The Curse Keepers Collection (156 page)

But what if it actually
had
happened? My grandmother firmly believed the Dare Keeper would seek me out to break the curse. And Ahone had confirmed her fear that the other Keeper would be powerful . . . and probably vindictive to boot. But what if I really could take the offensive, stopping her before her gifts blossomed?

I snorted, then immediately regretted it when pain shot through my head. This was why I rarely drank too much. I couldn’t hold my liquor. That would have been a bitter disappointment to my alcoholic father.

My cell phone rang, the sound making me jump and sending more pain through my head. I slid my phone out of my pocket and grimaced. It was the very last person I wanted to talk to, but I couldn’t avoid him forever. I answered it, already cringing before he spoke.

“Collin, you disappointment,” Marino’s raspy voice filled my ear. Apparently, there was plenty of disappointment to go around as far as I was concerned.

“Perhaps your expectations are too high for me, Marino.”

He chuckled. “Good thing I liked your old man or I wouldn’t let you get away with talking to me like that.”

I bit my tongue to keep from telling him the fact that he’d liked my father was reason enough to question his judgment. No need to push my luck.

“I know you must have gotten my message requesting your presence at my office, Collin. Why has it taken you so long to get back to me?”

I stood and looked around at the water, trying to find the shore. I must have drifted deeper into Pamlico Sound. How was I getting cell phone service out here? I opened the door to the captain’s room and turned on the navigational gear, waiting for it to warm up. “I’ve been detained. I’m out on the sound with a dead engine.”

Marino belly-laughed.

The GPS turned on and I saw I was a good half mile off shore, closer to Ocracoke Island than Hattaras Island. Shit. I’d been drifting all night. “I’m glad you find it amusing,” I said when he finally settled down.

“Why do you insist on keeping that death trap?” he asked.

“I’ve already told you,” I grumbled, heading back outside and dropping to my knees next to the engine compartment. “Tradition.”

“Your father started a new tradition before his disappearance. You should follow in
those
family footsteps, which leads me to the reason I’ve requested a meeting with you. Since you seem so reluctant, here’s an added incentive: an invaluable estate collection that went missing around the same time as your old man recently found its way to the surface.”

I sucked in a breath, sitting back up. “My father said he was working on something called the Ricardo Estate.”

“That’s right. Now get your ass in here and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Why do I give a shit about some estate collection that disappeared around the same time as my father?” I asked, trying to mask the level of my interest. “He was a mean drunk who beat the shit out of my mother. The day he disappeared was the best day of my young life.”

He laughed again. “You’re a good bullshitter, Collin Dailey, but I know you better than you think. You’re curious as hell to know what it’s all about. You may not give a shit about your father’s disappearance, but the estate is one giant mystery you want to solve. Come see me, Collin. This afternoon. Three o’clock.”

I cursed after he hung up. He did know me well. Too well. He’d met me as a child and had started to study me years before I realized what he was doing. Marino had grown in power since I’d first met him after my father’s disappearance, and his rise to bad-guy greatness could be attributed to his ability to read people. He knew his enemies as well as his associates. He knew what made people tick—what buttons to push, what triggers to pull to get them to do what he wanted. Marino had figured me out all right, but at least there was an upside: he’d also taught me to hide myself from everyone else. One of many reasons I was still under his thumb.

I examined the engine again and came up with a temporary fix that might get me back to the dock if I was lucky. When I was back on dry land, it would be time for some serious soul-searching about what to do with the money-sucker.

It was nearly noon when I tied up the
Lucky Star
to the dock. My beat-up red truck was in the parking lot, the windows rolled down, daring anyone to come steal it. I’d scrimped and saved to come up with the fifteen hundred dollars I’d needed to buy the thing when I was fifteen. My mother had been in and out of mental health hospitals since I was eleven, and we’d lost my father’s car. We’d only managed to hold on to our house because it belonged to Grandma Opal and we didn’t have any mortgage payments. My father’s meager social security checks, which continued to arrive long after he disappeared, helped pay the taxes and utilities. And my own wages from working for my uncle on his fishing boat helped with food and clothing for the whole family. So when I turned fifteen, I bought the truck with spare money I’d been saving for two years, and drove it without a license for the six months before my sixteenth birthday. I drove like a grandma to make sure I didn’t get pulled over. It was the one thing I truly owned.

As much as I hated to think about it, Marino now held the title on my boat.

I drove home to the tiny house where I’d grown up. Sometimes I was surprised I still lived here. My mother was gone and Conner had moved out years ago. Maybe I was a masochist, determined to coexist with the haunting memories of my father’s abuse. But most of his violence had been aimed at our mother, who’d done her best to protect us. Conner remembered things differently, blaming my mother for staying in the first place, subjecting us all to our father’s wrath. But Conner liked to toss judgment around, and he always made sure to heap plenty on me as well. Nevertheless, I stayed in the run-down house, telling myself it was because I could live there rent-free. It wasn’t like I spent much of my free time there anyway.

I pulled into the driveway and my stomach tightened when I saw that the front door was partially open behind the storm door. Someone was in my house. Only two people could be there—my brother, which seemed unlikely since it was a little past noon on a Tuesday afternoon and Conner had a
respectable
job at an insurance firm, or my grandmother.

