The Connelly Curse

by Lily Velez

  This led us to speak about our favorite things in general. Simple things. Like the way the light changed right before the sun set, gilding everything in a blinding tangerine gold. That was me. Or the feel of potting soil between my fingers, or the satisfaction that came from arranging flowers for a piece of resin jewelry just right, or a single breath sending cotton-soft dandelion seeds flying into the air. Those were also me.

  Jack? He loved the solemnity of solitary, witching rituals. He loved kneeling before his personal altar at Crowmarsh, incense burning and candles aglow, because in those moments, he felt connected to his ancestors and the gods like never before.

  He also loved driving to the edge of Rosalyn Bay’s coastal cliffs and then reclining back in the driver’s seat of his car to gaze up at the stars.

  “Some people say they feel insignificant or small when they think about how vast the universe is,” he said. “For me, it’s the opposite. When I look at the stars, I feel connected with every living thing. I feel the universe inside of me. I feel infinite. I feel eternal.”

  We talked for what had to be hours, and I relished every moment as we peeled back layer after layer, revealing things to each other that in some cases we had never told another soul. Jack’s words never ceased to pull at something in my chest, drawing me further into him and him into me. Even our trembling shadows cast upon the opposite wall had merged into a single form.

  At one point, as I massaged my hands, Jack noticed the scar on my palm, the one that hailed from the ritual we’d performed to invoke Brigid. Jack had been the one to draw his athamé across my skin, my blood a necessary ingredient in charging the Hallowstone.

  He took my hand, turning it over for a better look at the scar. The pain on his face made my chest ache. “I hate that I did this,” he said softly. He tenderly drew his thumb across the length of the scar.

  I braced myself to keep from shivering at that simple yet intimate touch. “We did what had to be done,” I told him. “And besides, I kind of like it. It’s just another one of my battle scars.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked up but only slightly. “Nonetheless, I never want to be the reason you ever feel any sort of pain.”

  He kept smoothing his thumb across the scar, as if he sought to erase it. Then he lifted my hand higher and inclined his head at the same time, and in the next moment, he pressed his warm lips against the scar, kissing my palm.

  Blood rushed to my face, and my lips slightly parted, as if I intended to say something, though I wasn’t sure how I planned to speak as parched as my throat had become.

  “We should try to get some sleep,” Jack said, still holding my hand. “The more well-rested we are, the better able we’ll be to face whatever comes.”

  I acquiesced with a nod, still fumbling for words. Jack, on the other hand, seemed perfectly oblivious to his effect on me. That, or he had a masterful poker face.

  Finally letting go of my hand, he balled up his cloak to serve as a pillow and set his head against it as he reclined back. Once situated, he held out an arm toward me. My stomach flipped as I scooted closer to him until I was snug against his side, his body heat instantly warming me more effectively than the fire itself.

  I twisted a little until I was more comfortable, and then I slowly rested my head against his firm chest. The smell of him was intoxicating. If I closed my eyes, I could almost fool myself into thinking I was traipsing through an ancient forest, the scent of pine needles and earth and bark in every breeze.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I curled an arm around his middle. The muscles of his stomach were like granite. I blushed at the mere thought of him without a shirt, at how he might look. Like a god probably.

  I moved slightly closer to him, and when he tightened his arm around me, I thought my heart would just about burst.

  I fell asleep to the sound of his breathing.

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep when the sing-song voice came.

  “Scarlet,” it beckoned, stretching out the vowels in my name.

  At first, I thought I was only dreaming. My eyes fluttered open. The fire had long died out, but despite the cave’s impossible coldness, I was warm. I realized it was because I was still intertwined with Jack, my arm around him, his around me.

  “Scarlet,” sang the voice again.

  I looked all around but saw no one. Where was the voice coming from?

  “Scarlet…”

  I slowly untangled myself from Jack and quietly rose, furrowing my brow as I peered into the darkness of the cave. Suddenly, a soft light glowed from the end of one of the far passageways. I squinted, trying to make out what waited on the other end, but from this distance, it was near impossible.

