From Bad to Cursed

“What’s next?” I asked. “What does Aralt want from us? How long does this go on?”

“Not much longer,” she said. “Usually he stays a month, six weeks. Then we have the graduation ceremony, and he moves on. I go with him.”

“Usually?” I asked. “Not this time?”

“Not this time,” she said. “Something has changed.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. But I…feel it.” She segued into a sweet, sad song. “I love Aralt, as much as I always have. But he tires of me. He grows restless. I can feel it. He is impatient.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you remember the night at Adrie

So that thing in the woods was Aralt. Which meant our golden hero, our ideal man, our benefactor—was a hideous monster?

“Can’t you stop it, though?”

“I’m his, Alexis. I want what he wants. Good or bad. If he wills it, it becomes my will too.” She glanced at me. “As with all of the girls in the Sunshine Club. All but one.”

All but one? All but me.

Because by the time I’d fully committed to Aralt, I’d already screwed things up too badly to have any time to enjoy it. The thought left me feeling dejected.

“I don’t have much time, you see,” she said.

What did that mean?

“Are you dying?”

Her expression was sad. “Not yet.”

I was leaning back, relieved, when the doorbell rang. We both shot to our feet, and Tashi held the flat of her hand out to me.

“Stay,” she said. I heard her at the front door, calling out a greeting to someone and saying she’d be right there. Then she hurried back to me.

With surprising speed and strength, she grabbed my arm and pulled me down the hall toward the garage door.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, Alexis,” she said. “There’s less time than I thought.”

“Time for what?”

She shoved me against the wall and glanced back at the front door. “Forgive me,” she said. She grew more agitated by the moment, shaking her head like she was trying to shake an image out of her mind. “Forgive me. I would never do this, except—”

I would have screamed, but her hand was over my mouth. Her face contorted as if she was in physical pain, and then she looked up at me.

Her cheeks were covered in the black tracks of tears, all melted together like someone had colored her face gray.

“To abandon—try again,” she whispered. “I need to show you.”

“Try what? Wait—!”

She opened the garage door and shoved me down the single stair. The door closed behind me, and the dead bolt clicked with finality.

I STUMBLED BUT managed not to fall. Then I charged at the wall and flipped on the light switch, preparing to start banging my fists on the door and screaming my head off.

But in the moment that the fluorescent lights flickered on, I forgot about all that.

Because everything I’d expected to see when I went into the master bedroom—the symbols, the candles, the movie set?

I was standing in it.

The plain concrete floor had been drawn on with a dark, thick marker, or some kind of black paint—a web of symbols that radiated from the center outward, stars and moons and other stuff I didn’t understand. Instinctively, I raised my feet, trying to get clear of it the way you’d try to get clear of quicksand. But it was sticky. It pulled on the soles of my shoes.

Forced to be still, I finally took a long, slow look around me.

Then, like when you’re standing in the ocean and a giant wave hits you out of nowhere, I was knocked over. I fell to the floor and curled into a ball, my hands over my ears.

But what struck me wasn’t a physical force.

It was emotion. Raw, surging, torrents of emotion—ranging from tattered tendrils of fear and pain to huge pulses of anger, jealousy, paranoia—

They formed into a roar that filled my head, my soul, my entire being.

Suspicion, disgust, torment—

I was like a helpless bird caught in a thunderstorm, buffeted from every side by a venomous black wall of hatred, selfishness, hunger—most of all, hunger—and if it continued, it would wear me down like a layer of paint under a sandblaster. Already I was losing pieces of myself, my thoughts—I couldn’t recall who I was or where I was or why I was there.

With my mind wiped clean, the hatred began to take root, filling my head with a pulling, tar-like need to destroy, devour, hurt—and I expanded to meet the force, began to feel its desires as if they were my own.

How I wanted to hurt someone. How I wanted someone to cower before me, begging for mercy, so I could crush them between my fingers. The world swirled dark and terrible, and I was dark and terrible too. The shrieks of pain on the edge of my consciousness were delicious to me; they soothed me and gave me an outlet for my most horrible awarenesses—

That I was imprisoned. Trapped. I contained so much force, and yet I was being held inside this place, rendered powerless. My fury flared up like flames and burned everything inside me.

I wanted to raise my arms and watch the oceans rise with them. I wanted to beat down everything in my path like a meteor shower of death and a

And then it stopped.

I don’t know how long it took me to uncurl myself. To let my own thoughts trickle back into my consciousness. To separate myself from the black, all-consuming hatred that had filled me.

But when I opened my eyes, I saw that the room around me was blank. All of the symbols were gone. The burning candles were dead hunks of wax. The talismans had been swept to the floor and turned to dust.

Numbly, I went to the wall and hit the glowing button, then watched the garage door open with a quiet rumble. I stared out into the night, still feeling like I was walking six feet behind my own body.

He’s evil.

He manipulated us. Controlled us. And we spent every minute of every day trying to please him. But he was a monster who only wanted to feel blood on his hands and taste fear on his tongue.

I made it about halfway home before my legs began to swim underneath me. I sat down on the curb outside of #65 and wrapped my arms around myself. My body shook, rattling the breath in my lungs.

He was evil, and there was nothing we could do about it.

He was evil, and he was inside us. So deep inside us that I didn’t know where Alexis ended and Aralt began.

He was so evil that even the girl who had loved him for almost two hundred years was terrified of him.

I ambled home, waved a senseless hand at my parents, and lurched down the hallway to the first door, which I knocked on, quietly, slowly, steadily, until my sister pulled it open.

She took one look at me and her face turned as gray as death.

“I need your help,” I said, my parched throat crackling behind the words. “I just met Aralt.”

WE WAITED UNTIL our parents went to sleep and then sat on the sofa, wrapped in blankets we’d pulled off our beds. I was in my pajamas, a robe, thick socks, and slippers, and I made a cocoon for myself with my comforter. If I could have settled between the couch cushions, I would have. The rawness of Aralt’s emotions left me feeling vulnerable, exposed. My shoulders still quaked under all my layers.

“Try again,” Kasey said, for the eightieth time. We’d been sitting there trying to figure out what Tashi had meant. “It’s what Elspeth said, too.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. My voice still had the dusty rasp of a lifelong smoker. “Why apologize and then push me into that place?”