AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Quilla’s aunt nodded. “He was the son of Corandra Graykey and Booker Blayton. And the first person he fucked was his half sister, Locasta Blayton.”
“Locasta Blayton?” I repeated with a frown because something about that name rattled my memory banks. But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall where I’d heard it before.
Huh.
“Locasta seemed to think this made them one and onlys,” Melaina was saying. “But Holden liked to spread his seed indiscriminately, which probably made him a very experienced and accomplished lover, if you want my take on the situation. Except it just made Locasta irrationally jealous.” She rolled her eyes and muttered, “Idiot,” under her breath.
I sighed, hoping she wasn’t going to drag the story out twice as long as it didn’t need to be with her unnecessary commentary.
“So, Locasta and Holden had one daughter together, who went off to have her own daughter named Billa Blair. And when Billa was fourteen, Holden noticed her blooming, I guess you could say, and he became unnaturally fixated on her. He put her under a spell, preventing her from fighting off his advances, and with another spell after that, he sealed her lips to keep her from telling anyone about what he did during his grandf
atherly visits.”
“Mother of God,” I gasped, shuddering and cringing in horrified sympathy for the poor girl. I swallowed down a bit of bile rising in my throat. “He must’ve been fairly along in his years by then too.”
“He was sixty-two, I believe.”
I slapped my bound hands over my mouth and shook my head. Wrong. That was all just so disgustingly wrong.
“When Billa mysteriously turned up pregnant, Locasta immediately suspected Holden was the child’s sire, and she grew irate with jealousy, even though he denied it was true.”
“Wait, she was jealous?” I exploded incredulously. “Um, shouldn’t she have been—I don’t know—outraged instead? Appalled? Livid with murderous rage? What the hell was wrong with her?”
“A lot, I suspect,” Melaina answered. “And that was when the Graykey curse was created. Wanting to seek the truth, Locasta spelled Billa so a mark would appear on her child when it was born if Holden was indeed the father. And if he was, the babe, along with every generation thereafter, would suffer through an onslaught of reapings full of power and revenge and blood for the rest of eternity.”
“Jesus, God,” I mumbled, sitting back in shock. “How could she doom her own great-grandchild like that?”
Shaking her head silently, Melaina glanced away. When I saw her lift a hand to her eyes and swipe something away, I kept talking so she’d stop feeling compassion and sympathy and she wouldn’t bleed to death on me. “Shouldn’t there be a way to break the curse?”
Melaina stiffened her shoulders and turned back to me. “No. Or at least, if there is, it’s been forgotten over time, or Locasta was smart in her spell casting and forbade anyone from repeating the specifics.”
Damn. I balled my hands in a frustrated fist. “What happened to them; do you know? To Holden? Locasta? Billa?”
“Well, when Billa gave birth to her third marked son—”
“What?” I yelled. “He impregnated her three times?! And no one stopped him? Not Locasta, who knew the fucking truth? Or her daughter? Or Billa’s own father?”
“I’m getting there, Captain Impatient,” Melaina snapped. “I was just about to say Corandra finally discovered the truth and stopped him.”
I sighed gratefully, only to scowl. I’d heard that name quite a lot today. “Her again, huh?”
“Of course. Now, usually, Corandra was all about free will and letting everyone live their own life as they wished, whether she agreed with their decisions or not. But her son really needed to be stopped.”
“Yeah,” I muttered acerbically. “About three children too late.”
Melaina fluttered out a hand. “Whatever. In any case, she helped Billa break the spells cast on her by Holden, to which her great-granddaughter immediately used her freedom to slay Holden in his sleep.”
“Thank God.”
“She renamed herself Billa Purge and took her three sons—Ian, Iago, and Icarus—up north to live in what is now the Gill Caves in Lowden.”
“So that’s why I found so many Purges in the family line,” I realized with clarity. They’d been Purges for over two hundred years until Orick Graykey had changed the house name back to Graykey. Until this moment, I’d always thought he’d just changed it to Graykey, hoping to escape the Purge name. But it had been Graykey before, and he’d merely returned it to the original.
Interesting.
“Anyway, running and changing their name obviously didn’t help them escape the effects of the curse,” Melaina went on. “They still managed to have three children each, named accordingly, and two are typically doomed to die so that only the strongest child takes on their powers and prevails. And that, my clueless High Clifter, is how Lowden became ground zero for all the Graykey reapings.”
“Damn,” I murmured. “So whatever happened to Locasta?”
