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Holland

I settled my hands on my hips, wishing I still had those stupid hand exercisers. “Again, I don’t want to take the master bedroom from you, Mick. Why won’t you just show me a guest room and leave me alone?”

“Because you deserve better than an old futon in a cold guest room.”

I set my jaw, speaking through my teeth. “It’s not just that you’re a stubborn ass?”

“Possibly.”

“Huh.”

“So, may I show you to your accommodations, milady?”

“If you must.” I punctuated my answer with an exaggerated eye roll.

Mick held out an arm in the direction of the old wooden staircase, and I shook my head. I didn’t want to walk ahead of him so he could stare at me. When he didn’t budge, I shook my head again and stared defiantly at him, crossing my arms and standing my ground.

“Yeah, and
I’m
the stubborn one,” he said as he started up the stairs.

I followed him up, the slightest hint of a smile playing at my lips. I knew we didn’t have a future—how could we with me turning shades of gray like some character out of an old silent film?—but I did like the way we tried to out-stubborn each other. Rod had always just let me have my way. I’d hated it.

Beat it, Rod.

We entered a huge room at the end of the hallway that had a giant four poster bed made out of the same honey-colored wood of the staircase. A fluffy white down comforter blanketed the top, and large green and brown pillows took up the entire upper half of the bed.

“Whose cabin is this?”

“It’s mine.”

I faced him, eyebrows raised. “Seriously?”

“Well, mine and Ro’s. It was our dad’s place.”

“Oh. This is your dad’s bed, then?” I looked at the bed warily.

“Well, no, since he’s no longer with us. It’s mine. Is it okay?”

He turned to face me, and I blushed as though he’d just asked me to hop into it with him. I turned away, absently wondering if my cheeks changed color as the heat rushed into them, or if they remained a dull shade of gray.

I looked around the room, checking out the contents. Next to a small bookcase with what appeared to be classic hardcovers and a bunch of woodsy knick-knacks, my gaze landed on a spiral staircase circling up to another level in the corner of the room.

“That’s the loft. There’s a reading area up there that was my mom’s, but no one really uses it. There’s a pretty cool stained glass window above a large picture window that opens up over the back of the cabin, if you want to check it out.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Do you want to?”

“Want to what?”

“Check out the loft?”

“No.” I shrugged. “Maybe later.”

“Well, the shower is fully stocked, and there are clean towels under the sink. I guess I’ll leave you alone now.”

“Okay.”

“Unless you want me to stay.”

I looked up at him, half annoyed and half happy that he wanted to be near me. I didn’t want to be alone, but Mick wasn’t going to be able to fix me just by hanging out and gawking, and I didn’t want him to see me like this anymore.

“No, Mick. Please just leave me alone.”

“I’ll be downstairs, then.”

Mick left the room, right as my stomach growled louder than it ever had before. I hoped he hadn’t heard it. I’d need to eat soon, but a hot shower sounded perfect. I wanted to wash away the day.

Maybe I’d be able to wash away the gray as well. Rain hadn’t done it, but maybe with a little soap…

I tip-toed to the door and locked it. As sweet as he was, I really didn’t know Mick and didn’t want to take the chance of him coming in when I was naked in the shower.

But you agreed to let him kidnap you to the mountains?

My inner cynic questioned me, or maybe that was just the smarter half of my brain, but I ignored it. Maybe coming with Mick to Big Bear wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done, but I couldn’t think of any other options. I didn’t want anyone else to see me like this, and since Mick already had…well, I guess he won by default.

I slipped into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

With the water on as hot as it would go, and the steam filling the room, I stripped down to nothing. Standing naked in front of the mirror, I examined every inch of myself.

And all I saw was gray.

Nothing but gray. I looked like the statue I’d seen in my reflection earlier. If I stood still long enough, I could actually be a statue.

Nothing on my body had any flesh-tones left. Nothing even slightly pink remained. And worse than all the grayness was the fact that, starting near my heart, a series of tiny lines began stretching outward on my body.

They looked almost like cracks. Like cracks in a cement statue.

‘Careful, dear, your face may freeze like that.’

Mr. Greenburg’s words drifted through the chaotic disarray of my thoughts. How odd that a phrase I’d heard throughout my life—which most children hear at one point or another—could one day ring true. Would I eventually freeze like this?

I turned around slowly, keeping my eyes focused on the mirror, trying to see if anything was different on my backside. Nothing. Just gray everywhere.

As I regarded myself in the mirror, searching first down the length of my legs, my reflection flashed in and out again. The effect reminded me of my grandma’s old television before Mom and Dad bought her a flat screen a few years ago. She had this crazy old box TV with an antenna on top. Occasionally, the picture would fade and she’d have to smack the top of the box to get the picture to return. Then it would flash in and out a few more times, successfully getting my sweet old grandma to say something nasty that she’d never say otherwise.

Something like
fiddlesticks
.