When I walked in through the door, she was sitting in my father’s old, green, threadbare recliner in the corner.

I offered her a grim smile. I knew this wasn’t a social call. Her lost souls were more gossipy than the women at her bingo night. “Grandmother,” I said, walking into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water from the fridge. “Glad to see you still have your key.”

“Of course I have a key. I own the damn house.”

I screwed the cap off my bottle and lifted it in salute. “And you can have it back anytime you want.”

“We both know that’s not why I’m here.”

I sat on the sofa across from her, leaning back in a nonchalant pose, even though I was feeling anything but. She never came to my house, so this was a bad sign. Was this confirmation that my tête-à-tête with Ahone had actually happened?

“Where were you last night?”

“Out on the sound.”

“Something happened.” It was a statement, not a question.

I cocked an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Don’t get smart with me, Collin Fitzgerald. You need to tell me everything.”

I crossed my legs and stretched my arm across the back of the sofa. “Something happened, all right. That piece of shit engine on the boat finally crapped out for good. I was lucky to make it back to shore this morning.”

She scowled, looking like she was about to wallop me in the head. I wouldn’t put it past her, which was one of the reasons I was leaning back. “You know damn good and well what I’m talking about.”

“Actually, Gran. I don’t. Why don’t you enlighten me?” I wasn’t exactly sure why I was lying to her. It would serve me better to tell her the truth and get her opinion on the whole mess, but lying was such an ingrained habit, it felt more natural than telling her what had really happened, as sick and twisted as that was.

“The lost souls are like a flock of chattering birds. They say the entire spirit world has been shaken.”

“Really?” I asked in mock surprise, taking a drink. “What could that be about?”

“Don’t you lie to me, Collin.”
She was up and out of the chair faster than I’d seen her move in years. All five-foot-two-inches of her towered over me. “Something happened on that boat of yours, and you’re going to tell me what it was.”

I heaved out a sigh. “I got a visit from a bright ball of light.”

She waited for me to continue.

“You realize anyone else would call me crazy.”

Her mouth twitched to the side. “I’m not anyone else. What was it?”

Fear caught my breath and “Ahone” came out in a whisper.

She sat back down in the chair, her face turning pale. “What did he want?”

“He wants me to break the curse.”

“You?”

I nodded. “He says the other Keeper is strong and I need to find her before her power grows and she destroys us all.”

Her mouth pressed into a tight line. “Do you believe him?”

I shrugged, my bravado evaporating. “I don’t know. I know he tricked Manteo, but what if he’s right?”

She remained silent.

Running my hand through my hair, I leaned forward. “You taught me that I should wait for the Dare Keeper. But what if you got it wrong?”

Her eyes narrowed. If I hadn’t been a twenty-five-year-old man, I would have been worried she’d take me out back and switch me.

“What do your voices say?” I asked.

“They are strangely silent on specifics.”

“But they told you the Dare Keeper was female and strong, which matches what Ahone told me last night. That was years ago. What do they say now?”

She shook her head, looking worried. “They stopped talking about her after your father disappeared.”

My eyebrows rose. “You never told me that.”

“You never asked,” was her short reply.

“They haven’t spoken of her for fifteen years?”

“No.”

“And now?”

“Still nothing. Even when I specifically ask.”

“What does that mean?”

Her mouth puckered. “Probably nothing good.”

This was getting worse and worse.

She stood. “What did you tell him?”

I stood next to her, dwarfing her tiny frame. I had seen her no more than a week ago, but she seemed older and more fragile. Even though she was in her late eighties, she’d never looked it. Until now. “I told him I’d wait for the other Keeper to find me.”

She grabbed my hands in her own and looked into my eyes. “Good boy.”

My mouth parted in surprise. Praise from my grandmother was as rare as a blue moon.

“Ahone used trickery and deceit with our ancestor, and he’ll use it again. I have no idea what he could be up to, but his purpose could only be evil. Stay away from that liar and carry on with your life.”

I nodded as I walked her to the door, though I couldn’t help but wonder if she was being naive. Was it possible to say no to a god and expect him to accept that answer? Had Manteo told Ahone no countless times before finally saying yes?

After showering, I made a sandwich and opened up my secondhand laptop, hacking into my neighbor’s Internet to do another search for anything about the Ricardo Estate. It had been a couple of years since I’d attempted to track down any information on it, and this search proved to be just as unfruitful as my previous attempts. It was as if the damn thing didn’t exist. For all I knew, it didn’t.

I pulled up in front of the thrift store Marino used as a front for his business. His newest front-desk employee, a teenage boy, looked just as bored as all of his predecessors. I’d been in the store a few times, and I’d never seen more than a handful of customers. I was certain the lack of business was the reason for the high turnover at the desk.

The employee perked up when I entered the musty store, but slumped over the counter again when he saw me heading for the curtain that divided the storefront from the back room where all the action happened. I found Marino in his office; a small space filled with disassembled electronic parts. He fancied himself a computer guru, but I’d never actually seen anything completed and in working order. At least it kept him occupied. An idle Marino was nothing but trouble for everyone.