Chapter 10: Covenant of the Cursed

Chapter 10: Covenant of the Cursed

Jackson Square at night was a tapestry of life woven with threads of light and shadow. Gas lamps cast a warm, flickering glow on the flagstones, where artists packed up their charcoal portraits and tarot readers shuffled their worn decks one last time. The air, thick with the scent of beignets from the nearby Café Du Monde and the sweet, cloying fragrance of night-blooming jasmine, was a symphony of human emotion.

Kaelen stood in the shadows of the St. Louis Cathedral, a ghost at the feast. He had been drawn here, pulled from the suffocating confines of the mansion by a morbid curiosity. The journal’s final, horrifying chapter had re-contextualized the world for him. He no longer saw a crowd of people; he saw an ocean of fuel. He could feel the vibrant thrum of their lives—the giddy joy of a young couple on their first date, the weary frustration of a street musician counting his meager earnings, the simmering resentment of a vendor who’d been cheated. It was all there, a buffet of raw power, a vineyard ripe for the harvest. The thought was a seductive poison, a whisper from his grandfather’s ghost promising an end to his struggle. All he had to do was reach out and take.

“Come to do a little shopping, Frost?”

The voice was a whip-crack of venom. Kaelen spun around. Camille and Bastien emerged from the deep shadows of an alley, their expressions stripped of all pretense. They were not here to taunt; they were here to kill.

“Picking out a soul to drink for an aperitif?” Camille continued, her voice dripping with scorn. She held a chain of braided thorns in her hand, which writhed with a malevolent, parasitic energy. Bastien cracked his massive knuckles, and the air around his fists shimmered with kinetic force. They moved to flank him, their movements practiced and predatory, cutting him off from the thinning crowds.

Kaelen’s hand went to his chest, the memory of white-hot rage a familiar comfort he tried to grasp. He reached for it, for the clean, purifying fire. But it wasn’t there. His emotions were a muddied, chaotic storm: the seductive whisper of his grandfather’s evil, the disgust at his own temptation, the crushing weight of the Coven’s grief he’d witnessed in his dreams, and a spike of simple, animal fear. The Soulfire required a pure catalyst, and his soul was now anything but.

“Your games are over,” Bastien growled, lunging forward.

Kaelen dodged, the blow pulverizing a stone bench where he’d been standing. Camille flicked her wrist, and the chain of thorns shot out like a living serpent, aiming to ensnare him. He threw himself back, the thorns scraping against the cathedral’s iron fence with a shriek of tortured metal. He was clumsy, his power a tangled knot in his gut. He was going to die here.

Suddenly, a gust of wind, unnaturally cold and smelling of magnolia and ozone, tore through the square. A swirl of dark leaves and petals spun between Kaelen and his attackers, forming a momentary, swirling barrier.

Liberté landed as softly as a falling shadow, positioning herself directly in front of Kaelen. In one hand, she held the cursed black knife, Le Silence, its void-like surface seeming to drink the gaslight from the air. Her amber eyes, fixed on Camille, burned with an intensity that made the Soulfire seem like a candle’s flicker.

“Liberté,” Camille spat, her face a mask of triumphant fury. “Just in time to watch. Or were you coming to join him? I always knew your blood ran thin. Traitor.”

“I side with the truth, Camille,” Liberté’s voice was as cold and sharp as her blade. “And you’ve poisoned it with your jealousy.”

“The Coven will not see it that way when we bring them his body and your excuses,” Camille sneered. She and Bastien charged as one.

What happened next was not the perfect, accidental synergy of the cemetery. It was a clumsy, desperate, and conscious act of alliance.

Bastien threw a punch wreathed in concussive force. Liberté met it, not with a block, but with a complex gesture that wove the air into a thick, viscous shield. It buckled under the impact, and she staggered back, crying out, “Kaelen, now! Fervor! Push!”

He didn’t know how, but he understood the command. He remembered the desperate, protective instinct that had saved her from the Amalgam. He looked at her, at the defiant line of her back as she stood between him and certain death, and he felt that same selfless, overwhelming will surge through him. He shoved the feeling outward, a chaotic wave of raw power.

