by Ts McKinney
“Darling, if you’re reading this, then my worst fears have come true and I wasn’t able to stop the curse from taking your father’s life. Without him, I simply can’t go on, but for you I would have tried. I would never have left you in the world alone and defenseless. So since you’re reading this now, my backup plan to save myself has failed too. I can only tell you that someone is coming for us and I’m afraid that no matter what we do to stop them, we won’t be able to survive. I’m enclosing a family tree with as much detail as I could in the short period of time we’ve had to prepare. Read the information carefully, darling. It describes an evil curse that originated in 1717, in Marblehead, Massachusetts—one that directly affects all the male descendants of your father’s line.”
That page ended, and curious, I turned it over to read what came next. I had to read it three times before the words began to make any sense—before they finally imprinted themselves on my brain.
All the males on your father’s side of the family commit suicide on the occasion of their twenty-fifth birthday.
I read that line again and really let it sink in. This was April, and my twenty-fifth birthday was only a few weeks away, on May fifteenth.
And despite how truly evil that is, once every one hundred years, another event coincides with that death. On that occasion, the man who commits suicide is the actual reincarnation of Nicodemus Bailey, a young man who lived and died in Salem in 1717. Nicodemus was the soul mate and true love of Corbin Hargreaves, a powerful witch who lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and who disappeared without a trace the same fateful night his true love died.
That terrible event—Nicodemus’s suicide—takes place again every one hundred years. Nicodemus is reincarnated into the body of on one of his descendants, and this is where the story gets even murkier. That descendant somehow finds his lost love not long before his birthday and is reunited with him. He and Corbin Hargreaves are deliriously happy once again—until the descendant has his twenty-fifth birthday. Then, even Corbin’s magic is unable to save him, and Corbin is forced again to watch him die. And again, Corbin disappears, not to resurface for another hundred years. The year of your twenty-fifth birthday, 2017, will be the third time this atrocity recurs. Unless you can find a way to stop it. I think you can.
I looked up from the letter and shook my head. Reincarnation? Curses? True love and mysterious disappearances? Complete bullshit, right? Had to be. I sure as hell didn’t believe in curses and I didn’t believe suicide was ever the answer either.
My great aunt, if that’s who she really was, hadn’t been there more than twenty minutes, but she’d managed to alter my entire life in that short amount of time. Not that I believed it, of course. It was crazy! Nuts! I looked up from the letter to tell old Great Aunt Hephzibah exactly what I thought of this bullshit letter, and she was looking at me so sadly I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I wanted to say.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “But if it’s any consolation, your mother truly believed you would be the one to break the curse. She believed it with every fiber of her being.”
“I don’t understand. Who was my mother? How did she know all this about my father’s family?”
“Your mother was Rosalie Banks. And she volunteered to come and meet your father on the occasion of his twenty-fourth birthday to try to warn him. Unfortunately, she took one look at him and fell in love. I say unfortunately, because once she fell in love, she refused to leave him and it sealed her own fate. We knew that in that year, 1991, he would meet someone, fall in love, marry and begin his family. We didn’t know that it would be with our Rosalie. She was so in love with your father that she couldn’t leave him to his fate. She hoped up until the last that she could manage to save him. But she was also a realist—she knew that she might not be able to. And she had premonitions of the future.” She looked over at me long and hard. “Your mother was a talented witch who gave her life for you and your father. She told me not long before you were born, “I still have hope to save my sweet husband, but if I should fail, my son, Nicholas, will be the one to stop this from ever happening again. He will find his true love, Corbin Hargreaves, and they will end this curse together. They will live happily ever after—unlike my sweet husband and I. But if the worst happens, then we will go to our deaths knowing that our baby will be the one. He will break the curse forever and end this terrible cycle.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, wiping some traitorous tears from my eye. I didn’t believe this bullshit. Not for a second, but the love my mother felt for me shone through the words on the page. I felt it as if she’d been in the room there with me. For the first time in my life, I felt loved—both by her and my father. And I felt cheated. Something had happened to take them away from me, and if it was the last thing I ever did, I was going to find out what that was.
