by Mara Webb
“I’ve been doing some reading and it has been batted around between humans for a few decades, but it hasn’t been in the possession of someone with powers. I’ve found the address of the curse-breaker witch I was telling you about and we need to get our butts over there quickly.”
Amber explained that there was one woman that had made a name for herself in being one of the most effective breakers of the Lundeen curse. It wasn’t possible to remove the curse from all the affected items at once, they had to be done one at a time.
I looked out of the kitchen window and saw that the police car was gone; they must have had it towed away. No one was watching the house anymore, not now they had Penny in custody. Where would Brent go to first? Would he come here? Would he know how to use his powers?
I didn’t know that he had any magic in the family and now he was going through all of this alone, I felt so sorry for him but I also knew that he was under a curse, he wasn’t going to be acting like himself.
Quin called for the six other cats to join us in the kitchen. He said that he would send us over to the curse-breakers house and they would wait behind and watch TV. I didn’t ask what it was that he was so desperate to see but he had a pretty strict routine for his shows, and I think he had gotten the need for adventure out of his system.
“Stand here with your backs to each other facing outwards,” Howl said. He seemed to know where I was in the room and brushed his fluffy white body against my leg. The cats sat around us in a circle and began to purr.
The kitchen began to swirl around me like I was spinning in place, and then I saw the kitchen cabinets replaced by bushes, the tiled floor replaced by soggy, dead leaves and the lights above me were now the small breaks in the tree canopy letting moonlight through. It was raining and within seconds the three of us were soaked through.
“Where are we?” Ryan asked.
“Where we need to be,” Amber replied.
She walked out of the trees and onto a lawn that sloped upwards to a large house with a glass front. It was three floors of architectural beauty, angular but soft somehow as it nestled into the hill on which it was built.
When we were out in the open, I looked back, from this point on the hill I could see for miles, small lights showing clusters of houses or businesses. I didn’t know what I was looking at, whether one of those light clusters was Sucré, but I knew that we weren’t somewhere I had been before.
Nothing looked familiar.
Amber seemed unconcerned with our exposed travel across the grass, Ryan followed her lead but did a poor job of masking his apprehension that we were going to get busted. I just hoped that Amber knew this woman well enough to warrant our unannounced arrival.
As we got closer to the house, I could see that the glass was frosted, an eerie white opaqueness allowed a little of the internal light through, but we couldn’t see in. I looked back again to stare out at the view, there didn’t seem to be any other houses on this hill but the trees around the edge of the grass prevented me from seeing what was close by.
None of the glass sections on the side of the building we were stood on seemed to contain an entrance. We followed Amber as she walked in a large circle around the entire ground floor of the house.
There was no way in.
“Can’t we just, you know, magic ourselves in?” I asked.
“I’m doing that!” Amber replied. “Have you ever opened a safe?”
“That would be a no.”
“Well you have to turn a dial, you know that much, right?”
“I’m keeping up so far.”
“Getting in here is similar. So many turns to the right, so many turns to the left. You have to know the pattern and walk around the house clockwise and anticlockwise the right number of times and then the door appears. We all have to do it otherwise we don’t all get in,” she said.
The rain was coming down harder now and it was so cold that my jaw was starting to seize up, I had always had this problem when the temperature dropped too low.
We must have walked around the outside of the building twelve times, following Amber’s instructions and trusting that her memory was accurate and that we weren’t wasting time. I had been wearing a watch but that was invisible now too, so I couldn’t check how long we had been doing this perimeter parade, but it felt like too long.
We turned to complete one more clockwise circle of the house when Amber stopped in front of one of the clouded windows on the ground floor. Where a solid pane of glass had been, now stood a door. Amber walked to the door and knocked.
“You have to knock now too? Jeez how long is this going to take? We have a curse to crack and we have been marching around in the pouring rain for probably three hours or something and now you have to knock?” I blurted out, exasperated.
“I don’t have to knock, I just thought it would be polite,” Amber said in a small voice. Hearing the frustration in my voice she decided to stop knocking and pushed down on the handle. It opened easily and she walked inside with Ryan and I close behind her.
I hadn’t imagined what the inside would look like but somehow the decoration seemed to make sense. The outside of the building had been designed with such attention to detail, maximizing light and space, it was clear that the owner of the home had skills in this area.
Once this whole curse thing was done with, I should get her to come over and communicate with the house somehow, get it to stop redecorating every five minutes and choose some more aesthetically pleasing designs to stick with.
The front door had opened onto an entirely open ground floor. There are many things I have no expertise in, many things that I don’t understand even a little, one of them is open plan houses.
I don’t understand how the ceiling stays up with no supporting walls, in this house it could be magic, but I have seen it in regular human houses too. I should really look it up.
We were standing in the lounge area. Beautiful cream sofas formed a horseshoe shape around a TV suspended from the ceiling. Unreasonably large bouquets of lilies filled glass vases all around the room and drew my eye into the rest of the room.