The energy slammed into Liberté’s shield. It didn’t just solidify; it exploded outward in a concussive ring of force, throwing Bastien back ten feet to crash into the base of the Andrew Jackson statue.

Camille shrieked in rage, lashing out with her thorn-whip. It snaked through the air, but Liberté was already moving. With a sweep of Le Silence, she didn’t cut the whip, she unmade the magic animating it. The thorns went limp and lifeless, clattering to the stone.

“He is a parasite! And you have become his host!” Camille screamed, pulling a handful of dark powder from her belt and flinging it. It burst into a cloud of clinging, spectral shadows that swarmed towards them.

Kaelen felt the familiar, cold touch of fear. But this time, it was a tool. He didn’t let it consume him; he harnessed it. FEAR = SHADOW BARRIER. A wall of rippling darkness, his own answer to her attack, rose from the ground. Her lesser shadows dissolved against his greater ones, consumed by the pure void of his terror.

For a moment, they stood at a stalemate, panting in the sudden silence. Camille looked from Liberté’s defiant stance to Kaelen’s controlled power, her expression of triumphant rage crumbling into disbelief and then into the bitter sneer of the defeated.

“The Coven will hunt you to the ends of the earth for this, Liberté,” she hissed, helping a groaning Bastien to his feet. “You are a dead woman walking.” With that, they melted back into the alleys, a parting curse hanging in the air.

Silence descended. The square was empty now, the last of the onlookers having fled the display of violent magic. Kaelen and Liberté were left alone under the watchful eyes of the cathedral, two opposing forces now irrevocably on the same side. The air crackled with the residue of their combined power.

“Why?” Kaelen finally managed to ask, his voice raw.

Liberté didn't answer immediately. She walked to where the thorn-whip lay inert and picked something small and silver from the ground beside it. She held it out to him in her palm. It was a tiny, exquisitely crafted magnolia charm, identical to the ones in her hair.

“Camille was not just going to kill you,” she said, her voice low and tight. “She was going to leave this in your hand. To prove I was a traitor who got what she deserved. Her ambition was going to murder us both.”

Kaelen stared at the charm, the full weight of her sacrifice crashing down on him. She hadn't just saved his life. She had sacrificed her own. Her home, her family, her history—all of it, wagered on him.

She drew a deep breath and held up the black knife. “This is Le Silence. It was given to me by my Grand-mère. Its purpose is to devour a bloodline’s magic, to ensure a final death. The Coven’s decree was absolute. By stopping Camille, by standing here with you now… I have broken it. I am an oath-breaker. An outcast.”

She finally looked at him, and for the first time, he saw past the Avenger. He saw the woman beneath the duty, and her eyes were filled with a terrifying, uncertain freedom.

“You’re hunted now,” he said, the words feeling horribly inadequate. “Because of me.”

“We are both hunted,” she corrected him, her gaze unwavering. “We are hunted by the ghosts of Otto Frost. You by his blood, me by the duty he created. My history taught me to hate your name. Your grandfather’s journal… it’s starting to show me why. But I don’t think either of us has the full story.”

She took a step closer, the space between them no longer a battlefield but the ground for a new, fragile truce. “My family only knows the pain he caused. You only know the power he created. The truth of what he really was, what he was trying to become, is somewhere in the middle. And it’s a truth that is clearly dangerous enough to make people like Camille want us dead before we can find it.”

He looked from her determined face to the dark, silent mansion looming in the distance, then back to the city that was now hostile territory. For the first time in his life, he was not entirely alone in his curse. He had an ally. An enemy. A partner.

“A covenant, then,” Kaelen said, the word tasting strange and momentous. “Of the cursed.”

Liberté gave a single, sharp nod. “The Coven is my past. Uncovering your grandfather’s secrets… that is our future.”

Under the gaslights of Jackson Square, the witch and the warlock, born of blood and grief to be each other’s doom, forged a new, unholy alliance. Their war was no longer with each other, but with the monstrous legacy that had bound them together.