Leo’s eyes widened. “Can I?”
“Yeah, you can.” Gabriel squatted so he and Leo were eye-to-eye. “It’s time to find out what you can do, Leo. You up for it?”
He nodded, his expression becoming serious. “Daddy said I had to be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“To protect Shea.”
Christ, that was a hell of a lot of responsibility to put on a child’s shoulders, even one as powerful as Leo. But then, Shea was a special case.
“Did he tell you anything else, Leo? About your powers?”
Leo shrugged, his gaze dropping to the weapons in his hands. “Sometimes they scare me.”
Gabriel put his arms around the kid’s shoulders before he even thought about what he was doing. “You don’t have to be scared anymore, Leo. I’m gonna teach you how to control them. Okay?”
The little boy nodded but didn’t lift his gaze.
“Did your dad tell you anything else? About what you can do?”
Now Leo looked up and Gabriel saw something hard flash through the boy’s eyes. “He said Sissy would come for me and we’d have to take care of each other.”
“Well, Quinn and I are here to help you with that now. So…you want to get started?”
When Leo nodded, Gabriel set him on his feet and waved Leo onto the mats in the center of the room. “Quinn’ll get you going. I’ve got a call to make first.”
He had Quinn start Leo on stretches before taking him through some simple moves with the blades. Gabriel made sure they were okay before he headed for an alcove at the rear. He picked up the old-fashioned black receiver, turned a few numbers on the rotary dial and waited until he heard Phil ask, “Party, please?”
“Matteo Michael Tedaldi, Las Vegas.”
Phil paused before answering. “That may take a few hours, Gabriel. I will call you back at this extension when I’ve reached your party.”
He caught her just before she disconnected him. “I need another connection. Crimson Moon Productions.”
“Please hold and I’ll connect you.”
Serena answered on the fourth ring.
“Gabriel, is everything all right?”
He paused, hearing the careful way she tried to hide the slur in her voice. Shit, his mom was drunk. And according to his sisters, that was never a good sign. “Yeah, we’re all fine. Quinn got here this morning.” He decided against telling her about Quinn’s accident. She’d be able to handle that better when she was sober. “But I’ve decided we need to split up. I want to take Shea to Maddie after we bring the boy up to you. I’m going to call Matt in from Vegas for Leo. The kid’s strong. Really strong.”
Serena fell silent and he knew she was biting her bottom lip, thinking it over, trying to look at it from all angles. Damn, Mom…
After at least thirty seconds, she said, “I’ll speak to Maddie, tell her to expect your call.”
“We’re going to move out after I hear from Matt, hopefully later today. We’ll wait for Matt to arrive before Shea and I head to Louisiana.”
“You appear to have this all figured out.”
“Yeah well, I learned from the best.”
She chuckled, but it had a shaky sound to it. “Stay safe, Gabriel.”
“Hey. You okay?”
“Yes. I’m fine. I didn’t sleep well. Stay safe.”
* * *
Serena’s head throbbed with a hangover and a vague sense of impending doom.
Looking at the bedside clock, she realized it was three in the afternoon. Dribbles of light seeped through the cracks where the curtains met the sill. Her mouth tasted like she’d eaten a whole bag of sour cream and onion chips and her throat was parched.
Groaning, she sat up and eased her legs over the side of the bed. The room spun around her for a few seconds before she got her feet on the ground.
She couldn’t remember coming back to bed. She hadn’t had a binge like that in years—
Quinn. She’d talked to Quinn last night.
Her temples pounded and her stomach rolled as their conversation came rushing back. Served her right. She’d said things to Quinn she’d never meant to say. Things he’d make her pay for the next time she saw him.
Because nothing had changed. Even though she’d told him how she felt, it didn’t change the facts.
She couldn’t be with him.
Losing her husband Nicolo five-hundred years ago had devastated her. But she’d had two teenage daughters to care for and they’d been on the run.
She still remembered that awful night in vivid detail, sometimes relived it in her dreams. After they’d burned Dafne, the villagers—men and women they’d grown up with and cared for for years—had stolen into their homes, slit the throats of the streghe and every member of their families then had carried the bodies to a mass grave.
She’d never forget the terror of her daughters’ muffled screams, the sensation of the dirt pouring down on their bodies. The blackness in the pit, buried alive.
Her lungs starved for air as she clawed her way out from under the dirt. Frantically digging for her daughters. Seeing the horror in her sixteen-year-old children’s eyes.
She hadn’t believed. Not until that moment, when their bodies healed what should have been Fatal wounds, that they had truly been cursed. She hadn’t believed and her husband had paid with his life, along with all the other streghe husbands and children not of the boschetta.
