The curses, p.1
The Curses, page 1
The Curses
LAURE EVE
CONTENTS
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
CHAPTER 1
Wolf had been back from the dead for almost three weeks when we had our first midnight picnic of the year.
Some childhood moments have a way of sinking deep into your bones, lingering on, casting their long shadows into your future. The midnight picnics were something my siblings and I had created between us as kids. They began as the kind of rebellion that ignited darkly addictive sparks in our bellies and that gradually, with repetition and the unofficial sanction of our parents, had become a spontaneous ritual.
We’d sneak out, laden with goods lifted from the pantry and fridge, and ramble into the darkness to find a place and a time and a moment that came together. We liked to allow our secret selves out of their everyday cages, just for a little while.
This was how I came to find myself in the hallway of our house, shivering in the late-night bite, eyeing my brother with bleary agreeableness as he stood in front of me and pulled my favourite scarf snug around my neck. I’d gone to bed early and he had shaken me awake, looming over me in the dark of my bedroom like a pretty, tousle-haired ghost.
It was early January and it had been a sharp and bitter month so far. Snow was promised but hadn’t yet delivered. I had always seen snow as a purifying substance that offers a clean slate – until it melts, exposing the dirt hidden underneath all along.
‘What are we doing?’ I said, still stupid from sleep.
My forgot-to-be-a-whisper carried clean across the hallway, and Fenrin shushed me softly. Cold air wound around our legs from the open back door.
‘It is veritably shocking that you haven’t figured it out yet,’ he murmured, and gave me his naughtiest smile.
I pulled my gloves out of the pocket of my leather jacket and wrestled my fingers into them. Fenrin took my gloved hand in his and led me outside, moving across the lawn’s frozen, crackling grass towards the fruit grove at the bottom of the garden, heading straight for the guard dog.
The guard dog was the ancient oak tree that squatted at the start of the grove, and family legend said that it had been here before the house, which had been deliberately built within its shadow. It was a sprawling, knotted old thing with a mind of its own, known for swaying its branches on a still day, as if it felt a wind no one else could. In the spring, tiny star-shaped flowers grew haphazardly on its trunk, which Esther would pick and use in small batches of face-cream formulas that her customers swore made them look younger overnight. Her back orders for that cream often extended into the previous year. One anonymous customer paid handsomely to have a guaranteed annual order, with a stipulation that it be made from the very first flowers of the season as, according to Esther, they were the most potent.
Right now, though, it was too early in the year for the star flowers and the guard dog’s trunk was bare, but its base was ringed in light. Tiny flames clawed up towards the tree from their candle plinths, turning the bark bright, sending orange-gold sparks against the dark. Higher up, the tree had been strung with fairy lights that glittered against the winter-sparse branches, illuminating the sky. Electric magic.
Spread out on the ground underneath the guard dog and its ring of candlelight was a blanket covered in plates and trays. Two dark figures crouched at its edges. They paused as we arrived, faces lit from below with candlelight.
I gave an entirely un-Summer-like gasp of delight.
‘Midnight picnic,’ I whispered gleefully, and Fenrin gave me a wink.
My sister, Thalia, balancing easily on her haunches, looked up at me. She was swaddled in a white woollen scarf that hung in huge mushrooming folds around her neck, her caramel hair spreading across the wool in soft waves. She had on her heaviest winter skirt, the colour of deep burgundy wine, and it swirled around her ankles, just long enough to flirt with the ground when she walked. I’d once borrowed it without asking. I was shorter than she was and had accidentally ripped the hem by repeatedly treading on it. Thalia hardly ever lost her temper, but when she did it was spectacular – almost worth provoking her just to see it.
Next to her was Wolf, his wasted frame buried under layers of muted pebble tones. With his black eyes and pale skin warmed underneath the fairy-light glow, he almost looked whole again – closer to the lean, lanky creature of the past, that distant country where we had all taken things like life and health for granted.
I arched a brow at him. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be swimming with the fishes?’
He grinned. ‘Came back just to torture you all.’
We’d been making variations on this joke with appalling regularity. It wasn’t actually funny, but we pretended it was.
There was a time I would have thrown myself on top of Wolf and teased him relentlessly until he shoved me off, but that had been a different him, a different us. Now we were all so afraid to touch him, as if he would shatter like glass and break the illusion that he was really back.
Wolf might have been brought back to life, but it was obvious that he wasn’t exactly at full health. A hospital visit had produced a cautious pronouncement of pneumonia, plus a bonus vague catchall of ‘with complications’. The hospital had sent him off to convalesce armed with an impressive array of drugs, half of which sounded like they had been included just because the doctors wanted to cover all their bases.
I couldn’t really blame them. It must be tough trying to diagnose a severe case of resurrection.
I sank to my knees. Down here we were sheltered from any wind by the guard dog’s sturdy, craggy branches, and all was calm and still. The winter air took a mild bite out of my exposed cheeks, but my leathers kept the rest of me warm.
It was perfect.
