The Keeper's Curse

by Diana Harrison

  Emmy’s hands shook so violently the book fell on the floor. Blood pounded in her ears, and if her stomach had contracted any further, she would have been sick on the floor.

  Persephone rushed to her side, putting her arms around Emmy’s shoulders.

  “I know. It’s a lot to take in,” Persephone said.

  “It’s not possible. I am not that.”

  Even as she said the words, she thought of the ritual, Breckin’s small body writhing in pain, while Emmy, thousands of miles and a world away, did the same thing.

  “It was rumoured the Keeper was a human, a non-crafter. The rumours were only half right.”

  She remembered Breckin telling her the story of him and his mother, of how he had cryptically said, “She” – his mother – “did something to me to make sure Thoreoux couldn’t ever hurt me.” And that had been all he said.

  “It’s not me, it can’t be me.”

  Persephone didn’t reply, which only made Emmy panic more. She yanked herself away from Persephone, backing away. Persephone’s expression wasn’t cruel or encouraging. There was only pity.

  So Emmy did the only thing that made sense in the moment. She bolted out of the room.

  ~

  Breckin waited hours for Lana to come back. He didn’t quite understand why, but he wanted to make sure she was alright. Was it because he had been telling her so much in the past few days? He had told her his life story. And now she knew about his severe claustrophobia.

  He felt his face burn. He had never voluntarily told anybody that before. Noah, Gabe and Roz knew, but they had found out the hard way. Images of Rhoan throwing him in the frenum closet began bubbling beneath the surface, and he had to force them away, returning to his train of thought. Lana.

  She had been so scared, and the guilt had been practically emanating from her in waves, like he felt her fear. But she never returned.

  Soon enough, other people came to visit Jade, but he didn’t leave. Despite Jade’s physical strength, she was one of the softest people he knew, and imagining her being in fear, being hurt by those monsters, made him furious. All he wanted to do was fix this for her, and hated himself for not knowing how.

  Gabe came in soon enough and they sat together. Breckin explained what had happened the previous night, jumbling his words from talking so quickly. Gabe didn’t interrupt him once, and didn’t say anything after he finished.

  That was one of the perks of having Gabe as your best friend, Breckin thought. You could bare your soul to him and he wouldn’t judge you. On the other hand, he wouldn’t comfort you either. Although he had no expression, Breckin knew he was worried. Jade was his sister, after all.

  Soon enough Alex showed up, then Teddy, and the rest of Jade’s friends. Later in the day the Woodworkers came - Sol’s brother, his wife, and their three daughters, Rozelyn among them.

  “Why would anyone want to hurt Jade?” she whispered to him after the others left, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “I don’t think it was Jade they were after,” Breckin said. “I think they were after Lana.” At Rozelyn’s puzzled expression, he expanded. “You know, Alex Rathers’s sister.”

  “You mean Emmy?”

  “Who on earth is Emmy?”

  There was no time to elaborate, for just then Persephone Nassar burst into the room, her black eyes round and huge, and out of breath. Breckin and Rozelyn stood up.

  “What happened?” Breckin demanded. “Is Lana alright?”

  “No, she bloody well isn’t,” she panted. “I left her alone and she’s gone. I went back to The Noir Beanery to see Vera and Sol and she’s not there. Her clothes and bag are missing as well. She’s gone.”

  Breckin took a deep breath, trying not to get upset. “Where did she go?”

  “How the hell should I know? You’re going to have to find her, you’re the only one who can.”

  “Okay, sure. Just let me try and track her.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Persephone said shortly. She took another deep breath, trying to control her breathing. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Breckin, but brace yourself, alright? I should’ve told you both before, but... Breckin, Emmy is your Keeper.”

  The loudest sound in the room for several seconds was Jade’s breathing. A thousand jumbled, crazy thoughts, most of them involving denial, raided Breckin’s head. After about a minute of gaping, he finally verbalized one of them.

  “That’s impossible,” he said. “My mom looked up my Keeper, and she said she was a human.”