  “Scarlet,” the voice urged, the light pulsating with each syllable.

  I took a step toward it, but quickly glanced back to Jack, hesitating. I knew he’d want me to wake him, but if the first of The Trials was officially beginning, I knew he’d have his own fears to face in The Cave of Nightmares. I couldn’t expect him to face mine too. This was something I had to do on my own.

  I pushed a long breath out of my lungs and braced myself, turning back to the light.

  “Scarlet…”

  The voice came again, and this time, I started forward and followed.

  23

  Rory

  Whenever I stood in the rain, I felt reborn.

  “Heaven weeps.”

  That’s how someone had once described the rain when I was younger. It was a somber illustration, but it wasn’t without merit. Times like this, when the skies were stone-faced and the rain unrelenting, the days could feel funereal.

  To most at least.

  To me, not really.

  These were my favorite kinds of afternoons. When windows, veined with rivulets of rainwater, glowed white with every flash of lightning. When thunder purred in the distance, and bare trees swayed in the wind, and everywhere, there was the sense of the world being made new again through a sort of baptism.

  Sadly, the rain didn’t last long.

  The storm broke, and a single, pale pillar of sunlight lanced through the gauze of clouds to grace Rosalyn Bay. The townspeople slowly emerged from the shops and restaurants where they’d sought shelter and trickled out onto the wet sand of Sweetwater Beach in twos and threes.

  As for me, I continued trekking across the shore. The ocean tide rushed in with a crash, seagulls gliding just above the foam. In the distance, the bells atop bobbing fishing boats pealed in low, hollow notes, making for a therapeutic symphony. Or, it would’ve been therapeutic if not for all the litter.

  I drifted into the knee-high water and grabbed a plastic fork floating on the waves, depositing it into the bag I carried, where it joined a menagerie of debris the likes of takeaway boxes, empty water bottles, and paper cups. It didn’t matter how many times a week I combed over Rosalyn Bay’s beaches. The litter only continued to pile up.

  How the ocean had become the town’s dumping grounds, I didn’t know, but with every disposed item I came across, the reel of images flashed through my mind, pictures I’d seen on the internet. Of seals entangled with fishing nets. Of turtles with misshapen shells stuck inside the ring of a six pack yoke. Of beached whales with upsetting amounts of plastic waste inside their stomachs.

  “You forgot one, Connelly.”

  I looked up in time to see fellow St. Andrew’s student Ian Gallagher, flanked by his usual henchmen, toss an empty bottle of Guinness into the water a few paces from where I stood. It submerged with a deep plop, the splash reaching high enough to wet the front of my shirt.

  It didn’t matter, considering I was still drying from the impromptu rainfall from earlier, but Gallagher’s cronies still guffawed like they’d never seen anything funnier.

  “Freak.” Gallagher’s favorite name for me, which incited more laughter as the group continued on their way, leaving deep footprints in the wet sand.

  I couldn’t exactly pinpoint the fateful day when Gall
agher had apparently hand-selected me as a promising recipient of his verbal abuse. It was an annoyance at best, but it didn’t bother me as much as he probably hoped it would. I knew he was only doing it on the off chance that I’d involve Jack or Connor. Their popularity, their athleticism, their top marks in every class—he envied it all, and because he envied it, he hated them.

  Which meant he hated me, reminding me of it every day by bulldozing into me between classes in the crowded hallways, by knocking my textbooks off my desk in passing, or by snatching one of my drawings during study hall and making a mockery of it to his friends.

  A hurricane. If I were to ever make a sketch of his energy, it’d just be a hurricane of rough lines all in grayscale, their angles chaotic and wild.

  He wanted me to take the bait and run to my brothers.

  I wouldn’t.

  Nothing Gallagher did ever managed to provoke me.

  Which is why it caught me off guard when I leaned down to retrieve the bottle of Guinness and instantly felt my magic rushing into my hands, my fingertips aching from the surge of power. There was a spark of heat in my chest, and an impulsive urge swelled between my ribs, begging for release.