Balanced on the blanketed ground before me was a tray of four mugs that held mounds of tiny marshmallows nestled in their depths, waiting to be filled with the cinnamon-laced hot cocoa that sat beside them in a giant, wool-swaddled pot, its spout curdling steam into the air. A stone serving plate was piled high with Thalia’s signature chocolate brownies. Sugar-rimmed molasses cookies were stacked in a row next to them.
‘Whose magnificent idea was this?’ I asked.
‘Mine,’ said Wolf.
Fenrin scoffed. ‘Not quite. He kept moaning about being bored and said he couldn’t sleep, so I suggested it.’
‘You know what we should do?’ I said, inspired. ‘We should have a late Yule party.’
‘Erm, I think that ship has sailed,’ Fenrin said. ‘The point of the Yule party is to have it at, you know, Yule, and we didn’t.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Wolf asked.
Silence descended, a silence so awkward that I felt my toes curling in my boots.
Because you were dead, and no one felt like celebrating.
‘We should ask if we can have a party now,’ I said doggedly, leaning back into the tree trunk and digging my spine comfortably against its rough bark.
Thalia sighed. ‘Sure. And put in a request for a holiday to Atlantis while you’re at it.’
Fenrin’s mouth twitched. ‘Slices of the moon in a pie.’
‘Made of unicorn-butter puff pastry,’ I said. Suddenly hungry, I reached forward and picked up a thick slab of chocolate brownie. Thalia had made them earlier that day. The fresh ginger she had used in the batter bit my tongue, and I savoured the sting.
‘Oh god, it’s freezing,’ Fenrin moaned. ‘Why didn’t we do this inside the house like normal people?’
‘It’s bracing,’ Thalia said. ‘Wake-up weather.’
Thalia was a creature of nature. Being out energised her. I knew some people thought it was all a show that she only put on in public, but I’d watched her run out barefoot into fresh snow, late at night when she thought no one would see her. Later I’d found my beloved idiot sister desperately pressing her pinched, blue feet against her radiator.
Normally we ventured further afield than just the bottom of our garden, but this felt far enough right now. We had hardly left the house over the Christmas holidays, what with Wolf’s condition and the adults hovering over us all like a particularly annoying combination of hawks and bees. But it hadn’t felt suffocating. It had felt safe.
Wolf leaned forward and took two brownies. Each was thicker than my hand and almost as big as my palm. I watched, impressed, as he chomped through the first in two bites and immediately started on the second. Just how had he fitted that entire thing in his mouth so quickly?
One thing resurrection had not wasted away was his appetite. Recent mealtimes were quite a thing to behold. He ate everything in sight, with a relish that bordered on orgasmic. This was an entirely new thing; the Wolf of before had always tackled food fastidiously and almost never finished everything on his plate. The rest of the family had begun to tease him for his newfound gluttony, but I thought I understood it. Pleasure was a very real, obvious way of feeling alive, and Wolf needed to feel alive right now.
I grumbled through mouthfuls of brownie. ‘Who the hell wants to wake up? It’s winter. We should be hibernating like all the best mammals.’
‘Don’t be a cliché, Summer,’ Thalia declared. ‘Just because you have the name doesn’t mean you’re supposed to embody the season.’
‘Names are important,’ I rebuffed her. ‘Names mould us. We fit into our names, our names don’t fit into us. For example, as I recall, Fenrin’s is based on a Norse name that translates as “asshole”.’
Wolf burst out laughing in his rich chocolate voice. Absent so long from us, it was a glorious sound. Fenrin swallowed a sudden, happy grin and tried his best to look unimpressed.
‘Well, what about Wolf?’ he said. ‘Are we really saying that his name means he’s a hairy predator because …’ He paused. ‘Damn it.’
‘You see?’ I crowed. ‘It’s destiny.’
‘Thalia was named for the muse of poetry,’ Fenrin retorted, ‘and when was the last time you saw her reading any?’
‘The original Greek etymology of Thalia, brother mine, means luxuriant. Verdant.’ Thalia stretched her arms upward and tipped her head back, exposing her throat. ‘To blossom.’
‘And she does make things blossom,’ I offered reasonably. ‘Herbs. Flowers. The groinal regions of schoolboys.’
Thalia brought her arms down and shoved me. ‘You always have to lower the tone.’
‘Give me some of that cocoa, then, before it goes cold,’ Fenrin said, surreptitiously moving closer to Wolf. I had begun to wonder if Wolf’s newfound love of indulgence yet extended to my brother. Having the boy you were in love with come back from the dead must be quite the relationship minefield.
‘Pour it yourself, lazy ass,’ Thalia said comfortably, but she did it for him anyway because she was Thalia. I tipped my head back, feeling for the first time in a long time an ache of happiness.
Wolf spoke into the silence, punctuated by the soft soughing of the wind above us.
‘I have something to say.’
My stomach clenched, and I wasn’t sure why. Wolf was pressing a hand to his own chest, palm cupped over his heart.
‘What you all did for me, bringing me to life …’ he began with an earnestness that made me profoundly uncomfortable. ‘Someday, I promise, I’ll find a way to repay you for it.’
