The Nymph's Curse: The Collection

by Danica Winters

  He stood up and walked out of the bathroom, then out of the house to his truck. In the bed was a red aluminum box of tools. He turned around to head back into the house, but was met by Harper standing in the front door, her hand on her hip.

  “Where do you think you’re going? Do you really think you could run away?” She sounded like an enraged mother, ready to take him out at the knees over her unfounded fear — well, not that her fears were not without some merit, but he wouldn’t have left — not like this, not without so much as a word to the only women in his life.

  “Just because I left Carey doesn’t mean that I’m going to run away from Starling. Or you.”

  “You say you’re not running away. But you are going to Vegas.” She could barely look at him. “You are running. You’re running away from me.”

  “Harper … ” He stopped beside her and sat down his tools. “I thought we understood that this couldn’t be anything.” No matter how much he was attracted to her. No matter how badly he wanted to pull her into his arms or taste her flavor on his lips.

  “It’s fine. I get it,” Harper said with an edge of anger to her voice.

  “Don’t be angry with me. Please.” He reached out and put his hands on her arms, but she pulled away.

  “What are you doing with your toolbox?” Harper asked as she avoided the uncomfortable silence that had settled between them.

  “The shower isn’t working. I was just getting going to try my hand at fixing the thing.”

  “I was going to call a plumber. You don’t need to worry about it.”

  “I’m staying here with Starling. It’s the least I can do to help.” Besides, if he wasn’t working, or keeping busy, he would be forced to repel the tension in the house. Around every corner he would feel Starling’s growing dislike and Harper’s fear that he would disappear.

  “When are you thinking you and Starling are going to leave?”

  He wanted to touch and comfort her, but after being rebuffed he forced his hands to rest at his sides. “I’m planning on heading out in the morning. The game in Vegas is starting the day after tomorrow and Kodie and I have to be there early — we have to get a feel for the other players.”

  “You taking Starling with you?”

  “I think so. I guess there really isn’t any alternative.”

  “You know, you could get a house here in Worley. You could settle down and let her finish school. She’s a senior — she only has a few months left. If you wanted, you could rent an apartment — maybe even this house — and have a normal life.”

  Something about the idea struck him as beautiful. There he could be with Starling at his side, living together as a family until Starling could finish her last bit of high school.

  On the other side of the argument, in order to follow that dream, he would have to give up his life, his hopes of striking it rich, and living a life most bachelors could only dream about. He’d been living the good life up until Kodie took the money from Nate. And with that debt looming, now wasn’t the time for Chance to run off and start playing house. He’d told his friend he would help him out; he’d told Kodie he’d win the tournament. If he didn’t he hated to think what Nate would do to his best friend.

  And about Starling … Well, the only thing that kept Starling tied to this place, except Harper — who herself was moving — was Starling’s high school. Starling could finish her education anywhere. Hell, she could even get her diploma from one of those online schools. Maybe. Other than her school, this placed was only filled with the horrific memories of her mother, the dead, and what had to be the terrors of her past — all the poor girl did was live with ghosts.

  Maybe Harper was the one who had it all wrong. Maybe a little travel and life experience was exactly what Starling needed. She could step out of the confines of her own mind for a while. Maybe he could even find others like her — others who connected with spirits. There was one thing he knew for sure — they wouldn’t find anyone else like Starling, no one with a gift, in the little dot on the map that was Worley, Idaho.

  Even though they were so close he could feel the heat of her body radiating from her, she was a world away. She didn’t understand all he had to lose, all he owed. She may have thought she knew him, but she didn’t have a clue. “I know what you’re trying to say, Harper, and I appreciate it. But I have to do what I have to do.”

  “There’s no way you would ever be willing to stop drifting, is there?”

  His mind slipped back to thoughts of Carey and the time they’d spent together in this town. He’d always been looking for the next big thing, always trying to make ends meet when there was never enough — not enough time, money, not even love. He couldn’t bear the thought of going through the motions of that type of life again.

  “You, a nymph, are going to judge me for something you don’t understand? You of all people should know that sometimes we have to do things other people don’t understand in order to survive. I carry my own curse.”

  She stepped back in affront. “How dare you use what I told you against me? You are lucky. You aren’t cursed. You can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be a nymph — always carrying the weight of knowing you can’t have love — that you can’t make another person truly happy — knowing you always have to walk away from the one thing you want more than anything else.”

  “You think I don’t want a home? A real life?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Look,” he said, “I want love. I want a real life. I get tired of traveling around, winning and losing, but never really getting anywhere. But I don’t have anything to offer anyone. I don’t have anything in my life except poker — and now a daughter who I’m going to have to figure out how to raise. You deserve a man better than me. You deserve a man who can give you everything you want, a man who can make you happy.”

  She looked up at him and there were tears in her sparkling eyes. Behind the tears, her amber eyes were filled with hundreds of years of pain — all which seemed to be captured in her heart and trying in vain to escape through her gaze. He couldn’t stop himself from wrapping his arms around her and pulling her into his chest. “I’m only trying to protect you, just like you are trying to protect Starling and me.” Her body tensed in his arms, but after a moment she relaxed — as if she knew there was no point in fighting.

