Obsidian Curse (A Stacy Justice Mystery Book Five)

by Barbra Annino

  Aunt Fiona was the middle Geraghty sister, who had broken a lot of hearts in her day and could still turn many a head when she walked down the street. She was Marilyn Monroe, Ann-Margret, and Jessica Rabbit all in one. The woman would have given Venus herself a run for her crown. She was unattached now, as were all the Geraghty Girls. It seemed that for the women in my family, love, no matter how strong in the beginning, was ever fleeting. A fact I tried not to dwell on.

  Fiona was wearing a black knit dress that hugged her curves, a gold necklace, a thick belt, and pointy polka-dotted heels. She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek, tied a frilly apron around her waist, and opened the refrigerator. She reached in and took out a potato-and-sausage breakfast casserole.

  “What brings you by this morning, dear?” She peeled the Saran Wrap off the casserole, popped some toast in the toaster, and set the oven to 350 degrees.

  “I need to talk to you about a few things.”

  I checked Lolly’s coffee. It was nearly finished and from the glint in her eye, I could see that the motor was running, but the tank needed more fuel. I fixed her a second cup of Irish coffee and set it in front of her.

  Fiona was drizzling maple syrup on the casserole and since Birdie hadn’t come downstairs yet, I decided to ask Fiona about Thor’s behavior toward Cinnamon.

  When I was finished explaining his bizarre behavior, she thought about it for a moment, then waved her hand. “I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s natural for animals, especially one as sensitive as Thor, to guard the young. Even in the womb. I’m sure that’s all it is.”

  I was inclined to believe her, although there was a small part of me that feared for the safety of Cin’s baby. What if there was something wrong? I knew that my cousin never missed a checkup, but still, the way Thor was acting, it gave me pause for concern.

  “Would it help if I had a chat with him?” Fiona asked, catching the worry on my face.

  I smiled. “I would appreciate that.”

  She couldn’t actually have full conversations with animals, but they sent her messages, images that she would then transcribe into words on paper. It couldn’t hurt, I decided.

  Birdie came down the stairs, dressed in wide-legged paisley pants and a loose crocheted sweater. Her signature bangles dangled as she whisked into the kitchen.

  She looked up, surprise on her face. “Stacy, you’re here early,” she said in an upbeat voice.

  She poured a cup of coffee and joined me and Lolly at the apothecary table. She put her hand on mine then instantly snapped it back.

  “Something’s wrong. What is it? It can’t be a mission, because the Council hasn’t contacted me.”

  Fiona had just put the casserole in the oven. She was holding a pitcher of orange juice as she turned around.

  I looked to all three of them. Lolly’s circuits were popping, so I got right to it.

  “It wasn’t the Council who contacted me,” I explained. “It was Danu. She told me that you as the Mage would explain everything and I haven’t had time to look into the matter myself.”

  “Well, go on, girl, spill it,” Birdie said.

  “She said, ‘tell the Mage that the Leanan Sidhe has escaped. You must find and bind her.’”

  Fiona dropped the pitcher of orange juice and I jumped. It splattered all over the floor and my boots.

  Lolly gasped, eyes wide, mouth agape.

  Birdie’s face slowly twisted into an angry grimace. She stood up and pointed to both her sisters. “I was afraid of this when you cut the hair of the harlot.”

  Fiona winced. Lolly just looked away.

  I grabbed some paper towels to quickly sop up the mess.

  Their reactions all threw me for a loop. They seemed spooked by this information. And it took a lot to spook these three. Suddenly my stomach twisted in knots. Who was the Leanan Sidhe?

  I dumped the broken glass and soiled paper towels into the garbage can and grabbed a sponge to wipe off my boots. They were suede, so they didn’t come clean, but I managed to lessen the damage.

  When I turned back around, Birdie was still steaming, Lolly looked guilty, and Fiona seemed nervous. I swiveled my head back and forth between the three of them. “Afraid of what? What is it?”

  They all hunched in a huddle, whispering.

