The Curse Girl (4 page)

“I’m cursed. Do you think I have time to care about you too?”

I finished folding the rose and let it drop too. “Ditto, Beast.”

He folded his arms. “I’d really rather you didn’t call me that. I have a name.”

“Oh? I thought everyone was just called by their most defining role.”

“If that was the case, then you’d be called
Bitch
,” he said. His shoulders rose and fell as he stood glaring. His eyes were very bright.

I refused to respond to that. I stalked out of the room, and he didn’t follow.

SIX

I refused to eat dinner with them that night, although both Housekeeper and Rose came and begged me to come. I sat in my room and tried to think of ways I could escape the house besides just blowing it up, which wasn’t going to happen of course.

Servants knocked on the door, but I told them all to go away. Eventually they did, and I was alone. The sun sunk on the horizon, and darkness began to fill the room, drowning me in black. The whispers started, a cacophony of voices that hummed like bees in the walls.

And then the screaming began.

I crept to the door and opened it. A long, black hallway stretched before me. The screaming sounded muffled and far away. I shut the door and opened it again. Steps fell away from me, leading into the dark labyrinth I’d seen on my first day. The yells echoed weirdly, distorted.

It was coming from the labyrinth, then.

I didn’t go down the steps. I might not avoid unpleasant things, but I wasn’t crazy.

I shut the door and leaned against it, and stayed that way until morning.

~

“The Master has a message for you,” Housekeeper reported.

I ran a brush through my hair at the dressing table. I didn’t turn. “I don’t want to see him or talk to him. He’s a jerk.”

She set down a stack of clean sheets on my bed. “Please read it, Miss Beauty.” She put a letter sealed with wax on top of the sheets and crept away.

Maybe I’d scared her off with my questions. After she left I picked up the letter. I wouldn’t do what he wanted, naturally, but I might as well read it and see.

Dear Curse Girl,

I know you’re interested in a way out. I know my sister likes to preserve a sense of decency and decorum, and that means dining with the guests, not matter how infuriating they might be. So to preserve the peace, if you’ll join my sister and me for dinner, we can discuss your hopes of escape.

Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant

“Beast”

I crumpled up the letter and tossed it against the wall with a half-hearted sigh.

~

“You’re not going to find a way out,” Will said at dinner, after a cold silence in which the servants brought the food while Rose picked at her dress and her brother and I engaged in a scowling contest.

“Excuse me?”

“A way out of this house,” he repeated. His blue eyes shimmered as he spoke. It was a crime how beautiful those eyes were. They made it easier to hate him, too. Attractiveness went hand in hand with villains in real life, no matter what the fairy tales said.

“Hmmm,” I said.

“It’s impossible,” he said coldly.

“I’ll believe that when I see it, Beast.”

His face twisted with exquisite outrage, whether from what I’d called him, or my disbelief in his statement, I didn’t know. “Don’t you think I’ve tried to escape? Hasn’t it once entered into your foolish head that if there was some easy way out, like breaking a window or opening the right door, I’d have done it years ago?”

“Well, forgive me if I don’t trust you. You’ve got a nice setup here—servants you can boss around, a whole village that’s terrified of you—”

He held very still for a moment, his shoulders rigid. The fork in his hand trembled. “Believe me, if I could leave this place I’d do anything to make it happen.”

“As clearly demonstrated by your inclination to work with me.”

He speared a bite of asparagus with the fork. “You are infuriating.”

“So I’ve been told. You’d get along well with my father. And all my high school teachers. Most of the people in the town, really.”

“I doubt that. I imagine they’re as pathetic as the last time I was there.”

I wanted to slap him. But I needed information. “Yeah? When was that?”

He eyed me. “Long before you were born.”

“How is that possible? How are you not like, eighty years old? You can’t be older than twenty.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “I’m not as old as that.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s the curse. Time is different here.”

That made me freeze. “Different? What do you mean,
different?
”

Will scowled. “I came under the bondage of the curse four years ago. But since then, more than a generation of villagers have come and gone.”

