The Connelly Curse

by Lily Velez

Jack had started to feel like a new beginning, the next chapter in an unexpected life…and now this?

  My shadow self laughed, and the laughter multiplied until it was everywhere. And it magnified until it was loud between my temples, more excruciating than a migraine. The scenes of my supposed destiny came in a rush. I couldn’t turn one way or another without being met by the sight of me spilling Jack’s blood.

  “No!”

  I clamped my hands over my ears and squeezed my eyes shut, but then the scenes simply entered my mind, assailing me. And all the while, my shadow self cackled, feasting on my fear, devouring it.

  I bolted out of the cavern.

  I needed to get as far away from her as possible.

  I rushed down the passageway that had led me here, continuing on even when I accidentally dropped my fire rock. In the darkness, I tripped, crashing to my hands and knees hard, cutting open my skin.

  “Scarlet, how could you?”

  I gasped and looked up. A translucent Jack was on the ground just out of reach, his hand plastered to a wound in his stomach that was gushing blood. I nearly gagged.

  I sprang to my feet and took off again, but a host of Jacks awaited me at every turn. There were sorrowful Jacks who begged me for mercy, broken Jacks that couldn’t believe I’d betrayed them, unsuspecting Jacks that still looked at me with fondness in their eyes.

  The worst, however, were the malevolent Jacks. Their eyes were wells of poison as they regarded me with rage and disgust. They lunged for me time and again with all manner of weapons, and though I knew they weren’t real, I dodged and ducked and twisted away, a cry escaping me as I longed for this all to be over.

  “You can’t outrun your destiny!” my shadow self bellowed from somewhere behind me.

  That gut-wrenching possibility was what scared me the most. Still, I ran.

  “Stop it! Leave me alone!” With no light to guide me, I’d lost my sense of direction, the passageway never-ending, spitting me out into unfamiliar caverns that were dead-ends. Every time I circled back, apparitions of Jack would block my path.

  “Scarlet, why?”

  “Scarlet, no!”

  “Scarlet, please.”

  His words pulled at my heart until an agonizing wound cracked down the center of my chest. I threw my arms out at the apparitions to make them disperse, but they just kept materializing, haunting me like ghosts with unfinished business.

  I was so turned around that it surprised me when my feet stumbled into a puddle of water.

  No, this was more than a puddle. As I continued forward, the water lifted past my ankles and then my shins. Exhausted, I sank to the ground, sitting back on my heels while I panted, a thin sheen of sweat covering my forehead.

  “Scarlet!”

  No, no, no!

  “Please stop,” I begged, covering my ears once more.

  Please stop reminding me of what’s to come. I was trembling all over, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the cold of the water or the anxiety festering in my core. I had believed that being a Daughter of Brigid was a good thing, an honorable thing. But I was meant to be as much of a weapon as Jack was. What was good and honorable about that?

  I kept seeing all those different versions of Jack falling by my doing, dying by my will. And all the while, the cruel inevitability of loneliness spread in me like a toxin, consuming me entirely.

  “Scarlet!”

  Every time the apparitions said my name, another piece of my heart broke off. I didn’t want this! I hadn’t asked for this! Why did fate have to be so cruel? Why did it want to take yet another person away from me—and not just take them, but force my hand in the matter?

  I wanted the pain to go away. I wanted the visions to end. I wanted the voices to stop. I needed them to stop. They were like needles stabbing at my mind, my sanity splintering.

  I rose and marched through the water, until I was in so deep it rose past my waist.

  Just a few moments of silence. That’s all I needed. Just a few moments of silence to gather my bearings and hear myself think. I could figure this out. I knew I could. But I needed silence. I needed those apparitions to stop reminding me of what I was destined to do.

  I pitched forward and let myself fall into the water.

  Submerged, I was greeted by perfect, soundless peace. My body relaxed, and though it wasn’t long before my lungs burned, the pain was far more welcoming than what awaited me outside of the water.

