The Curse Keepers Collection (34 page)

I held out a bottle of sunscreen. “Can you help me? I take it that we’ll be outside?”

He took the bottle, and I turned around as he swept my loose braid over my shoulder. He kissed the back of my neck. “I liked your hair last night.”

“Thank you,” I murmured. This Collin was so foreign to me that he took some getting used to. When he finished, I put on the coverup Claire had packed. What had possessed her to think of my swimsuit? Probably wishful thinking.

Collin held the door open, holding several towels. “After you.”

Outside the door, we encountered a rude reminder of the curse: two dead blackbirds, four robins, and a cardinal. Collin turned back to me, his face expressionless. “Is this what you find every morning?”

I nodded. “You don’t?”

“No.” His voice was hard. He kept his eyes on the birds as he kicked them out of the pattern. He went back into the room and called the front desk, asking them to send someone to clean them up.

Would there be another sacrifice today? The messenger had said there would be a sacrifice every day I didn’t choose to side with Okeus. The guilt was overwhelming, but I knew if I pledged my loyalty to him, things would become so much worse. “Collin, something happened a couple of nights ago—”

He kissed me. “No. We’re not going to talk about that right now. The sun is out and you’re safe. We’re going to enjoy the morning and deal with everything else later.”

A new panic flooded my senses. “But the body in the botanical gardens yesterday, you said you thought it was a message to me.” I grabbed his arm, my nails digging into this skin. “What if they go after my father and my stepmother? I have to go back!”

His hand cupped my cheek as he gazed into my eyes with reassurance. “Relax, Ellie. I already thought of that. After I heard about the body, I realized your family might not be safe. I poured salt across the doorways to the bed and breakfast.”

My hold loosened. “How did you know about the bed and breakfast?”

His eyes wrinkled in confusion. “You told me you were helping keep your father’s bed and breakfast afloat. Your last name is Lancaster. It wasn’t hard to find out which place was his.”

“But why would you do that, Collin? What made you think to protect them?”

“Because I know they are important to you.” He kissed me gently. “I meant to tell you yesterday, but then the phone call from Marino’s guy threw me off.”

“Thank you.” Those two words seemed so inadequate to express how much what he’d done meant to me, but the look in his eyes told me that he knew.

With Collin, I really felt we
could
be okay. Collin knew how to handle the spirits and the gods, but I also brought power to the union. We were stronger together than our two separate selves. We were getting his bowl tonight. We’d close the gate in time.

The morning was beautiful. The sun shone bright and the waves crashed onto the shore. I leaned against the railing, and Collin put his arm around my back. “Is it calling to you now?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Then let’s answer it.”

We went down the stairs to the beach. I couldn’t help thinking about climbing those same stairs last night. I still couldn’t believe how quickly things had changed. Collin must have been thinking the same thing because he gave me a wicked smile on the second-floor landing.

At the bottom of the staircase, Collin stopped next to two surfboards propped against the motel. “I take it you’ve never surfed.”

My stomach tingled with excitement. “Are you serious?”

He grinned and handed me one of the boards. “So that’s no?”

“What are you doing? We can’t just take these.”

“Relax. A friend of mine dropped them off.”

I cocked my head. “Let me guess, you know a guy?”

He winked. “I always know a guy. I called him before you woke up.” He picked up a bag and his board and we walked to the water.

“Shouldn’t we be doing something more important?” I asked. “Like preparing for tonight? Or teaching me to defend myself?”

“Trust me.”

A girl could get whiplash with his trust me/trust me not flip-flopping. He’d proven that he cared about me and my well-being. I trusted him. My stomach twisted with both excitement and nerves. “I take it that
you
surf.”

“Any self-respecting boy growing up in Buxton surfed.” He dropped the towels on the sand. “Drop your board on the sand first.”

I did as he instructed and stripped off my coverup, tossing it on top of the towels.

Collin had that hungry look in his eyes again.

“I thought you were teaching me to surf.”

“I got distracted by the view.” He grinned. “First you need to learn how to stand on the board. Move to the center with your left foot forward.”