  He took in her soft scent as he leaned down and kissed the top of her head.

  His phone chirped from his back pocket.

  Harper wiggled from his arms and wiped her hands under her eyes, hiding any tears that had slipped out of her control.

  Chance dropped his empty arms. Numbly, he reached back and extracted the phone from his pocket. A text message popped up from Kodie. “You ready to go, man? Vegas waits.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The red box of tools sat inside the front door of the house, reminding Harper of Chance’s leaving. He’d made some lame excuse about how Kodie had needed him. She had seen through his feeble attempt to get away from the house — she tried to tell herself she didn’t care.

  He’d only left to pick up Kodie, but she couldn’t harness the uncontrollable fear that he may never return. She could only hope he would come back again so she could at least tell him one last good bye before they forever parted ways.

  Harper grabbed an empty cardboard box and pushed it open. It was time. It was time to start emptying the house, to move on, and come to terms with her sister’s death. Everything needed to get back to normal. She was sick of this constant emotional rollercoaster. Chance had made it clear that there was nothing left here for him — and there was certainly nothing left here for her. The comfort of her job waited for her and she couldn’t wait to get home to the warm blanket of her routine.

  The romance novels filled the box to the brim. Harper stood up and walked to the table be
side the door where she had sat the lawyer’s paperwork and opened one of the drawers. She couldn’t help but stare at Jenna’s keys. The mismatched keys had shifted slightly, disturbing the dust on the table around them. There were so many things, so many keys, to Jenna’s life — she would never get to know what most of them meant, or who Jenna had become in the last few years. Harper had missed so much.

  In the drawer sat an old Sharpie and a mass of accumulated pens in a variety of cheap plastic and covered in the logos of several businesses. The pen on the top read Shaw Pharmaceuticals. Harper reached down and picked up the pen and the marker. One of her friends from college had gone on to work at Shaw Pharmaceuticals, but aside from the company being a rival of Merckson, she knew little about them except they were located in Las Vegas. She dropped the pen back in the drawer and slid it shut carefully in an effort to leave her sister’s keys undisturbed.

  Uncapping the marker, she wrote Giveaway across the top of the book filled box. It made her heart ache to think about having to do this in every room of the house. Each box would be another piece of Jenna slipping away and another slice into Harper’s heart. She would never be able to understand why the men at the God forsaken Diamond Bar Ranch had done what they had to Jenna.

  Ariadne Papadakis, the new leader of the Sisterhood of Epione, had told her the men had wanted to create a hybrid species of horse to use in the rodeo circuit. Jenna had been taking a fertility drug, Clomiphene, in an attempt to get pregnant up until her captors had found out the truth of her being a swan-shifter. Even if Jenna had wanted a baby it seemed a long stretch for her to become involved with the murderers — in fact, it had cost her life.

  The floor creaked behind her drawing her attention.

  “Harper?” Starling stood at the end of the hallway looking at her. She had her hair pulled back and a black backpack slung over her shoulder. “Can you take me to school?”

  Never in her wildest dreams had Harper thought the young woman would have wanted to go to school — not after everything that had happened.

  “Are you sure you want to go?”

  Starling nodded and dropped her gaze to the ground.

  If Starling was anything like Harper, she probably wanted to find something normal in all of the rapid changes in her life. She probably wanted to hold on to the one thing that remained a constant and served as a challenge, which required her mind to move away from the events happening in her private life.

  “Okay,” Harper said, standing up. “You’ll have to show me where to go. I’m afraid I’ve never dropped anyone off at high school before.”

  It was hard to tell by looking at Starling’s downcast face, but for a moment she could have sworn she saw a flicker of a smile.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The boxes were beginning to stack up in the living room, making it look more like a mini-storage and less like a home. The clock ticked away, marking each second of Harper’s loneliness. Though she’d lived the last twenty years alone, she’d not been this lonely since she and Jenna had parted ways.

  She gazed up at the clock and watched the damned second hand tick by as if it was the clock that controlled the arrival of Chance and Starling back into her life.

  What was she going to do when they left? No amount of watching the clock was going to bring back the sounds of Starling’s scribbling and Chance’s footfalls down the hall — nothing was going to bring back the sounds of living. No. Instead she would fall back into her old life and her old routines, but she’d never again get the chance to pretend to be a part of a family.

  Every moment that ticked by, every second wasted, was a chance lost, a memory not made, and a change that would never come.

  Guilt gnawed at her like a hungry pup as she started to take down Jenna’s knickknacks and pack them into a box. She shouldn’t have been so needy. They had talked about how they couldn’t have a relationship — he was only keeping true to his word. And he had every right.

  He needed to learn how to incorporate Starling into his life and to do this he couldn’t focus on having a relationship. Her mind turned to how he had handled Starling’s automatic writing. He’d seemed like he’d been lost in a sea of confusion. And she’d been so hard on him. She had no right to criticize him for doing things differently than she would have liked. He was a grown man.