  Here, I wasn’t besieged by my fears. Here, I was safe. Here, I didn’t have to worry about a destiny that terrified me, a destiny I wanted no part in.

  So I stayed there.

  I stayed there even as my ribcage tightened and my lungs strained.

  I stayed there even as a small part of me screamed at me to get out.

  I stayed there even as the darkness flooded my mind.

  26

  Jack

  It wasn’t so much that I awoke.

  That implied a gradual coming to, a slow progression in stages.

  What I experienced was more a pull, though it’d be more accurate to say I was yanked. Yanked from a dreamless sleep, my eyes snapping open to meet unending black.

  Despite the crushing darkness, which pressed in from all sides, I knew that Scarlet was gone. It wasn’t so much that I could no longer feel the weight and warmth of her body against my side. It’s that I couldn’t sense her intuitively.

  More specifically, her absence was loud. Loud and pervasive. The sensation was a lot like leaving your home knowing you’d forgotten something but not being able to figure out what exactly. Regardless, that feeling of ‘missing’ stuck with you all day long, dug into you until you could think of nothing else.

  Being ‘missing’ in The Cave of Nightmares was the last thing a person wanted to be.

  Already on my feet, I surveyed the immediate area.

  The fire had long gone out, the kindling cold and charred. Scarlet had left her cloak behind. I retrieved it from the ground, but its woolen fibers were no longer warm. She’d been gone for a while.

  Kai was nowhere in sight, and when I tuned into the sounds of the cavern I occupied, all that reached my ears was the steady dripping of condensation from the stalactites above.

  Scarlet’s fears had obviously called for her, beckoning her into their arms. I couldn’t imagine what would’ve inspired her to face them alone except the possibility that she hadn’t been in her right mind, perhaps beguiled and lured from her sleep.

  If that was the case, there was no time to lose. Producing my fire rock from a pocket, I let it illuminate the darkness and pressed forward down the nearest passageway.

  “Scarlet?”

  To say The Cave of Nightmares was a maze was very much an understatement. It was a dizzying gallery of chambers, each connected by a network of convoluted, twisting paths that sometimes deposited you into a cavern that looked identical to the one you’d just occupied and other times led you straight to a dead-end. Merely navigating it successfully could drive a person mad.

  That, or frustrate them to no end.

  When my forward motion was stonewalled for the third time by an unexpected cul-de-sac, I pressed my teeth together and stilled myself, closing my eyes. On an exhale, I let the tension melt from my muscles. I took another breath. I slowly released it. I took a third, a fourth.

  Finally, I tuned in.

  I tuned into everything, into anything my magic could grasp.

  Being that Scarlet’s magic was bound within her, I wouldn’t be able to sense her magical signature. Normally, that would prove an issue. As she’d fallen asleep earlier, though, she’d shivered slightly, and unable to stand the thought of her being even the slightest bit uncomfortable, I’d acted with a knee-jerk reaction, warming her with my magic.

  Magic that should still be, theoretically speaking, inside her. Though its warming effects tended to wear off quickly, the magic itself remained in a person for hours. I suspected this was how Scarlet had been able to summon Kai w
hen we’d been imprisoned by The Black Hand. My magic had still danced in her blood when she’d touched the demon’s mark, calling Kai forth. It was my magic he would’ve felt on his end, hence why he’d responded at all. What a surprise it must’ve been for him to happen upon Scarlet instead.

  I detached from all else and honed in on lingering traces of my magic.

  It was a lot like following a trail of breadcrumbs…with limited visibility and with absolutely no concept of where you’d dropped each scrap. After several minutes had passed, I almost abandoned the tactic altogether, ready to throw myself into another approach.

  Except something finally came into alignment.

  A shift, and then a connection locked into place.

  …there!

  I could feel the thunderous beat of her racing heart, the cold gleam of sweat on her forehead, the way her breath sawed in and out of her. She was scared. No, petrified. I felt her terror as if it were my own, a hollow, devouring sensation in the pit of my stomach.

  She needed me now.

