“Yes, because there may have been an object she bound the curse to, since it didn’t originate in Lilith’s blood,” Ali added. “And we can assume it wasn’t a simple witchcraft curse, because most of those die with the witch. So this is something darker—”
“Dark magic?” Something clicked then. “So should we ask Drake?”
Everyone stopped and looked up, exchanging odd glances that I think read as uncertainty.
“What’s wrong with asking Drake?” I shrugged. “Surely he’d know more than anyone, given that Lilith is his grandmother.”
“Yes, but he didn’t know his family until later in life,” Jason said. “And while you’re right in assuming he’d know about dark magic, I’m not sure he wants to be disturbed right now.”
“Why not?”
“He’s not left Morgana’s side since she died,” David said, “or so our sources say.”
“Has she shown signs of recovery yet?” I asked, forcing myself to remember I’d let the old Morgana die and that this one was to wake with a clean slate.
“Not that we know.”
Good, I thought. “Oh,” is all I said, pulling my phone from my pocket. And then it occurred to me: not one of them asked if I’d had any luck with Lilith.
“We know,” Jason said, not even looking up.
“Know what?” I spun at the waist to look at him.
“Aside from the fact that your expression said it all when you walked in, we all knew Lilith wouldn’t give up the curse.”
“How did you know?”
“Because she lied to you the first time,” Ali said. “That vial of blood was never going to cure David—”
“Yeah, he’d have drank it down and then you’d turn him back into a vampire and move on, not realizing until later that he was still cursed,” Lora said.
“He might have acted different at first,” Jason joined in, “you know, the placebo effect, or maybe even the temporary cure we saw when we injected everyone, but it wears off, and she knew that.”
I nodded. But even if we found out who cursed Lilith, and what magic was used, what then?
“Then we find what’s binding the curse, giving it its power,” Jason said, “and we burn it.”
David looked at my mouth, hanging open in shock, and then at his brother. “Can you stay out of my wife’s head, please, you’re freaking her out.”
Jason looked at me to confirm.
I snapped my gob shut and nodded.
“Sorry.” His eyes grinned before his lips followed, a cheeky sparkle making them glint. “It’s a force of habit.”
“Well the force of my boot’s gonna be up your ass next time that force of habit makes you forget your place.”
Jason just laughed, shaking his head as he flipped a page.
“Here’s another one,” a girl from the lab team called. “Mary Winthrop’s account of her husband’s confession.”
“Why are we looking for confessions?” I asked.
“Because you told us Lilith had been cursed by someone she used when she conceived her hundred sons,” Ali said.
“And no man’s gonna have a problem getting laid by a hot goddess, so we assume it’s one of the wives that cursed her. With that in mind, we’re going back through all accounts of men having been violated by the so-called ‘Goddess of Seduction’,” Jason said, leaning forward then to look at the girl across the room. “Read it out, Fran.”
The voice echoed down from the second floor of the library, clear and sterile as it read. “My late husband John Winthrop confessed to me his sins before death.” The woman went quiet as she read for a moment. “Okay, looks like he was tricked by a beautiful woman to have sex and, riddled with guilt, he fell on his sword. His wife found him in the throes of death—”
“And that’s the twentieth case so far,” said the guy that had taken way too much blood from me the other day in all their testing. “It seems that every victim eventually killed himself.”
“Not this one,” another person called out from a table across the room, digging under a stack of papers as he stood up. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now that you mention it, this is the only case where the victim died of natural causes.”
“What did he die of?” Jason asked.
His eyes scanned the page and then he turned to dig around in a pile of notes, and when he found a small yellowed rectangle of paper, he passed it to Ali who passed it to Jason. He read it for a moment, eyes narrowing. “Blackworth.”
“Blackworth?” David shot to his feet, snatching the paper from Jason.
“What’s wrong with that name?” I asked.
“Old witch bloodline,” David said, marveling at the page. “Wiped out a thousand years ago. They’re nothing but legend nowadays.”
“Yes, I remember this from college—vampire college,” Ali said. “Francine Blackworth was said to have been a daughter of the devil—that her mother and father, being cousins, could not conceive a child and so Ophelia, her mother, bargained with the devil, and her husband’s life was the price.”
“They were cousins?” I said.
“Yes, and didn’t the husband die of some strange disease?” David said, handing Ali the paper.
“Yeah. They said it was unnatural—some people even accused Ophelia of murdering him. They had a pitchfork rally and killed her, and the child, Francine, was put in an institution for the insane,” Ali said. “But if you look at the date of James Blackworth’s death, it’s in line with the earliest accounts we’ve found regarding Lilith’s breeding-crawl across the nation.”
“You think he was one of them?” I said.
“No, I’m certain of it,” said the guy who found the document. “He made a complaint to the lord of their lands and then recanted it later on, saying it was the work of the drink.”
“And then he dies a pretty terrible death?” I said.
“Shortly after his daughter was born,” the guy added.
None of us had any clue what this meant, that much was clear. It was obvious we’d found our witch, but what did this tell us about the curse? That it was placed on Lilith by the devil? Was there even really a devil?
