Page 49 of A Touch Charmed

“You can’t hear him?” I asked Finn.

“Hear who?” His grip on me tightened.

“I’m trying to figure that out.” I squeezed Finn’s hand, pushing more of my energy into him in case we needed his speed to make a quick escape.

This could’ve been a trick. The curse could’ve been pulling images from my memory to scare me. Audrey and Wes had faced something similar. But this didn’t feel like an illusion. The forked-tongue man was real. My magic recognized him, not from my memories, but from somewhere deeper, driving a swirling wedge of power through my sternum.

I needed to keep him talking. The more I uncovered, the better chance I had of discovering a weakness. “How do I know you won’t kill us once you have my magic?”

“I didn’t kill the other twelve.”

Everything that had been bothering me about the curse’s attempt to make us trap it again began to fall into place. The original descendants didn’t give up their magic in a moment of fear or desperation. It was an exchange. Their lives, and ultimately ours, for their magic, their memories, and everything that had made their lives worth living.

I still didn’t know why the curse wanted to keep our magic in the stones, but it confirmed my suspicions about the man with the forked tongue. He couldn’t be Ophiuchus or another corporeal figure from the curse he’d created. Gods didn’t bargain with humans. They gifted their lovers and showed their descendants wrath or mercy, but rarely anything in between.

We all thought the curse had been created by Ophiuchus, based on an oral legend that had been wrong about everything except the order of attacks so far. But what if it hadn’t been created by a god? What if it had been created by a human?

I tried to see if he was solid or a projection of some kind, but he backed away from my reach, and I wouldn’t risk stepping out of Finn’s embrace just to test a theory. “If I take your bargain, what will happen to me and Finn?”

“You won’t remember him, so it won’t matter.” Invisible claws scraped against my mind, looking for a way in. “It will be the burden of the next twelve. They won’t be born for another twelve generations. You’ll all be long-forgotten stardust by then.”

Twelve generations. That’s how long it had been since there had been magic on the island in the original descendants. Blood pumped through my veins as my heart raced. None of this had been by accident or chance. This battle was supposed to be now.

And it was always meant to be with us.

The poison in the man’s eyes swirled. Inky wisps of smoke leaked from his fingertips. His back snapped and arched. The howl he let out caused my teeth to snap together. Like something inside him had broken his bones for revealing the smallest amount of information.

The past mattered. If we put the real story together, maybe we could get closer to figuring out how to stop the curse for good. “Who are you?”

The man and the dark disappeared. The scent of sea salt penetrated the air. My feet sank into the sand, still warm from the sun, and my eardrums felt fuzzy, like I’d just popped them at a high altitude. It took a moment to get my bearings again, but the dark void was gone.

He must not have liked my question.

Finn held my face, turning it from side to side as he checked me over to make sure I was okay and nothing had gotten inside my head. “Did he mess with you at all?”

“No.” I clutched his wrists. “I think the curse punishes him if he says too much.”

I rattled off everything I’d learned, which admittedly wasn’t much. It was a start though. In just a handful of weeks, we’d already turned over and discarded most of the legend we all knew by heart. If we kept pushing, we’d find the key to undoing this curse. I believed in the other descendants, and for the first time in my life, I believed in myself too.

“We should start keeping notes on this.” Finn pulled me against him, as if he needed to keep as much of me as possible molded to his side. “In case we need to cross-reference new information against the old.”

I leaned my head against him. “That’s a good idea.”

We started walking again, but before we could get too far, a funnel of smoke burrowed into the ground. Bits of shale and shells went flying as the earth split open and a snake rose over us, fifteen feet tall. Black scales glistened in the moonlight. No doubt coated in the poison that dripped from its impossibly sharp fangs.

“This is fine.” Finn kept his tone light as he pushed me behind him. “Hercules survived the Hydra and he didn’t even have a healer.”

The snake unhinged its jaw and reared back to strike as rain and electricity drenched the beach in golden green light. Wes and Audrey charged toward us. The scent of molten fires rose in the air as their lightning created thick potholes of glass along the sand.

“Duck!” Audrey flung her palms out and blew away wisps of her loose blonde hair.

Finn grabbed my arm, darting us both to the left in a blink. Two bolts of electricity seized the snake. It glowed green before exploding in a burst of inky smoke. As it began to reform, I blinked. Finn was beside me. I blinked again and Wes and Audrey were beside me. A dozen black arrows were buried in the sand where Audrey had stood a moment before.

The sound of crackling leaves overpowered the waves crashing on the rocks. What I now understood to be the curse burning some of its energy. “Wasps will be next.”

Wes tugged Audrey against him and raised his palm. “We’ve got this.”

A thick mist separated our spot on the beach from the rest of the town. The man with the forked tongue stepped out of the fog. His waist shifted from side to side as he walked in that same jerking motion. As if his spine had been severed in two, yet he managed to remain upright. He turned his empty, bottomless eyes on us. His pupils swirled with smoke.

---