I walked forward to see the kitchen up close, everything was painted in a neutral color which made the place look clean and elegant. There was a chopping board out on the kitchen counter and a very expensive looking chef’s knife on top of it.
I recognized the brand name on the handle. Drooling over expensive kitchen utensils had been one of my go to distractions during the darker moments of my failed marriage. This thing must have cost a few thousand dollars, was curse-breaking such a lucrative career?
Maybe I should get into it because I was never going to be buying Tsukasa chopping knives for my house on a researcher’s wage, even if I got Quin to chip in with his profits from the cat café. I reached over to lift the handle, I wanted to see if the way the weight was distributed was really worth the hype.
My hand was inches away from making contact when a voice rang out across the ground floor.
“Please don’t touch that.” I looked around. Who had spoken? Were they talking to me? How could they know what I was doing when I’m invisible?
“She doesn’t like people touching her stuff.” I looked down and saw a tabby cat sitting neatly on the wooden floor beside me.
“Are you her familiar?” Amber asked.
“Yes, well I prefer the title ‘executive assistant’ but I’ll take what I can get. Is this about the rogue police officer with the cursed item around his neck?”
“Yeah, how do you know that?” Amber replied.
“Equinox sent me a series of snapchat messages outlining the whole thing. Oh, sorry, he prefers Quin, doesn’t he? I’m Sundae by the way, I expected you sooner.” The brown and black fur twitched as Sundae shivered and then got up onto her feet. “I just had an awful feeling of dread; do you ever get that? Dread or I’m mad thirsty. Anyone for a drink?”
“Not right now, thank you. We need to speak with your witch, we need help with t
he curse. Where is she?” I asked.
“First of all, it is crazy that you are invisible because I’ve never seen an invisible person before. Or have I? That’s pretty intense to think about actually isn’t it? We could be surrounded by invisible people all the time and never know it? Wow, really something to think about.”
She jumped up onto the counter and used her magic to open the refrigerator and pour milk from a carton into a shallow dish. I could understand why she would be friends with Quin, they were cut from the same cloth.
“Sundae?” I said with a stern tone. I felt like I was back in my own house trying to get my familiar to focus long enough to finish a thought.
“Oh yeah, sorry. Well like I said, I thought you would be here sooner. Cecily took her sleeping pills already; she takes them every night and she is out. You couldn’t wake her up with a gun fight.”
Great.
18
Amber ran upstairs to see where Cecily, the curse-breaker witch, was. After a minute or two of stomping around and some shouting, it seemed clear that she was not going to be waking up anytime soon.
We would be in this alone as we couldn’t wait for the morning. Brent could be on his way here right now and we would have no way to know how powerful he was until it was too late. “Cecily!” Amber screamed from upstairs. I looked up and saw my co-council member walking out of a door onto the mezzanine above. “Yeah, she’s out cold.”
“Don’t panic you guys, it can’t be that hard,” Sundae said, her furry mouth white from the droplets of milk she was yet to clean off. “I can show you to her books, have a crack at it yourself, you’ve got nothing to lose right?”
She made it sound like it wouldn’t be difficult, as if breaking a curse that had been terrorizing people for decades would be a walk in the park. It had already ended two lives in Sucré this week alone, Cassandra had narrowly avoided being victim number three and now my boyfriend was out for blood apparently. There was no way this would be simple.
We stood around Sundae trying our hardest to be patient as she continued to drink milk, oblivious to the urgency the rest of us felt. Amber was reaching the end of her rope and seemed to be growing increasingly annoyed as Sundae didn’t react to her tutting, foot tapping or frequent watch checking.
“Can you show us to her library then? If we have to do it ourselves it would be useful to know where we should be looking,” Amber snapped.
“You should have said!” Sundae replied, licking at a front paw and using it to clean her face. “Jeez, I sometimes get into a feasting frenzy and just forget everything I was supposed to be doing. I was saying to Quin the other day, would you rather have the gift of perfect memory or the gift of never feeling hungry again? It was a real tough one because we would both eat whether we were hungry or not, but then the thing about—”
Amber started to wave her arms about frantically to draw attention back to the current situation.
“Sorry, yes,” Sundae said. “This way, follow me.” She jumped and lead us towards a small staircase that travelled down into a basement area. The further down the steps we got, the more obvious it was that this basement was much nicer than the one Quin had decorated.
It was carpeted and there were bookshelves on all of the walls with books organized by color to create a swooping rainbow around the room.
As beautiful as the room was, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe arranging books in a library like this might not be the most efficient way to do it. Ryan’s sister had an attic library with a digitized catalogue so you could search for the books you wanted, and they would float off the shelves and fall at your feet.
This room was more form over function. There was one giant lamp in the room that was placed in a corner but arched over so that the bulb was almost in the center of the ceiling, it looked as if the lamp should tip over but somehow it was standing. Sundae walked over to a column of blue books and sat down.
