The Curse Keepers Collection Read Online Free Page A

rocked. “Oh.”
    The soft rhythmic creak of his chair filled the space around us, and I leaned my head against the wood slats of the rocker, closing my eyes. Nostalgia washed over me, hot and sweet. Funny, the more you want things to stay the same, the more they change.
    “How’s the New Moon?”
    My eyes flew open, and I sat up. Daddy was having a really lucid day. “Oh, you know. It’s a job.”
    “I told you that you should have gone into archaeology like your mother.” He winked. “Then you could play in the dirt for a living.”
    I nearly burst into tears. I used to spend hours playing in the dirt when I was a little girl, before my mother died, digging for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. I was sure that Momma and the rangers at the visitor center had it wrong. The colony was probably in my own backyard, even though Daddy used to tell me that I could dig to China and never find it. Daddy hadn’t mentioned the memory in years.
    “Daddy, I need to ask you about the curse.”
    His chair stopped, and his hands tightened on the edges of the curved arms.
    “I’ve forgotten how the curse is broken. Can you remind me about that part?”
    His rocking resumed, and he focused on the dogs playing in the yard. “I thought you gave up on that nonsense years ago.”
    His words pierced my heart. I had given up on the nonsense years ago, but the curse was his entire life, his legacy passed down to me. If I had only known how little time I’d have left with him, the real him and not the shell of him I saw every day, I wouldn’t have been so callous about dismissing his stories as nonsense. I would have at least pretended.
    “You felt it too,” he whispered.
    My heart jolted as my breath caught. “Felt what?” I whispered back, terrified of his answer.
    “It opened. I thought I’d dreamed it.” His face turned to me, fear in his eyes. “It happened.”
    The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. While Daddy never doubted the curse’s existence, he’d never once claimed that it had broken. I pushed aside my terror and patted his hand. “Don’t be silly, Daddy. That curse has held for well over four hundred years. Why would it break now?”
    Confusion flickered in his eyes again. “The two Keepers would have had to have met.”
    Oh, shit on a brick. I had trouble catching my breath, but this time not from possible supernatural causes.
    His eyes bore into mine, more lucid than I’d seen him in months. “Did you meet the other Keeper today?”
    I snatched a towel out of the basket and started folding. “How in the world would I know? We don’t even know that there still is another Keeper, let alone what he looks like.” My mind backtracked to the few memories I had. “Besides, even if I had, how would that break the curse?” I fisted my hand to hide the mark.
    “You would have to touch the other Keeper.”
    The towel in my hand shook.
    “Did you touch the other Keeper?”
    “How would I know?” But my defensive tone gave me away.
    Excitement filled his eyes. “Who was it? A man or woman?”
    “Daddy . . . we don’t even know . . . ”
    “Ellie.”
    I took a deep breath and bit my tongue before I blurted out this is crazy . “Man.” I turned my attention to the next towel.
    “Old, young . . . Did he look Native American?”
    I folded my hands on the towel on my lap, avoiding eye contact with Daddy. “Man, young. About my age. It’s hard to say if he was Native American. He had dark hair and eyes, but you know the Lumbee Indians are so integrated with Caucasians and African-Americans that you can’t always tell.”
    “Do you think he was Lumbee?”
    I closed my eyes, nausea churning in my stomach. “I don’t know. I do know that I’d never seen him before until he walked into the restaurant.”
    “What happened?”
    I set the towel in the spare basket and began folding another. “Not much. He ordered a beer, I felt like I’d been slightly electrocuted, I nearly suffocated, then he