  A string of suggestions raced through my mind at once. I saw how easily it could be to retaliate. Not for my sake, but for the ocean’s, its weariness soul-deep, its pain from this endless mistreatment raw and stinging.

  I saw me speaking wicked things that made Gallagher choke on salt water. I saw the shore opening up right under his feet and swallowing him to his shoulders. I saw me uttering a single word—Giotaigh—and I saw me crushing the bottle in my hand but Gallagher’s palm being the one to spill blood, being the one from which glass shards pushed through bleeding cuts.

  I honed in on Gallagher’s figure as it grew smaller and smaller and narrowed my eyes, my grip on the bottle tightening. I didn’t realize at first how the water at my knees had begun to bubble. I hadn’t immediately noticed the bayonets of lightning spearing the sky or the way a colony of seagulls had started to fly in haphazard circles above me, their caws high-pitched and urgent.

  All I knew in that one, focused moment was the build-up of energy pulsing just behind my heart, the rush of scorching power as it built and built and built, ready to explode out of me, ready to be wielded as a weapon, ready to—

  Wait!

  Stop!

  I drew up short, screeching to a halt.

  I blinked rapidly as the fog of magic cleared, as the heat abated, as the surge of power gradually drew back like a receding wave.

  The water around me calmed. The lightning retreated. The seagulls dispersed. I was left only with the thud of my pounding heart, my pulse throbbing at my neck.

  That had been close.

  That had been closer than ever.

  The bottle of Guinness slipped from my fingertips. I squeezed my eyes shut, wondering how I could’ve ever allowed my moods to swing so wildly out of control.

  “You mustn’t ever let the magic become your master,” Father Nolan had told me the first time I’d come to him about my witching year.

  I’d heard all the stories. I’d seen three brothers go through witching years of their own. Not once had I ever anticipated experiencing even half the difficulty they had. I wasn’t prone to anger the way Connor was. I didn’t use magic for mischief the way Lucas did. I certainly wasn’t as powerful as Jack. Who was?

  I’d expected the most uneventful witching year in recorded history for myself.

  It wasn’t what I got. I hadn’t told my brothers, but it wasn’t what I got at all.

  I inhaled a slow, long breath, letting the briny air expand my lungs and clear my mind.

  Do not repay evil with evil, but overcome evil by doing good.

  A verse from one of Father Nolan’s holy books.

  “Recite it to yourself whenever you need to keep your magic in check,” he’d said.

  I recited it now. Over and over again. First, only in my mind. Then I mouthed the words, my lips quickly moving through every syllable. Only when I was confident the storm in me had broken did I open my eyes again.

  The bottle of Guinness floated in the air before me.

  It took me a jolting moment to realize it wasn’t floating. It was attached to a hand. My eyes flew up the arm to the person on the other end, and my heart stumbled over its next beat.

  Liam Misaki.

  Gods, had he seen all that? Heat instantly suffused my cheeks.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, accepting the bottle from him and taking longer than necessary to settle it into my bag if only so that I didn’t have to meet his eyes straightaway.

  “Can I help?” Liam asked. He’d joined me plenty of times before on these excursions. Which I hadn’t understood at first. Litter cleanup was hardly high on my classmates’ lists of Saturday morning priorities. I was sure the majority of them didn’t even know what a Saturday morning looked like.

  So as we’d walked along the beach that first time, I’d made it a point to concentrate on Liam’s emotions, taken aback by what I ultimately discovered. In that moment, while we collected litter from the beach, he was…happy. Enjoying himself. His spirit light and buoyant.

  I was sure I’d misread him, so I tried again and again throughout the rest of the morning, but the reading was always the same. I didn’t know what to make of it then. Most days, I still didn’t. A part of me dreaded the inevitable day when Liam realized I really was the strange, awkward Connelly my classmates pegged me as, the one not worth the effort of a friendship.

