. The council knew. And the guy himself knew, which meant he'd been living with that thing inside him for who knows how long.
I took a photo of the file with my phone and got out of there before someone asked questions I couldn't answer. The sun was just starting to rise when I stepped outside, painting Vesper City's skyline in shades of pink and gold. Pretty, if you ignored the fact that half the buildings were held together with duct tape and illegal spells.
I should've gone home. I should've slept. Instead, I found myself walking toward the ICU.
He was in room 12, according to the file. No guards, no cops, no council enforcers. Just a guy in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines that beeped softly in the dim light. I stood in the doorway, telling myself I was just checking to make sure he was stable. That's all. Professional follow-up.
His eyes were open.
I froze. He turned his head slowly, like it hurt, and looked straight at me. For a long moment, neither of us said anything. Then he smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the kind of smile that said he knew exactly who I was and what I could do.
"You're Evelyn," he said. His voice was still rough, but stronger now. "Evelyn Hart."
I didn't move. "How do you know my name?"
"Your name tag," he said, nodding toward my uniform. Oh. Right. "But I knew your mother."
The floor dropped out from under me.
"My mother's dead," I said flatly.
"I know." He shifted slightly, wincing. The curse pulsed once under his skin, visible even through the thin hospital gown. "She's the one who put this in me."
I stopped breathing.
He kept talking, his eyes locked on mine, and I couldn't look away. "My name is Kane Rook. And I need you to finish what your mother started."