MARK OF LOVE (Lovemark #3)

17. Indigo

Chapter 17

Indigo

Gazing after Quilla as she hurried away, I wondered if I should follow her. Mentioning the curse’s origins had been a bad trigger, I could tell. She felt guilt and responsibility.

I didn’t understand that because it was obvious the curse had been started long before she was born. None of this was her fault.

I stood, deciding I should try to soothe her.

But Melaina grabbed my arm and yanked me back down onto the stump. “It’s not a pretty tale,” she started as if she hadn’t noticed I’d been about to chase down her niece. “In fact, if I were a blood-born Graykey, I wouldn’t tell anyone about the origins of their curse either.”

I waved an unconcerned hand. “Trust me. I already know what kind of inbred, murderous genes she comes from. I’m sure nothing could shock me anymore.”

Reaching for a leather flask sitting near the fire, I picked it up and brought it to my mouth for a healthy drink, needing to wash away the nasty aftertaste that came with thinking of the Graykey lore I’d heard before today.

Melaina lifted her eyebrows and watched me, waiting until I was swallowing deeply before saying, “Oh, so you already know about the siblings Morgaine and Marvello marrying and killing their father, Lawton, who was also married to his first cousin Laylee. Or maybe you’re talking about Holden Graykey, who r***d his granddaughter for three years straight?”

Raped his what?

I spit out the drink, instantly choking on what I’d just swallowed down the wrong tube. “Dear God.” Appalled, I gaped at her incredulously as she burst out laughing and pointed at me.

“You should see the look on your face. If this isn’t your shocked expression, then I can’t wait to see what is.”

“I thought the mating of Morgaine and Marvello was the only case of i****t in the family line,” I admitted weakly, feeling queasy in the stomach.

Melaina kept chuckling. Patting her knee with mirth, she shook her head and sighed. “Sweetling, every new world that starts out with such a small population, like two or even nineteen people, has to experience some i****t in the beginning to get their numbers up. The Graykeys merely kept the tradition going long after it was considered acceptable. And Holden was the first child born in the Outer Realms. Did you know that?”

I shook my head. “No. I’ve never even heard of him before.” But then, I hadn’t heard of Corandra Graykey before today either.

I sat back down to hear yet another Graykey family tale.

Quilla’s aunt nodded. “He was the son of Corandra Graykey and Booker Blayton. And the first person he f****d was his half sister, Locasta Blayton.”

“Locasta Blayton?” I repeated with a frown because something about that name rattled my memory banks. But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall where I’d heard it before.

Huh.

“Locasta seemed to think this made them one and onlys,” Melaina was saying. “But Holden liked to spread his seed indiscriminately, which probably made him a very experienced and accomplished lover, if you want my take on the situation. Except it just made Locasta irrationally jealous.” She rolled her eyes and muttered, “i***t,” under her breath.

I sighed, hoping she wasn’t going to drag the story out twice as long as it didn’t need to be with her unnecessary commentary.

“So, Locasta and Holden had one daughter together, who went off to have her own daughter named Billa Blair. And when Billa was fourteen, Holden noticed her blooming, I guess you could say, and he became unnaturally fixated on her. He put her under a spell, preventing her from fighting off his advances, and with another spell after that, he sealed her lips to keep her from telling anyone about what he did during his grandfatherly visits.”

“Mother of God,” I gasped, shuddering and cringing in horrified sympathy for the poor girl. I swallowed down a bit of bile rising in my throat. “He must’ve been fairly along in his years by then too.”

“He was sixty-two, I believe.”

I slapped my bound hands over my mouth and shook my head. Wrong. That was all just so disgustingly wrong.

“When Billa mysteriously turned up pregnant, Locasta immediately suspected Holden was the child’s sire, and she grew irate with jealousy, even though he denied it was true.”

“Wait, she was jealous?” I exploded incredulously. “Um, shouldn’t she have been—I don’t know—outraged instead? Appalled? Livid with murderous rage? What the hell was wrong with her?”

“A lot, I suspect,” Melaina answered. “And that was when the Graykey curse was created. Wanting to seek the truth, Locasta spelled Billa so a mark would appear on her child when it was born if Holden was indeed the father. And if he was, the babe, along with every generation thereafter, would suffer through an onslaught of reapings full of power and revenge and blood for the rest of eternity.”

“Jesus, God,” I mumbled, sitting back in shock. “How could she doom her own great-grandchild like that?”

Shaking her head silently, Melaina glanced away. When I saw her lift a hand to her eyes and swipe something away, I kept talking so she’d stop feeling compassion and sympathy and she wouldn’t bleed to death on me. “Shouldn’t there be a way to break the curse?”

Melaina stiffened her shoulders and turned back to me. “No. Or at least, if there is, it’s been forgotten over time, or Locasta was smart in her spell casting and forbade anyone from repeating the specifics.”

Damn. I balled my hands in a frustrated fist. “What happened to them; do you know? To Holden? Locasta? Billa?”

“Well, when Billa gave birth to her third marked son—”

“What?” I yelled. “He impregnated her three times?! And no one stopped him? Not Locasta, who knew the f*****g truth? Or her daughter? Or Billa’s own father?”

“I’m getting there, Captain Impatient,” Melaina snapped. “I was just about to say Corandra finally discovered the truth and stopped him.”

I sighed gratefully, only to scowl. I’d heard that name quite a lot today. “Her again, huh?”