  “Stop that right now! You worked long and hard to recruit me to the team, which means I’m in on all discussions. No scheming, plotting, planning, or spellcasting without me. I mean it, Birdie!”

  My grandmother popped her head up and something about the look on my face made her acquiesce. “Very well.”

  The three sisters broke the huddle and formed a semicircle around the apothecary table.

  Birdie was the one to speak. “It seems, granddaughter, that your aunts may have invoked the hundred-year curse.”

  I tapped my foot. “Well, that doesn’t sound good.”

  Aunt Fiona said, “All Geraghtys pay a deep price when the curse is awakened.”

  “It’s nearly impossible to stop,” Birdie said.

  “That doesn’t sound any better. What price?” I asked.

  “The highest price of all,” Lolly answered. “Loss of our loved ones. Forever.”

  “You mean, as in death?” I asked.

  Birdie nodded solemnly.

  That wasn’t an option I was willing to accept. “So what’s the curse? Who’s the Leanan Sidhe? And what’s the plan?”

  Chapter 15

  Birdie looked at me and said, “The Leanan Sidhe was once an Irish fairy-muse.”

  “The name translates to fairy mistress,” Fiona added.

  Birdie nodded. “That’s right. Her beauty was unsurpassed by any mortal woman; her gifts, pure genius to human men.”

  “For whom she had an insatiable appetite,” said Lolly.

  Birdie continued. “Her lovers were painters, poets, sculptors, scribes, musicians, architects—anyone involved in some form of creative art. She would inspire their work through her magic, feeding their creativity, and elevating merely talented men to become masters of their craft.”

  “Her influence sparked some of the greatest art, literature, and music the world had ever known,” said Fiona. “Gifts to humanity.”

  “But they came at a price,” Lolly said softly.

  Birdie went on to explain. “Men who were bespelled by her would fall so irretrievably in love that eventually, after weeks or months of blissful passion, the creative energy could no longer sustain them. They needed more and more of the muse herself, and that was a demand she could not meet for long, for it drained her power, her life force. Inspiration—creativity itself—was what sustained her.”

  Fiona said, “So she could only have them sucking that away for so long until one day, she would be forced to leave her lover.”

  “Which is when they would suffer an emotional pain so unbearable many would either die of a broken heart, self-destruction such as drink or drugs, or by their own hand,” Lolly said.

  “So where does the curse come in?” I asked.

  Birdie said, “Eventually she became intoxicated by the power of her magic. It occurred to her what a waste it was that she fed these men all of her imaginative juices only for them to be discarded in death.”

  “So she devised a plan to siphon the energy back,” said Lolly.

  “How?” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer, but thinking it was important to the story.

  Birdie exchanged a look with her sisters. “She would sneak into their homes after they had died and steal their bodies.”

  I grimaced. “Please tell me we aren’t talking about necrophilia.”

  “No,” Birdie said. “She would drain all the blood from their bodies, fill a large cauldron with it, and bathe herself.”

  I don’t think I had ever been more horrified in my life.

 
Fiona said, “Sometimes she would drink it.”

  Correction. Now I was more horrified than I had ever been. I gagged. “Oh, so vampirism then. Much better.”

  Lolly said, “Really?”

  “No, not really.” I stood up. “This is the worst story I think you’ve ever told me, and I’ve heard quite a few humdingers.” I went to the sink and washed my hands, then I stuck my head under the faucet and gargled. What I really wanted to do was boil myself and electroshock my brain to unhear that tale.

  I blew out a sigh, grabbed a towel to dry my hands, and turned around. “So the curse?”

  “Right,” Birdie said. “You see, when the Tuatha Dé Danann discovered what she was doing to mortal men, they bound her to the Otherworld and banished her from ever making contact with our realm again.”

  “Only they didn’t count on one of their own succumbing to her seduction. The son of a god, no less, who set her free, ages later, to once again roam the countryside seeking a lover,” said Fiona.

