How to Break an Evil Curse

by Laura Morrison

  “As you wish,” he grumbled and floated through the wall. Almost as soon as he had gone, she wished he hadn’t. It was pitch black, and she was hesitant to feel around for fear of what she might find. At least she didn’t hear any scurrying sounds or feel cobwebs.

  On the other side of the wall, Warren had waited until the stone was back in place, then he had unlocked the door and flung it open with a look of utmost perturbation upon his visage. “What gives, man?” he inquired of the angry silhouette in the hallway. Corrine joined her brother, bringing the lantern along with her in order to shed a little light on the situation.

  Mortimer looked at Corrine with confusion. “But—” he spluttered. “You’re not her—” and then he peered beyond them into the sparse little room. He pushed Warren aside and walked right in, spinning around in a slow circle to take in everything. “Where is she?”

  “Where is who?” Warren asked with fake but convincing confusion.

  “I followed her down here. I followed her to this room,” Mortimer insisted, though he found himself becoming steadily less sure by the second. Corrine and Warren were pretty good actors (they had been members of a traveling theater troupe since they’d been in diapers, after all), and their looks of confusion seemed mighty real.

  “No… You followed me,” Corrine said. “I was just coming back here from the bathroom when you came slamming down the stairs, yelling like a crazy person. I assure you, you were following me, not someone else.”

  “Well, yes,” Mortimer spluttered. “Yes, I followed you. But you were with her. I saw her bump into someone halfway down the hall. You. And you brought her here.” He looked around confusedly. “I know what I saw.”

  “Well then, where is this mystery lady?” Warren asked, gesturing at the empty room.

  Mortimer looked angrily from Corrine to Warren and back again. “Okay. So you must be in cahoots with that moron innkeeper as well. Which means you aren’t going to tell me anything.” Then he went and plunked himself right down on Warren’s bed. “So I’m just going to wait right here.”

  “You can’t do that!” Corrine exclaimed. “It’s the middle of the night. We need to sleep! We have nothing to do with whatever it is you’re blathering about!”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Come on. You mistook what you saw out there in the hallway,” Warren said. “It was dark. You thought you saw a lady come in here with my sister, but she probably just went into some other doorway. You should be out there searching the basement,” he said pointing toward the hallway.

  “I know what I saw. I’m a miner. I’m used to seeing in poor light.” Mortimer glared at them. “She ran into this room. She is hiding somewhere.” He felt a bit like an idiot being so insistent that Julianna was here when she clearly wasn’t. He began to worry that more damage had been done during that mugging than he’d originally thought. “Oh!” he cried, making Warren and Corrine jump. “An invisibility potion! She must have used one!”

  While they watched Mortimer stretch out his arms and feel all around the room for an invisible person, the siblings exchanged silent looks of amusement.

  “You’re loony, man,” Warren said. “My sister and I have nothing to do with whatever you are a part of. And we need to sleep.”

  “Yeah,” Corrine said. “And I can’t sleep with some strange man in my room.”

  Warren nodded. “Yeah. Like, her reputation and stuff.”

  “Maidenly honor,” Corrine elaborated. “Gotta keep that intact.”

  Mortimer snorted as he reached under one of the beds. “Uh huh. Right. This dude here—your brother?—he’ll protect you, right?”

  “Well sure,” Warren conceded. “But people will talk. And we can’t have that. Maidenly honor is important.”

  Corrine nodded. “I’ll never land a man if you stay in here.”

  Warren went on, “And she needs to land a man.”

  Mortimer shook his head and glared at them while feeling around under the other bed. “I’m not going anywhere. Besides us three, the only person who knows I’m in here is that other lady, and I’m guessing she won’t be gossiping about you since you’re all working together.”