I dropped my spoon, and it clattered to the floor. “Only four years ago? Impossible.” Still, my heart was pounding.

“That’s all the time that’s passed for me, in this house.”

“You’re just lying to scare me.”

“It’s true,” Rose said. She’d been silent up until this point, watching our conversation with wide eyes. I looked at her and noticed and feathery veins that patterned her face, the delicate blush of pink on her cheeks. Her eyelashes—were they … unfurling rose petals?

“Believe me,
Beauty
, I have other ways to scare you.” Will’s voice dragged my attention back to him. My skin prickled with sweat, and I looked away, thinking about the screams from the labyrinth I’d heard in the night.

Truth be told, I believed him. This house was crazy enough for it to be true. And if it was, then I had to get out of here fast. Otherwise I would break the curse and find Drew in college—or older! Married, maybe. Middle-aged. He would be old, and I would be still a teenager.

My heart started pounding. I tried to calm down by taking a few deep breaths. I couldn’t think about this now. I needed to focus. Get him to tell me more. “How exactly is it different?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “When we—when the curse first took effect, the seasons passed quickly. Snow, spring, falling leaves … we watched it all pass by through the windows at a dizzying rate. But now the seasons are slower. It’s almost as if the house were a giant top, spinning fast for three years, and now it has begun to slow.”

Dizziness threatened to overwhelm me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I would find out more about this time thing later. I had to prioritize.

“Let’s talk about the curse,” I said, trying to sound as if I were not about to become hysterical.

Rose sighed softly, as if I’d mentioned the death of her favorite pet. Will looked away. The muscle in his jaw twitched.

“Tell me,” I said, and my voice came out sharp. Rose flinched.

Will turned his head and caught me in his gaze. I wanted to shrink beneath it.

“There was a witch, and she cursed me. Cursed the whole house by extension, including my sister. She said there was a way to break it—if I was smart enough to find it—and then she left me with a riddle to solve and an hourglass to count down the time.”

I remembered the hourglass from my first day in the house. There hadn’t been much sand left in it.

“What happens if time runs out before you break the curse?”

His voice was icy. “Then I—we—remain cursed forever.”

“And what about me?”

“I don’t know about you. You probably stay stuck here too.” He didn’t look like he cared, either. Which didn’t surprise me. Why should he?

I needed him to keep talking. I couldn’t figure out a way to solve this if I didn’t know everything that was going on. “Tell me about this riddle,” I said.

“Break the riddle, break the curse. But I’ve never been able to figure it out. I doubt you’ll do any better than me.”

“Hey, you might try to contain your optimism. No reason to get your hopes up so high.”

He scowled. “Do you always approach grave situations with such flippancy? You won’t figure it out if I haven’t.”

I leaned forward and glared at him. “Try me, Beast Boy.”

I expected him to refuse. Instead, with the sigh of an oppressed martyr, he rolled his eyes at the ceiling and recited the words, looking more like a boy dutifully repeating a school poem for his grandmother than the feared beast of legend:

Let the Owner of this House be Cursed

Darkness and Moonlight Change the Face

Unless the Brightest Pearl He Grasps

Forever, He’ll take his Place

Creature of Regret and Scorn

Forever Left to Lapse and Mourn

His Fate inscribed in Letters of Love and Fury

Unless, Aid from a Beauty He shall Receive

Bestow the Long-Sought Gift and Then

Break the Curse With Word and Deed.

My skin prickled as I listened. I was supposed to . . . give him aid? He was supposed to find a pearl? Something about moonlight?

“That’s the whole riddle?”

“We’ve gone over every line dozens of times,” Rose said. “Hundreds, maybe.”

Will gazed at me, impassive. “And you have no idea what it could mean? Thought not.”

“How can it? I just heard it. I need time to think.” I hesitated, running over the lines again in my head. “You really think I’m the person called Beauty?”

His lips tugged down. “Well, your name is Beauty. If that’s what she meant.”