  I shot forward in the direction the magic had come from. Unfortunately, having a vague sense of Scarlet’s whereabouts made it no easier to navigate The Cave of Nightmares. Again and again, I kept storming up to dead-ends until I couldn’t help but speculate that some type of foul play was at work.

  Sure enough, the moment the suspicions arose, he materialized at my side, easily keeping pace with me as if he’d been there all along.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I said by way of greeting.

  “Did I give the impression that I cared?” he asked by way of insult.

  My shadow self and I were well acquainted. Perhaps more well acquainted than a witch had any business being with their shadow self. It was eerie, having the company of a would-be twin. It was in every way like looking into a mirror—if that mirror displayed the worst of you. Unfortunately, there was little disparity between my shadow self and my actual true reflection each time I’d used dark magic in the past, the most telling resemblance between us the darkness of the patches that sat under each eye.

  “So determined to play the hero for the girl,” my shadow self said, his tone dripping with scorn. He wasn’t fond of anything that saw me acting as anything but dark. “Why? Because she’s more beautiful than you can stand?”

  Scarlet was beautiful, yes. I was certainly attracted to her. It’s only that, to me, it was more than her looks that made her beautiful. To me, it was something else entirely that had first made me look at her, really look at her, and think, This girl is breathtaking.

  Her determination in saving her father’s soul from the Reaping, for one.

  Her fearlessness when facing off against Mary-Anne and the lengths she went to deliver us from The Black Hand’s clutches, despite what it cost her.

  Her ferocity when the strength of a goddess radiated from her core, transforming her from witch to warrior, the power unleashed unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

  Her saving my very life on more than one occasion.

  Since Uisneach, I didn’t think there was ever a moment when I looked at her without thinking she was other.

  Filled with otherness.

  Descended from a clan who, if they lived, dwelled otherwhere.

  Blessed by a goddess that lived in otherworlds.

  And thus, barely human because of the rarity of her existence.

  Yes, Scarlet Monroe was undoubtedly other in every possible way.

  But even if she weren’t any of those things…that courage, that tenacity, that strength, that fight in her—those were the things that made her beautiful to me. Those were the things that held me captive, that made me look at her with wonder, that left me mesmerized by her.

  Nevermind all that she’d done for my family. My grandfather’s death, and my inability to puzzle it out, found me inheriting an exhausting and ever present hopelessness. Scarlet’s unheralded arrival in my life had challenged that hopelessness. She’d been the long-awaited break of dawn after a brutal, seemingly endless night. A ray of sunlight when so much darkness had consumed my family.

  I was indebted to her beyond measure.

  More than that, she’d come to mean something to me. Something that, even now, I couldn’t adequately describe with words. Perhaps because no words could sufficiently encompass it.

  When I came upon yet another dead-end, my patience began to fray. I tuned into those breadcrumbs of my magic once again, but the signal was faint this time, barely there.

  “It’s possible you’re too late,” my shadow self offered dismissively, leaning his shoulder against a wall. “It’s possible you’ve failed the girl. It wouldn’t be entirely outside the realm of possibility, would it? Failing those you love is an art you’ve mastered.”

  Midway down the passageway, an apparition flickered into form. I knew better than to watch. I knew better because anything that was my shadow self’s doing was never even the remotest bit constructive.

  That said, the apparition drew me in, intriguing me. I recognized the set of those shoulders as they hunched over something. I recognized the man’s haircut and jawline as he turned just slightly and began to ascend a ladder.

  My father.

  Coils of thickly braided rope hung from one shoulder. When he reached the second topmost step on the ladder, he peered up into the rafters. There was a pregnant pause, as if he were contemplating the magnitude of what came next. He threw one end of the rope over a crossbeam.

  I immediately turned away, but I couldn’t unsee his actions, and it hit me like a thunderbolt, momentarily jerking me out of the present, momentarily sending me back into the mind of a twelve-year-old boy whose world had just imploded.

  “Still a touchy subject, I see,” my shadow self observed through a wicked grin.