  “Did she say that? Or did she say the Keeper was in the real world?”

  Breckin thought about it for a moment, not remembering the exact wording. His mom had told him years ago, right before she had disappeared from his life forever. It hadn’t been the most important thing on his mind at the time.

  “Lana never said anything. How can you be sure?”

  Persephone smiled without mirth. “She can hear you talk in her head. Last night we broke into the dream downloading room, and guess what we found? She had a dream about you years ago when you were having the curse put on you.”

  There were so many things he wanted to protest, but none of them came to his lips. Lana, his Keeper?

  He thought of her, the skinny, awkward girl who always stared at him intently, sometimes with suspicion, other times with ... almost adoration.

  Ever since he had met her, something about her had drawn him in, despite her initial hostility. Maybe because the first time he had ever seen her she had been hurt, or maybe it was because she looked so helpless, but he hadn’t been able to control his reaction to her. If what Persephone was saying was true, those feelings would have made a lot of sense. Lana, his Keeper. Lana, with his soul.

  His mind wandered to the previous night, when he had been jerked awake. He had heard Lana’s voice in his head, pleading for his help. And he had known where she was. Like a tug inside him, bringing him to her. He hadn’t even questioned it.

  “Listen,” Persephone said, breaking him out of his thoughts. “She didn’t take the news so well, and you have to bring her back. Those monsters that nearly killed us last night were after her. She’s defenceless now.”

  She was his Keeper. This was real. He had met her.

  Breckin began pacing back and forth, ignoring all the eyes on him.

  The Keeper had always been this far-off entity to him. He had never given her a face, never tried to find her or contact her. He had just thanked his lucky stars she was a human, that she would never be hurt on account of him. She would live her whole life never knowing he existed.

  It took a moment for him to adjust that blurred image to fit Lana. Lana, one of the most vulnerable crafters in the world. She was not at all his naive idea of an Amazon with a whip in one hand, and a knife in the other. But that girl didn’t exist, and she never had because she had just done the one thing the books said a Keeper would never do – she deserted him. He hated himself for being surprised.

  “No,” he finally said. “Let her go.”

  Persephone gave him a look that indicated he was clearly stupid. “Excuse me?”

  Rozelyn squeezed his hand. “Breckin, if they find her they’ll kill her. They’ll kill you.”

  “I know that, it’s just ... I can’t make her stay.”

  “Of course you can,” Persephone said automatically.

  Breckin threw his hands up. “Okay, yes, I can literally force her to stay, but I can’t do that to her. Do you realize what she’s just discovered?”

  “Yes, it’s awful,” Persephone said. “But she can’t take care of herself.”

  “I don’t think you quite understand what’s been done to her,” Breckin said, his voice rising. “I’ve ruined her life. Thoreoux knows I have a Keeper.” And then another realization hit home; his knees nearly buckled under him. “Cyrus. That’s why Cyrus is here. That’s why he threatened her. Oh, God.”

  Persephone paled at Cyrus’s name. “I should have known that.”


  Breckin narrowed his eyes at her. “Exactly how do you know all about this, Persephone? How do you know I have a Keeper? Hardly anyone knows. Thoreoux and his clan know. My mom knows. Circlet and Oka know. Noah, Gabe and Rozelyn know. And that’s all.”

  Persephone paled further, but straightened her back. “That’s none of your business, Crawford. I’m just trying to help you.”

  “If she wants to leave, let her leave. I can’t blame her for wanting to. Maybe she’ll come back.” Persephone rolled her eyes, which made Breckin’s neutral feelings for her slip into dislike. He already felt stupid enough. You could only have so many people leave you before you just start accepting it when it happens.

  “She won’t come back, you moron. Cyrus is going to kill her.”

  As the two of them went on in this manner, neither of them noticed Rozelyn left the room.

  ~

  Stop. Turn around. Stay. Like a metronome, the words pounded in her head, in her heart, in her blood. Every step she took that led her farther from Methelwood made her skin crawl.

