Page 1 of The Curse Breaker

Entry 11

From Evelyn Terry’s Private Journal, Dated June 10, 1825

I looked out at the dark churning sea and couldn’t believe my eyes. The island had vanished into thin air and taken my friends along with it.

“No!” I cried out. My voice seemed to echo in the growing darkness on that private stretch of beach. It took me a moment to realize I was not alone. Someone else was shouting too. I spun around.

Captain Jonas Kimble stood behind me, his expression one of utter disbelief as he looked from the water—where the island had been, moments before—to me.

“Kid,” he said hoarsely. He let the lantern in his hand clang to the ground and the flame inside went out. “What did you do?”

I was afraid to answer.

We stared each other down as the wind gusts that accompanied the approaching storm threatened to blow us both out to sea. Aggy’s words, spoken only moments before she ran onto the island without me, still echoed in my mind. Be patient with Kimble. Don’t hate each other for what happens. You will need each other in the end. I held on tight to the note Aggy had given me, the one I still didn’t understand.

She knew all this would happen, I realized. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been about to cry. I sunk onto my knees in the cold, wet sand. “I didn’t do anything.”

Islands did not disappear. Where were my friends?

Kimble glared at me, his blue eyes wild. “I’m no fool, kid.”

No, he wasn’t. I suspected this man out of time, one I’d only recently learned didn’t age (he appeared much younger than Papa, but older than my brothers), had the answers I sought. He did not look like he was in the mood to share them.

“Sparrow!” he thundered as the storm boomed. “Tell me what you did.”

Sparrow. Kimble remembered the nickname my friends had given me. Aggy. Gil. Thomas. Laurel. Where were they right now? Was that rat Axel with them? They’d followed Axel onto the island only minutes before, and now the island was gone.

How? Why?

Questions swirled in my head like the storm closing in. Was this the Blood Orange Moon’s doing? This strange celestial event my father so feared occurred every two hundred years. It happened when a lunar eclipse, two full moons in one month, and an orange moon (when the sun and moon converged in the sky at the same time) all came together, wreaking havoc on the weather and causing wicked storms.

It was here. Now. And Kimble had told me that he needed to find the missing treasure by the Blood Orange Moon. Every piece needed to be returned to its chest. Once it was, he said he’d be free.

But now I knew Kimble had failed. Because of me.

Kimble sounded eerily calm. Like my father, whenever my brothers had done something wrong and hadn’t confessed yet. “You found the treasure, didn’t you?”

I couldn’t look at him when I spoke. Strands of my wet brown hair blew in front of my face, hiding my shame. “Yes.”

I knew now that Kimble hadn’t aged a day since the last Blood Orange Moon, in 1625, when he had been the one to take treasure from the island. And that he’d spent the last few weeks trying to make the treasure whole again, to break his curse.

Is that what living forever was? A curse? I’d seen it as a gift, one that I was convinced would save my friends’ lives. But now my friends, with their shiny cursed coins, were gone, along with an island that had mysteriously appeared to us only weeks before.

My island. It had first shown up like a mirage, calling to me. Welcome home, Evelyn Terry! Welcome!

Now it was silent.

“And what did you do with the treasure?” His voice was strained. “Did you take some?”

I nodded ever so slightly, waiting for him to explode.

“For yourself?” I heard his voice crack.

“No.” I shook my head. “I gave coins to my friends.” His eyes flashed dangerously. “They were dying of the Cough,” I blurted out. “I thought the coins would save them. But the coins didn’t do anything, so I told them to run onto the island to make them work.”

“Work?” His voice rose again, and he started to laugh deliriously. “Do you have any idea what you just did, kid?”

Remind Kimble: another moon will be here—in two hundred years. Isn’t that what Aggy had said?