That’s what I watched myself do in the mirror now. Except, like earlier, what replaced my reflection wasn’t empty air or even salt and pepper static like Grandma’s old TV, but a statue of me.

Solid, deathly still, and completely concrete.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, hoping when I opened them again, I’d see myself and not a hallucination. Not a gray statue of me frozen in time.

…eight, nine, ten . . .

I opened my eyes again and brought my gaze to the mirror. Still gray, but my reflection wasn’t flashing in and out of existence anymore.

I need medication.

I climbed into the shower and let the scalding water run down my body, determined to wash as much of the day away as I could before the hot water ran out.

Mick

With Holland getting comfortable in the master bedroom, I was anxious to get into my office to review my files. But first, I needed to feed her. It had been an argument to get her to concede to taking the master, but luckily she hadn’t argued about being hungry. She couldn’t—her stomach gave me all the answer I needed. And I think she gave up her fight about bedrooms in the end, only so she could walk away and keep me from looking at her. If only she knew I’d been waiting for this day for years.

She couldn’t shock me. That gray skin was part of our story, and I wasn’t afraid.

I’d been up to the cabin last weekend, so some food was in the fridge. Not much, but enough to get us through the next day or two. I’d go to the store as soon as I could trust Holland not to try to run away or do something crazy. The last thing I needed was to lose her to the surrounding, snow-covered forest.

The cupboards were pretty well stocked year-round, so dry goods and canned goods were in no short supply. I heated some tomato soup and fried up a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. One thing about plastic cheese that I was thankful for at that moment was the fact that it didn’t go bad very quickly.

The shower turned off just as I started up the stairs, my arms full of our sandwiches and bowls of soup. I kicked the door to the master bedroom lightly a few times with the toe of my boot, and waited for a response.

Silence. No surprise there.

“Holland?”

“Leave me alone,
please
, Mick.”

“I made you some food. Can you open the door for me?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Oh, come on. I know that’s not true. I made grilled cheese. Everyone loves grilled cheese.”

“I’m not hungry! Leave me alone, Mick!” The fierceness in her voice would have shocked me if I hadn’t been prepared for it. That was one of the things I knew would come when the change started. Anger. Rage. At times, even uncontrollable.

I was ready for it.

A loud
thud
echoed through the door as, I think, her fist slammed into the wooden barrier between us.

I wasn’t ready for that.

“I know you’re upset. I get it—”

The door flew open, startling me, and I took a step back, careful not to cover myself with hot tomato soup.

“You
get
it? You fucking
get
it? I highly doubt that you
get this
, Mick. Look at me! My skin is gray!
Gray!
You don’t get this, Mick.
I
don’t even get this.” She paused, running a hand down her face in exasperation, then cringed as she pulled her hand away and gazed down at her fingers as if they were foreign to her. She then tucked that hand limply to her stomach, and peered up at me again, this time with sadness in her eyes. She pointed to her chest with her left, good hand. “And the feeling I have
inside
—”

She stopped abruptly, taking the food from my hands, then shutting the door in my face.

“Just leave me alone.”

She didn’t have to continue. I knew what was happening to her inside. The outside was only the beginning, and not the worst of the change. The visible changes were weird and scary, and yes, we had to keep her away from people because of them, but the worst part had yet to fully develop. The beast inside would likely emerge sooner rather than later—her rising anger was indication of that, so even without the traumatic events involving her ex, it was obvious that we were well into the process.

Of course, if the timeline was as it should be, she wouldn’t have started aesthetically changing until mid-March. Which reminded me…

With my cooling lunch in hand, I left Holland to eat alone in her room and headed downstairs to my office, which doubled as a den. Once I’d found Holland, I’d had to learn everything I could from afar, so the den side of the room had been used way less than the office side—though I’d slept on the couch more times than not, after marathon nights of research. My desk had seen a lot of late nights in the past few years. One rule in all of this: I couldn’t approach her blindly and introduce myself as the man she was going to fall in love with to break the millennia-old spell cursing her family. She would have thought I was a psycho anyway, so the rule was fine by me.

The biggest issue, and something no one could prepare me for, was how to get her to fall in love with me. Dad prepared me for what would happen once the change began, how to handle Holland’s outbursts, what to do when she raged—stuff like that. I was more than prepared to remain calm in the face of her rage, solid in the grip of her turmoil. I wasn’t sure if that was something he’d taught me, or just someone I was—never quick to anger, never acting in haste. Maybe the trait had been passed down to me from my mother. I didn’t know.

I’d learned all about the curse, and the generations of men before me; their trials, their minor successes, and, ultimately, their many failures. I’d studied each documented bit of history about the incarnations of Holland over the years. I knew each statue’s location around the world—not that I’d visited any of them, or even planned to; that part of our history was best left alone. I had documents explaining what stories had been developed around each missing girl, the vague stories formed for the Briggs family so that they never discovered the true fate of their beloved daughters.