  “I think I’m finished for the day actually.”

  “Sorry I missed you then,” he said. He was in his black and blue wetsuit, so he’d probably been surfing when he’d spotted me. Ocean water still dripped from his shiny, black hair. “I’ve been meaning to ask, is everything all right with your brothers? I noticed Jack’s been out of school for a few days.”

  I tried to figure out a way to explain Jack’s absence without mentioning curses or demons or a hidden realm where forgotten gods still lived. Admittedly, this had grown tiring, the endless charade. More than once, I suspected that part of the reason Liam’s friendship never felt real was because I was never real with him. Not always. He didn’t know the most important thing about me.

  “Uh, yeah, they’re all fine.”

  “And what about you? Are you all right? You seem like you haven’t slept in days.”

  Honestly, I hadn’t. My nights lately had been restless. I kept having this recurring dream. In it, Jinx and I walked through the woods behind Elizabeth’s cottage. Suddenly, he would bolt, and I’d run after him across the crackling dry leaves.

  Screams and shouts chased after us, though I could never make out the bodies they belonged to, only the fire-topped torches those bodies carried. I knew I wasn’t alone in the woods, that others ran with me. I knew the dream was portraying the witch persecutions of Elizabeth’s time. I could feel the terror of my kin, dense like smoke, choking me.

  When Jinx came to an abrupt halt, we were alone again. We stood at the center of a clearing, a ring of trees around us. Leaves rose from the ground and began to flutter around, revealing they weren’t leaves at all. They were butterflies. White butterflies. Jinx, delighted, leapt after them. Then I’d wake.

  What surprised me more than anything was how vivid the dreams always were. I’d made any number of concoctions before out of roots and berries and flower petals to gift me with second sight while I slept, but there was something different about these dreams, some significance in them I was still trying to make sense of.

  “You can get that if you want,” Liam said when my phone rang, saving me from having to answer his question.

  Except it was Connor’s name that flashed across the caller ID. I already knew what he wanted. For us to all return to Crowmarsh immediately to continue our attempts at waking up our mother.

  He forgot that a witch had to be in the right state of mind to cast effectively. The energies we carried into our spe
lls had just as much an effect as the ingredients themselves. And Connor’s moods lately were a recipe for disaster. I had a suspicion part of the reason today’s spell had grown so aggressive was because there was just too much anger in him.

  Worse still, considering what I’d experienced on the beach minutes ago, I wasn’t in any condition to work with magic either.

  “It’s all right,” I told Liam, sending the call to voicemail.

  Normally, it was next to impossible to get in touch with someone in Rosalyn Bay, given the town’s poor cell reception. I’d drawn sigils on the back of all our phones to counteract that problem. Usually, I didn’t regret it. Right now, as Connor called me three more times, and I sent him to voicemail three more times, I did.

  “I really don’t mind,” Liam said.

  I knew he didn’t. I could feel he didn’t. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to be rude. I’d call Connor back soon enough. But call after call kept coming, my phone buzzing in a way that started to become exasperating. When the calls failed to reach me, a volley of text messages came in quick hums.

  Slowly, a sick feeling crept through my gut. I checked the phone’s screen. The most recent text was from Lucas. It contained only one word.

  Emergency!

  24

  Rory

  By the time I arrived at Five Maidens Beach, the docks were in complete ruins, reduced to floating panels of wood and splintered beams that pointed up at the sky like broken lances. The few boats that were moored to the pier, mostly abandoned vessels long forgotten by their owners, had capsized, some already more than halfway submerged.

  Except for one. It fell out of the sky and crash-landed right in front of me.

  A wraith-like creature rose from the carnage of wood, fiberglass, and sails, floating in the air like a phantom of shadows. I stared. Because though I’d heard of the creature from my grandfather’s stories, I’d never seen one in the flesh. Because its face was every nightmare patched together in one terrifying mask. Because its eyes, as bright and shiny as red jaspers, fixed on me, and it bared its fangs in wicked delight.