“We may never know the truth,” Ali said, laying the paper aside. “All we know is that Ophelia Blackworth is quite possibly the one responsible for all of this, and we need to know more about her.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Where she lived, who she mixed with—”
“Where she’s buried,” Jason said. “If we can burn her bones, maybe cleanse them, we might be able to break the curse.”
“Great thinking!” Ali said, leaning right over the desk to high-five the king. She skipped off then and started rummaging around at the table where the other documents had been found.
“Why? I mean, how can that break it?” I asked.
“Because the curse may be bound to the witch,” Ali said from across the room, “and though the curse normally dies when the witch does, if it was a powerful one, born of hatred or any other evil, it may be set in her bones. Which means that as long as her bones stay around, the curse will.”
“And we know for a fact that it’s bound to something,” Elora said. “Otherwise Jason’s cure would’ve worked.”
“So if we burn the bones, the cure will work then?” I said.
“No. In this case, the curse will die without need of a cure,” he said.
“And what if it’s not bound to the bones?” David asked.
“Then the object it is bound to will most likely be buried with the witch,” Ali told him, sitting back down at our desk with a stack of papers. “A curse of this caliber takes a heart full of hatred, and it’s not likely Ophelia would ever have wanted Lilith to rest. She would have taken the key to ending this suffering”—she winked at me—“to her grave.”
I laughed, even though no one else did. “What?” I said to David, shrugging. “That was funny.”
He just shook his head, sighing. “You always did
love a bad joke.”
* * *
One by one the team dwindled away until it was just me and Jason still poring over books. David had moved to sit by the fireplace over an hour ago and then fallen asleep on the fluffy rug, covered in books, and even Ali and Elora had turned in, rubbing the backs of their necks. But I was driven by something much stronger and more determined than my will to sleep or eat, or even pee. I flipped through book after book, digging up scrolls from the scroll room, and checking my phone every twenty minutes to see if Drake had returned a text to the one I sent earlier, asking if he could call me. He would be our best ally in this, I was sure, but until I could speak to him, I had to do something to help, even if it wasn’t actually helping.
When the drag of fatigue got too much for me, I put my head on my arms, waking in what felt like a second later to the shrill sound of pop music.
“Ara,” David groaned. “Answer your damn phone.”
“It’s not my phone.”
“My love,” he said, but his voice came from farther away than he usually slept, “you’re the only one with a Justin Bieber ring tone.”
He was right. And I really needed to change that. But the song was kinda funky. Anyway, irrelevant. I forced my eyes open, only realizing then that I was still in the library, a page stuck to my forehead, my phone stuck to my cheek. I peeled them both off and rubbed my mouth, checking my breath before answering my phone, not that the person on the other end would be able to smell my morning breath. “Hello?” I said groggily.
“Daughter of mine.” The voice woke me up immediately. It was a friendly, warm announcement of the title, but he always seemed to have that effect on me. “I just got your message. How can I help?”
“Um…” My brain farted. It just wasn’t warmed up yet. I mean, what time was it? I checked my watch, but the battery was dead, so my eyes went around the room, looking for a clock. Until I realized I was holding one. I lifted the phone from my ear and saw a six on the screen, taking that to mean it was six in the morning. I was in the library. The fire was out. It was six in the morning. What was I reading last night? Not a romance, surely. Maybe a thriller.
“Amara?”
Amara. Oh yes, only Drake and Lilith called me Amara. I was looking for a cure to the curse. Now I remembered. “Sorry. Brain fog. Um…” I sifted through papers, looking for the name of that dead witch. “We’re trying to find a cure for this curse.”
“Which one?” He laughed. “No, don’t tell me—the one my grandmother carries like a trophy.”
“Trophy?” I screwed my nose up. How did he know that?
“I’ve been to her in the past—asked for a cure in order to ease Morgana’s suffering when she was younger—but to no avail. She seems quite content to keep it around. So, how can I help?”
“What can you tell me about dark magic? And Blackworth.”
“Blackworth,” he coughed. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a century.”
“Who was he?”
“He? My dear, I’ve heard only stories, but I’ve not heard any told of a male Blackworth—not of consequence, anyway.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes. It was the women in that family that inherited the power, and they were not to be trifled with.”
“Why?”
“They say their magic was a gift from the devil—that he was in the hand of every spell they cast.”
“Great,” I said flatly. “Because we believe it was a Blackworth that put the curse on Lilith.”
“Not Francine Blackworth?”
“No. Her mother, why?”
He breathed what I assumed was a sigh of relief. “They say Francine was the spawn of evil—that, after fifteen years without conceiving a child, her mother made a deal with a demon and he took the father’s life as payment.”
“But that’s not true. We have reason to believe that he was one of your grandmother’s victims, and that maybe his wife killed him.”
“What reason? What proof?”
“An old complaint that was later recanted,” I said. “And we have a death certificate; well, a death account, explaining his physical appearance after death, too—”
“Do you have it on you?”
“Yes.” I dug around, looking up when Jason handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, turning it in my hands. And then I froze, my cheeks rushing with heat. “Um… crap.”
“Here, let me,” Jase said with a laugh.