Bending at the waist, she took deep breaths, waiting for the nausea to recede. For the sounds to fade from her memory.
But the pain of losing Niccolo would never fade.
The second time she’d found him, his soul had been reincarnated three hundred years later as Charles Smithson, a farmer in 1820s New England. Losing Charles had hurt just as much as losing Niccolo.
If she committed her heart and something happened to her beautiful Quinn… She knew her heart would not survive this time.
Sliding off the bed without jarring her head or her stomach, she went to the kitchen and mixed a virgin Bloody Mary, adding mint for her stomach and rue for her head. She felt a little better after finishing the glass, enough to banish all thoughts of the physical and concentrate solely on the spiritual.
Down the hall, she knelt before her altar, the familiarity of the tools comforting. The wand from the walnut tree in Benevento, the black cauldron she hadn’t used to cook food for centuries, the athame her father had made for her.
After lighting the candles she made from beeswax, she opened the circle.
“Great Mother Goddess Uni, from whom all gifts emanate. I give thanks for your blessings.”
A whisper of power brushed against her arus, like a cat rubbing against her legs. It soothed her jangled nerves, gave her a sense of serenity she sorely needed.
With a tiny yank, she pulled the nail, in its key form, from around her neck and held it in her hands. Wrapping her fingers around it, she felt it transform, then placed it on the altar.
“Goddess Menrva, whose wisdom is all-knowing, I am humbled by your faith in me to watch your most precious gift. Accept my humble words as offerings, Great Mother Goddess Uni. Grant Your protection to my children and my loved ones. And give safe passage to those no longer with us.”
Poor sweet Tullia. Why her?
It was a question she knew better than to ask the Goddesses because, sometimes, there were no answers.
And in her darkest moments, Serena thought maybe, just maybe there were no answers because the Involuti, the founding deities of the Etruscan pantheon, had deserted them.
After she finished the prayer and banished the circle, Serena fell to the floor and let herself weep for Tullia’s death, her tears pooling in front of the altar. Another offering.
Several minutes later, after she’d worn herself out, she dried her tears and took a deep breath. She had work to do. She couldn’t put it off any longer.
In the office, she picked up the heavy black phone on the desk and called Madrona and Fur
ia first. Her daughters would have only a vague notion of what had happened. Their Gifts, arrested at the time of the curse, were spotty.
The phone rang once before Maddie picked it up, her brisk hello erasing the lingering memories of her daughters’ screams.
“Hello, sweetheart, how are you today?”
“Mama! I was going to call you today. We haven’t heard from you for so long and we both felt something last night. How are you? Are you okay? What’s going on?”
Goddess, Maddie could heap the guilt thicker with just a few words than Serena could ever hope to. Of course, they’d had five-hundred years to perfect their technique. But she wasn’t ready to answer her daughter’s last question yet.
“I’ve missed you, Maddie. What trouble are you and your sister getting into now?”
“Nothing much lately. Donal is a more-effective watchdog than the others you’ve sicced on us before. The bookstore is doing well, and Furia’s finally agreed to close that burlesque club and open a respectable business. How is everything up there?”
She couldn’t avoid it any longer. “Tullia’s gone, honey. Last night. I don’t have details yet, but…”
The silence from the other end of the phone throbbed with unspoken questions. Maddie always thought things through before she spoke, looked at all the angles.
“Brian, too?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.” So much I don’t know.
“Do you want us to come?”
Oh, Goddess, yes. She missed her children. “Not yet. Soon. And Gabriel will be calling you. He’ll explain why.”
“Mama, is there something going on that we need to know?”
“I miss you, Maddie. You and Furia. I’ll see you soon.”
She hung up before she broke down again. She had other calls to make, calls that wouldn’t be as easy.
Sophia and Nerina would need to be contacted wherever they happened to be in Europe at the moment. She wouldn’t be able to notify Amalia. She had no idea where that girl was, though she’d tried for years to find her. She’d been the strongest after Dafne. She should have been the one to lead, not Serena. Serena didn’t have the strength.
But Amalia had deserted them almost immediately.
Serena would have to find her this time. Amalia needed to be told about Shea. The rest of the boschetta needed to be told about Shea.
But not yet. Not until she’d met the girl.
Then hopefully, together they could figure out how to break this miserable curse.
* * *
It took Shea a few minutes to open her grandfather’s journal.
She had the ridiculous sense that her life was about to change. The knowledge lay so heavy on her chest, she could barely breathe.
Get a grip, it’s just a book. No harm ever came from reading a book. At least not in real life.
