The Curse Keepers (Curse Keepers series) (2 page)

I groaned, rolling my eyes. Every time she uttered “Look, sweetie,” I knew a lecture was coming.

Her mouth puckered in disapproval as she pointed a finger in my face. “Don’t you be rolling your eyes at me, Miss Elinor Dare Lancaster. You respect your elders.”

Elders, my eye. Marlena was barely fifteen years older than me.

“I know good and well that Dwight’s here on a temporary assignment. Which means he’ll be leaving soon, and you’ll be all alone.”

“So?”

“So, give that warm-blooded American man over there a chance, Ellie.”

I pursed my lips, shooting a glance at the customer at table five. He took a sip of his beer and continued watching the crowd outside the window. His short-sleeved T-shirt showed off his muscular arms—not solid enough to make him look like a bodybuilder, but just enough to show that he was a man accustomed to working with his hands. Suddenly, my mind took a detour to forbidden territory, thinking what he might do with those hands. I shook my head to snap out of my stupor. It had been too long since I’d had sex, and I wasn’t entirely immune to an attractive guy. My defenses were weakening.

Sighing, I shook my head. “For all you know, he’s a tourist, so what makes him any different than Dwight?”

Something about my demeanor signaled Marlena’s victory, and she grinned. “He’s ten times better looking, for starters.” She thrust his bill into my hands. “You’ll thank me for it later. Now go.” Turning with a laugh, she walked out the back door, calling into the kitchen, “I’ll be back in fifteen, Fred.”

I studied the dining room after she left. People often lingered at their tables, seeking refuge in the air conditioning from the humid heat outside. Only two of the twenty tables were occupied: the table where the man I’d tried to avoid for the last fifteen minutes sat, and a table with an older couple in my station. The couple, obviously tourists based on their camera sitting on the table and their “Outer Banks” T-shirts, had rung out with Marlena. They studied pamphlets while discussing where to go next and ignoring their half-full glasses. I took a pitcher of sweet tea and Marlena’s bill folder and stopped at the couple’s table first. “Would you like a refill?”

The woman smiled, pulling her reading glasses off her nose. “Oh, no, honey. We were about to leave.”

“You all are welcome to stay as long as you like,” I said, shifting my weight, trying to calm my increasing anxiety. I was getting light headed and I fought the urge to gasp for air. My blood pounded in my head. The man and woman in front of me seemed fine. “No need to hurry off.” If they left, I’d be alone in the dining room with the stranger. Sure, Fred was in the back, but little good that did me.

The older gentleman stood and grabbed his backpack. “Thanks for the beer recommendation. That was the best draft ale I’ve had in a long time.”

“You’re welcome,” I forced out with a smile, my heart racing as they headed for the door. “Thanks for coming in. Have a great day.”

They waved as they walked into the summer heat, and I turned to table five, trying to force air into my lungs.
This is stupid. He’s just some guy. Give him his ticket, and he’ll leave and that will be that. This has nothing to do with him.

But I knew he was different. Deep, deep down in the pit of my soul. One of the few things I remembered from Daddy’s story floated into memory, begging for attention. My shoe caught on the edge of a table foot, and I stumbled, sloshing tea over the side of the pitcher and onto a nearby table.

What in the hell was
wrong
with me?

The man turned his face to watch me. His dark eyes burned into mine. Marlena was right. He was an extremely good-looking man. His dark hair was closely trimmed and stubble covered his face, like he’d forgotten to shave for a few days. But the hint of dark circles underlined his eyes, giving him a weary look. He clutched his beer bottle, his knuckles white, as though he were nervous even though his expression suggested otherwise.

Alarms rang in my head again, my instincts pinging every nerve along my spine. I needed him to leave. Now.

I set the pitcher on the sticky table and took two steps toward him. The hair on my arms stood on end as though I’d become electrically charged.

What the hell?

The man’s eyes widened as he turned to me, his lips parting slightly.

I thrust the folder toward him from several feet away, and flopped it on the table with a dull thud. “You can pay whenever you’re ready,” I said in a rasp, the air sticking in my throat even more than before. My panic rose and I stomped it down, frustrated that after all these years, the fucking curse was the first place my mind leapt to in this situation.

The corners of his mouth lifted into the barest hint of a smile, giving him a ruggedly handsome look. I was sure most women around the world swooned at the sight. I, on the other hand, was close to passing out from lack of oxygen.

His chest rose and fell in heavy gasps. He was having a hard time breathing as well. It should have made me feel better. Instead, it made my near-hysteria worse.

Don’t let him touch you
.

I took two steps back and put my hand over my heart. Maybe we were being overcome with carbon monoxide poisoning. Could you get that from air conditioning? There had to be some logical explanation what was happening to me. Happening to
us
. I just couldn’t seem to find it at the moment.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and hastily removed some cash, tossing it on the table. The hair on his arms stood on end.

My eyes widened in fear as he got to his feet. He took a step toward me and stopped as I backed into a table. His dark, almost black, eyes held my gaze. “I didn’t catch your name.” His breath escaped in short bursts.

My face tingled from lack of oxygen, and I felt dangerously close to passing out. The closer he came toward me, the more difficult it was to breathe. I knew I should move away from him but everything around me slowed, and I couldn’t seem to get my muscles to work. Not to mention I was trapped by the table and two chairs on either side of me. The hair on my head felt electrified. “I didn’t give it.” My words came out slurred.