I placed both feet on the board. “Now what?”

“Now bend your knees, keeping them over your toes. Then squat slightly and hold your arms out from your body.”

I did as he instructed and winced. “Someone gave my inner thighs a workout last night.”

Collin moved closer, his voice husky. “You’re distracting me again.”

I shrugged sheepishly. “Sorry.”

His hand skimmed my bare waist. “No, you’re not.”

“You’re right.”

“Do you want to learn to surf or not?”

It was a tough decision. “I do. Now what?”

“Now we’re going to practice getting up on the board.”

He explained how to paddle into the waves and how to get to my feet once I was in a wave and ready to surf. After he showed me how to wax the board and we strapped the boards to our ankles, his face glowed with excitement. “I think you’re ready.”

We walked into the water and the first step in, I gasped and froze as the rush of power swept through me. Collin turned around.

When I caught my breath, I shook my head. “I’ve walked in the ocean before but never had this happen.”

“It’s because of the curse. Now that it’s broken, you need the power of the sea. You probably felt it before but at a much lower level so you didn’t recognize it.” He turned serious again. “Ananias Dare traveled to the new land by the ocean, so he represented the sea in the creation of the curse. Manteo needed forces more powerful than the gods in order to contain them. Ahone wasn’t enough help on his own. Whenever you feel weak, you’ll need to return to the sea to recharge. Not fresh water. It has to be the sea. That’s part of the reason we’re out here.”

“And the second part?”

He didn’t answer.

I’d never needed the sea before. Intrigued by and drawn to it, yes. Why would I need the power of the sea if the spirits were all contained when we closed the gate? “Collin, doesn’t closing the gate send all the spirits back?”

He paused. “Yes.”

“Then why do I need to know this?”

He took my hand in his. “There are no guarantees. I want to plan for a worst-case scenario, okay?”

The surge of power had stabilized so we walked deep enough into the water to slide onto the boards and paddle out to the waves. After we got far enough out, Collin taught me how to sit on the board and find the right wave.

I was really going to do this. While I was nervous, my nervousness was outweighed by excitement. “What if I fall off?”

“You probably will at first, but try to fall off the back.”

“Anything else?”

“Have fun.”

The first few attempts, I did fall off, but then I found my balance and rode out several small waves. Collin, of course, was not only good, but all kinds of sexy. When I wasn’t concentrating on staying on the board, I was watching him.

He caught me several times and grinned. I was sure I only added fuel to the massive Collin Dailey ego. He paddled next to me. “Let’s go out a bit farther. I want to try something.”

When we got out far enough to suit him, we both sat up, our boards parallel. “I want to touch our palms together out on the water. I’m curious to see if it does anything for you since we’re in the sea.”

“Do you think it will?”

“There’s only one way to find out.” He paused. “We sometimes lose ourselves when we do this. If I think you’re in trouble, I’m going to break the connection, and you do the same.”

My hands were jittery. “Okay.”

“Ready?”

I lifted my palm and held it forward. Collin stretched his hand and grasped mine, linking our fingers.

The jolt was stronger than before, but the sensation was the same. Awareness of every living thing flooded my senses. The pulse of their life force throbbed within me. Surrounded me. Saturated me. The fish around us. The plant life in the sea. The microbes not seen by the human eye. Raw power danced across my skin, soaking through my pores, permeating every cell in my body.

My consciousness exploded, racing backward, through time and space to the birth of everything. And it was familiar. I’d been there, not just now, but there to witness the miracle when it happened. A primeval memory buried deep in the structure of my DNA.

A massive explosion of gas and energy filled the void of nothingness, rushing through my head. Power, so much power, engulfed me and swallowed me whole, as I raced through the creation of time and space. Stars burst into life, violent explosions of light and wind, fire and ice. Reds and blues and greens. Bright balls and gaseous clouds. The cosmos ruptured into life, reaching out into the far corners of the universe, carrying me along with it.

My trajectory slowed, circling around another explosion of orange and yellow light, a dying star, swirling in vortex, spinning, spinning, spinning until a giant ball of yellow light filled the black void. The light blinded me and the energy seared my core as the new star imploded. The sun.