“If my mother’s family knew about this, like you say you did, why did you leave me in foster care?”
“To protect you. It was your mother’s wish to save your life at all costs. She cast spells to help you survive until you were found. She thought going to foster care might help stop the curse from finding you before you were ready. When you turned twenty-four, I started looking for you, and I’ve only just found you. I’m sorry you had to go through that, dear. But know that it was done out of love for you and fear for your safety.”
My great aunt left not long after, saying that she would be in touch. I didn’t ask her any questions—just let her go. That night, I got shitfaced drunk and had a pity party for one. I’m embarrassed to say I cried for a long time. I cried for my mother who had called me darling. I cried for the parents I’d never known but who were so obviously disturbed. How could they both have believed that foolishness my mother was spouting in the letter? How had she convinced my father of her craziness to the point that he killed himself right along with her and left me high and dry? I cried for all those dreams of theirs gone up in smoke. All the things they’d planned for me, all the things I missed because they were dead, by their own insane choice.
Eventually, I moved on from crying to cussing. I cussed them for leaving me behind, and for leaving me a fucking note that gave me only a cruel taste of what might have been. For putting all these ridiculous doubts inside my head. Suicide at the age of twenty-five? Fuck that shit.
When I’d sobered up, I put my brand-new history degree to the test and began researching the small amount of information I’d received from my so-called great aunt Hephzibah and the letter, feeling one hundred percent certain that I’d find that my parents were total nut jobs and the supposed family curse was nothing more than a figment of their very vivid imaginations.
But that’s not what I found at all. And that, unfortunately, was when shit got real.
Chapter One
I didn’t want to leave Tennessee, but I suddenly began to feel like I didn’t have another choice. No, I didn’t for a minute believe that I was going to commit suicide on my twenty-fifth birthday, which was still weeks away. And I had absolutely no fear whatsoever that I would be tempted in any way to hurt myself. But something seemed to be driving me on, guiding my actions. It sounded weird, even in my own head, but since I read that letter, I’d felt almost a compulsion to find out why the rest of my family had taken such a different and tragic path.
Since my family history had all started in Marblehead, Massachusetts, I immediately started looking for jobs there that could justify me moving in that direction. I sent a letter to the dean, requesting removal from their Master’s program and I began to research jobs in and around the area of Marblehead. And—just like magic—I found one almost immediately. I came across an ad for an assistant position at the Goodheart Witch Museum in Salem, and I applied. I heard back that same afternoon and was offered the job. Again, just like that. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. It almost seemed too good to be true.
The night before I left, I lay out on the roof, smoking and talking to maybe the only re
al friend I had at Kempler, Evie Redd. I’d met her one day on the roof, a fellow smoker, and we’d kind of bonded over a shared history as foster kids.
“Are you excited about beginning your new adventure tomorrow, Nico?” Evie asked, blowing out a column of smoke and rolling over to look me in the eye. My name was Nicholas, but Evie had always called me Nico. It struck me as really weird now, knowing that was the name of the man I was supposedly the reincarnation of.
“Who would have ever thought you would be headed to Marblehead, Massachusetts, and I would be leaving for New York City? When I imagined our futures, I always pictured us staying in Tennessee—maybe moving to Knoxville and turning into a Volunteer fan.”
“Get a grip. You know as well as I do that I’ll never be a Vols fan—I’m Crimson Tide through and through, and we hate all things orange.” Evie was the only person on campus that I would miss, actually. She was the first woman I’d ever made love to, before we realized we were better friends than lovers, and she was the only person who knew about my parent’s suicide.