This was so unlike the sullen Wolf I knew that I was struck dumb.
‘If you think about it, you’re like my gods,’ Wolf continued over our shock in a musing tone. His eyebrows rose. ‘I should worship you.’ He turned and placed his palms flat on the blanket-covered ground in front of a wide-eyed Fenrin. ‘I should get on my knees and praise your names,’ he declared soulfully, his voice climbing in proclamation.
I began to laugh while Thalia made shushing noises and Fenrin did nothing but gape stupidly.
‘Summer, I thank thee,’ Wolf howled up into the sky. ‘Thaliaaa, thou art my saviour. Fenrin, I worship thee …’
‘Hush, you’ll wake the parentals,’ Thalia hissed frantically.
‘Oh please, as if they don’t already know we’re out here,’ I sniffed. They usually tolerated whatever we might get up to as long as we were doing it on home ground where we were ‘safe’.
Fenrin had the world’s sweetest blush creeping across his face. A mischievous part of me wanted so badly to point it out, but I held my tongue. Wolf sat back and flashed me a highly enjoyable grin.
‘I’m alive because of you,’ he said, and my heart gave a lurch.
I knew now why Wolf had wanted this midnight picnic, why all of us did. It was a rare and precious snatched moment between us all. We were only back home for the weekend – tomorrow we’d be going back to the boarding school our parents had, in one of their regular fits of protective madness, transferred us to last term.
We would once again be cut off from the boy who had only just come back into our lives after leaving an awful, ragged hole behind in his absence. The hole still hurt. The wound still gaped. It felt like he could disappear on us again at any moment. It was a horrible feeling, like falling down forever and never hitting the ground.
There came a dull-sounding crack from out of the darkness beyond, cutting the moment in two.
‘Badger,’ Thalia whispered, eyes wide and glittering in the candlelight.
‘Are badgers that clumsy?’ I hissed back.
‘They have those giant claws. It’s probably hard to maintain your balance—’
‘Guys,’ Fenrin said.
A figure emerged from the murky trunk shapes of the grove beyond our circle of light. The grove backed onto the dunes, which led out and away to the beach and the coast, a wide expanse capable of throwing up any kind of creature it was possible to imagine – and imagination tended to be fuelled by the dark. In my head I saw a serpentine sea monster that had dragged itself out of the waves and slithered its way up to us from the cove. I saw a werewolf with bared and saliva-glistened jaws, shivering in a knotted-muscle crouch.
Sadly, it was more mundane than anything like that, though perhaps no less dangerous.
It was Marcus.
Marcus Dagda, our ex-best friend and Thalia’s ex-love. He was banned from our house. He was banned from our lives. He was not supposed to be here.
He took a long look at us all, his face pale and waxy in the grey dim beyond our candlelight.
Then he collapsed to the ground.
CHAPTER 2
‘They’ll hear the engine,’ Fenrin said.
I turned the key in the ignition and felt the car kick into life beneath my thighs.
‘Just tell them I went to the all-night garage for ice cream because we’re such crazy kids, so young and carefree, thinking nothing of the reckless abandonment it takes to eat freezing food in the middle of the freezing cold,’ I replied.
Fenrin sighed. ‘Just … don’t take too long.’ His eyes lingered briefly on the huddled form of Marcus, curled up like a miserable beetle on the front seat beside me. ‘Make sure he gets home.’
I wasn’t too sure if that was out of concern for Marcus or a desire to know that he was far away from us. Probably, knowing Fenrin, a little of both.
They had been best friends once. I remembered them binge-watching old classic cartoons that no one had ever heard of, hunched over Marcus’s secondhand laptop for hours, singing the theme of each cartoon on every single episode, and never skipping over it. (One of their absolute favourites was Pinky and the Brain, a weird cartoon about two laboratory mice plotting to take over the world.) They would make each other cry with laughter over obscure references that the rest of us never got. Best friends stuff, the stuff that binds hearts together.
It must have hurt both of them to lose that.
I eased us out of the driveway and up the lane, every crunch of loose stone underneath the tyres sounding like a twenty-one-gun salute, shattering the quiet night. In the rearview mirror I could see my brother, his arms folded around him as he watched us pull away. Thalia had stayed back in the garden with Wolf, who busily hoovered up the remaining cookies at her side.
She wasn’t too good at being near Marcus these days.
I glanced at the object of our collective tension. He was staring at me oddly.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Something on my face? Chocolate? Blood? Invisible alien monster?’
‘You’re just so … bright,’ he said.
I had to ask. ‘Marcus, are you high right now?’
He sighed. ‘No, nothing like that. Look, I’m sorry.’
‘You said that already, several times. Are you sure you’re okay?’
He didn’t look okay. He looked stretched and faded, as if some of the colour had been washed out of him. The hair on his forehead had rolled into limp strings from the sweat damp on his skin, and his pale eyes were stark and luminous in the car’s dashboard glow.
It had not been a pleasant experience, seeing him faint. He had recovered pretty quickly, but for a while there I’d been freaking out about a possible concussion, even though he didn’t seem to have hit his head.