“Lundeen curse isn’t it? Should be in the blues, but don’t take my word for it. I’ll leave you guys down here to figure it out, Quin likes to Facetime when we watch forensic files and they have new episodes out, so I’ve got to go.” With that she bounded back up the steps and left us to find the solution to a decades old curse by ourselves.
“Nora?” Amber said.
“Yeah?” I replied.
“I’m leaving this lipstick on the table here, come pick it up and put some on so we have a small reference point as to where you are. We are going to smash into you in this room otherwise.”
She pulled a tube out of her pocket and placed it down on a small table beside an armchair with a tall back and flowery velvet patterns all over it. I picked it up, knocked it over several times as I couldn’t see where my hand was, pulled off the cap and added some color to my lips.
I pushed my lips forward in a pout and I could see them again, it was a relief. I drew a line of lipstick across the top of both cheeks and in a line down the slope of my nose giving my eyes the reference points that I can normally see on the outer borders of my vision.
I held out my left hand and drew a lipstick line from the center of the back of my hand to the nail on each finger, then repeated it on my right hand. Now I could see where my hands were. I put the lipstick back down with ease now that I was able to locate myself in the room and looked up at Amber.
“Great idea!” she said. “That lipstick was actually pretty expensive, and you’ve made it all blunt at the end but, you know, big picture, it was a great idea.” I turned to look at Ryan and he was already starting to run his finger along the rows of book spines to see if a title stood out.
“Ryan, you carry on with the blues, Nora start with red and I’ll jump in at orange. Sundae might have gotten the color wrong and I think it’s worth splitting up to check, we can’t all be squashed over there anyway,” Amber instructed.
Ryan turned to give a salute and then continued with his task. I spun in place until I found the red books column, the rainbow effect surrounded us completely so there was no beginning or end, just a small gap for the lamp to sit in and another gap for the stairs. I wasn’t sure what book title we were looking for, of the magical textbooks I have read so far, I have rarely found that the title was much of a reflection of what was inside.
The red books didn’t even seem to cover much magic, the first dozen books were dystopian novels and a recipe book for smoothies. A few fluffy romance books, a novel about an alien invasion, a self-help book to deal with shopping addiction and then, finally, the magic books began.
I heard a loud sound behind me and saw that Ryan was now throwing books onto the ground once he had eliminated them from the search, a book or two remained on the blue shelf and I assumed that must be forming his ‘maybe’ pile.
“Any luck?” I asked the room.
“I have one about sour romance, a book on welding and something about revenge. I am clutching at straws here, I don’t think these are right,” Amber said. Ryan just shook his head. I turned back to the shelf in front of me and my eye was drawn to a book called ‘Romance Reprisal: Vengeance for the Valiant’.
I pulled the book from the shelf and saw that the title was only written on the spine, the front and back cover of the book were blank. I turned the red leather book over in my hands, it was such a strange shade of red, like shimmering red wine. I opened the front cover and read a note from the author.
“If you are holding this book in your angry little hands then it is to be assumed that you have been wronged in romance and are out for blood. May I suggest, dear reader, that instead of lashing out with physical violence perhaps you would prefer emotional destruction? There are many reasons why you may wish to dent the happiness of a former lover, I’m not here to judge.
“In the following text I have provided a number of exquisitely cruel and deliciously twisted curses and spells to either tempt back your ex-partner or sabotage their future joy. This is not a book for the faint of heart, I must warn you that there will be severe consequences
to using your magic in such a sinister way.
“‘What consequences might I face?’ I hear you ask, well it’s hard to say. With love, and with war, there is always a risk. If your revenge is so important to you then you will throw caution to the wind and read on, if you wish to keep both ears and stay out of jail then maybe you should put this down.
“For history fans, as I know that is why many students have been instructed to battle their way through this book, there is special mention of the Lundeen curse in Chapter 5, a unique and troublesome problem.”
I flicked through the pages frantically to find the correct chapter and began to read. I was impatient to find a section that just told me the magic word so that I could end this curse forever and get Brent back to normal, but it wasn’t that straight forward. My eyes scanned around the words, skim reading as quickly as I could to see if I could instruct the others to call off the search or not.
It droned on about the relationship between the married couple at the heart of the original curse, the dark magic that Mrs. Lundeen had used to cause so much damage in the first place and then, finally, there was a mention of the work of researchers that had begun a clean up operation to remove items from circulation and restore them to neutral.
“It was important to consult with the elders; established witches and wizards with experience in ancient magic and complicated hexes, curses and enchantments. After months of failed attempts, many of which resulted in dramatic hair growth, they were finally able to come up with the formula to crack the Lundeen curse.”
What followed was a garbled collection of shapes that I recognized from my rune’s textbook. It was written in an ancient language and it would be up to me to put my very-new skill into practice to save us all.
“I have it!” I shouted. Ryan and Amber turned to stare at my lipstick covered face. “It’s going to take me a minute to figure out what I’m doing but the answer is here, I think.”