“William,” Rose said, warning him.

The comment stung. “If you want my help, you need to learn to be nicer.”

“You want to break the curse, I want to break the curse. We don’t need to be nice. We need to be effective. Just help me figure it out, and I’ll make you a rich woman.”

All I wanted to do was get out of this house. He could keep his money.

“Okay,” I said. “We need to go through the curse line by line. Figure out what it means. The first part curses you, obviously. But that second bit, ‘unless the brightest pearl he grasps.’ Are you supposed to find a piece of jewelry?”

He sighed. “Believe me, I’ve torn this house apart looking for some kind of pearl. A pearl necklace, a pearl earring, a broach—anything.”

“And?”

“I never found so much as a bit of pearl dust.”

Crap. I fought the sense of disappointment that welled inside. Then I thought of something. “How are you sure it’s in this house?”

“Well, how could I break the curse otherwise? The front door is locked to me. The servants can’t leave. We’re trapped here just like you. And another thing—the witch that cursed me used to live here.”

“What?” That was something I’d never heard before in any of the legends in town. “She lived here?”

“Yes.” He traced a circle on the table. “She was my sister-in-law.”

“What?”

“She was married to my brother.”

“I understand what the word means,” I growled. “I’m just surprised. If she’s your sister-in-law, why’d she curse you?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “And it really doesn’t matter.”

“It might!”

“Look.” He braced both hands on the table and leaned forward. His blue eyes snapped with unspoken emotion. “I don’t really like having you here. And I don’t really want you prying into the private bits of my life. So why don’t you eat your supper and then go back to your room like a good Curse Girl, and I’ll send for you when I need you to give me aid, whatever that might entail. Got it?”

“No way,” I said, throwing down my napkin and jumping up. “I’m not some pansy you can snap into submission like Rose. I’m not going to cower—oh, the scary beast, what shall I do!—and forget about my responsibilities here!”

“
Your
responsibilities?” His hands twitched like he was keeping himself from grabbing a dish and throwing it at me.

“I’m supposed to help you break the curse, you idiot!”

“Listen,” he said, his voice rising a little, “Just because the curse might mention you—and nobody is sure that’s even what it’s doing when it speaks of a beauty, mind you—doesn’t mean you get free reign in this house, and it doesn’t mean I have to listen to anything you say. Do you understand?”

“Fine.” I scooted my chair back and stood. “Whatever.”

“Where are you going?”

“To my room. You’re being a complete jerk and I’m not going to fight about this right now.”

“I’m being a
what?
”

I didn’t respond. I just stalked out.

~

That night, the screams were worse than before. They rose above the whispers in the walls and the rustling beneath my bed. Did anyone else hear them? Was I going insane?

I lay on my bed with a pillow smashed over my ears to drown them out. But still they tormented me. Even the whispers in the walls around me didn’t cover the sounds. Shivers danced up and down my skin as I listened. The words of the curse danced in my head.

Let the Owner of this House be Cursed…

I thought about Rose, and Housekeeper.

Darkness and Moonlight Change the Face…

The screams came again, dragging me from my morbid musings. I twisted under the sheets, trying to get comfortable. Trying to sleep instead of thinking about it. But I couldn’t. Was someone hurt? Was that horrible Beast torturing someone? Someone like me, trapped here because of a malicious curse?

Forever Left to Lapse and Mourn…

Somebody was mourning right now.

I threw back the blanket and fumbled for the slippers Housekeeper had brought me earlier. I had to find out.

Feeling along the wall, I found one of the candles and plucked it from its bracket. The flame ignited once the candle was in my hand, just like before. Slowly, I opened my bedroom door.

The steps to the labyrinth fell away from me. A dank draft caught the candle flame and made it dance.

“Maybe I’m supposed to go down these steps,” I muttered aloud. Famous last words, maybe. I inched forward. My toe bumped on the next step down. My chest squeezed tight.

An agonizing scream echoed from below. I froze.