Page 30 of Grave Expectations

Still.

“I wished I’d lived in a world with cinnamon rolls,” Alaric said, his gaze snagging on her fingers as she licked the frosting from them.

“They’re delicious,” Roz agreed.

They were sitting in the cemetery, the only place Roz could think to regain some semblance of normalcy before investigating Franny’s cottage.

“So, this curse,” Roz said after she’d cleaned the last of the frosting off. “We know the circumstances of it, we can work backwards.”

“It’s that easy?” Alaric asked.

“Yes. We’re in a unique position of knowing exactly what went into the curse. Usually we don’t have that insight, and we just see the remnants of the curse. It’s usually a delicate matter of tracing backwards to find all the parts. But you were there, you know the words, and...” She waved her hands to punctuate her point.

“Magic is fascinating,” Alaric remarked.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Roz agreed. It’d been part of her life so long that it was hard to think of it as anything other than mundane.

“What do we need?” Alaric asked.

“A waning moon,” she started. “Something from the one that cursed you—that might be harder to find.”

“Would hair do?” Alaric asked.

“You have his hair?”

“I might have gotten a swing at him,” he said, giving her another one of his wolfish smiles. It was hard to marry this version of Alaric with the one in the history books, until he gave her one of those sly smiles.

“And took his hair?”

“Grabbed a chunk of it. I wish they didn’t wear those ugly hats, then I could have marveled at the bald spot in the years after my death,” he said with a sigh. “Anyway, it’s likely on my robes.”

“The moon is waning all this week, and there’s a new moon on the Pumpkin Festival,” she said. “So we’re at the right time. Then we’ll have the hair, then it just comes down to the right herbs. I think doing it in the cemetery will give it power, grave dirt and all.” She tapped her lower lip with her finger as she thought. “And if it doesn’t work, we can try again next month,” she added.

“Why wouldn’t it work?” Alaric asked.

“I’ve never had to break a curse before,” she admitted. “I don’t think anyone has ever been brave enough to try to curse me.”

“Why would they? I can’t imagine you’ve ever crossed anyone.”

“Kids are cruel,” she said. “I had a classmate who was cursed to have her hair never grow beyond her shoulders. It took years to reverse it because they thought it was medical, and no one knew who did it until years later, when the perpetrator got drunk at a party and admitted it.”

“Why?”

“Jealousy,” Roz said with a shrug. “Curses aren’t always retaliatory.”

“Now that we’ve solved the curse…” Alaric said, standing. “We can move on to more exciting things.”

“More exciting than ending your three-hundred-year curse?” Roz protested.

“Infinitely. This book that your aunt hid contains multitudes of secrets kept from the Graves line for decades. I, for one, am terribly excited to piss her off when we find it.”

Roz laughed and stood. They walked in silence into the neighborhood around Pumpkin Hollow, stopping before the line of cottages the Graves family lived in. Franny’s cottage was in the middle, one of the oldest and smallest.

Roz’s hand shook as she slipped the key into the door and turned. The door creaked open and Roz was hit with the overwhelming smell of her dead aunt. Dried herbs, spent candles, the coffee she drank black, all swirled in the space and made Roz pause.

“She’s gone,” Alaric said softly from behind her. “She can’t hurt you from the other side.”

Roz knew that. She shook her head and stepped over the threshold, flipping on an overhead light. It cast shadows over the space.