Druid's Curse: A Druidverse Urban Fantasy Novel (The Trickster Cycle Book 2) by M.D. Massey

Author:M.D. Massey [Massey, M.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Modern Digital Publishing
Published: 2021-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

I awoke an indeterminate amount of time later, my head pounding and my ears ringing like I’d tied one on the night before. My eyes were glued shut, whether with crusted blood or eye boogers, it was hard to tell. I reached up experimentally to rub my face and assure myself that my nose and ears were still attached.

“Ugh, I feel like I got hit by a train.”

“So, the young druid awakes,” a wheezy, gurgling female voice said from somewhere nearby. I recognized that voice immediately. I had heard it a couple of years prior on our first visit to Underhill.

“Peg Powler, I presume?” I said as I pried my eyes open and sat up, casting about for the source of the voice. Failing to locate her, I looked around to see if Crowley was present. When he proved to be absent, I turned my attention instead to assessing my current state.

As my blurred vision cleared and my eyes adjusted to the gloom of the deep swamp, I did a quick visual survey of my person. Although my clothing had been ripped to shreds by those toothy little bastards, the skin and flesh underneath looked to be perfectly intact. However, those places where I had been bitten were covered in a slimy, greenish brown paste that was quickly drying to a flaky, muddy crust on my skin.

Experimentally, I lifted my arm to my nose and took a whiff. The smell was exactly what I expected, a combination of swamp gas, rotting vegetation, and a vaguely medicinal, iodine note.

“Don’t you be wiping that stuff off yet, young demi-human. Your ability to heal might be the equal to that of some of the gods, but you’ll be needing ol’ Peg’s magic to put you right as rain, and that’s a fact.”

I nodded, as much to acknowledge her wisdom as to assure myself it was the proper course of action. “Obviously, I’m in no position to argue. Incidentally, your efforts to help me have been noted.”

“I suppose that’s as close to thanks that ol’ Peg’ll get, even though she’s not a fae-born creature—no, not at all. T’wasn’t Peg’s fault she was cursed twice and then once more, first when her children drowned, and again when she went mad with grief, and the final time when that old fae witch turned her into what she is now.”

Wisely I remained silent, as it seemed Peg’s intentions were not so much to explain herself to me, as they were to simply reflect on the past. I knew a little of her origin story, although that version differed quite a bit from what she had just shared. Supposedly, she had drowned her own children—whether due to insanity or wickedness, I had no idea.

As these legends often go, when Peg realized what she had done she went mad with grief and drowned herself in the same bog, intending to spend eternity in a watery grave next to her children. But due to divine intervention, or that of some fae spirit playing the world’s cruelest prank, she was not allowed to die.

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