  They kept up the argument for a good long while. Corrine and Warren insisted that Mortimer had lost track of his mystery lady in the dark hallway, and Mortimer insisted that they were hiding her somewhere. As with most heated arguments, in the end no one’s mind was changed, and if anything, Mortimer was more convinced than ever that he was right and that these two were stonewalling him. Somehow, though, by the end of the argument they had decided that if Mortimer was indeed going to stake out their room, and Warren and Corrine were indeed not going to get any more sleep that night, they might as well have a little fun instead of continuing with a pointless argument.

  So, Warren pulled out a stack of cards. “You know Crazy 8’s?” he asked Mortimer, who nodded and flexed his fingers. They sat down on the ground and began to play.

  “They’re doing what?” Julianna whispered to Dexter when he floated through the wall to report.

  “Playing Crazy 8’s. I think you’re going to be in here a while.”

  She sighed and leaned against the wall. “I wonder what time it is. I can’t have more than two hours left to get back.”

  “Well at least if you get stuck here after sunrise, you’re in a dark place.”

  She gasped, “If I get stuck here after sunrise?” It had never even occurred to her that this might happen. But yes, if Mortimer had really decided to plant himself down in that room, then she couldn’t leave her hiding place. And if he stayed there for even a few more hours, then she would indeed be stuck in this room until the following night. Delia would wake and find her missing. Her family and ghost friends would go crazy with worry. “Oh no,” she breathed. “Dexter, what if I get stuck here? How long can Mortimer possibly stay?”

  “Whatever will be will be,” Dexter said calmly. “At least you won’t die. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  Since there was nothing for her to but sit down on the floor and worry and wait, that’s what she did. After a while, Dexter got tired of her whining and decided to float off and see how much of the inn he could explore before reaching the end of his spectral tether.

  Meanwhile, back on the high seas, Jane and Captain Maximus McManlyman were hauling an unconscious Farland Phelps up the stairs and onto the deck of the pirate ship. When Jane had asked McManlyman to help her out, he had taken it all in stride, not even thinking to ask who Farland was or why they were dragging an unconscious guy out of the infirmary and onto the deck in the wee hours of the morning.

  It was only when she asked him to help her stuff Farland into a barrel that he asked, “Now what’s going on here?”

  “The barrel’s so he won’t drown when we throw him overboard.”

  “Um…”

  “Look, we don’t have much time. I’ll explain later. Right now, all you need to know is that he’s a bad guy and I’ve been keeping him unconscious for Warren and his family. I can’t keep him unconscious any longer, though, because the drugs have run out. But he’s a wizard, so I don’t want him around me when he wakes up and realizes what I’ve done. So, I’m just tossing him overboard instead,” she explained. “He’ll wake up and magic himself back onto land,” she added as though McManlyman might actually be concerned for Farland’s safety.

  McManlyman pondered a moment. “Wait. Why do you want him to magic himself onto land? He’s a bad guy, right?” He pulled out his cutlass and asked, “Wouldn’t killing him solve things?”

  “Captain, if I thought killing bad guys was the way to solve problems, I could have poisoned you and your pirates about ten times over and made my escape.”

  McManlyman frowned, feeling a bit hurt by her words. He had thought that, while they hadn’t exactly started out on the best foot, they had bonded
over the past few days. They’d had dinner two nights in a row in his quarters and had had some good heart-to-hearts.

  Or so he’d thought.

  To find that she still considered him a bad guy who could theoretically be neutralized through poisoning made him feel quite depressed. It had been a while since McManlyman had been in a relationship. He was starting to daydream about the possibilities with Jane.

  That very morning, he had been scanning through one of his very favorite romance novels—one that featured a lovely lady who had been taken captive by pirates, but in a great plot twist she actually ended up falling in love with the dashing, misunderstood pirate captain who was really quite a sensitive guy on the inside and just needed the love of a good woman to sort him out. A first-rate book in his opinion.

  Clearly, her thoughts were not running in the same direction as McManlyman’s.

  “Put away your sword,” she said with obvious annoyance. Violence and Hippocratic oaths just didn’t mix as far as she was concerned. “Warren and I talked it through, and the plan is that I stick this guy in a barrel.”

