The Connelly Curse

by Lily Velez

  I still remembered the day I decided to stop visiting my mother at Serenity Falls. There didn’t seem to be a point, not when she continued to exist in her own grief-stricken world, the one where our father had been the center of her universe, the one where his absence made that universe collapse on itself like a dying star. Depression stole the life right out of her, graying her hair, leaching the color from her face, reducing her to a wiry caricature of a person who couldn’t register the four sons who regularly visited her without fail.

  I’d hated her for it.

  I’d hated her so badly it burned between my ribs.

  Sometimes, I thought I’d burst into flames from the anger.

  Seeing her after consulting The Wise Ones, though…

  That had really set a wildfire in me. I couldn’t believe how much she’d deteriorated. I’d wanted to yell, to punch a wall, to start an argument with Jack, to wring a doctor’s neck and demand to know why they thought her catatonic condition was in any way normal when she’d once been so full of life, when she’d used to sing in the kitchen while preparing sage bundles, when she’d used to laugh from her core whenever our father lifted her feet off the ground in a hug and spun her around, when she’d once been so beautiful in the glow of our Sabbat candles, smiling at every last one of us with a soul-deep love that was practically tangible.

  And now she might never wake up.

  I forced myself to look anywhere but at her. The thought was a constant plague, one that assailed me day and night. It never failed to bring its old friend guilt along either, and right now, the guilt was cutting off the air supply in my lungs so that I had to step away and breathe in the fresh air coming in from one of the open windows.

  I’d spent so much time hating her that now my hate could very well be all that I had left of her. Jack, meanwhile, had tried to help her. He’d apparently regularly used his illusions on her, hoping to lead her back to herself. Unfortunately, the remedy never lasted very long, but at least he’d tried. What had I done?

  She might never wake up…

  I clenched my teeth against the doubts. No, this was going to work.

  It had to.

  I returned my attention to Rory. “Well? Is our mother going to spontaneously combust or what?”

  “He’s still assessing,” Lucas said, his cards clicking from one hand to another in an arch. “What do you say, Rory? Does he have any hope of being at least a mediocre witch? Or should we sell him off to a visiting circus? And would they even want him?”

  “I guess it should be all right,” Rory said, handing The Book of Fates back to me.

  Lucas laughed. “You guess? That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. If we end up having to order a headstone when this is all said and done, we’ll be sure to include the inscription, ‘Rory said it would be okay.’”

  Rory ignored him and proceeded to set out sprigs of elderflower and hemlock around our mother’s sleeping figure. In that moment, she looked every bit a queen, one about to be delivered into the Land of Youth by her loyal subjects.

  I produced a polished, black stone from my pocket and held it up for my brothers to see.

  “Onyx?” Lucas asked.

  “It’ll help rid her body of any negative energy as we perform the spell,” I said, gently setting the stone atop our mother’s forehead. I tried to ignore the wrinkles on her face, which cut into her skin like deep grooves in sand.

  Once everything was in place, I tilted a vial of waning moon rainwater, the phase of the moon that best complemented spells meant to break curses and cleanse people, against my fingertip until a fat, glistening bead of it clung to my skin. I pressed the drop to my mother’s left temple and repeated my actions to press a second drop to her right one. After that, we assumed cardinal points around her.

  In Jack’s absence, we used representational magic to take care of the west point. The totem I selected to stand in as his proxy was a small statue of a white stag, Jack’s Celtic zodiac animal. He kept it on his personal altar here at Crowmarsh, so I knew it was imbued with his magic.

  “Ready?” I asked my brothers, who both nodded. Lucas had done away with his cards, his expression serious now.

  I started off the incantation. It had taken some time to translate and modernize the Old Irish, which Brigid had insisted on using when dictating The Book of Fates to our Connelly ancestor centuries ago, but I knew the words by heart now. I spoke them into the air in a low but firm voice.

  Rory and Lucas soon joined me, and our voices merged as one, growing louder in the small space of the bedroom until I could feel the magic pulsating in my veins, like revving up an engine that vibrated in your core.

