Page 23 of Cursed Bonds: An Alpha's Destiny

The first box I cut open had my father’s name scrawled on the side. This had to be the one the lawyer had said was left to him. Nothing else had his name on it. The box was full of strange old objects, most ancient-looking and coated in dust—bookends, a weird-looking knife, some small trinkets, some sort of old necklace, and more. A strange combination of objects, and not one of them looked like something my father would want or need.

On a hunch, I took a photo of the items and did a reverse image search on them, curious to see what they might be worth. The first thing that came up was the knife. An athame, some kind of dagger used in séances. What the hell would Nana want with something like this?

An identical knife was on an auction site, and my eyes bulged when I looked at the current bids. They were already at over two thousand dollars, and there were still four days left to bid on it.

“What the hell?” I gasped, laying the knife aside with more reverence than I’d used to pull it from the box.

The other items were equally or even more valuable. If my math was right, the box Nana had left for my father was worth almost twenty thousand dollars. Jaw hanging open, I gaped at it all. Worry nagged at my insides. Should I call Dad back now and tell him? It would be the right thing to do, but… we’d had a fairly normal and productive conversation on the phone, one of the few we’d ever had, but that didn’t mean I trusted him with this kind of money. Part of me was happy he bounced between dead-end jobs. It meant he never quite had the money to buy enough drugs or booze to accidentally kill himself.

With no idea what to do, I decided to save the box for later, repacking everything as gently as I could and sliding it aside. The next box was filled with stacks of old books, files, and an old-fashioned photo album. The album drew my interest first, and after digging it out, I opened it to peruse the old pictures.

One of the first photos was a black-and-white image that looked incredibly old and faded with age. A very young girl, maybe five or six years old, stood beside an adult. Even with the faded picture and the youthful appearance, I recognized Nana. I smiled and ran a finger across the photo. I’d never seen a picture of her as a child.

My eyes were drawn to the woman holding her tiny hand. She had to be my great-grandmother. Both she, Nana, and I had similar cheekbones, and my great-grandmother even had the same nose I did. I had my mother’s raven-black hair, but other than that, it appeared I definitely took after my father’s side of the family.

A grin slowly formed on my face as I flipped through the pages, watching as my grandmother grew and aged. Seven, ten, thirteen—the years blew by as I paged through the album.

Her smile vanished on one of the later pages, where a strange photo greeted me. Nana, clad in a peculiar and ornate dress, stood before a huge bonfire. She had to be around sixteen in the picture, and my great-grandmother stood next to her.

The longer I looked at the picture, the weirder it became. What at first looked like shadows became clearer. Twisting figures, obscured by the dark and flames of the fire, caught mid-dance, their arms flailing back in some sort of supplication. Something about the image sent a chill through me, raising gooseflesh on my arms.

Flipping the page, I found an even stranger photo. Nana again, at a similar age but a bit older. She stood in front of another bonfire, the same dancing figures twined around the very edges of the picture, ghostlike and amorphic. In fact, the entire picture had a dreamlike quality, an otherworldly look. Nana almost looked like she was both in and out of the picture as she was more faded than the surroundings.

My head and skin buzzed. I truly had the sense that I was looking at something that shouldn’t be real. Before I could stop myself, I slid the photo from the page and flipped it over, checking to see if there was a note. What I read made no sense whatsoever and made my head spin.

Lola. Winter Solstice. 1910.

What? I flipped the picture back over, taking a close look at it again. I thought I must have looked at it wrong, but there was no denying it was Nana. I’d know that face in my dreams even with all the age lines and wrinkles gone. No, that number must have meant something else.

Quickly, I flipped back to the previous page, tugged the photo of Nana out, and flipped it over.

Lola’s coronation ceremony. 1905.

“Coronation ceremony?” I mouthed, the words tumbling from my lips in a breathless whisper.

With numb fingers, I slid the two photos back into their slots, then continued turning pages, watching as the years flipped by. My curious and nostalgic interest had vanished, and a dark, confusing thought bubbled at the back of my mind. I wasn’t sure what it was, what it meant. All I knew was that I needed to follow this strange trail to its conclusion. My heart fluttered, and my stomach twisted into knots. I had the sense that I was about to discover something big, something important. Something existential in scope and breadth.

As I turned pages, the photos slowly changed from black-and-white to color. Nana looked like she was in her early twenties, then her late twenties. More and more bonfires, but less and less of the twisting and dancing figures, until, in a photo of her at around the age of forty, it was Nana alone, standing before the fire with that same strange gown on, arms stretched toward the heavens before the fire. The pictures grew newer, yet Nana wasn’t aging as fast as it seemed she should. Not until the later photos did she look closer to the age she should have been.

A marked change took place over the pictures after that final one of Nana alone. Gone were the bonfires and strange clothes. Now it was her with me. The first image was nearly a carbon copy of that first photo of Nana with her mother, except it was a very young me standing with Nana.

The last page held a copy of the photo I’d kept in my classroom. We’d taken it the last time she and I had come to the cabin. I was sixteen, and Nana was in her mid-to-late sixties. We stood, arms around each other, laughing wildly. The image was tilted at a weird angle, and I remembered the camera had been set on a timer and had tumbled over a moment before taking the picture. We were laughing because it had taken forever to get it set up right, and it had still fallen.

The backs of my eyes stung as I looked at our laughing faces, and a smile once again spread across my lips. Flipping the page over, I sucked in a breath. An envelope was taped to the hardback binding. The crisp white paper was unblemished except for one word written in Nana’s sloping copperplate script: Kirsten.

A strange, rasping sound echoed through the living room, and it took a few moments for me to realize it was my own strangled breath exploding in and out of me in short, ragged gasps. I didn’t even want to touch that envelope, but I was desperate to know what was inside it. In the end, my curiosity overwhelmed the strange, bone-deep dread that battled against it.

With a quiet pop, the tape came away from the back cover, and before I could talk myself out of it, I tore the seal on the envelope and pulled out two folded pages of thick vellum. Nana’s distinct script covered the pages. With trembling fingers, I unfolded the paper and began to read.

Kirsten, my darling girl.

I’m sure you have many questions. I also know that if you are reading this letter, I have gone on to be with my sisters in the summer lands. I am so sorry I’ve left you, that I can’t be there to guide you during this time. After seeing the photographs in this book, you must be confused and scared. For that, I hope you will forgive me.

Our family has many secrets. Secrets even my husband and son didn’t understand. Secrets even you don’t know. I held them back because of your father. Having a son should have broken the line. I assumed you had not inherited anything at all, so I kept my secrets in hopes of giving you a normal life. I waited years to see if your power might manifest. Sixteen is when most show signs, but by the time you were twenty-one, I’d seen no signs of magic within you, so I resigned myself to the fact that my gift would die with me.

I froze, reading and rereading the word magic again and again. Magic? What the hell was Nana saying in this letter? What was happening? The room around me seemed to be tilting wildly as everything I thought I knew and believed was thrown out the window.

Desperate for more information, I continued reading.

---