It wasn’t something I liked sharing with other people. It wasn’t that I was ashamed that they’d committed suicide, exactly, but more like I was ashamed they’d left me behind. I hadn’t, however, told Evie anything about the supposed family curse that would require me to take my own life the fifteenth of May. “Anyway, who says that both of us won’t be back here in Tennessee before the year is up? There’s no reason for you to give up on your dream of us making Knoxville home—just that really stupid part about me ever becoming a Volunteer fan.”
She snorted. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” She reached over and wrapped our hands together. “You have to promise you won’t forget me, Nico. I really am going to come visit you, you know, just like I said. You know I don’t make friends easily and I just know I’m going to be a lost country girl in the big city. I’m afraid I’m going to be swallowed up and forgotten.”
“You’re fucking gorgeous, Evie. I hardly think you’ll be overlooked or swallowed up,” I argued. I wasn’t just doing lip service either. She was gorgeous. Tall and curvaceous, beautiful auburn hair, bright green eyes, and pretty pink lips. Every guy and a few girls had fallen in love with Evie at one point or another over the past six years. Hell, I’d fancied myself in love with her every damned day of our freshman year. Thankfully, it had only taken one disastrous fuck for us to realize it wasn’t meant to be.
“Thank you, Nico,” she answered shyly, totally in denial of how beautiful, inside and out, she truly was. “What about you though? Isn’t Salem like really close to Marblehead? You’ll have every little witch in Salem trying to cast spells to get you into their beds. I can’t wait until I get to visit. I’ve heard that the tourists wear witch costumes and pointy hats while enjoying the local tourist traps. I can’t wait. I’m going to buy myself the coolest witch hat on the market and totally embarrass your pretty ass. It’s going to be awesome,” she teased in a singsong voice.
“You could never embarrass me, babe. Never. And I can’t wait either.”
“I’m going to miss you, Nicholas Bailey. Take care of yourself and have a wickedly hot warlock picked out for me when I come. I’ll need something to play with on my first visit.”
“I’m going to miss you, too, Evie Redd,” I said. “And don’t worry, one wickedly hot warlock will be available for you to play with when you come to visit. Witches’ honor.” All this witch talk felt weird after my great-aunt’s visit, but I played along anyway.
She growled. “But you’re not a witch! Were you a Boy Scout at least? Try Scout's honor,” she pleaded.
I shook my head. I definitely wasn’t a Boy Scout.
I may have been teasing about witches with Evie, but I had a real purpose in mind for moving so far from home, and it had nothing to do with witchcraft. I needed to find out why the hell my male relatives all seemed to lose their minds on their twenty-fifth birthdays. In my research, I’d discovered that my male relatives had indeed all committed suicide on their birthday, and I mean like all of them—stretching back to my great-grandfather’s suicide by walking off a cliff on his twenty-fifth in 1817 to another great-grandfather standing up and walking into the German gunfire on the battlefield in Arras, France, on April 5, 1917. My own father killed himself with a single bullet to the temple in 1992. As to why they did this unthinkable thing? On that, I came up blank. Nada. Nothing.
I keep telling myself it has nothing to do with witchcraft or curses.
Surely there had to be a logical explanation as to why the Bailey men felt the need to off themselves, and sometimes their significant others. There had to be one, but I sure as hell couldn’t figure out what that fucking explanation might be.
The next morning I overslept, missed my flight and had to wait three hours for the next one. Once I arrived in Massachusetts, there weren’t any rental cars available, and I ended up having to take a fucking taxi all the way to Marblehead—where I’d rented a small cottage for the duration of my stay. I didn’t have a clue how long that would be, but I wasn’t going into it with the idea that Marblehead, Salem, or anywhere else in Massachusetts would be my forever home. I simply needed to do some research about my family history, and, if one believed in family curses, I probably only had weeks left to get all my researching completed.
“This is the address, kid. Looks like you owe me three hundred and twelve dollars, plus a tip, of course,” the man behind the wheel said.
He had a grin on his pocked face that told me he was somehow involved with the fucking car rental place at the airport. Them not having my car available and me having to pay over three hundred dollars was not nearly as innocent as they’d tried to make it appear. Fucking pricks. It was like I was cursed or something. Ha!
