Cursed Read online

  But it wasn’t the coming punishment that made Charlie want to run bury her face in her grandma’s quilt and never look up again. It was her Daddy’s next words that did that.

  “Someday I’ll have enough of your horseshit and I’ll just up and leave you. Leave you to raise the girls alone—is that what you want, Maureen? You want me to leave and never come back?”

  Oh God, no Daddy! Please…please don’t go! Charlie’s heart thumped painfully in her chest. Despite everything, she loved her dad. He was the one who took her on his knee and read her books at night—if he wasn’t working the night shift, that was. Or out with one of his whores, as her mother often said. He was the one who bandaged her cuts and took her out hunting with him during deer season.

  Her mother was cold and withdrawn—angry and sullen at the way her life had turned out. But Daddy, though he wasn’t there nearly as often as she would have liked, was affectionate and sweet. He smelled like leather and clean sweat and cigarette smoke and when she climbed in his lap it was the only time Charlie ever felt really safe. The idea that he might leave and never look back terrified her.

  In that moment, Charlie was no longer a grown woman with a career and a mind of her own. She was eight all over again, crying and shivering as she watched from behind the upstairs banister as her parents fought and shouted and hated each other below.

  “No, Daddy,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around herself to try and still her shaking. “No, Daddy, please don’t leave me…please don’t leave…”

  “Hey—its okay. Don’t listen—don’t look.” Suddenly Missy was there—the ten year old Missy who Charlie had loved and looked up to. She put an arm around Charlie’s shoulders and led her away.

  “Oh Missy!” Charlie held her sister tight. “I’ve missed you so much. You’re the only one I could ever really talk to. I—”

  But suddenly Missy melted away, leaving nothing but a blank, black corridor.

  Charlie looked around wildly. “Momma? Daddy? Missy?”

  Everyone was gone. Did that mean the vision was over? Would she be allowed to leave the Temple of Regrets now?

  Charlie started walking again, looking hopefully for the exit.

  That was a pretty bad memory. Momma and Daddy always fighting all the time…maybe it was bad enough to count as my whole punishment. Maybe…

  She turned the corner and found herself in another familiar room—her bedroom.

  “Come here, you little brat.” Momma was standing there stone-faced with a long, stingy-looking switch in her hand. “Come here and get what’s coming to you.”

  And to her horror, Charlie found she couldn’t say no. Couldn’t do anything but walk towards the switch and the beating that was waiting for her…

  “Charlotte? Charlotte, where are you?” Stavros wandered through the maze of black corridors calling and calling for her. He was getting hoarse and yet still he couldn’t find her. Where could she be? He would swear she had been only a minute ahead of him in entering the Temple of Regrets but she was nowhere to be found. How had she gotten so far ahead of him in such a short period of time?

  “Charlotte?” he called again. “Char—”

  Suddenly he rounded a corner and came to a room he recognized. It was the living area of his childhood domicile back on Tranq Prime. The pale purple stream of super hot water that heated the underground home ran through the channel that subdivided the room and emitted soft clouds of steam.

  On one side of the stream his mother was pacing, her long tharp dragging the ground. Her lovely ice-blonde hair hung down her back in a river of pale gold and her white-blue eyes flashed dangerously as she looked at his father. When he was a child, Stavros had been convinced his Maman was the most beautiful female in the whole universe and indeed, she was truly lovely—as lovely and untouchable as a statue made of ice.

  His Patro was reclining on one of the soft low chairs covered in vranna hide. He listened helplessly as Stav’s mother berated him.

  “It’s your fault,” she said in a low, angry voice not meant to carry past the room. “Your filthy Kindred genes that brought this about! No pureblooded Prime has ever been affected by the Curse! Not a single male in my family has ever been marked. And now, look—our only son, ruined. And all because of you.”

  “He isn’t ruined, Landa,” his father protested weakly. “The Curse doesn’t mean immediate death—there are many who can live for years if they just—”

  “If they just what? Isolate themselves from everyone?” She gave a bitter laugh. “He’ll have to do that anyway. The other children will never accept him. He’ll be an outcast—a pariah. And what other mother will want to let him play with their child? He’ll have no friends—none.”

  Watching invisibly from the sidelines, just as he had when he was a child, Stavros recoiled at the tone of bitterness and anger in his beloved mother’s voice. The back of his neck, where the black mark had first started to show, itched and burned. The skin there felt suddenly raw, as it had when he was little and had tried to scrub the blackness off.

  He’d scrubbed until he bled and the tears came to his eyes but the mark remained as stubbornly black and ugly as ever. Still, he kept trying. He’d thought that if only he could get rid of it, his Maman might start loving him again. Ever since it had first appeared, she hadn’t been in once to tuck him in and kiss him goodnight. And when he tried to hug her, she pushed him gently but firmly away, keeping him at arm’s length as though he had some sickness that might be catching if she got too close.

  “The boy will be all right,” his father said, a little too heartily, Stavros thought. “He might have a hard time of it at first but he’ll learn to live with it—he’ll have to.”

  “But what about us? What about me?” his Maman demanded shrilly. “We’ll be known as the ones who produced a defective child. A Sin Eater for the Goddess’s sake! How can we ever live that down? How can I look any of my friends in the eye ever again?”

  “Are you worried about Stav’s fate or your own?” his father demanded harshly. “He’s the one who bears the mark, Landa, not you.”

  His mother made a face.

  “Of course you don’t understand. I never should have joined with you in the first place—or let you talk me into having a child! I should have terminated the pregnancy as soon as I found out I was carrying him. To think—a Sin Eater! It will mar our entire bloodline! Not that yours was all that pure to begin with.”

  They continued to bicker but Stavros didn’t want to hear any more. Standing in the shadows, he clenched his jaw and swallowed hard. Even as a child he’d understood what they were saying. That he never should have been born. That he ought to have been gotten rid of—thrown away like refuse.

  To hear his beloved Maman speak so of him pierced his heart like a poison dart. Part of him was once more only six cycles old, watching from the dark hallway and wishing he was dead. His breath came short and his eyes burned but he refused to let the tears fall. There was no point in crying—this was his fate from now on. And yet, it still hurt terribly. Overhearing this conversation was the first time he’d understood what he was—worthless. A burden. A freak unworthy of love.

  He’d wanted to hate his mother for that, but he never could. She was so beautiful—so untouchable. A goddess that he worshipped. He didn’t dare to stop loving her, even if she had stopped loving him.

  Cursed, he thought. I’m Cursed and Maman hates me for it. Hates me because it makes her look bad too. She’ll never love me again. Never hug me or kiss me goodnight or care about me and all because of this awful black mark on my back…

  The mark on his back. The curving black lines that sealed his fate. The hateful sign of a Sin Eater which his mother had avoided at all costs. In fact, only one female had ever touched him there, only one hadn’t recoiled from the ugly, revolting thing. Charlotte…

  Charlotte! I’m here to find Charlotte.

  He mentally shook himself and turned away from the scene. This isn’t why I�€