“Just open it already,” she chided. “Do you really think you’re going to find a page titled ‘How to Break the Curse’?”
Forcing her fingers to obey, she cracked open the cover, nose wrinkling at the musty smell. Probably hadn’t been opened in decades.
She gasped as the first few pages slid away from the rest of the book, thinking the damn thing was going to crumble before she got to read it. Then she realized the journal was more of a folio. The outer leather covers enclosed several paper notebooks, each labeled with a range of years. The first was 1941-1950.
She read every word of the first few pages, brief entries that talked about his days in boot camp, preparing for World War II. Those pages were fascinating glimpses of a time long gone but not what she needed.
After a while, she started skimming pages, looking for key words—Kyle, Celeste, son, curse.
Her grandfather hadn’t been a real dedicated writer. He’d skipped whole years completely, wrote only a few passages for several years in the late ’40s and early ’50s.
Her dad’s birth in 1960 started a slew of entries that continued through the last journal, dated 1990.
Just the sight of her dad’s name made her chest tighten. Damn, she missed him.
Taking a deep breath, she wanted to read everything her grandfather had to say about her dad, but knew it would have to wait until she had more time. Now, she was supposed to look for answers.
She forced herself to skim her dad’s early years, his training as a grigorio, searching for anything that might have something to do with the curse. And then she found an entry from 1972.
Kyle had the dream again last night. Woke up screaming so loud, thought he’d wake the neighbors. Third time this week.
Rina and I haven’t talked about it, but she’s probably thinking the same thing I am. It’s been almost five hundred years since Paganelli’s curse took the streghe out of the natural order of life.
Still no sign of the daughter foretold by D before her death. The daughter to break the curse.
Unless K’s dream is a vision.
He described Dario perfectly, down to the mole on his cheek. K says he sees Dario stick a knife into his chest then into the chest of a dark-haired girl. The girl screams in agony and K wants to stop it but he can’t. It’s like he’s watching it on television. He can see what’s happening but he’s not there.
He says he doesn’t recognize the girl but I don’t believe him. Asked him to describe her, but it made him cry. Figured it wasn’t worth it. There’s so much pain in his eyes. He’s hiding something.
Was it at dream? Or a vision of things to come?
Maybe I don’t want know.
Flipping through the pages with shaking fingers, she searched for any more references to the dreams, anything else her dad might have told his father.
Was it her mother he’d been dreaming about?
Or her?
She found her answer several pages later.
C&K stopped to say goodbye. They’re disappearing. They want the girl to have a life before K’s dream comes to pass. Before the curse is ended.
A low drone buzzed in her ears and her temples throbbed, the start of a headache imminent.
Setting the journal on the table in front of her, she swallowed a few times, trying to keep her stomach from revolting.
That was her destiny? To die with a knife in her heart? At the hands of the monster who wanted her brother?
No. That couldn’t be it. It was too…gruesome.
But if that wasn’t how to break the curse then why had her parents run?
And why hadn’t they told her about the curse? Had they been trying to protect her? Or had her parents been biding their time until she was old enough to be sacrificed?
Her breath started to come in shallow pants, and her gaze fixed on the book in front of her.
No. It’s not fair. It’s not…
Vaffanculo. She couldn’t breathe.
She sat there, trying to calm down, trying not to panic. Not to give in to the feeling that she was fighting a losing battle.
So many questions. Too many questions. But she knew one thing for certain—her parents had believed she could break the curse.
And they’d knowingly hidden her from the rest of the boschetta.
The drone in her head grew, the voices buzzing. But they weren’t angry. No, they were upset.
Damn, her head hurt. She rubbed her temples, trying to massage away the pain.
She knew what the voices were trying to tell her. They wanted her to know her parents had loved her. Her dad had told her every night before he tucked her in bed. Her mom… Had her mom ever said it?
She couldn’t remember her mom saying the words. Not once.
Rising from the couch, she started to pace, accepting the still-sharp pain in her leg to bring a little clarity to her brain.
Had her mom just been biding the time until she could sacrifice her daughter to end the curse?
The voices responded with a surge of denial that stopped her in her tracks.
No, she didn’t believe that, either. Her mom might have been aloof most of her life, but
she hadn’t been plotting her own daughter’s death.
Come to think of it, aloof wasn’t the right word. As a child, she remembered asking her dad why her mom was always so sad. She didn’t remember his exact response. Couldn’t remember if he’d actually answered her.
As she’d gotten older, she’d translated sad into aloof. So many years she’d spent pissed off at her mom. At her distance, her unwillingness to connect. Her disapproval.
Spell Bound (Darkly Enchanted) Page 17