  Within seconds, the sprigs of elderflower and hemlock rose from the bed, levitating several feet into the air. They started spinning rapidly. Each gave off a white light in an expanding orb of brightness, so that it was like a crown of stars hovered above our mother.

  Her bed began to tremble, bucking against the wall. The glass vase on her nightstand toppled over and broke into a dozen, glimmering pieces. Curtains the color of rose quartz swelled out as powerful gusts of wind blew into the room, responding to the spell’s power.

  I pressed on with the words of the spell, more emphatic. It was working! We couldn’t stop now.

  The magic lifted our mother from the bed. She floated upward slowly, and the orbs of light spiraled over and across her body in loops. They moved so fast, it was impossible to distinguish one from the other. They became one blur of blinding brightness.

  Then, suddenly, one of the orbs came right for me. I ducked in just enough time to only feel it graze my hair before it shot through the upper pane of a window, shattering the glass. The large, jagged shards rained down to the floor, but as they did, three more orbs bolted for the window, striking the falling pieces and repelling them with an outburst of magic, flinging the glass shards clear across the room.

  One piece stabbed into a far wall with vicious precision. Lucas dodged the second piece, but the third charged right for Rory’s neck. With a quickness I didn’t expect, he threw up his hands just in time to lift a shield of magic in front of himself. The piece of glass bounced against it and fell harmlessly to the ground.

  The remaining orbs fired away, and for a few moments, we were soldiers in the trenches, dodging gunfire and grenades. When the last of them sped out the window, I hurried to seal the gaping space with magic so none of the orbs could return.

  The words spoken, I leaned back against a wall to catch my breath.

  “Bloody hell,” Lucas said, rising from his hands and knees. He’d been taking cover behind an armchair. “Was that waning moon rainwater or flat out acid rain?”

  Our mother’s body had returned to its resting posture on the bed, as if nothing had happened. The onyx on her forehead had been incinerated, leaving a pile of ash in its wake, though her skin was cool to the touch. She still wasn’t awake, nor had her youth returned to her. The spell hadn’t worked in the least.

  “So what do we do now?” Lucas asked.

  My jaw was clenched so tight I thought I’d grind my teeth to dust. Before, I could hardly look at my mother. Now, I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

  I cursed when my phone rang, ready to send the call straight to voicemail. Except Father Nolan’s name popped up on the caller ID. Furrowing my brow, I answered.

  “Connor, I’m glad to have reached you. I tried Jack’s number, but I couldn’t get in touch.” Because Jack’s gone mad and decided to play hero in the Otherworld, Father.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “Far from it, I’m afraid. I’ve just received some troubling news about Elizabeth’s cottage. They’ve decided to move up the date of the demolition.”

  I started to mutter an expletive but managed to curb myself at the last second. Even I had limits around a man of the cloth. “To when?”

  A deep sigh on the other end. “To this very afternoon.”

  19

  Connor
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br />   I hated going into town.

  It was a gods-forsaken place forgotten by time, where people inherited superstitions that were centuries old. As Lucas and I strode through the main square, I glared at the number of horseshoes nailed above the doors of residences and places of business. Rosalyn Bay had a thing for iron, long believed to keep faeries, witches, and devils away. Rumor had it the townspeople always carried iron in their pocket. Traditionally a nail, though being that this was a seaport town, a fishing hook was the more popular, evil-repelling charm.

  Though not the only one. On pagan holidays, mothers braided red threads into their daughters’ plaits lest witches steal them away. On the night of The Wild Hunt, families left fresh bowls of milk or cream on their doorsteps as libations so that wicked creatures wouldn’t abduct their loved ones. And every full moon, the townspeople strung garlands of hag stones above their doorways to keep dark magic from entering their home.

  Most of the time, it didn’t bother me. It didn’t bother me how people hung rowan berry wreaths on their windows in an effort to drive away my kind. That was just ironic, considering rowan trees had been sacred to our druidic ancestors and were still sacred to the Celtic witches of today. We buried its leaves with our dead, included a rowan in our sacred groves for divination.

