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Cursed City Chapters 27–35 Summary
This Kate Golden Cursed City chapter summary contains full spoilers.
Cursed City Chapter 27
Viv falls asleep and slips into a syrabraxa dream inside Reid’s mind. She watches Reid in an alley with a contact who says there’s no way to get close to the relic Reid is after and that nobody even knows if the High Thane has it. Reid refuses to give up. When Viv wakes, shaken, she holds onto the belief that he’s finding his way back to her.
Deacon collects Viv, and they head to Simon and Son’s. Deacon gets himself, Viv, and Ward past the hostess by invoking his reputation as the White Stag. Ward then spots a Brood demon who catches sight of Viv before losing her in the crowd. The demon pulls out a phone, almost certainly calling for backup, so they need to move fast.
Viv, Deacon, and Ward are shown to a back office where Nicco, a djinn who deals in black market antiques, is waiting. It turns out Deacon has already visited Nicco before while searching for Reid on his own. Nicco is nervous but insists he has nothing.
Then Viv takes over and steers the conversation toward antiques that can remove spells. When Nicco grows cagey and angles for payment, she punches him. Then, against Deacon’s wishes, she tells Nicco that she carries the syrabraxa, a risk she’s desperate enough to take. Nicco recognizes her, panics, and tells her to get out. She refuses until he tells her how to remove it.
Cursed City Chapter 28
Nicco warns the group to leave, claiming someone already told him they might show up. Viv pushes forward anyway, and Deacon threatens to kill Viv and her friends if Viv fails to find Odette.
When Deacon presses Nicco for information about a mysterious item, Nicco transforms into a towering, glowing creature and hurls Deacon and Ward across the room. Ward ends up with a wooden shard lodged in his leg before Nicco reverts to his normal form, visibly horrified by what he’s done.
Through careful questioning, Viv determines that Nicco is a djinn bound to an ancient master. He was wished into delivering a certain item and guarding its location, and he physically can’t name either the item or the master who bound him. She reads Nicco’s reactions well enough to conclude the item is a ring, one she suspects may be connected to her own curse.
Deacon wants to kill Nicco for injuring Ward. Viv talks Deacon out of it by agreeing to admit she finds him attractive, then goes further than Deacon expects, delivering a theatrical confession about fantasizing about him until he reaches toward her. She steps back and makes clear it was all a performance. Nicco lives.
On the way out, Deacon asks if any of it was true. Viv says no, and the last thing she hears is Deacon knocking Nicco out for laughing.
Cursed City Chapter 29
Viv steps outside Nicco’s office and sees a string of missed texts, including one from Penny. Penny has gone back to their apartment after receiving a message from someone pretending to be Viv. Viv sprints across the city to get there.
When Viv arrives, Penny is already under attack from a naga, a reptilian humanoid creature. A Brood demon that had followed Viv and Penny earlier breaks in through the fire escape and grabs Penny. Viv kills the demon with her dagger, then catches an oak cooking spoon Penny throws her way and uses it to finish off the naga, since the spoon is the only thing that can kill it.
The naga explodes on top of Viv, coating her in a venom that paralyzes her and burns her skin. Deacon and Ward show up shortly after. Ward pulls Penny out of the apartment while Deacon carries Viv to the shower and rinses off the venom, burning himself in the process.
Once she has recovered, Viv goes looking for her father’s locket, and Deacon tells her that the naga likely swallowed it before it died. The locket is gone. Before Deacon and Viv leave to stay ahead of Finn, Deacon tells her he was only joking around earlier and acknowledges that her real feelings are for Reid.
Cursed City Chapter 30
Viv, Penny, and Sophia spend the evening in Viv’s room at Fever Dream, painting their nails and drinking wine while they vent about everything going wrong in their lives. Viv misses Reid, and she quietly struggles with the syrabraxa bound to her.
Deacon stops by the doorway with a girl he has brought home. After a brief, charged exchange with Viv, Deacon disappears into his room.
Peter and Elliot call from the library with a possible lead on the Caspian Ring, an artifact that might be the key to removing the syrabraxa. Viv tells Peter and Elliot to follow up with their professor Dawnmere in the morning.
The mood shifts when it becomes clear that Deacon and his date are having sex in the next room. Viv impulsively wants to escape downstairs to the club, but Sophia stops her and points out that the syrabraxa makes Viv a danger to the people around her. The reminder deflates her completely.
After her friends leave, Viv lies awake, unable to stop thinking about Deacon, which unsettles her given her feelings for Reid. She falls asleep questioning how much of those feelings are genuine and how much the syrabraxa might be warping her emotions. She promises that she’d rather die than become a danger to someone innocent.
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Cursed City Chapter 31
Finn opens the chapter mid-game, playing a twisted version of chess where the pieces are living captive souls. He’s moments away from losing to his underling Orin when a djinn prisoner desperately calls out a winning move. Finn takes the advice, wins the game, and decides the djinn is worth keeping alive.