  “Except by that time, the Druids had already signed the treaty with the Tuatha Dé Danann to protect the four treasures—the spear, the cauldron, the sword, and the stone—and the Council had been formed. The two races had been working together peacefully for centuries and neither wanted to disrupt that agreement. So the Tuatha Dé Danann asked their mortal friends for help in capturing the Leanan Sidhe and they obliged.”

  The realization of what they were getting at was beginning to dawn on me. “So one of my ancestors agreed to be seduced by the Leanan Sidhe. And he paid with his life.”

  “We are sometimes forced to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good,” said Birdie. “It was the only way. And when the Leanan realized she had walked into a trap, she was so incensed that she didn’t even wait for him to die. She killed him herself. But before he took his last breath, she cast a curse upon her lover that his lineage would always suffer in matters of the heart. And that every hundred years, she vowed to escape and demand a blood sacrifice from his clan.” Birdie looked at me. “When the first drop of his blood touched the green isle, the curse was sealed.”

  “So the curse is actually a double-edged sword,” I said. “A blood sacrifice from a Geraghty—”

  “And a heart sacrifice against the clan,” Fiona said.

  I looked at Lolly, whose heart had once been so shattered that the wreckage traveled all the way to her mind.

  No one spoke for a long time.

  I said, “So would it be strictly a lover of a Geraghty who’s in danger? What about Thor? Cinnamon?”

  Birdie said, “She’s only known to target men. Never animals. But we think, although the curse seems to have had lasting affects on affairs of the heart for generations of Geraghty women, that the Leanan’s true goal is to break a love bond, no matter what the form.”

  Which meant anyone I cared about was a target.

  “But she’s been bound, right? She hasn’t escaped before? So you really don’t know for certain what she’ll do.”

  Birdie was chewing her lower lip. She shook her head, cast her eyes first to Fiona, then Lolly. “I told you both it was a bad idea to cut the hair of the harlot.”

  Lolly stood. “Well, it was your spell after all, Brighid.”

  Fiona crossed her arms and snapped, “And what would you have us do? Stacy was stuck in the Web of Wyrd. We had to pull her out somehow.”

  I lifted my hand. “Wait a second, what are you talking about?”

  Birdie hit the button on the toaster and poured a cup of coffee. “On your birthday. When you were sucked into the realm of the Fae. I had written a fetching spell long ago and we needed the hair of a harlot to see it through to completion.”

  I vaguely recalled something about that, but my brain had been so scrambled when I got sucked into the Web of Wyrd—the pathway to the Otherworld—that I didn’t remember much of the night I came back. “But what does that have to do with what’s happening now?”

  Birdie sighed and stirred her coffee. “We suspect that somehow, because the worlds had been crossed that evening, that when we cut the hair of the harlot and used the lock to cast a spell for your retrieval, perhaps we inadvertently called the muse forth.”

  Fiona said, “You see, dear, the Leanan needs a human form to inhabit now. She was stripped of her enchantments when last she escaped the Otherworld, so her beauty will only remain intact on this plane for twenty-four hours. After that, she’ll age drastically, which would not only make it difficult to attract a man to seduce, but it would drain her energy, so bewitching won’t come as easily.”

  Birdie said, “It would need to be someone with a free spirit, someone provocative, open to persuasion.”

  “Someone sexy,” Fiona said.

  “Attractive to men,” said Lolly.

  Birdie said, “Of course, you can prevent the occupation from ever happening if you find the Sidhe first.”

  Lolly said, “But we fear maybe the harlot would fit the profile she seeks.”

  Magical profiler. That was something you didn’t see in the “help wanted” section too often.

  I took a deep breath, groaned, and put my head in my hands. “Okay, first of all, please stop saying harlot. It’s giving me a migraine. Second, whose hair did you cut?”

  No one spoke for a few moments. Finally, Fiona said, “That nice young woman who owns the tavern across from Cinnamon’s establishment.”

  My stomach did a flip. No. Way. They couldn’t be serious. They couldn’t possibly mean her.

  “Monique Fontaine?” I asked, praying to the Goddess it wasn’t true.

  They all three nodded.