  “My way is better,” McManlyman grumbled. But he didn’t want to make her mad, so he refrained from slitting Farland’s throat, and instead sheathed his cutlass with a sigh. “You ‘good guys’ make things so much harder for yourselves when you take murder off the table.”

  She stared at him incredulously for a few moments and looked like she was about to say something, but instead clamped her mouth shut and rolled over the empty barrel she’d brought up from the galley. Together they stuffed Farland in and sealed the top up good and snug. Then they rolled it over the edge of the ship and stood side by side, watching it bobbing off into the ocean and toward the sun which was just starting to rise over the horizon. McManlyman toyed with the idea of mentioning how romantic he found sunrises to be, but he looked down and saw Jane had already walked away.

  Without even so much as a thank you.

  Chapter Twenty

  Julianna had, at long last, managed to fall asleep as she sat against the wall of the hidden room. She woke only when the sound of the stone rubbing against its neighbors pierced the silence. “You can come out,” came Warren’s voice. “He’s gone.”

  Dexter had already informed her that there were no windows in their room, so Julianna crawled through the hole in the wall with no fear of sunlight. Warren extended a hand to help her to her feet.

  No magical curse-breaking sparks flew upon contact.

  “Hi,” he said, “I hope things weren’t too uncomfortable for you in there last night.”

  “Better than getting caught by that guy who was chasing me,” she said, brushing off her dress. “Are you sure he’s gone?”

  “Yeah. My sister even followed him for a few blocks to make sure he wasn’t going to circle back. I think he would have stayed indefinitely, but there was apparently something important going on back in his village, and he had to start his journey this morning to make it in time.”

  “Lucky for me,” she sighed, thinking guiltily of Mortimer. But then she pushed away the guilt because there was currently no fixing it. She said, “Thank you so much for your help. Really. If I hadn’t run into you guys, I’d have been in big trouble.” Warren had no way of knowing what an exaggeration that was; really, it wouldn’t have been too bad if Mortimer had caught her. He would have just taken back the box that belonged to him anyway, given her a disappointed look because up until the box fiasco things had been going swimmingly between them as regarded potential future romance, and gone on his way; she would have had to go back to the smugglers with no box, but that wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Just the end of her adventures.

  “Happy to help,” Warren said with a smile. “You know, I gotta say, that Mortimer didn’t seem too bad. A little lecturey about workers’ rights, and a bit too good at Crazy 8’s if you’re playing for money, but I tell you if I hadn’t seen with my own two eyes that he chased you down that hallway, and if I hadn’t heard him threatening to break down the door, I’d never have believed it of him. Pretty cool dude.”

  “Oh yeah?” Julianna asked and sat down uninvited on one of the beds. It had been an uncomfortable night, and even the lumpy old musty mattresses were looking mighty welcoming. She was very aware that Mortimer was a pretty cool dude; aware that he was the good guy and she was the bad guy. But she felt that in order to keep up her façade as the damsel in distress, she had better malign Mortimer’s character, pronto. “Well, he seemed like a big jerk to me.” Not the best maligning, but all she could muster up, considering how bad she felt and how much she still liked Mortimer even after all the yelling and chasing and misunderstanding.

  “Naturally. And I’m sure he really is a big jerk. Just saying he’s good at faking niceness.” Warren changed the subject then. “My name’s Warren.” He held out his hand.

  “Jennifer,” Julianna said. She took his hand in hers and gave it a shake.

  Still no magical curse-breaking sparks upon contact.

  At that point, there was a knock on the door, and Corrine announced from the other side, “It’s me.”

  Warren went to get the door, but Julianna screeched, “Are there any windows in the hallway?”

  Warren stopped short and looked at her confusedly with his hand on the doorknob. “Um.”