  She had criticized Chance for screwing up his second chance at life, but she was no better. She’d found a great job, a great home, but she’d failed on so many other levels. She had been completely alone. She’d poured herself into her work and lost everything that really mattered. At least Chance was living the life he wanted to live. She couldn’t say the same for herself.

  And here she was, given another chance at having more than strangers in her life, and she was repeating her old mistakes, once again trying to hold onto something she couldn’t have at the same time trying to push him away. With everything she did: love, life, family — everything except her work — she failed.

  The marker’s bitter licorice smell wafted up to her as she wrote Giveaway across the top of a box filled with the little porcelain figurines with soft pastel colors finely brushed over their cherubic cheeks. She could barely stand to look at them anymore, the way they smiled while the world collapsed around them. Their big eyes seemed to follow her around, mocking her with their ever-present glee.

  Harper stood up and stepped back, her foot brushing against Chance’s red box of tools. The need to escape the torrent of her thoughts followed her just like the little porcelain dolls’ gaze — the need grated at her, but unlike the dolls she couldn’t simply pack her feelings away.

  She dropped her hands down to her lower belly and the simple action made her think about the possibility of a pregnancy. Just that morning it had seemed like such a revolting possibility. Yet the more she thought about it, the more the idea of a baby tucked safely inside of her belly seemed like a precious gift. Nymphs had had babies, but it was so rare that Harper had never met anyone except Carey who’d borne a child. And though she knew the required physical action necessary to make a human baby, it wasn’t the same for nymphs. No — for nymphs there were many myths surrounding conception, and sprinkled in there was always a certain amount of magic.

  Once during one of her trips to Croatia, she had heard a myth. An old nymph had talked about a nymph named Cetina, a dolphin-shifter, who was among the first of her kind. One day many thousands of years ago, before the time of Epione, Cetina had been crying at the bottom of a hill when Zeus came down from the heavens and sat beside her. Zeus asked her why she was crying and Cetina told him she had always wanted a baby. Zeus, being the sexual beast he was, tried to convince her that if she made love to him in the moonlight as they bathed in the salt of her tears, she would conceive a child.

  Cetina was no fool and knew of Zeus and his sexual appetite and his narcissistic need to fornicate with every woman with whom he crossed paths. “Zeus,” Cetina said, “if you promise me our union will result in a child, I’ll be forever grateful, but if you leave me barren, for the rest of time no other nymphs will lay with you.”

  Zeus eagerly agreed and made love to the beautiful young nymph and left. After many weeks of waiting, nothing happened and Cetina knew that she had fallen victim to the empty promises of the sexually ravenous god. Again she wept and wept until her tears became a river and Cetina, drying up, turned to stone.

  The Neolithic people named the river Cetina in honor of the woman who had been tricked by the gods, and it was said those who wished to become pregnant, nymph or human, merely had to bathe in the demigoddess’s tears after a night of making love and a baby of good fortune would come. Around 1912, huge hydroelectric power plants were built on the river, disturbing its flow and the magic the river contained. Since then, no nymph had been able to get pregnant.

  Somehow Carey had found a way around the magic of the river in order to get
pregnant. Had she gotten pregnant on purpose? Or had the pregnancy been some trick of the fates?

  Harper’s fingers trembled over her stomach as she caught a glimpse of a future that she had never before thought possible — strollers, bottles, night feedings, and lullabies. For a second she envisioned Chance standing by her side, a baby cradled in his arms.

  A pained laugh escaped her lips before she could hold it back. Chance would never stay in one place long enough to share a family with her. There was no future for them — no matter how much she dreamed.

  She picked up Chance’s toolbox. She couldn’t depend on him for anything. No. Not even to fix a damn faucet.

  Her footfalls thundered through the empty house as she made her way to the upstairs bathroom. She dropped the cold metal box onto the floor. She didn’t have a clue how to start. Harper took out a screwdriver. Locating the faucet’s screws she fumbled them loose and pulled the handle from the wall. Then she unscrewed the faceplate.

  The door to the bathroom flew open, making her jump. The screwdriver dropped from her hand and clattered in the porcelain tub.

  “Oh look!” Kodie exclaimed. “Ms. Trips-a-Lot is a plumber too.” His laughter filled the tiled bathroom.

  “She’s always a surprise.” Chance stepped beside Kodie in the doorway. “Where’s Starling?”

  “She wanted to go to school, so I dropped her off. I thought she should have one last chance to say goodbye to her friends before you took her traipsing off for some poker game.”

  Chance nodded, but didn’t seem thrown by her jab. “Did you remember to turn off the main water line?”

  Her cheeks burned. Another five minutes and they would have found her standing in a pool. “I wouldn’t be doing this at all if you had just finished what you started.”

  He looked at her as if he understood she was talking about more than simply fixing the faucet. “I’m sorry, but I’m back.”