  It didn’t bother me how the local apothecary still sold ‘witch boxes,’ something hunters had peddled since the sixteenth century to fan the flames of witch hysteria. They were about the size of a small, wooden jewelry box and filled with herbs and crystals over which a spell of protection had been cast to ward off witches. Not a very effective spell, as it were, considering I’d bought one once in an act of defiance and kept it on my desk at Seymour House to this day.

  But it did bother me the day Lucas choked on over-salted haddock when we were eating in at a chipper near the docks. I hadn’t thought much of it at first, had assumed he—glutton that he was—had simply literally bitten off more than he could chew.

  But then I saw the hungry, satisfied gleam in the eyes of the woman behind the counter, the one who owned the establishment and who’d taken our order. And instantly, I remembered the stories about inquisitors in the Middle Ages who, believing witches couldn’t stomach salt, would force feed accused witches unspeakable amounts of the stuff and then deny them water, waiting for their prisoner’s guilt to inevitably be confirmed. But Lucas hadn’t gone red-faced because he was a witch. It was because no person in their right mind would be able to down that amount of salt.

  And it had bothered me the day Jack stopped driving his Jaguar into town. The last time he had, I’d been with him, picking up takeaway and grabbing a few, last-minute items from the apothecary for an Imbolc ritual. When we returned to the car, its convertible top down, we were still a few paces away when I saw the object lying on the driver’s seat.

  At first, I mistook it for a sock. As we drew closer, though, I noticed its humanoid form. It was a doll, but not just any doll. A poppet. A hair-raising, faceless poppet made from sackcloth. A nail had been driven through the sides of its head.

  “Agrimony,” Jack said, sniffing the poppet.

  The herb the doll had been stuffed with, one that banished evil. I snatched the poppet from Jack and flung it to the ground. Flames engulfed it before it even hit the asphalt, and I stared the poppet down, making the fire grow hotter and brighter until the sackcloth blackened, until nothing could be made out of the doll’s remains save that damn nail.

  Whoever had left that gift for Jack had been lucky I wasn’t alone that day. I would’ve tracked them down with magic. I would’ve found them. And I would’ve given them something to really be terrified about. Half the time, I felt Elizabeth had had the right idea in mind cursing this entire town.

  “We’re stopping at Murphy’s on the way back,” Lucas announced as we strode across the wet, gleaming cobblestones of the main square. “No one does fried clam strips like them. Remind me to ask for extra tartar sauce, though.”

  I glanced at the sandwich board outside Murphy’s. Today’s specials, written in chalk, included oysters, crab cakes, and Lucas’s beloved clam strips. Try as I did, I couldn’t muster an appetite myself. I was tired of seafood, which seemed to be all Rosalyn Bay had the imagination to serve day in and day out. It didn’t help that every last sea breeze stank of fish. The day I was done with St. Andrew’s couldn’t come fast enough.

  We turned a corner to complete the final stretch of our journey. Two women coming our way recognized us at once and promptly crossed to the other side of the avenue. I pretended not to notice, just like I pretended not to notice the pockets of people here and there who whispered to each other behind their hands, eyes glued on us, watching ever so warily. Probably a good thing there was only two of us and not three. We’d parted ways with Rory upon arriving, but if he’d been with us, talk about the apocalypse would’ve spread in a heartbeat.

  The mayor’s office was at the end of the block, the only building in town that had a fresh paint of coat and window shutters that weren’t hanging off their final nails. A crew of laborers hung a banner from one lamppost to another just outside the office, advertising the upcoming, week-long Founder’s Day celebration.

  The sight of it chafed my nerves. What a joke. Rosalyn Bay’s first settlers had been Celts, and the witches who’d descended from those Celts, or at least from the few who’d survived invasion and persecution, had eventually returned to this land to live in peace. Until they too were persecuted by a new group of invaders: the town’s beloved founders, who decided they had discovered the place simply because no one had ever put it on a map before or given it a name.

