From Bad to Cursed (29 page)

T
HE ROUGH PAVEMENT
tore at my bare feet as I sprinted away from the house.

From behind me, I heard my name:
“Alexis!”

I wasted a fraction of a second looking over my shoulder.

Lydia was chasing me. She was out of breath, but she was moving fast, catching up. She hadn’t read the spell with us; she could still draw speed and strength from Aralt’s energy. Meanwhile, thanks to the abandoning spell, I was growing weaker by the moment.

“Come back!”
she screeched.

Two blocks later, I felt like I might pass out, but I forced myself to keep going. Lydia was so close I could hear her footsteps slapping the sidewalk. I turned onto a side road and ended up running toward the back of a mini-mall, through a parking lot that was littered with broken bottles glinting in the moonlight. The glass gouged the soles of my feet as I crossed it.

I leaped over a deep pothole; a second later, Lydia screamed, and I looked back to see her on the ground, holding her ankle. She climbed to her feet and ran toward me with a dragging, unbalanced stride.

One of the doors to a store had glass windowpanes; I scooped up a chunk of asphalt and busted it through the glass, clearing enough room to slip my hand through and unlock the door.

I was closing it behind me when Lydia hurled herself at it, knocking me backward into the room. The book went flying from my hands. Lydia tumbled inside right after me.

While she flailed, I picked up the book and ran for the front of the store.

But the front door was bolted. And outside of that was a locked metal gate. i was trapped.

I glanced around the place I’d chosen to escape to: a beauty parlor. In the front window was a neon sign—the name of the salon. Glancing at one of the mirrors, I read:
JUST TEASING
.

No Just Teasing,
Elspeth had said.

For a moment, the air got heavy around me.

Something horrible was going to happen here. Elspeth had done her best to warn us, but we’d totally ignored her.

Lydia was having trouble getting to her feet—her ankle seemed to be causing her a lot of pain. She hauled herself off the floor and limped toward me. “Aw, what’s the matter?” she asked. “Did you forget you’re in the ghetto, Alexis? We have bars on our windows here.”

I needed something to start a fire with. I saw the open bathroom door at the back of the long room and sprinted past Lydia, who pawed madly at me and lost her balance again, falling onto one of the swivel chairs.

There were matches on the counter, next to an incense burner with a stick of incense in it.

Now all I needed was fuel.

Just outside the bathroom was a supply cabinet. I threw open the doors, looking for flammable hair products, aware that Lydia was dragging her way toward me, grunting and howling like Frankenstein’s monster.

I emptied a bottle of hairspray over the book. The fluid spilled out, soaking the leather cover. I flipped through the pages, trying to cover as much of the surface as I could.

I pulled a match from the box.

“Leave it alone,” Lydia said, her voice low and gravelly and dead serious. “Or you won’t leave this place alive.”

I turned around, holding the book in my arms.

“You lied,” I said. “That wasn’t the right spell. What were you trying to do, Lydia?”

She made a disgusted noise and sneered at me. “
You
lied,” she said. “That was the summoning spell. If you’d just read it like you were supposed to, Aralt would be gathering all of your energy, storing it, preparing for his triumphant return to life.”

Gathering our energy…

“You were going to kill us all?”

“For a good cause!” she snarled.

“Your own grandmother tried to warn you.”

“Warn me? Grandma’s the one who told me stories about Aralt.
He makes you beautiful, he makes you popular
.…then she dies and gets all holier-than-thou.” She sniffed. “If Grandma
really
cared, she would have left us some of her money, instead of donating it all to some stupid charity. You know what she left me? Cookbooks!”

The matches were pressed between my sweaty hand and the edge of the book.

“You know plenty about lying, don’t you, Alexis?” she asked. “This whole thing was just a game to you. You never cared about Aralt.”

I had, but never in a way that would satisfy her. “But you did?” I asked. “You cared?”

Her face crumpled. “I love him,” she sniffled. “More than anything. And he loves me.”

“But you killed Tashi. You took her away from him.”

“He didn’t need her anymore,” she said. “He didn’t want her. He has me now. I can be the new
creatura
. I can control his energy. I’m learning.”

“Seriously,” I said. “If this week was what you call controlling his energy…”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get better. I’ll stay with him. He promised me we could be together.”

“But why would you want to be with a ghost?”

“That’s why I have to summon him. He’ll come out of the book. And he’ll take care of me,” she whispered. Her voice hardened. “You have
no idea
, Alexis. No idea how horrible my life is. My dad lost his job, and now he works part-time at a hardware store. He’s living in a fantasy world—he thinks he’s going to be some big rock star. The whole thing is
pathetic
. It makes me sick.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“And we had to move into that filthy little house, and my mom goes out and drinks every night. I haven’t seen her in two days. All they think about is themselves. It’s like I don’t even exist anymore.”

“I’m really sorry, Lydia. I didn’t know.” I thought of all the times I’d been snide to Lydia, because I was in the habit of doing it, and all the while her whole life had been collapsing around her.

“Do you know how I got my lunch money?” she asked. “Before Aralt? I mowed lawns, Alexis. I went around the neighborhood on Saturdays and begged lazy slobs in muumuus to let me spend the whole afternoon in the sun, pushing a freaking lawn mower, getting ant bites all over my feet. Do you know how many lawns I had to mow to buy Aralt’s book? To convince Tashi to come to Surrey? And you got it for free! No wonder you never appreciated it.”

She seemed to be growing kind of wired—all jittery and twitchy. If she hadn’t separated herself from Aralt, then she was the only person still connected to him. That was a lot of energy to feed into one person.

“Lydia, listen to me. You don’t want Aralt taking care of you. He’s not what you think. I met him, and—”

Her expression, suddenly rigid with jealousy, told me it was the wrong thing to say.

