Page 20 of Cursed

The grimoire lay there, still and treacherous, its whispers muted but not silenced. It had lost its perch, but I could feel the malevolence radiating from it as it thrummed with power and promises of darker things.

I stumbled back, a single step that felt like a leap into an abyss. My breath came in shallow gasps, each inhale laced with the sharpness of the storm that clung to the air.

The grimoire lay on the floor, but its presence was heavy and suffocating as if it were a living thing, breathing secrets that clawed at my sanity.

I shoved at it with the poker, but it didn’t move—as though it had been bolted to the floor.

No matter how much I rubbed my eyes or wished that it would vanish, the book was just… there.

The flickering red of the firelight played over its dark cover and the stones embedded in it seemed to glow like baleful eyes.

Watching me.

My heart beat so strangely in my chest that I could barely breathe.

I couldn’t just leave it there.

The shadows around me seemed to stretch and contract, and they wrapped around the edges of my vision as I placed the poker back beside the fire, but kept my eyes on the grimoire.

I gnawed on my lip as I tried to think of what I should do—

What if I just picked it up and threw it out of the room?

Would it just appear at the end of the bed again?

Fuck.

With a desperate cry, I rushed to the chaise in the room's corner and snatched the blanket off it. I ran back to the bed and stood, trembling, for a moment before I threw the blanket down over the grimoire. The blanket completely covered the grimoire, and I took a shaking breath as the malevolence radiating from the cursed book was suddenly muffled.

But for how long?

The knitted blanket quieted the whispers, but I could still feel them clawing at the edges of my mind, insistent and cruel. I had only succeeded in masking the horror; the threat remained, lurking beneath the layers of fabric, waiting for a moment of weakness.

“Stay there,” I commanded, though the words sounded weak even as they left my lips.

I crawled back onto the bed and pulled the covers up to my chin to cocoon myself in their warmth as if they could protect me from the encroaching darkness. My skin prickled with unease, and exhaustion tugged at my limbs, urging me to surrender to sleep.

But how could I sleep?

I pressed my head into the pillow and took a deep breath as I closed my eyes tightly.

The shadows twisted and writhed in my mind, grotesque shapes that danced just beyond the edge of reason. They flickered like candle flames, their forms stretching and contorting into nightmarish visages that grinned with malicious glee. I could sense them closing in, taunting me with each rise and fall of my chest.

“Embrace the darkness,” a voice whispered from the depths of my subconscious. It was Titus’ voice—smooth and dark. Laced with honeyed malice. “Give in. You know you want to.”

Their faces loomed in my mind.

Valen’s smooth smile. Bastian’s ghostly pale eyes—too much like his father’s.

“Get away!” I gasped, tossing and turning, sheets twisting around my limbs like creeping vines, constricting, tightening.

My breath came in quick bursts, each inhalation filled with the metallic tang of panic and rain-soaked earth.

The storm outside raged against my windows—crashes of thunder that drowned out my thoughts and left only the whispers of the grimoire that echoed in the dark corners of my mind.

“Do you really think you can escape?” it hissed, its voice dripping with contempt, as shadows morphed into strange faces—but faces that I knew.

My mother—beautiful and horrifying in her decay— and my father—it must have been him. His eyes were hollow— Sunken and strange. His fingertips were black and stained with blood and dark magic— The cuts on his arms. The blood that soaked his shirt.

---