I slingshotted off, caught in the debris spewed out from the implosion. Particles of dust and rocks clumped together to form a molten mass, twirling on an axis, circling the star.

Earth was born.

Trillions and trillions of rocks carrying droplets of water bombarded the cooling mass. An outer crust covered the earth while the water released from the meteorites formed oceans. In steaming springs of boiling water, created from the union of land and water, an essence rose from the water and the Manitou was born.

Life.

And the birth of the gods.

Ahone, creator god, emerged from the dust of the land. He held his arms wide and called plant life into being. And when he saw the beauty before his eyes, he created animals of every kind. But still he wanted more. He put pieces of land and sea into a bag and shook them in it, creating man and woman. Humanity was his most prized creation, and he loved man and woman too much to set them free.

The four wind gods, angry and covetous beings, lacked the power to create, only able to destroy. They swirled around the earth becoming more and more angry at the beauty Ahone had made, but it wasn’t until they discovered men and women that they rebelled.

Jealousy burned hot and fierce in the winds, and they decided to punish the creator of all life. They chose Ahone’s greatest source of pride and threatened to destroy humanity if he refused to give up his power before the dawn of the seventh day.

Ahone loved his children and refused to kill them, yet he didn’t want to hand his power to the hateful wind gods. His tears fell and flooded the earth, wiping out half of his creation. The earth, sympathetic to Ahone’s pain, returned the tears to the air, creating clouds to foil the winds.

But still, Ahone did not turn over his power. On the eve of the seventh day, in his misery and despair, Ahone split himself in two, giving the majority of his power to his twin, Okeus.

While Ahone kept empathy and compassion, Okeus only knew greed and anger, receiving the ugly parts of Ahone.

The wind gods railed at Ahone’s trickery, but were forced to concede. They swore they would leave humanity unharmed unless man performed a transgression worthy of retaliation. So Ahone shook out his bag and placed man and woman of all races in all four corners of the earth.

Jealous of his brother’s creation of man and woman, Okeus made creations of his own. But Okeus lacked the love and compassion that filled Ahone, and Okeus’s creations were abominations. He set them far and wide upon the earth to hunt and stalk man.

Ahone and Okeus sculpted the shells of their creations, but the land and sea’s gift of Manitou gave them life.

The gods, spirits, man, and Okeus’s creations reached a balance, coexisting for thousands and thousands of years until the white man invaded the land of Ahone’s people, throwing unbalance back into the world.

Manteo, son of the Croatan chief and friend to Ananias Dare and his people, called upon the parents of the gods—land and sea—to contain their power and spare humanity in his desperate attempt to calm the chaos. Ahone stepped forward to add his now weakened power of creation. A gate was formed at the threshold of Popogusso, and the gods and spirits were sucked from the earth and locked away, where they cursed man and especially the Curse Keepers. All the gods except for Ahone, who watched for centuries, while the Curse Keepers waited for the seam dividing the realms to unravel.

The wind gods remembered their vow to Ahone and spent over four hundred years plotting their revenge.

Finally, two Keepers met and the gate was opened, but only by a crack, and two spirits and a god escaped. Aposo and Kanim, messengers for Ahone and Okeus, and Wapi, the wind god of the north.

The three other wind gods remained locked behind the gate, their anger and hate oozing through the crack in the gate to Popogusso, along with a host of Okeus’s abominations.

They seethed, waiting for the gate to open the rest of the way.

They sensed my presence outside their gate, the threshold to both worlds. They cursed me with multiple tongues and multiple languages, reaching arms and legs, tentacles and tails through the crack in their desperate attempts to reach me.

“We are coming for you, Curse Keeper, daughter of the sea, witness to creation. In the dead of night, we will be watching and waiting. We will come for you, and we will make you suffer in retribution for the misery your people caused. You will curse the day you were created a thousand times over.” Hundreds of tongues echoed the chant, my title on their tongues. “Curse Keeper, daughter of the sea, witness to creation, we are coming for you.”