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I had complete faith in Wes. As long as that remained true, and our belief in each other remained strong, the curse wouldn’t be able to find a way between us. That’s why it attacked our minds first. If it could shred through our bond, we had no hope of defeating it.
His brow was still pinched. I ran my thumb over the worry line to smooth it out as I held his gaze. “I need you to believe in me like I believe in you.”
“I do.” He cupped the back of my neck and kissed me deeply, stealing the breath from my lungs and making me dizzy with the heady combination of lust and love.
I hugged his waist to keep my balance. “Let’s finish this thing so we can get a quickie in before I have to get back to the shop.”
He let out a laugh and took my hand, though the tension remained in his frame. Uncertainty rolled off of him in waves. The closer we got to the cave, the more fear and doubt rose to the surface. It permeated the air. While I could feel it slithering against me and searching for cracks, it couldn’t find a way in.
I couldn’t say the same for Wes, though. He looked down at me and smiled, but it was strained around the edges. The past still ate away at him in little ways that only time could heal. I squeezed his hand, pushing the love I had for him into my energy, hoping it would be enough.
The closer we got to the center of the island, the less life there seemed to be. It started out small. Birds stopped chirping, insects quit buzzing past our ears. Then it got worse. Once bright and healthy bushes had turned to brown husks. Flowers that had once burst with color and sweet scents were now little more than wilted stems. The trees were all bare stalks of deadwood, scratching at the sky with gnarled branches.
“This is cozy,” I said.
“The curse has been busy.” Wes’s lips thinned as he tightened his grip on my hand. “We shouldn’t let go of each other unless it becomes absolutely necessary.”
I agreed. We’d been holding hands most of the walk, pushing the positive and negative energy between us, but at this point, I didn’t want to physically break from him unless we needed to trap the smoke between us. As we approached the ring of birch trees around the dead zone, I expected to see a wall of smoke rising over the cave like an atomic mushroom cloud, but the sky was clear. Silent, dead, and empty per the usual, but not much different than a regular day up here, with the exception of the cracked cave and dull stones.
Wes stayed with me, keeping the charge, as I approached the center of the circle. That nagging feeling in my mind increased. There was something here. I couldn’t put my finger on it though. I touched the topaz, the place where my storms had been trapped for over three centuries. My magic squeezed my lungs to the point where it became difficult to draw a breath. I pressed a hand over my stomach to calm it.
Wes grimaced. “My magic hates it here.”
“Mine too.”
My mind pulled in a million directions as I looked over the stones, feeling like the answer was just there, right on the tip of being known, and I couldn’t quite grab it. My palm glimmered with golden light. I placed it directly over the topaz. Power began to flow out of me and into the stone. Was this all we needed to do to bind the curse again? Gather our light and push our palms against the stones? Why hadn’t the legend just said so? We could’ve done this weeks ago.
Before the thought could even clear my head, my magic grabbed my throat. It battered my rib cage, pummeled my kidneys, and thrashed around inside me. It crushed my airway shut until I dropped my hand. I bent over, holding my chest as I sucked in air.
Wes rubbed my back with a look of concern on his face. “I don’t think you should do that again. You work with your magic, remember?”
“Right…”
When we had last come up here and I touched my stone, my magic had a similar reaction, though not quite as intense. Probably because my energy hadn’t been activated and I’d only touched it with a finger, not my palm where my powers actually flowed. But I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I hadn’t been working well with my magic anyway and just assumed it was another side effect. It didn’t care if I touched Wes’s emerald, though. I slapped my palm over his stone, just to be sure, and got the same result. Nothing. Same as the other stones. My magic only seemed to care about the topaz.
I stacked everything about our island’s history together, separating the legend from the things we either knew or strongly suspected. The descendants would’ve had the same powers as us and the same relationship with their magic as us. They sacrificed their magic to trap the curse. Then the majority left the island, spreading out to places unknown. The legend claimed it was due to heartbreak over losing their magic, but Wes and I agreed that it must’ve been to keep it contained within the stones.
There hadn’t been twelve direct descendants on the island at the same time in over three hundred years. Until Thora Chase returned to Zodiac Cove. Only then could the magic break free. When it had twelve human hosts to hold it. Whatever the original twelve had done to create the stones hadn’t been a good or right thing. Trapping the magic had been done without consent. Our magic would kill us both before it would let us put it back into the stones.
So how were we supposed to bind the curse?
Unless…
We were never supposed to bind the curse in the first place.
“Oh my God.” I held my hands over my open mouth as it all fell into place. The thing we’d been missing the whole time. I grabbed Wes’s arm. “We’re not supposed to trap the curse. It never should’ve been bound within that cave.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“The descendants made a mistake.” My gaze darted to the stones again. The certainty of it rose inside me and tangled around my magic, confirming that I was right. “I don’t know why they did it. Maybe they were tired or scared or didn’t realize there was another way. But they weren’t supposed to sacrifice their magic to bind the curse. They were supposed to use their powers to defeat it.”
Leaves crunched to my left, the sound of footsteps approaching. I tensed, clutching harder to Wes’s arm. Jocelyn had stopped running tour groups up here, and the curse had wound enough of its inky tendrils through the surrounding area to keep people away, so it was doubtful any stray hikers had stumbled here by accident. And that wasn’t the sound smoke made as it slithered through the forest. Those were human footfalls.
Wes adjusted his stance in preparation to fight. Energy charged between us, lighting up our hands with that brilliant gold and green glow. We held our palms out, ready to blast whatever corporeal form came through the trees.
I put my hand down when Wes stepped out from behind a birch. Beside me, the real Wes let go of his light and dropped my hand. I looked between the two of them. Devastation marred the features of my Wes, the one who stood beside me. He must’ve been seeing something different. An illusion then. Not yet corporeal. The curse was trying to trick us. I could feel its creepy claws sinking into my brain, probing for doubt.
“Audrey.” Fake Wes looked at me with cold eyes. That wasn’t my Wes. He never looked at me that way, even when I thought he’d betrayed me. “You were never good enough. What makes you think anything has changed?”