“Of course. Now, usually, Corandra was all about free will and letting everyone live their own life as they wished, whether she agreed with their decisions or not. But her son really needed to be stopped.”

“Yeah,” I muttered acerbically. “About three children too late.”

Melaina fluttered out a hand. “Whatever. In any case, she helped Billa break the spells cast on her by Holden, to which her great-granddaughter immediately used her freedom to slay Holden in his sleep.”

“Thank God.”

“She renamed herself Billa Purge and took her three sons—Ian, Iago, and Icarus—up north to live in what is now the Gill Caves in Lowden.”

“So that’s why I found so many Purges in the family line,” I realized with clarity. They’d been Purges for over two hundred years until Orick Graykey had changed the house name back to Graykey. Until this moment, I’d always thought he’d just changed it to Graykey, hoping to escape the Purge name. But it had been Graykey before, and he’d merely returned it to the original.

Interesting.

“Anyway, running and changing their name obviously didn’t help them escape the effects of the curse,” Melaina went on. “They still managed to have three children each, named accordingly, and two are typically doomed to die so that only the strongest child takes on their powers and prevails. And that, my clueless High Clifter, is how Lowden became ground zero for all the Graykey reapings.”

“Damn,” I murmured. “So whatever happened to Locasta?”

“She was quite distraught when Holden perished.”

“Wow.” I shook my head in dry disbelief. But seriously, that Locasta woman was definitely a piece of work. And she sure had picked a winner to become obsessed with, too.

“She wailed to the world that Holden had been her one true love, and she couldn’t go on without him. So Corandra came up with her own curse. To discover if there was any truth to such a claim, she put a mark on Locasta’s temple to reveal whether he was honestly her true love or not. She instructed Locasta to kiss Holden’s fresh corpse. If she was truly his soulmate, she’d be able to bring him back to life. Except she wasn’t able to, and she had to live the rest of her days knowing Holden had never craved her the way she’d craved him.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” I waved my hands. “Back up a minute. Are you saying Corandra Graykey created the first love mark? This mark right here?” I tapped the tattoo on my own temple. “But that’s impossible. I heard the first love mark was given to Elaina, the first Queen of High Cliff.”

“Locasta’s mark was Corandra’s prototype. But yes, for some reason she also gifted Elaina L’Amante with the same mark later on when Elaina became the queen. And from there, Elaina proclaimed a law that all her subjects should get the same mark.”

I frowned, not sure if I could believe this particular story.

Or any of them really.

Nicolette had come across a woman named Mydera only a few moon cycles ago, who’d told her the legend about how Queen Elaina had been the first person to receive the love mark. It didn’t completely jive with Melaina’s story now. Except I hadn’t told Melaina which house Elaina had come from either—yet she already knew—so maybe her version was more accurate. But the mage Mydera had also claimed to be a descendant of the first person to apply the love mark, which would mean she’d have to be a descendant of Corandra Graykey.

She’d have to be a Graykey herself.

“Son of a b***h,” I murmured, wiping at my face. This was all getting too complicated for me. And I wasn’t sure how it had anything to do with what was happening now. Or even if it did have anything to do with finding lost amulets.

Probably not.

I shook my head and dropped my hands. “This Corandra Graykey sounds like quite the altruistic heroine in every story you tell,” I said, wondering what truly lay behind all her kinder deeds.

“That’s probably because all the stories I’ve told you originated from her journal,” Melaina answered before glancing at my book I’d set on the ground between us. “And she probably wrote them on scrolls like all Outer Realms writings are meant to be written on.”

Ignoring her bashing of my beloved book, I shook my head. “She wrote a journal? Well, where is that? Maybe it says something in it about how to break the curse.”

Then Quilla wouldn’t have to leave at all, and she could stay here in the Outer Realms with me.

Melaina laughed. “Oh, darling. That was hundreds of years ago. Her journal’s long gone by now. Or maybe she still has it with her. Who knows.”

“Hmm.” Well, that was a depressing dead end.

“The only thing that matters now is escaping this godforsaken world. Isn’t that right, Quilla dear?”

Quilla?

She was back?

I whirled around to find her approaching through the trees from the direction of the stream. I’d been so involved in her aunt’s story that I hadn’t even noticed the tingling in my mark, telling me she was coming nearer again.

The cauldron she’d stalked off with was full of water now, but her hair was wet and pulled back, as well, whereas it’s been flowing down free around her shoulders when she’d left.

“You bathed,” I realized dumbly. “In the stream.”

The setting sun glinted a golden shimmer off her light hair, and damp spots on the tunic she wore told me she’d put her clothes back on before fully drying. I couldn't help but notice she wasn’t wearing a corset or even a chemise underneath, either.

Which made me think about all the naked flesh hiding under only one layer of clothing.

And suddenly, I was remembering how she’d looked yesterday, bathing and coming out of the water like the goddess of the brook.

Or an empress.

Yes. The empress of the brook.

My body instantly grew tense as I forgot all about whatever it was I’d been discussing with her aunt. I could only think about one thing.

As my c**k hardened in my trousers, I surged to my feet. “You know. A dip in the stream sounds lovely right about now. I think I’ll do the same.”

And I hurried past her, shuddering when her sweet scent wafted out and grabbed me by the balls.

Damn, she smelled good.

Let’s hope the water was ice-cold.