  Emmy had nothing but a bit of clothing and the meagre amount of money she had made working at The Noir Beanery. She had no idea what she was going to do, and the pleas her body was making didn’t help her think any clearer. All she could hope for was that there was some orb out there that could transport her back into the real world. She wouldn’t go back to Canada, but that wasn’t the point. She just needed to go somewhere where there were no crafters, where it would be nearly impossible to find her.

  The only person who would be honest about that would be her mother, so there she was, in Ministrial, heading for the prison where her mother was kept.

  When she demanded to see her mother at last, she was taken aback by the guard at the gate being agreeable and told her to wait a few minutes. After a thorough body search, less than ten minutes passed before she was assisted by a Ministrialian guard to the wing where her mother was imprisoned.

  Emmy had never been in a prison before, but this one didn’t look too different than ones she had seen in movies. It was dank, dark, with paltry living conditions, and for the first time since Emmy had learned about the orb world, she felt pity for her mother.

  The security guard eventually came to a halt, gesturing to the right. Emmy followed his lead, and then she saw her.

  Annalise sat curled up in her little bed in a grey robe, reading a paperback novel. Her hair was slightly longer than Emmy had last seen it, and her skin, greyer. She must have felt eyes on her, because she raised her head, and when her eyes laid on Emmy, she began to cry.

  “Would you like to go inside?” the guard asked her.

  “No,” Emmy said. The guard backed off and made his way back down the corridor.

  Annalise, with sluggish movements, got off the bed and walked over to the edge of her cell, curling her hands around the bars.

  “You finally came,” she said. “I thought I would never see you again.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Look, this isn’t a social visit. I need to get out of here. The orbs, I mean. You did it, clearly, so I need you to tell me where the portal is.”

  Her mother’s face fell. “Honey, only one portal in existence can get you back into the real world. And they move it around all the time. It took me months to find it.”

  “I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.”

  Emmy hated herself for sounding so desperate, and her mother picked up on the tone. Realization dawned on Annalise. “Oh, no. You know. About the curse.”

  Could this situation get any worse? Emmy backed away from the cell. If she stood too close, she would hit her mother.

  “You knew?”

  “Yes, I knew. I got a letter from Clara Crawford about what she had done to you about a week after your eleventh birthday. If I ever find the woman, I’ll kill her.” Emmy felt like she was on the edge of flying into a rage. “Anyway, it’s why I tried so hard to keep you out of the orbs. More than your brother, that is. I didn’t want you anywhere near Breckin Crawford.”

  “I’m – going – to – die. Do you understand? Someone is trying to kill Breckin. And to do that he has to kill me.”

  Annalise didn’t flinch. “James Thoreoux. The would-be Eldoir.”

  “Maybe I could have protected myself, if you had only told me! Instead you lied, you left me vulnerable. What, you were hoping I’d die in ignorance? That it wouldn’t hurt?”

  “No, Emmy.”

  “Did you think Thoreoux wouldn’t come looking for me?”

  “No.”

  “Then WHY?”

  Annalise sighed, burying her face in her weathered hands. “I was hoping you’d never find out.”

  Emmy’s voice reverberated off the walls. The other prisoners heard the commotion and began to watch. “I LIVE IN METHELWOOD! HOW WOULD I NOT KNOW?”

  “I was hoping you’d stay away from him!” she shouted back, not in anger. “I know, it was a stupid hope, but I still hoped. I knew if you met him it’d be over. That you couldn’t leave him.”

  Annalise was right, and Emmy couldn’t stand it. She felt whatever was inside her screaming, begging her to stay. The part of Breckin inside her. “It hurts. It hurts so badly. I want to stay, but I know can’t.”

  “No, you can’t. Emmy, there’s a reason I didn’t tell you. You may look like your father, but you’re me.” Emmy waited for her to explain whatever that meant. “You know how stubborn I am. I escaped the orbs for the first time when I turned seventeen years old, and after that I traveled back and forth constantly. At first I just did it for fun, but then I met your father, and I couldn’t stop.”

