A Witch's Curse

A Witch's Curse

(The Rose Whelan Series -Book 1)

By Nicole Lee

Copyright © 2012 Showcase Publishing

Amazon Kindle Edition

This entire book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are all either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, persons - witch, warlock, demon, undead or non-magical - are entirely coincidental. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author:

Student and writer Nicole Lee was born in 1990 in southern California. Her family moved to sixteen various towns and cities when she was an adolescent. She has been an avid reader since she was little, and has wanted to be a writer for as long as she can remember. Ms. Lee's life, in her down time, consists of watching and reading anything paranormal romance and/or YA. She hoards cookies, collects statues of faires, and refuses to give up her appreciation of novels aimed at teens. She wrote The Witch's Curse while juggling a full schedule of college courses and working part time as a barista in a coffee shop. She welcomes fan mail to [email protected]

Prologue

December 13th

Dear diary,

I never thought people would die in this town because of me.

These circumstances started when I woke up in the graveyard. I had no clue as to how I arrived there, although the reason would become clear in the following three months.

I guess you could say I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s best to start from the beginning, right?

Safe to say, no one asks to be born by a parent who does not care for their child. I never wanted Karen Lynch to be my mother, but life has a way of sentencing us to fates we wish were not ours. The worst kind of childhood is one spent being raised by someone incapable of devotion.

Having conflicts with your parent is an experience no one deserves. That is one of the reasons I picked up the black arts.

The allure of witch craft is the idea that one can have power over their existence, therefore banishing anything in their past indicating a lack of control. The notion that I could somehow rise above my mother’s authority by being like her is a foolish one, but I clung to it. That was before the first day of my senior year.

Before that morning, I truly believed that Karen would never visit me in Lake Pines, the settlement I have been a local of since I was eight years old.

The town is an expansive stretch of suburban sprawls whose porches are filled with golden tuft flower beds set in front of trimmed lawns. All of the houses are upper middle class. The region’s only entertainment value include a range of beaches and one shopping mall. During the winter it snows heavily and feels isolated, but in the midst of summer, droves of travelers do visit to party near the sand and water.

The idea of having the woman I loathed more than any other being near me after last summer had ended seemed doubtful. She gave me warnings of such a time being near a decade before my father gained full custody of me.

Her words were right.

Even after everything, I have a suspicion she will be back. I cannot erase both the feeling and fear that we will meet again in the coming days.

1

Rose was sitting in the back seat of a moving car while staring out at Washington state. Its hills were monochrome and the sky was colorless. Loomis lake was visible from the vehicle‘s window. A thick fog had settled over the edge of the water, and when disappearing it revealed fallen trees whose limbs were dipping into the shallow surface of its silvery flecked top. Mist was laying on the highway. Rose wondered how her mother was driving without seeing, until she found out that the answer was magic.

Today would be the last time they would see each other for a decade.

Rose had trouble trying to remember a point during those weekends when she was not on the move. Staying in the same place was rare. During the custody battles between her parents, she would return to her mother’s for forty eight hours. Her visits were never in the same house or town as the Saturday and Sunday before. Rose assumed that the Whelan’s, the family she was strangely a part of, must have had an ancestor in their past who was a restless wanderer.

Rose was kidnapped by her mother. To her, being kidnapped felt like a term ripe with exaggeration, considering it was a family member who did it. She was a seven year old in the midst of being taken away by the first woman who informed her that thieves existed in this world.

According to the law, she was supposed to have been dropped off at a court sanctioned area so her Dad could pick her up and bring her to her second home. Instead, Mom had decided to keep Rose longer than she was allowed, and moved her out of California and into Washington.

Four miles later they were in Ocean Park. The car sped up a circuitous boulevard covered by walls of trees on both planes. They found a space on the side of the road to stop the car.

After being ordered to get out, Rose fought with the seatbelt, unclipping it and then expending lots of energy towards lifting the door latch. Descending onto the pavement after sliding from the leather interior, she gazed at all of the steep jade hills surrounding her.

They walked along a moss enclosed path and headed into the forest on a trail sheltered with everything from soggy and dirt covered leaves to strongly scented pine needles. The two stopped in the middle of a large clearing delimited by vine maple and lodge pole trees. There were haze obscured branches and expanses of water. This area was a nice change from the suburban sprawls and enclosed vicinities she had grown to think was the only sort of place that could exist.

She walked closer to a downward sloping prominence and brushed against a jagged limb. A cut three inches long formed on her arm. Rose was surprised at how much blood began pouring from the slashed skin, dripping onto the loam next to her feet. She did not have the courage to tell her mother that she had hurt herself, fearing that she would be accused of not having enough independence to deal with a wound. She was raised to believe such afflictions were not lady like.

Karen still noticed it. Her mother reached into her purse when seeing the scratch and pulled out a label less pill bottle, its glass translucent rather than brown. She dug her fingers into the container and pulled out a palm full of the seasoning. The woman patted it on the sore.