“I hope you take plastic,” I muttered as I reached into my wallet to pull out my check card. I handed him my card as I realized my new life was starting out about as sucky as possible. Perfect.
When the card was approved, he ran the ticket and handed it to me. “Don’t forget the tip. This here trip took me away from my little one’s birthday party.”
Here’s a tip—hygiene’s important. Instead of saying it, though, I added a generous amount and handed it back to him. I had enough bad mojo going on, and it wasn’t like I could take it with me when I died. Maybe he would invest in some soap and toothpaste. It could be my last contribution to society.
Weird, my death jokes weren’t funny at all anymore. Why did I keep pulling them out of my ass? Maybe it was like whistling in the dark—trying to get my courage up and convince myself that all this was just some crazy ass coincidence or some kind of inherited madness that I’d been lucky enough to dodge.
Forty-five minutes later, I was sitting on the front porch of the small colonial cottage, waiting for someone from the rental office to show up with a key. Because, naturally, it hadn’t been left for me as they’d promised. Seriously, what was going on? I hadn’t been the least bit surprised when taxi driver hadn’t even offered to help me get my luggage out of the back of the taxi, nor was I surprised when the key wasn’t under the flower pot like they’d promised. What I was surprised about was that it wasn’t raining. A savage New England coastal storm would have fucked up my fucking arrival even more.
Frustrated, I leaned my head back against the back of one of the cozy chairs that decorated the small front porch. A rain drop splatted against my forehead.
Fucking perfect.
By the time the guy from the rental agency arrived, I was soaked to the bone and most of my belongings were soaked as well since the overhang on the small porch hadn’t been large enough to protect it from the fierce storm that sent hail and cold rain down on me with a force that would probably leave bruises. I was tired, hungry, and pissed off. I was also lonely.
“Sorry about that, Mr. Bailey,” the younger man said. “I swear that the key was there. I dropped it off myself earlier today. Shit, you’re soaked. I’m really, really sorry.�
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Pretty gray eyes that appeared incredibly nervous and ashamed, looked up at me from behind bangs that were too long and dyed a cool lavender shade over his natural blond. The kid couldn’t be older than eighteen. His next statement made me feel like an old man instead of twenty-four years old.
“Are you gonna tell my mom?” He grinned when he said it, like there was something hilariously funny about him getting into trouble with his mommy.
My head started splitting—as if there was a tiny man standing on top of my head with a pickax, swinging for all he was worth. My clothes were soaked and plastered against my skin. I was freezing. Still hungry. Yet those big Bambi eyes got to me.
“Nah, it was just a mix-up. No big deal. Thanks for getting here so quickly,” I answered. He was sweet enough and easy on the eyes, but now I wanted him to go away. First, I was going to order a large pizza with everything on it. Then, I needed to get in a hot shower, start a fire, and snuggle up in a thick, furry blanket. Once all those things were in progress, I could start worrying about the fact that it would be around midnight which meant I probably had one day less left to walk this earth.
Another not-so-funny joke.
I paused for a second, wondering if I was beginning to believe that I was going to die on my twenty-fifth birthday? Did I secretly think something was going to happen in the next weeks that might lead to making me want to commit suicide? Or was this whole situation just getting to me?
“Cool, man. I appreciate it. For what it’s worth, I really did drop the key off. You might want to mention to my mom that you’d like the locks changed.” He shrugged. “Not that Marblehead sees much crime, but you can’t ever be too careful.” He jammed his hands into his baggy jeans and said, “I overheard that you were going to work at Goodheart’s Museum in Salem. Cool. But be careful. There’s a bunch of freaky shit that goes on over there. Watch your back.” He grinned and then added, “By the way, they frown on magic from different covens in Salem, so you might want to tuck that energy back in a bit. Trust me on this, you don’t want Morgan Goodheart as an enemy.”