“He’s
evil
. Just read the abandoning spell and live your life. Things will be different.”

“Oh, you’re going to make me your charity case?” she asked. “No thanks, Alexis. At least Aralt loves me for me. Not out of pity.”

“He doesn’t love anyone, Lydia.”

She stared at me through glazed eyes. Tashi’s dress, which would have cost about thirty mowed lawns, was torn and smeared with dirt and blood. “Give me the book. I’ll walk out that door, and you’ll never see me again. You have until the count of five. And then I break your neck.”

“Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

“Set it on the counter.”

I turned my body halfway and set the book down. Then I raised my arms, holdup style, and took a step back.

As Lydia rushed toward the book, I threw myself at her. We fell to the floor. She reached up, grabbed a container full of sanitizer from the counter, and swung it at my head. It didn’t shatter, but the impact stunned me, and a wave of liquid splashed my face.

For a few seconds I felt like I was in a dream, watching this happen to someone else.

Then I stumbled backward and fell to the ground.

I closed my eyes and curled into a fetal position, waiting for the furious pain in my skull to subside. After a minute, I pushed myself to my hands and knees.

I opened my burning eyes.

My vision was hazy and gray-tinted. I held on to a chair and stared at the ceiling like a shipwreck victim staring at the distant lights of a rescue ship.

“What’s wrong? Is it your precious eyes?” Lydia said, her voice syrupy with fake concern. “That stuff is
nasty
. Mom always wore goggles just to dilute it.”

My eyes began to tear, but the tears felt different, somehow—thicker, sticky, like they were trying to hold my eyelids shut.

A whole-body terror gripped me—

“
O-M-G
—what if you go
blind
?” Lydia asked. “Can hotshot photographers be blind?”

Her taunts were nothing to me, nothing at all, compared to the panic expanding in my chest. I tried to crawl toward the shampoo stations, but Lydia blocked my path.

“I don’t know, Lexi,” she said. “Adding water might make it worse. Are you willing to take that chance?”

She was bluffing. She had to be.

“I think I know something that could help,” Lydia said. I swung my head toward the sound of her voice, and she laughed bitterly. “You look like a drunk sea lion.”

I can’t be blind.

I’d ruined everything else in my life. The only thing I had left was photography.

“Seriously? What is it?” I said. “Help me! Lydia, please!”

My eyes were starting to feel hot and dehydrated. They weren’t tearing anymore—even blinking was hard.

“You know what it is, Alexis.” Her voice was suddenly dry, humorless. “It’s Aralt.”

But I couldn’t. It was out of the question.

Just for a couple of minutes—just until I’m healed, I told myself. And then I’ll read
Tréigann
again. It won’t even matter.

But
no
—I
couldn’t
.

“Tick-tock,” Lydia said. “Those darling corneas are blistering as we speak.”

Blind. Never to see the so-blue-it-hurts sky on a late summer day; never to look through the viewfinder of a camera or watch a print fade to life in the darkroom; never to see Carter—even from afar.

“Fine! I’ll do it!” I said, my voice breaking into a sob. I didn’t have the strength to pretend to be dignified. “Hurry, Lydia
, please
.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “It’s not a very Alexis thing to do, you know. Don’t you want some time to think it over?”

It was starting to feel like the walls were closing in on me, panic compressing my body.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to think about it.”

She seemed to go as slowly as possible, but she led me through the oath, phrase by phrase.

I repeated every word.

As soon as I spoke the final sentence, energy surged through my body, like ice water poured on a man who’s been crawling through the desert. My eyes no longer stung; my limbs no longer ached; I felt forgiven. I felt alive again. I lay down on the linoleum and stared at the ceiling, watching the tiles slowly come back into focus, tasting relief like honey in my mouth.

From the back of the room I could hear muttering, but I was too overwhelmed to even wonder about Lydia. After a minute, I sat up and twisted my body to look at her. She was bent over the book on the counter. Her lips were moving.

I came up behind her in time to see the word at the top of the page:
TOGHRAIONN
.

“Lydia!” I gasped. “What are you doing?!?”

“I summoned him,” she said, arms crossed triumphantly. “Aralt. He’s coming for me.”

“Why would you—you
can’t
,” I said. “He’s not what you think he is.”

“You’re forgetting, Alexis. He loves me. He would never hurt me. You wouldn’t understand that kind of trust.” She shrugged. “And you know what? None of this would have happened if you’d minded your own business. I tried to summon him the very first night. But the stupid dog had to get out.…Aralt came looking for me, but Tashi got him back in the book before he could find me.”

She had no idea. She didn’t know what he really was. She was expecting some Prince Charming to come carry her off on his white horse.

The room, which a minute earlier had seemed so full of noise and chaos, now seemed like the inside of a chapel. The only sounds were our breathing and a strange sizzling sound in the air.

“Lydia,” I said. “Please. Read the other spell.”

“We’re going to be together forever,” she whispered. “I’m so happy.”

She set the book into one of the sinks and smirked at me. “And no one else is going to try to take Aralt away from me. Stay sunny, Alexis.”

She lit a match.

“Lydia, no!”

And she dropped it on the book.

Her eyes were starry, enthralled. Her lips formed a sweet smile. Her gaze fixed on a spot over my shoulder. “I’m so happ—”

Her eyes went wide. From behind me came a scraping sound.

“
What is that?
” she cried.

I turned just in time to see a hulking, formless black shadow slither past me.

Lydia tried to run, but the shadow was on top of her in an instant. It knocked her to the ground and wrapped itself around her like it was melting, a thin black membrane spreading across her whole body. When she tried to scream, it filled her mouth.

She struggled, but her flailing arms were enveloped by the black web.