  I strode down the passageway, marching through the apparition with my gaze fixed ahead. My shadow self stayed beside me with ease, ready to salt the wound.

  I spoke first. “If your plan was to strangle me with guilt over my father’s death,” I said, “I’m sorry to say you’re a bit late on that front. I’ve already been doing that for years.”

  “You couldn’t stop your father, you couldn’t protect your mother, you couldn’t save your grandfather, you couldn’t reason with your uncle. It’s no wonder one of your long-running fears is that you’re simply incapable of saving anyone you love. Is that why you try so hard to protect her?”

  I ignored him, advancing down another path, puddles splashing under every footfall. The surrounding humidity was nearly suffocating. I thought about how I was breathing the same air countless others had over the centuries. I thought about that graveyard of a pool.

  “One has to wonder if it’s her goodness you crave.”

  Another dead-end. My grip on the fire rock tightened. I doubled back and veered right this time at a fork, the shadows quivering against the milky light emanating from my hand.

  “Long ago, it was believed that if you did so much as pass into the shadow of a god-touched witch, you could be healed of all ailments. Is that what this is? Do you think she can deliver you from your doom? Do you think she’s your salvation?”

  Truthfully, I didn’t. I was moved by her desire to help me break my curse, but I accepted the possibility that our efforts could very well be in vain. I didn’t think even the god-touched could defy fate.

  “No, they can’t,” my shadow self affirmed. “And gods be thanked, for it’s a glorious fate that awaits you.”

  I’d just entered a cavern, but stopped short at the screams, the cries, the pleads for mercy. They echoed through the space, as if they belonged to the ghosts of days past. A solitary apparition cut a path down the cavern’s center.

  His face, neck, and arms were freckled with fresh blood, and he carried a saw-toothed dagger, its blade dripping red.

  He looked deathly, the dark circles under his eyes rendering him a walking corpse.

  He looked deadly, those same eyes gleaming with feral delight.
>
  He was me.

  “As the Dark Lord’s right hand,” my shadow self explained, “you’ll have the pleasure of executing any witches who refuse to submit to his reign on earth.”

  I leveled a violent look at him. “That will never happen.”

  My shadow self grinned wildly, relishing in the provocation. “You’ll do as the Dark Lord commands. You’ll have no choice. And therein lies another great fear of yours. You fear you’ll love your position at the Dark Lord’s side.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Admit it. You savor the way dark magic feels as it courses through your body. You love the power that thrums in your veins with every drop of demon blood you consume. You love how invincible you become, how the entire universe seems yours to command when dark magic sparks at your fingertips.”

  I was already storming down another passageway, my fingers so tight around the fire rock it was any wonder I didn’t crush the stone. My magic didn’t work on my shadow self. Otherwise, I would’ve already uttered a command—Éist!—to silence him.

  “Which is what gave birth to the newest fear you carry with you,” he called after me.

  “Jack?”

  I pivoted at Scarlet’s familiar voice, my chest convulsing at her sudden presence.

  I realized instantly it wasn’t truly her, but I took her in regardless. Her silken, cinnamon hair billowed in a phantom breeze, and I longed to reach out and comb a few wayward locks behind the shell of her ear. She wore a lily-white dress, and all around her, an aura of the purest light glowed.

  It was fitting. She was pure. She was good and kind. She was loyal and brave. I didn’t think it was entirely an exaggeration to describe her as an angel. She certainly looked like one in that moment.

  Her doe-like eyes fell on me, and I saw the emotion in them, the warm affection. It made me feel like more of a man. I wanted to do everything in my power to be deserving of it.

  Her gaze slid past me, though, and her expression changed. She paled, her eyes growing rounder. “Jack, what have you done?”

  From behind me, my executioner twin approached, looking more animal than human. His sweat-drenched—or maybe it was blood-drenched—hair fell over his eyes, and there was nothing tender in the way he looked at Scarlet. I noted the way his grip on the dagger changed, noted the shift of muscles in his dominant arm.