  She had Emmy’s attention. Never had Annalise talked about how she had met her father.

  “My friends kept warning me – Vera and Evelyn Circlet included – to stop doing it, that it was too dangerous. I knew what I was doing could ultimately ruin my future, that I could end up in jail, but I couldn’t stop seeing him. I fell in love with him within a month. Everyone thought I had lost my mind. Eventually, one night, I made a decision to never come back. I left my entire life, everyone I loved, for a boy.”

  Emmy had a hard time believing this. Her sensible, passionless mother ruining her life for a caring, affable person like her father? Emmy nearly threw up again at the parallels. But she was different. She wasn’t staying for Breckin.

  “And the worst part is I don’t regret the choice. I’m still just as addicted to him as I was when I was seventeen. I’m miserable, Emmy. Not because I’m in prison, but because I’ll never see your father again.” Annalise turned her face away from her daughter. “I love you, Emmy. I love you and your brother so much, but if I ever get out of here, I’ll wait until you two turn the legal age, wait until you’ve made lives for yourselves, and then I’ll try to get back to your father again. The idea of having to live forty more years without him drives me insane, Emmy.”

  After this little story, they stayed silent for several moments. A cold, piercing fear began traveling through Emmy’s veins. That would never happen to her. Never. If there was one thing that terrified her beyond all reason, it was not having free will. There was a reason that no matter how often Emmy snuck out of the house and did dangerous things, she never did drugs or got drunk. Not because they were bad for her, which would have been a normal person’s reaction, but because the idea of her body craving something, against her will, and perhaps succumbing, was revolting to her. If you didn’t have free will, you were nothing more than an animal driven by its instincts. You had nothing.

  But then she thought about it. Why did she used to sneak out of her house all the time? Why did she used to wander for hours in the dark, her body leading her about, searching for something, despite not knowing what it was?

  “Do you ever feel like you’re not in the right place?” she had asked Jesse once. “Like you’re supposed to be somewhere more important, doing something more important?”

  “Not really,” he had said.

  But that
warm ache in the center of her body had always told her differently. It had never stopped stinging, that place inside her she had always gone to when she got scared or angry or sad. It had always been a comfort to her, but she hated it now, knowing it wasn’t hers. She thought of the first couple of times she heard his voice in her head – she had been meditating, searching for that familiar tranquility in her breast. It was him.

  “I don’t need Breckin,” she whispered. “I barely know him. And I’m leaving him.”

  “Then you’re smarter and stronger than I am,” she said. “I envy you. Get out of here and don’t ever come back. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

  Emmy stayed silent while Annalise gave her an orb name (Seawych), with an address. Apparently this address belonged to her grandparents, who would hide her until she had a plan.

  Emmy thanked her, taking in one last look at her mother, not knowing if she would ever see her again. She took finally left, in long, deliberate strides, leaving without thanking the guard.

  Once she left the prison, she picked up the pace into a sprint, sidestepping the business men and women on the street, nearly getting run over by the pods in the process. The House of Law, the largest and grandest building in the orb, stuck out like a sore thumb. Emmy ran back in, heading up the stairs and into the portal room.

  She didn’t get two steps in before she was tackled to the ground. Emmy rolled over onto her back to face her attacker. Rozelyn.

  “How could you leave him like that?”

  “Get off of me, you crazy bitch!” Emmy shouted, taking her free hand to throw Rozelyn an uppercut to the jaw

  This surprised Rozelyn enough for her immobilized body to roll off Emmy’s, but it wasn’t enough to stop her. Emmy crawled away, only to have Rozelyn loop her arms around Emmy’s waist.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Rozelyn said.

  Emmy sighed, taking a break from the struggle. “It’s cute you’re worried about me, but I can handle myself.”

  “You can’t actually, and to be honest, I couldn’t care less what happens to you. Unfortunately, you’re carrying around the most important thing in the world to me, so your safety is my concern.”