  “It’s very important,” Julianna insisted. “Don’t open the door until I know whether there’s any sunlight. Any sunlight at all.” As she talked, she got up and walked to the corner behind the door so it would act as a shield if needed.

  “Er, Corrine, are there any windows in the hallway? Any sunlight at all?” he asked as he looked questioningly at Julianna.

  “I’m allergic. Very allergic,” Julianna said by way of explanation.

  “Nope, no windows,” said Corrine. “No sunlight.”

  Julianna nodded, and Warren opened the door. In walked Corrine, who saw Julianna and said, “So, you’re out! Hi, I’m Corrine.”

  “Jennifer,” said Julianna again. “Thanks for helping me out.”

  “No trouble. Hey, did you really steal something from that guy? He was super mad.”

  “Nope,” Julianna lied. “I don’t know what that was all about.”

  “He was pretty certain you stole something,” Corrine insisted.

  “I’m guessing someone else in the bar last night stole whatever it was, and he just assumed it was me for some reason,” Julianna said with a shrug.

  “I just don’t see why—”

  “Geez, Corrine, don’t interrogate her. Why are you acting so suspicious?”

  “I dunno. It just seems like someone like her could quite plausibly be the thief he accused her of being. It isn’t much of a stretch.”

  “Whatever do you mean by that? A person like me?” asked Julianna, so annoyed at Corrine’s implications that she found herself talking in her haughty, princess voice.

  “I mean, a person who doesn’t even have the money for shoes might be inclined to steal. Obviously, you’re pretty strapped for cash.”

  “Oh!” Julianna said, looking down at her destroyed slippers. “I can so afford shoes. It’s just…I’m new in town and I haven’t had a chance…It’s hard…” She found herself struggling to explain why she didn’t have shoes when probably everyone but the poorest people around (or cursed princesses who never set foot outside) had them.

  “Being allergic to sunlight and all, it must be hard to get to a shoe store during business hours,” Warren commented.

  “Exactly,” Julianna said, thankful that he’d supplied her with a somewhat believable reason.

  “Hey, listen, Corrine and I are going out for a bit,” Warren said; they had decided to risk a bit of early morning shopping since there were some provisions they needed, and the earlier they went out the less the chance that some Farland-related hijinks would come up. “Obviously you can�
��t come, but if we can get your shoe size, we could pick up something for you. It’s only a matter of time before you step on something sharp and germy with those slippers, and then you’ll get an infection.”

  Julianna was impressed that he was among the minority of the population who thought infections came from germs and not spells cast by angry wizards. “That’d be swell!” she said excitedly, because he was right: walking around in her slippers was dangerous, since the discovery of antibiotics in Fritillary was at least a few decades down the road, she could well end up dead, or with an amputated foot, if she stepped on the wrong thing. “But I don’t know my shoe size.” The Royal Cobbler had never shared that intelligence with her.

  “Here, we’re about the same height, let’s compare feet,” he suggested, and they soon ascertained that she needed a pair of shoes a little smaller than the size Warren wore.

  Corrine watched the exchange from her bed without comment; Julianna felt strongly that Corrine was busy judging her and forming some fairly negative conclusions. However, once Julianna had handed over her pouch of money (“See!” she said with a glare at Corrine. “I have plenty money.”) in order for them to pay for her footwear and Warren had put his shoes back on in preparation for departure, Corrine said in a friendly enough manner, “Take a nap on my bed if you want. Make sure you lock the door. The innkeeper’s a creep. But you probably already know that.”

  “Tell me about it,” Julianna muttered.

  After they left, she laid down, staring at the ceiling and smiling a bit; those had been some friendly folks! Or at least the brother had been.

  If Dexter had been with her, he’d have been telling her not to hand her money over to strangers; he’d have said she was too trusting, and she didn’t know anything about the world. But Dexter couldn’t lecture her because he was somewhere upstairs floating around. So, she had no advice to listen to but the voice of her instinct, which told her that they seemed trustworthy enough.