Page 67 of Hexes and Exes

David laughs again, this time louder until the shadows squeeze, and he stops. “It passes on the curse.”

“Having children passes on the curse,” Stellan says. He looks like he might take a swing at the skeleton too.

“Fools.” The bones rattle with laughter that makes all the hair on my arms stand up. “All of you. Just like her. She thought she was so clever, cursing us. But we were smarter. We were better witches.”

“What do you mean?” Bram’s voice is low, menacing.

“We found a way around her spell. We bested her and got rid of our curses.”

“How?” I snarl.

The shadows squeeze and David yells out his answer, “By cursing our children.”

“Isn’t that just part of the Briar Witch’s curse?” Ambrose asks.

“No. No, we found a loophole.”

29

BRAM

“Explain,” I snap, tightening my shadows until David’s bone snaps off at the knee. He shrieks in pain, and I smile, feeling my curse surge forward to feed off the pain and misery. Whatever spell Piper found is powerful. How she made a skeleton feel pain is impressive.

“Stop. I’ll talk. I’ll talk. We found a workaround. Her curse was only meant for us. Those on the bridge that day.” His words come out in rapid fire.

Ava shakes her head and steps forward. “No. We’ve heard the curse. We have the Briar Witch’s grimoire. She cursed the firstborns of the most powerful families of Mystic Hollows.”

David cackles, his evil laughter a foul sound that feeds my curse. “We manipulated it all. That whore plagued us with the worst kind of curses. Half of the council died within a year. We had to figure out how to get rid of them.”

“What was the workaround?” Roman barks.

“We found a ritual to pass along our curses to our firstborns. My son was already a man of thirty-five when it transferred to him. We later learned that it set the paradigm for the ritual andpassing on the curse. You had until your thirty-fifth year to do the ritual and have a child. If the child gained another year of age, then the curse would rebound to all the firstborns in the family who once had the curse.”

“And if you didn’t do the ritual?” Piper’s voice is soft, all of her fire diminished.

“Then you were saddled with the curse until you died.”

“What about your children, then?” Josephine asks, her voice soft with shock.

“Who cares. My curse would have killed me.”

“Are you saying that none of us would have a curse unless one of our parents performed the ritual to pass it along to us?” Ambrose is more serious than I’ve ever heard him.

“I see you are a generation of idiots.”

I tighten the shadows and David screams. “Yes. Yes! That’s exactly it. The curse could have died out in a generation.”

The only sound inside the tomb is the wind battering against the walls and whistling through cracks in the stone.

Piper’s hands are shaking, and she looks paler than usual under the lamplight. “I can’t hold it.” She gasps, sweat dotting her brow.

“I think we’ve heard enough,” I growl, and the bones clatter to the ground, lifeless once more. No one moves. I think we’re all in shock.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.” I turn and shove open the doors, sucking in a deep breath of frozen air, needing to cleanse my lungs, my fucking soul. The dark presence of my curse is writhing inside me, feeling like a thousand insects buzzing beneath my skin. My curse has soaked up the malevolence and anger pouring from that thing in there like a sponge.

The others pile out of the mausoleum as if stumbling from a fire. I start walking. I don’t know what I need, but I have to get away from this place. From that evil fuck who is hopefully nowback in hell burning for an eternity, even if I don’t believe such a place exists.

“Let’s go find somewhere to warm up,” Stellan says with a sigh.

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