From Bad to Cursed

I needed something to start a fire with. I saw the open bathroom door at the back of the long room and sprinted past Lydia, who pawed madly at me and lost her balance again, falling onto one of the swivel chairs.

There were matches on the counter, next to an incense burner with a stick of incense in it.

Now all I needed was fuel.

Just outside the bathroom was a supply cabinet. I threw open the doors, looking for flammable hair products, aware that Lydia was dragging her way toward me, grunting and howling like Frankenstein’s monster.

I emptied a bottle of hairspray over the book. The fluid spilled out, soaking the leather cover. I flipped through the pages, trying to cover as much of the surface as I could.

I pulled a match from the box.

“Leave it alone,” Lydia said, her voice low and gravelly and dead serious. “Or you won’t leave this place alive.”

I turned around, holding the book in my arms.

“You lied,” I said. “That wasn’t the right spell. What were you trying to do, Lydia?”

She made a disgusted noise and sneered at me. “You lied,” she said. “That was the summoning spell. If you’d just read it like you were supposed to, Aralt would be gathering all of your energy, storing it, preparing for his triumphant return to life.”

Gathering our energy…

“You were going to kill us all?”

“For a good cause!” she snarled.

“Your own grandmother tried to warn you.”

“Warn me? Grandma’s the one who told me stories about Aralt. He makes you beautiful, he makes you popular.…then she dies and gets all holier-than-thou.” She sniffed. “If Grandma really cared, she would have left us some of her money, instead of donating it all to some stupid charity. You know what she left me? Cookbooks!”

The matches were pressed between my sweaty hand and the edge of the book.

“You know plenty about lying, don’t you, Alexis?” she asked. “This whole thing was just a game to you. You never cared about Aralt.”

I had, but never in a way that would satisfy her. “But you did?” I asked. “You cared?”

Her face crumpled. “I love him,” she sniffled. “More than anything. And he loves me.”

“But you killed Tashi. You took her away from him.”

“He didn’t need her anymore,” she said. “He didn’t want her. He has me now. I can be the new creatura. I can control his energy. I’m learning.”

“Seriously,” I said. “If this week was what you call controlling his energy…”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get better. I’ll stay with him. He promised me we could be together.”

“But why would you want to be with a ghost?”

“That’s why I have to summon him. He’ll come out of the book. And he’ll take care of me,” she whispered. Her voice hardened. “You have no idea, Alexis. No idea how horrible my life is. My dad lost his job, and now he works part-time at a hardware store. He’s living in a fantasy world—he thinks he’s going to be some big rock star. The whole thing is pathetic. It makes me sick.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“And we had to move into that filthy little house, and my mom goes out and drinks every night. I haven’t seen her in two days. All they think about is themselves. It’s like I don’t even exist anymore.”

“I’m really sorry, Lydia. I didn’t know.” I thought of all the times I’d been snide to Lydia, because I was in the habit of doing it, and all the while her whole life had been collapsing around her.

“Do you know how I got my lunch money?” she asked. “Before Aralt? I mowed lawns, Alexis. I went around the neighborhood on Saturdays and begged lazy slobs in muumuus to let me spend the whole afternoon in the sun, pushing a freaking lawn mower, getting ant bites all over my feet. Do you know how many lawns I had to mow to buy Aralt’s book? To convince Tashi to come to Surrey? And you got it for free! No wonder you never appreciated it.”

She seemed to be growing kind of wired—all jittery and twitchy. If she hadn’t separated herself from Aralt, then she was the only person still co

“Lydia, listen to me. You don’t want Aralt taking care of you. He’s not what you think. I met him, and—”

Her expression, suddenly rigid with jealousy, told me it was the wrong thing to say.

“He’s evil. Just read the abandoning spell and live your life. Things will be different.”

“Oh, you’re going to make me your charity case?” she asked. “No thanks, Alexis. At least Aralt loves me for me. Not out of pity.”

“He doesn’t love anyone, Lydia.”

She stared at me through glazed eyes. Tashi’s dress, which would have cost about thirty mowed lawns, was torn and smeared with dirt and blood. “Give me the book. I’ll walk out that door, and you’ll never see me again. You have until the count of five. And then I break your neck.”

“Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

“Set it on the counter.”

I turned my body halfway and set the book down. Then I raised my arms, holdup style, and took a step back.

As Lydia rushed toward the book, I threw myself at her. We fell to the floor. She reached up, grabbed a container full of sanitizer from the counter, and swung it at my head. It didn’t shatter, but the impact stu

For a few seconds I felt like I was in a dream, watching this happen to someone else.

Then I stumbled backward and fell to the ground.

I closed my eyes and curled into a fetal position, waiting for the furious pain in my skull to subside. After a minute, I pushed myself to my hands and knees.

I opened my burning eyes.

My vision was hazy and gray-tinted. I held on to a chair and stared at the ceiling like a shipwreck victim staring at the distant lights of a rescue ship.

“What’s wrong? Is it your precious eyes?” Lydia said, her voice syrupy with fake concern. “That stuff is nasty. Mom always wore goggles just to dilute it.”

My eyes began to tear, but the tears felt different, somehow—thicker, sticky, like they were trying to hold my eyelids shut.

A whole-body terror gripped me—

“O-M-G—what if you go blind?” Lydia asked. “Can hotshot photographers be blind?”

Her taunts were nothing to me, nothing at all, compared to the panic expanding in my chest. I tried to crawl toward the shampoo stations, but Lydia blocked my path.

“I don’t know, Lexi,” she said. “Adding water might make it worse. Are you willing to take that chance?”

She was bluffing. She had to be.

“I think I know something that could help,” Lydia said. I swung my head toward the sound of her voice, and she laughed bitterly. “You look like a drunk sea lion.”

I can’t be blind.

I’d ruined everything else in my life. The only thing I had left was photography.

“Seriously? What is it?” I said. “Help me! Lydia, please!”

My eyes were starting to feel hot and dehydrated. They weren’t tearing anymore—even blinking was hard.

“You know what it is, Alexis.” Her voice was suddenly dry, humorless. “It’s Aralt.”

But I couldn’t. It was out of the question.

Just for a couple of minutes—just until I’m healed, I told myself. And then I’ll read Tréiga