I knew it all, and anything I had yet to learn was within my reach in this office. But making someone fall in love with me? How was I supposed to do that?

Especially now, with even less time than I’d counted on. We wouldn’t get the needed time to date, get to know one another. There would be nothing natural about our courtship, destined or otherwise.

I was completely screwed.

I sat in my dad’s old oversized stuffed chair, the cushions worn from so many nights of sitting here across from him as he taught me about our family history and duty. I closed my eyes for a brief moment, wishing he was still here. I needed his help figuring out why Holland began changing before she was supposed to. How could I have been so wrong about her birthday?

I flipped through my books, through pages of information my dad and ancestors collected for generations. I couldn’t find anything about the girls before Holland having birthdays that weren’t as they should be. Every girl was accounted for, every single one, and every story made perfect sense. Each bit of history matched up to the timeline the men in my family were given, fitting perfectly into the mold of the story. The curse remained exactly the same, year after year. Nothing changed. Nothing. Each reincarnation regenerated differently, obviously, so she never remembered any of the lives she’d lived before. The Destined were different, as well, but the curse was the same, and we were eventually made aware of it while her manifestations rarely were. Each man before me had a chance to fall in love with her and break the spell, yet somehow, each time, they’d failed.

Had none of the men before me fallen in love with the previous incarnations? I couldn’t imagine how they could fail. I’d known the moment I saw her that I’d be able to love her with ease. The spark of defiance in her eyes pulled me toward her like a magnet. Was that something each manifestation of her carried with them, or something unique to this version of her? Had she always been so strong-willed, yet vulnerable? So brave, but scared? Hadn’t she always been a beautiful mess of walking contradictions?

I couldn’t see how any man could not be consumed by her.

Wait.
I massaged my temples with my middle finger and thumb as a thought took shape in my mind. A concept I didn’t want to acknowledge, but couldn’t ignore.

What if all of the men had loved her with ease, but she never reciprocated their love?

Could that be the reason all the generations of Destined before me were unable to break the curse?

Because
she
hadn’t loved
them
?

My stomach did more than just pitch at the thought, it did a full-blown flip. Not because of my feelings for Holland and the fact they were so strong, so soon, but because I’d been sure I’d be the one to finally break the spell. I’d been sure my generation would be the last.

I’d promised my dad as much.

I couldn’t break that promise. I wouldn’t.

I laid my head on my arm on the desk and closed my eyes as I mentally scanned years of documents I’d reviewed. Something didn’t make sense, didn’t fit into the nice little puzzle of our intertwined fates.

Something was wrong.

I lacked a huge bit of information…

“Oh my God.”

Her voice penetrated my dreams, muted, distant…

“Mick! What the hell is this?”

The harshness of her tone ripped me out of my slumber, dragging me quickly back to consciousness. I lifted my head, my eyes fighting to focus. I scanned my surroundings. The office. I was still in my dad’s office. How long had I been out?

Holland sat cross-legged on the corner of my dad’s massive cherry wood desk, gripping a stack of papers, discarded pages surrounding her on the desktop. Her gray, ashen face was pulled into a deep glower, her lips in a scowl.

“What is this?”

“It’s…it’s—” I shook my head, struggling for the right words amid the fog still muddling my sleep-addled brain, “—It’s not…I can explain.”

She grabbed the ceramic bust on the edge of the desk, then whipped it at the wall behind my head. The piece shattered against the plaid, wallpapered wall, thousands of tiny bits of plaster showering out around me. I ducked, covering my head with my arms, but still managed to receive a few soft hits of pottery to my back and head.

“Answer me! What. Is. This?”

I stood, slowly, my gaze locked with hers. “Holland, I—”

She jumped off the desk, then whipped the papers at my face. I barely had enough time to raise my arm and swat them away.

“Screw this.”

She stormed out of the office. I moved to follow her, banging my knee into my dad’s desk. Pain shot fire up into my thigh and down to my toes, and I reached to grasp my kneecap with both hands, groaning as my leg threatened to go out beneath me. I pushed through the pain, gritting my teeth, then raced for the office door just as the front door of the cabin slammed shut, the sound echoing throughout the house.

“Holland!”

I silently cursed myself for letting her discover her fate this way instead of finding an honorable way to tell her the truth. I’d been irresponsible to fall asleep without locking the door. Every truth she’d ever need to know lay amongst the chaos of this office, and many secrets she shouldn’t have to discover.
The shit you’re meant to protect her from, asshole.

I ran to the main entrance of the cabin, a slight limp in one leg, then threw the wooden door open and spotted her running into the tree line.

“Holland!”

“Don’t follow me, Mick!”

“You’ll freeze out there!”

I stepped onto the porch, then buckled to the wooden planks beneath me as my leg twisted and my knee gave out. I cursed the forest around me, then watched in agony as she disappeared into its depths.