His face had paled and his eyes moved to my name tag. He grinned, but it wasn’t friendly. “Thank you,
Ellie
.” My name sounded like the answer to a riddle on his lips. “Until next time.”

He started to walk away, then stopped, spinning around and grabbing my right hand with his, as though he meant to shake my hand. An electrical shock ran from my palm into my chest.

For one brief moment, the entire world seemed magnified and microscopic all at once. The room faded and I was no longer me. I was the waves in the sound off the pier and the clouds in the sky. I was an ant outside on the parking lot. I was part of every tree on the street.

Before I could marvel at the vast connectedness of the universe, I felt a tear in the veil separating the earthly world from the spiritual, and the screams of hundreds of things, ugly and foul, filled my head.

The man’s mouth opened, and he dropped his hold with a start. Stumbling backward, he hurried out the door, not even casting a glance back.

My lungs expanded, as though some invisible band around my chest had burst loose. I sank into a nearby chair and sucked in gasps of air. My head spun, grappling to make sense of what had just happened, sure that I’d just had a hallucination, further proof that there was a logical explanation. Maybe I’d been poisoned. Or drugged. People didn’t sense bugs or plants. People didn’t feel like they were one with the water a hundred feet away.

The door creaked, and I jumped out of the seat, worried that he’d returned. Instead, a young family entered the restaurant. The mother pulled off her sunglasses and squinted at my startled reaction. I forced a smile and snatched up the pitcher off the nearby table. “Welcome to the New Moon. You all can take a seat wherever you’d like. I’ll be right with you.”

I hurried to the back and washed the now dried, sticky tea from my hand, trying to calm down. Never in my twenty-three years had I experienced anything like that. Yet part of the story Daddy had recited since before I could talk echoed in my head.

“
When the two Keepers meet for the first time, the seam separating the spirit world and our world will be ripped apart and the gate will be opened. Your chest will tighten, and you’ll have a hard time catching your breath. It will be as though the very air you breathe is sucked out of you. It is. The Keepers watch over the seam dividing the worlds. They alone will feel the tear.
That
is when the curse will be broken. Then God help us all
.”

My palm tingled and I glanced down at my hand, gasping at the faint pink mark I saw there—but that wasn’t all. The outline of a square surrounding a circle, their lines intersecting, covered my palm.

“
Once the mark of the Keeper appears, you have until the beginning of the seventh day to make things right
.”

Oh shit.

I had to talk to Daddy.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

Another rush hit within minutes of the man running out the door. It was as though he’d been keeping everyone away. But when I thought about it later, it was probably the two of us combined. He and I were polar opposites, like magnets when you try to stick the wrong ends together and they shove each other away. Not only could we not occupy the same space without repelling one another, but we flung off the people around us.

Until you flipped the magnets and set them right.

But then again, to my irritation, I’d hardly been repelled at all. Nearly suffocated, sure. But repelled? No. Marlena was right. He was extremely good looking, if only I could get past my sudden asthma attack. My reaction had to have been some kind of breathing episode exacerbated by my overactive imagination, because for some reason, he triggered a resurfacing of all the hocus-pocus I’d left in the past with my middle school Tamagotchi and *NSYNC posters.

The curse was make-believe and nonsense.

Still, something stirred deep inside, setting me on edge and making me clumsy the rest of the afternoon. What the hell had I experienced when he touched my hand? And how did I explain the scorch mark on my hand and the thing that looked like a tattoo?

“What’s gotten into you and more importantly, why are you still here?” Marlena asked. “You tryin’ to get out of your date with Dweeb tonight?”

Her question shook me out of my thoughts. I’d forgotten all about my date. I forced a scowl. “
Dwight
.” I rolled my eyes. “And no, I’m not. If anything,
I’m late for my shift at the inn. But I can’t leave because I’m covering for Lila. She had to run up to Norfolk.”

Marlena tsked. “That’s twice in two weeks that girl’s sloughed off her shift.” She snagged my shirt and pulled me backward, untying my apron. “Barb’s here. We can handle things until Lila gets in. You have to get ready to see Dagwood.”

She didn’t have to tell me to leave twice. “Dwight… and I thought you didn’t like him.”

Marlena shrugged with a grin that told me she was up to no good. “You said this was date five. Your men don’t make it much longer than that. The sooner Dwane is gone, the sooner you’ll hook up with someone like Mr. Hottie.”

With a sigh, I stripped my apron over my head and tossed it into a hamper. “His name is
Dwight
and things are different with him. He’s got a job with State Farm. He’s stable.” I grabbed my purse out of a drawer in the back room and stared at her, raising my eyebrows and daring her to contradict me.

Marlena placed her hand on the doorjamb to the back door, barring my exit. “Oh, he’s stable all right, but he’s so full of stability that he’ll suck the life out of ya.”

My heart thudded against my chest at her statement. Going out with Dwight was
nothing
like having the life sucked out of me. I’d had the life sucked out of me on two occasions. The first was figurative and had happened when my mother was killed. I didn’t care to dwell on that memory. The second had happened that afternoon and was quite literal.
Give me stability, thank you very much.