“Hang on,” I told Drake. “I couldn’t understand the handwriting… or the language.”
Drake laughed too.
“Translating it,” Jason said, loud enough for Drake to hear. “They say the blackness branched out from his right hand and up his arm. There was bleeding from the eyes and mouth, his skin completely black on the right side of his body—”
“It wasn’t the devil,” Drake said swiftly and surely, making me miss the end of Jason’s sentence.
“Huh?” I muttered. “What do you mean?”
“Anyone that knows anything about black magic knows the effects of a dark curse on a human’s body,” he explained. “He was cursed, Amara—at the hand, by the sounds of it.”
“At the hand?” That made no sense to me.
“You said he was one of the hundred men consumed by Lilith in her quest for freedom?”
“Yes.”
“And his jealous wife—the evil and wrathful Blackworth woman,” he said, leading me into some conclusion that I wasn’t grasping, “what must she have done when she learned her husband had been unfaithful—”
It sunk in. “Yes, how horrific would his punishment have been if she cursed the woman responsible.”
“And to make matters worse,” David said, “Lilith had a child to that man who supposedly couldn’t give a child to his wife—”
“The child Ophelia and James had tried for fifteen years to have,” I added.
“If I had to guess, I would say Ophelia cursed the hand that touched a woman outside their marital bed, or rather, bound Lilith’s curse to it. The evil in that magic would have consumed him in the end—”
“And would have died with him, right?” I said.
“No,” Drake said with way too much certainty for my liking. “It would be bone-deep—”
“Like Ali said,” I noted. “So… buried with him?”
“Then you have your answer,” he announced pragmatically. “I’m glad I could be of help.”
“Well, you wouldn’t happen to know where he was buried, would you? Or how we can get the curse out of his bones?”
“Buried, no.” He sucked in a long breath and let it out through his nose. “As for releasing the curse, well… let me think…”
I glanced up at David as he came to stand behind me, kissing the top of my head.
“One of two ways come to mind: you could salt and burn the bones or, failing that, lock his skeleton in a spelled room.”
“Spelled room?”
“Like a hex coffer, but bigger.”
“What’s a hex coffer?”
“It’s a box, of sorts, that traps magic. If this curse is powerful enough that it didn’t die with Blackworth, or with the witch that placed it, then that might be your only option. The magic will still be alive, but as long as it’s locked in that box, it has no power out here in the mortal world.”
I wanted to kiss Drake then. He would never understand how much he just helped me out. “Thank you, Drake.”
“Please, Amara, call me Dad. It is well past time.”
And yet I still wasn’t totally sure I was ready.
“Amara,” he said in a tone that made Jason step away, taking David with him. I shook my head at them to ask where they were going, but they both just smiled, giving me what I assumed was some space. “I have wronged you. I can see that,” he continued. “I was blinded by the fear in my heart for Morgana as she suffered, but I see clearly now how much I hurt you. I should have been there at your side—”
“You don’t have to explain. I get it.” And I did. I truly did. After all, I had kids too. I couldn’t even imagine being in his position.
“I know you do, but I don’t think you understand just how much I love you. And how sorry I am for the way I’ve treated you. Without the memory of me from your past, you can’t understand where my words came from, or what context to absorb them in. We were close once, Amara, and I miss that.”
The genuineness in his words made it hard for me to swallow. I blinked to cleanse the coating of tears and just nodded. “Well, I appreciate that,” I choked out, keeping the emotion out of my voice. “Thanks.” Then I hung up the phone before he could hear what I truly wanted to say. I did understand where he was coming from, but he’d hurt me all the same when he sided with Morgana. All should have been forgiven after he torched her, or when he gave me the key to kill her after learning the truth, but in my heart of hearts, I felt like he would always choose her over me, and I just didn’t want to get hurt again next time he did.
“Ara?” David took the phone, which was still at my ear. “We need to eat.”
I nodded, wiping the corners of my eye. “Good idea.”
* * *
David paced the halls outside while I stared at the phone, waiting for it to ring. The faded old record of Blackworth’s death gave us the location of his bones, but Wiltshire, England, was unfortunately just too far away for all of us to run off to at such short notice. So, instead, we sat waiting while some members from the London set of Lilithians flew out there and tracked down the grave with the intention of destroying the cursed bones.
David burst in the door when my phone rang, and I joined the conference video call before he even made it to my side.
“You got it?” said a guy on the other end, not addressing any of us. The image bumped and jostled about, showing a grey sky and the muddy, snow-sprinkled ground under someone’s dirty boots.
“It’s a go,” said someone else, a shovel appearing in the right-hand corner of the screen.
“A GoPro?” said the other guy, and laughed.
There was a brief moment where the two Englishmen joked around about a few things, digging up some more dirt from a hole they’d been working on. I couldn’t make out the words on the headstone that had been tipped over long ago, but I knew it was Blackworth’s grave. I found myself marveling at the graveyard surrounding his final resting place though. It was so old that each headstone looked green, was cluttered closer together than modern cemeteries, and not one of them was set straight in the ground any longer. On occasion, as the camera angled up with the guy’s head, I could just make out a really old stone church in the background.
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