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“Bartending?” It’s a knock at my aunt, but I’ll resort to a whole list of unsavory jobs before I’ll consider doing what she’s done day in and day out for the last twenty years. I refuse to be yet another Quinn sopping up the leftovers in this town.

“Hey, The Shoal’s been good to me. Good people. Good work.”

Shitty pay. “Look, I’m not doing this to rattle your cage. We need the money. You need it.”

“I don’t need it this bad, Isa.”

This bad.

Tempest Cove is a town ruled by its superstitions. Etched in the northern cliffs on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, it’s a place where most of the redheads are single, and no one, no matter how ambitious, leaves port on a Thursday or Friday, because Sunday sails never fails. Women are said to be bad luck aboard a ship, and there’s no whistling for fear of a gale. Also, the dudes walking around with shaggy hair and unkempt nails aren’t bums, but die-hard fishermen who believe good hygiene spoils a catch. Hell, half the regulars who close down The Shoal every night look like they stumbled in from the streets, because of their crazy superstitions.

Here? It’s just the way of life.

They also believe that if you cross paths with a Blackthorne, you’re doomed to an unfortunate and indeterminate fate.

Which probably explains why I got the job of looking after Mrs. Blackthorne based on nothing more than a phone interview. No one else in Tempest Cove is crazy enough to tempt their luck by working for them.

I just happen to be desperate enough.

As I understand, the family owns the most successful shipping company in the whole United States, so I’m not the only crazy person in need of a paycheck. To be fair, though, the business is said to operate out of Gloucester, where their employees aren’t likely to know much about the family history, like folks here.

Or what folks here think they know about them, anyway.

The only thing I really know about the Blackthornes is that they are the richest family in Tempest Cove, true royalty, and they own the only castle I’m aware of, which can be seen from any point downtown.

Oh, and they’re cursed, too. Supposedly by a siren, although some accounts reference a sea witch. Depends on who’s telling the story.

Ask anyone in Tempest Cove, and they won’t so much as bat an eye at the mention of a sea witch, or siren. They believe in such things nearly as much as the God they insist will deliver them from the evils of the world.

Including the Blackthornes.

“What about an education?” Eyes on the road, she doesn’t bother to look at me, while she sucks in another drag of her cigarette. Good thing, because we’ve already gone over this, and I’d hate for her to see the exasperated look on my face. “You have a gift. One that shouldn’t go to waste.”

Since childhood, I’ve had an uncanny ability to play music by ear. Note for note, even though I can’t actually read a lick of music. My high school music teacher referred to me as lost potential before I graduated six months ago. A prodigious waste of talent, I believe were his exact words. Not that he ever believed I’d amount to anything if I did pursue my music. After all, kids in this town are cursed to follow in their parents’ footsteps.

Sons become fishermen. Daughters become their lonely wives. It’s been that way for generations.

It so happens, though, my mother has been, and still is, the reigning whore on this island who’s kept their husbands from becoming lonely, too. A somewhat colorful deviation from the town’s norm, I suppose. While my real father died when I was born, my mother insists it could’ve been any of the men who got her pregnant. She’s always made a point to tell me how lucky I am to have a whole damn town as a father. My own personal kingdom, she once called it.

As if that makes it easier to fit in here.

What I wouldn’t give to be ignorant to this town’s disapproving stares and whispers. The way the women shield their husbands and sons, as if I walk around with snakes wriggling about my head, ready to turn them to stone.

Unfortunately, I grew up as the daughter of a sinner, and as far as they’re concerned, that’s all I’ll ever be.

“Need money for an education,” I answer, drawing a dollar symbol in the nicotine stained film on the window beside me. “That’s the problem. I’m cursed with impractical potential. Just like you’re cursed to meddle where you shouldn’t.”

“And if I didn’t meddle, you’d be living under a viaduct right now.”

She’s not lying, although I haven’t visited my mom in weeks to know if she’s still camped out off the highway. Last I checked, she’d gone on another bender with one of her many junkie boyfriends.

“Your mother wasn’t always bad, for the record.”

Sometimes I forget that, if anyone is capable of understanding what it’s like to be the daughter of the town’s blacksheep, it’s the sister of said sheep. Maybe that’s why Aunt Midge is so hardened and jaded by life.

Could be that my mother made her that way, too. Or maybe it was having to raise me all these years.

Either way, we’re both cursed, just like the Blackthornes, so it doesn’t make sense that she’d side with the rumors.