  “What?” I said through gritted teeth. When they didn’t answer I shouted, “What! You don’t even know Monique. Why on earth would she let you cut her hair?”

  “Well, we didn’t ask, dear,” said Lolly.

  “It was a matter of life and death, you know,” said Fiona.

  “This is not good. Not. Good.” I began pacing, chewing my nails off one by one. “If your theory is correct you could not have handpicked a better harlot, let me tell you.” I stopped, threw my hands in the air. “In fact, you may as well have just strapped a big sign around her neck with blinking lights all around that says, ‘Hey, vampire succubus, open vessel right here. No vacancy!’”

  “Now, calm down, Stacy, I’m sure it won’t be as easy as all that for the Sidhe to possess her,” Birdie said.

  “Are you kidding me? Monique’s license plate says EASY4U! The woman writes a sex column, for the love of Danu!”

  “Oh, I so enjoy her work. Best part of the paper,” Fiona said.

  Lolly said, “She really knows her stuff.”

  I glared at both of them and did a few more laps around the apothecary table. “I can’t believe this, I really can’t.” Then a horrible thought hit me. “She’s been spending time with Chance. Is he in danger?”

  Birdie flicked her eyes to Fiona.

  “I would suggest you limit that contact,” she said.

  “Oh my Goddess. This is a nightmare.” I plastered my hands on top of my head and looked at the three of them. “Why didn’t you just cut Fiona’s hair?”

  “Hey,” Fiona protested.

  Birdie said, “It was discussed, but she’s been wed.”

  “Hey!” Fiona said louder.

  Birdie said, “Oh please, you’ve enticed more men to ‘be all they can be’ than the Army.”

  Fiona stuck her tongue out at my grandmother.

  “Can we focus, please, kids?” My head was bobbing from one to the other frantically. “What are we going to do? I mean, what if it’s too late?”

  Lolly shuffled off into the pantry.

  Birdie said, “If Danu just came to you, then I doubt it will be too late. But you’ll need to guard and protect the har—, er, Monique.”

  I narrow
ed my eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “You’ll have to ensure that the Leanan Sidhe doesn’t get near her. She must not be compromised or there’s no telling what could happen to the men in this town. All of them. Your grandfather, the chief, Derek, Chance, Tony. They’re all at risk,” Birdie said.

  I shoved aside the thought of Monique seducing my grandfather. That could only be expunged on a therapist’s couch after about ten years of psychoanalysis.

  “But I thought you said it was just artists she targeted?” I asked. “Painters, musicians, scribes.”

  Scribes. Writers. Did that mean Blade was in danger too?

  Fiona said, “That was before, but she hasn’t fed in a while. And art comes in many forms in the modern world. Construction workers need inspiration to design their projects, scientists need inspiration to solve equations, even police officers need to get creative to solve crimes.”

  “Plus we don’t suspect she’d be too picky after all this time,” Lolly said.

  “Protect Monique and we’ll figure out a way to bind the muse,” Birdie said.

  “What’s Plan B?” I asked.

  Birdie frowned.

  “Birdie, I’m serious. You have no idea what you are asking me to do. Please, there has to be another way. I can’t stand that woman. Besides, how am I supposed to protect her? Do I just chain her to my desk until we find the fairy mistress?”

  Hmm. If I could gag her too, that wasn’t a bad idea.

  Lolly came back from the pantry with a cup and three straws.

  Fiona squeezed my shoulder. “Just be your charming self, Stacy. I’m sure you can learn to be friends with this person. You’re resourceful. You’ll find a way.”

  “Can’t I just hit her with my car?” I asked. Then I remembered I didn’t have a car.

  Lolly came over to her sisters, three straws sticking out of her hand.

  Fiona said, “I suppose we’ll need to cancel Samhain.” She drew a straw.

  Birdie plucked a straw too. “I’ll call the coven.”

  I said, “And how will I know her, the Leanan Sidhe? How will I spot her? What does she look like?”

  “Well, if you don’t do as we say, I gather she’ll look a lot like that Monique person,” Birdie said.