  The warmth inside the mayor’s office was stifling. I instantly shed my coat and unwound the crimson-and-gold-striped St. Andrew’s scarf from around my neck, stuffing it into a pocket. Not that it helped much. The longer we sat on the cracked leather of the lobby chairs, the more it felt like we were being roasted alive.

  I drummed my fingertips on the arms of my chair. Beside me, Lucas whistled to himself while he shuffled a deck of cards. The only other person in the lobby was the mayor’s secretary, a woman in her late sixties who wore reading glasses on a chain and kept peering over the cat-eye frames at us, as if she thought we might shapeshift into fanged demons if she didn’t remain vigilant. I finally met her eyes and stared back. She lasted two seconds before busying herself with pecking away at her computer keyboard.

  When Mayor Keegan O’Sullivan finally finished his phone call, he emerged from his office and strode to the gurgling coffee machine beside the secretary’s workspace, fixing himself a cup and plucking a powdered donut from a neighboring box. He was a plump, red-faced man with a handlebar mustache and a stomach that threatened to pop the buttons on his suspenders. A donut was probably the last thing he needed.

  “Mr. Mayor, you have some…guests,” his secretary said.

  Apparently, if you were a witch, people here had to think twice about whether or not you were a guest or an ungodly intruder.

  “Oh?” The mayor turned toward us, sugar peppering his mustache. A good thing he’d already swallowed the bite he’d taken. If his stunned face were any indication, he probably would’ve choked on the thing the moment his eyes landed on us.

  He gathered his bearings in the space between seconds and cleared his throat. “Ah, the Connellys. Please, come into my office.”

  The office windows were thankfully open, affording relief from the infernal heat inside. In the distance, the Atlantic Ocean pounded against the coastal cliffs and seagulls called out to each other, but I was more focused on the mayor’s wall clock. The second hand was obnoxiously loud. Tick, tick, tick. The thing seemed to echo in the small space. Gods, it was going to drive me mad. All the more motivation to make this short and sweet.

  “What can I do for you lads?” Mayor O’Sullivan was all smiles, as if he weren’t about to put a wrecking ball to Elizabeth’s cottage any minute now. He set his mug of coffee on the desk before him, its stron
g aroma filling my nose.

  “Did Maeve offer you anything to drink?” the mayor asked, misinterpreting my focus on the coffee. He used a silk handkerchief to wipe the powdered sugar off his thick fingertips.

  I held up a hand to signify we were fine. “I’m sure I don’t have to explain why we’re here.”

  The mayor sank into his high-back, tufted chair. For a moment, I thought he’d continue playing dumb, but he seemed to sense at the last moment that he wasn’t dealing with a carbon copy of Jack, the diplomatic brother.

  “An unfortunate business, what’s being done with your ancestor’s cottage.”

  “What’s being done with your approval, you mean.”

  The mayor collated a stack of papers on his desk. “I’m only doing what’s best for the town. A new development will boost our economy. We’re northwest Ireland’s best kept secret, if you ask me. I see a future not so far away when we host oyster festivals as grand as those in Carlingford and Hillsborough, when we’re known for our beaches and water sports the way Bundoran is. These sorts of things draw crowds, crowds full of tourists who are ready to spend their money in our restaurants, inns, and other shops. And all that traffic will mean we might even manage to get the N59 looping through Rosalyn Bay in no time. We’d be better connected to Sligo, Westport, Galway…do you see how that could improve the lives of those who call Rosalyn Bay their home?”

  “Right, except it’s not really improving much for my family, is it? Your hypothetical road is doing this irritating thing where it’s cutting through our land.”

  “I understand your frustration. The cottage holds historical significance for your family. We respect that.”

  “If you respected that, you wouldn’t be giving the go-ahead to have it razed to the ground.”

  He heaved a sigh. “Mr. Connelly, my hands are simply tied in this matter. The cottage has become a hazard. Nevermind the safety perils of the structure itself. The surrounding land is a minefield of health risks. All those dead animals…”