Viv wakes in a panic, gripped by a violent hunger for blood caused by the syrabraxa. She slips out of her room before she can hurt anyone, but Deacon catches her in the hallway and leads her outside to hunt safely while he stands watch.
Once outside, Viv tracks down a vampire who has cornered a young sex worker named Piper, and she and Deacon take him down together. The kill quiets her bloodlust. Instead of glamouring Piper and erasing her memory, Deacon offers her a job and a room at his club.
Walking back to Fever Dream, Viv admits the syrabraxa is getting worse and confesses that she’s been having nightmares about demons. She worries she’s running out of time. Deacon tells her he won’t let anything happen to her. The moment lingers for all of a second before they both hear footsteps and realize Finn and his Brood are waiting outside the club.
Cursed City Chapter 32
Viv and Deacon are cornered on a dark street by Finn, who shows up with twenty men. Deacon tries to invoke an old pact between himself and Finn to buy time, but Finn isn’t interested. Finn orders his men to kill Deacon and take Viv alive.
A brawl breaks out. Finn slashes Viv’s forearm, but Deacon hurls Finn through a shop window. Then Viv and Deacon manage to flag down a passing taxi and speed away, with Finn’s crew right behind them.
Viv decides that Harker is the best place for her and Deacon to hide, since the Brood has no way of reaching it. To avoid the hunters stationed at the main gate, Viv and Deacon plan to slip in through the thicket instead. The chase grows increasingly chaotic as Deacon tears apart the cab’s interior and uses the pieces as projectiles. He eventually sends Finn’s Mercedes into a spin with a car door ripped clean off its hinges.
After reaching the Windsor museum, Viv brings the cab to a stop, and she and Deacon ditch it. They go in through the back to stay off the security cameras. Deacon uses his coin at a kiosk, and the gateway pulls Viv and Deacon through.
Cursed City Chapter 33
Viv and Deacon are back on Harker’s campus, but they can’t be seen by Citadel hunters. Viv remembers that she still has Fiona’s key card and suggests making for the archives, since only professors can access it. The plan falls apart almost immediately when Viv and Deacon reach the tree line and find six hunters already standing guard.
A fight breaks out. Viv and Deacon take the hunters down together, moving in sync throughout. She handles the two hunters who come directly at her, though the effort tears open a wound on her forearm. Viv and Deacon push through, dodge patrol groups moving across campus, and slip into the archives with the key card.
Once inside, Deacon spots the wound on Viv’s forearm and wraps it with a piece of antique cloth pulled from one of the archive cases. Viv calls Sophia and brings Peter into the conversation to work out their next move. The news isn’t good. The campus is packed with Citadel hunters, the gateway is already blocked off, and the dorms are too risky.
Deacon suggests sitting tight until morning. Once students start moving between classes, he thinks they should be able to blend in and walk out without drawing attention. Sophia offers to bring a disguise to help. With that settled, Viv takes stock of the situation and realizes that she and Deacon will be alone together in the archives for the next few hours.
Cursed City Chapter 34
Viv and Deacon are hiding in the school’s archive room. Viv uses the time to search for information about the Caspian Ring, sending Deacon to the Compendium while she tries to reach Fiona by phone. Both efforts fail, and a manual search through the archives turns up nothing. She eventually gives up and lies down on the pallet Deacon made for her in the closet.
Afterward, Viv asks how Deacon knew her father was killed by demons. Deacon tells her that Caspar used to brag about the killing. She admits she was there when her father died and was only ten years old. Deacon tells her there was nothing she could have done, and for the first time, she finds herself believing him.
Deacon then speaks about his own past. His mother was a harpy, which makes him half-born rather than the pure-blooded demon Viv had assumed. His father exiled Deacon’s mother and raised him with a kind of cold favoritism that Deacon never forgave, even centuries after his father’s death. Viv asks to see the scars on his back. He shows them to her and explains they came from silver nails driven into his skin and left there for weeks at a time. Putting it together from what she knows of him, Viv realizes he was tortured in hell.
Cursed City Chapter 35
Deacon tells Viv that his neck tattoos are a sign of his time in hell, where the High Thane banished him for killing Reid’s fiancée. He admits to the killing but refuses to explain why, saying the full story isn’t his to share.
Viv confesses she once considered giving up her hunting abilities to live as an ordinary person but couldn’t go through with it. Deacon argues that being a hunter is a gift and that Viv’s family doesn’t deserve her loyalty if her family can’t accept who she is.
Deacon then opens up about what happened after he escaped hell with Ward and Baz. He rebuilt his life under a false name rather than go to his father for help, so his father died never knowing that Deacon had made it out. When Viv asks whether he struggles to resist taking her soul the way Reid did, Deacon says he doesn’t, because he knows exactly what that place does to people and he would never put Viv through it.
Viv and Deacon fall asleep in the closet. Viv wakes just before dawn to find Deacon asleep against her back, which she finds remarkable since Deacon doesn’t sleep. She lets herself sit with her feelings for him and accepts that Reid may have chosen not to come back. Just as Viv drifts off again, she hears Reid’s voice at the doorway.