Looking down, Rose was impressed but not surprised when it healed. She had seen her mother do things like this before. When Karen performed curative acts, she did so for a charge, and often went under the pseudonym Hemera instead of her own surname so as to keep her birth handle clean.

Removing her hand from the gash, she sighed and gave an order.

“
Remember the story I told you of the clumsy witch Gerdur? Don’t be like that one. Watch where you‘re walking.”

She nodded, recalling the folk tale in detail for a flash of a second before Karen seized her hand again. They walked a mile to a clearing where her mother then set up a tent.

While sitting, a plastic grocery bag of food was placed in front of Rose. It was the typical edibles they thrived on when taking a trip. There was a cooler of juice and soda that they had left in the trunk of the car, but neither mentioned how it was missing, since deep down neither wanted to take the hike back. So she ate crackers, cheese, dried fruit, and jerky in silence, feeling guilty for being the nuisance Karen had persuaded her to believe she was.

The evening fell into an all encompassing shade, and before the hints of darkness had distorted into night, the mountains covering what was once the global supply of light like a black blanket over an effervescent lamp, they walked into the tanned pavilion and prepared their sleeping blankets. There were no words of good night or wishes towards pleasant dreams. Karen turned over, and Rose stared at the top of the tent while deep thought.

It was not long before Rose found herself cringing, waiting for the quiet stillness and calm tranquility brought about by their emerald landscape and steel hued aerial backdrop to shatter. Their conversations could start out as promising and even affectionate, but before long an insult would be thrown in her direction, making her feel as she did the first time she was made fun of in school. Intuitive self-preservation informed her that it was best not to talk. She hated silence as much as being insulted.

Morning arrived. “Don’t be lazy. It’s time to move.”

She felt her mother poking her in the ribs.

Rose rubbed the corners of her eyes, turning on her back and staring upwards at the rage filled expression of her mother, one in the shape of a malevolent smile. Her eyes gave the impression of existing as distinctive cavities of indifference.

Later in life, Rose often found herself pondering why her mother was detached from everyone else’s in this way. Melinda Lowenstein, a girl who sat next to her in class, had a warm hearted Mom whose smile and eyes reminded her of humor, reflective of how hilarious and gentle she was when talking to. Karen’s eyes were unique due to her seemingly inherent lack of empathy for anyone.

Rose stood up and stretched out, feeling a bit incensed but trying to keep this emotion within. Despite the mild frigidity making its way with the breeze over the peaks, she felt a comfortable gust. Somehow not seeing sunlight provided consolation for her, and she would later realize that it was because of how she was so used to it in the Californian town of Lake Pines.

They were walking along the path and staring out at the ocean. At this point, Rose had no exact idea where her mother was coming from, but she bobbed her head in agreement because that was easier, she had come to discover, than expressing a variance of opinion, knowing well what the reaction would be.

The two neared their vehicle.

“
Mommy, why did we come here?”

Karen stopped in her tracks before pulling out a bottle containing four strange looking leafs. “Let’s say I needed a garnish for a meal.”

“
Will I get to taste it?”

“
No.”

Rose had always suspected this was for a spell‘s ingredient. It could have contributed to a curse.

Soon they were back on the road, passing files of ever reaching plants sprouting from the ground and piercing the bulky drab cloud hanging above them. A wind picked up and brushed odds and ends previously on the ground against the outside of their russet Park Avenue car. Rose looked out at the silvery white caps forming in the ocean, the noise still audible as the waves crashed on shore.

“
Rose, I hope you know this could be the last time we see each other. When we get back to California, there will be rows of police officers awaiting our arrival, and they’re going to take you from me. Probably for a very long time.”

This filled Rose with a paradoxical sense of despair towards the notion that she would never see her own Mom again, when in fact she had always fantasized about such a day. It thrilled her, but she tried her best to do something that her friend Melinda had always taught her to - that is to say, act as if it would be a bad event.

“
Don’t talk like that,” Rose said.

“
Oh please, I know you can’t wait to get rid of me. You’re a rotten child who only thinks about herself. I’m happy you’ll never be with me again. I don’t know if I’m even ready to raise a child like you.” Before continuing, Karen stared into the rear view mirror with eyes so dark they could have been broken flashlight bulbs in a grotto through a nocturnal hour. “Know that while I won’t be there for you, I’ll always keep you in my heart whether you want to be there or not.”

Following the end of that day, Rose thought that suffering because of Hemera was over. What she did not know was how, years later, they would meet again, and Rose’s life would change in ways she could have never expected.

2

Rose had met Melinda when both of them were twelve years old. Although they were not well acquainted with each other, they were still part of the same hide and seek group, one created by many people older than them, despite how its primary leaders were still people in their teens. They called themselves The Clandestine Midnight order.

There were a few rules one had to follow if you wanted to actually be a part of the organization. All of them were dressed in black as a mandatory obligation. Even back then, she knew that being part of the Order was not the safest idea, yet it was an exciting one. It gave her a group of people to commingle with who did not play by the politics that most of the girls at her school thrived on.