Page 14 of The Curse

Then he pulled the trigger for the second time.

I woke myself up screaming. My face was bathed in tears, and my heart ached from a pain like I’d never experienced in my life. I looked around the room, trying to figure out where I was and what was happening. I was in the cozy cottage. Alone.

I’d just dreamed about my parents killing themselves.

Wait—no, it wasn’t a dream. It was a vision of something that had really happened. But I’d felt like I had been there. Not just as a child but as my adult self, too. My mother had known I was there. The mother that I’d spent most of my life not loving… I felt such shame and heartache.

She had faith in me. She thought I could end the curse, or the spell, or whatever the hell it was.

My parents had loved me. They were watching me now like she’d promised they would.

Oh, and the fucking bitch that forced my parents to kill themselves? None other than Morgan Goodheart. I would have recognized that bitch’s voice anywhere. That motherfucking bitch was behind the curse that destroyed my family, and I was so going to fuck her up.

I didn’t have a clue how, but I was going to. The problem was, I didn’t have long to do it.

The rest of my night was spent watching the rest of my descendants take their own lives. I was there when Nathaniel Bailey hanged himself, at the orders of Morgan Goodheart, of course. I watched when Noel and Tabitha were killed and scalped by the Indians and put up no fight at all, with Morgan sitting up in a tree nearby, laughing hysterically. Within about three hours, I’d watched my entire family tree decimated…and the worst of all was Nicodemus. I saw the whole thing, along with Corbin’s attempt to save him in living color and it was the worst thing I ever saw. I didn’t even want to think about how it made me feel.

I’d woken up disappointed that my dreams ended before seeing what started the curse. What caused Morgan Goodheart to force Nicodemus to walk off that cliff? I knew having to watch it would break my heart, just as it had with the rest of my family, but I also knew it was necessary if I had any hopes of reversing the curse. If something didn’t change, I’d take my own life less than two weeks, but after last night, this had turned into something much more than me just trying to save myself. I would, somehow, find a way to get revenge for the ones who went before me. Before I died, I would see that bitch go straight to hell for all she’d done. I hoped to send her there myself.

After I admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to fall back asleep, regardless of how hard I tried, I’d rolled out of bed and called Alastair immediately. I needed to hear what he’d learned last night when he talked to the coven, and I needed to tell him about the dreams. We set up a lunch date for noon. It wasn’t until after I hung up that I realized I only had about thirty minutes to get ready and get there. I’d slept longer than I thought.

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