“No!” She grabbed his wrist, her heart still racing. “It’s the ring! It’s Lady Willoughby’s ring! It’s cursed!”
Chapter
Seven
“Cursed?” Sterling bolted after her as Edwina scurried toward Willoughby Hall. He’d managed to grab a sackful of salt from the kitchens, his pentacle, and a ritual knife, and had had to run to catch up to her.
“Yes, cursed!” She held fistfuls of her skirts in both hands as she hurried along the lane toward Willoughby House. “My clairvoyance finally lit up and I could see a malevolent shadow hovering over Lady Willoughby’s ring. That’s what is causing these fits of death-like sleep!”
“You do realize that for a curse to take hold, a life must have been lost?”
Cursed objects were nasty things. They required an enormous amount of power and ritual to create, but at the heart of it all was a sacrifice. The soul was bound to the item, where it inevitably soured with bitterness as elements of its personality were slowly eroded over the years. Finally, all that remained was rage and pain, and the effect of that wielded terrible power over the aura of the bearer or wearer of the object.
Some people suffered hallucinations, or personality shifts.
Some could barely bring themselves to remove from bed.
Others turned violent, or turned to liquor or opium.
And some even suffered harm if the cursed soul was powerful enough to manipulate physical matter around them.
“Yes. And someone had to have borne the Willoughby’s a powerful grudge to have laid such a curse in the first place,” Edwina said grimly. “Yet, by all account the Willoughby’s are happily married, with no enemies and few that might wish them ill.”
“I wonder….” If the Willoughby’s were anything like his family, then heirlooms would have been passed down through the family. His older brother, Hart, had received the Clarenvale jewels for his bride, Olivia, leaving Sterling with little choice but to purchase his own for Edwina.
“What?” Edwina threw over her shoulder.
“Lord Willoughby’s grandmother fell ill with the same affliction. What if the ring is a family heirloom?”
Edwina stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh, goodness. Of course! Lady Annabelle—the first reawakened dead lady—is alleged to have stolen the original Lord Willoughby’s hand in marriage from a local girl. I heard it in the tavern last night, but didn’t give it much thought at the time as it didn’t pertain to the current Lady Willoughby.”
“There’s your grudge.”
“Sterling, that was decades ago. A curse like that….”
She didn’t have to say it.
Curses only grew in power as the soul fed off the life force of the bearer of the object they were bound to.
“We need somewhere safe where we can lay a circle of protection,” he said, capturing her arm. “It’s going to have to be chiseled into the stone. Anything else—chalk or salt—might be blown away in a flurry if the entity can manipulate raw matter.”
Edwina bit her lip. “Best if it’s laid in a place of power too.”
Sterling couldn’t stop himself from grimacing. They both knew where the best place to lay the curse to rest was going to be.
“St. Mary’s church.”
Hallowed ground. Blessed with years’ worth of prayers and belief.
The sexton was just going to love that.
Edwina sighed. “You go fetch the ring and Lady Willoughby—they’ll respond better to a fellow peer of the realm—and I’ll go talk to the priest and the sexton and set up the circle.”
Lady Willoughby reclined in the sunroom, soaking up the sunlight again. Her olive skin seemed to be a little ashen still, but it was as though the sunlight gave her some measure of life.
As it probably did.
Sunlight was anathema to creatures like ghosts and succubae, and even curses and black magic waned within its direct influence. She probably wasn’t even aware of why she desperately wanted to lie in the sun, though survival instinct probably told her she felt better in that moment.
