Page 44 of Too Cursed To Kiss
“So, you are telling me that, if I stay in this windowless room forever, I could actually do that? Live forever?”
“Well, technically no. Time doesn’t pass, so there is no forever, only a perpetual state of now.”
I wrapped my head around that. I had no idea what advantage it would give me, but it appeared hanging out with a drop-dead hot guy in a room we couldn’t leave, while time didn’t pass, was not a bad place to be in.
I fingered the front strings of the corselette. “Hmmm, so what should we do now? I mean while we wait?”
“You will wait here,” Wald said, pushing me gently behind him.
“Wait, what?”
“I’m going to go help Agatha, and you are going to wait here,” he said, walking around me and placing a hand on the doorknob.
“Dream on,” I replied, grabbing the back of his jacket. “There’s no way you are leaving me alone in this fucking dead room.”
“It’s not death. The room is in stasis. I told you that,” he said, glancing back at me and shaking his coat so I had to let go of it. “Besides, Agatha might need my…”
The sound of nothing blocked my senses. My head emptied as the floor and the wall rippled, throwing me forward into Wald. My butt hit the ground hard, and I rolled sideways curling around myself. The explosion, I guess you could call it, didn't decimate the door as much as dissolve it. Wald righted me and then took a step back as the hallway appeared where the door had been.
“What happened?” I choked out as Wald tore down the hall.
I stumbled after him, shaking off the weird cottony feeling. The main room glittered with fragments of shattered mirrors. I put my hand over my nose and mouth. Every mirrored surface was cracked or broken into irreparablepieces. In the center of the room, where the mirrored coffee table had been, lay Agatha. With all the glass, I had expected lots of blood, but her face was devoid of the cuts. She lay still, but her limbs were no longer in a position that living people can do who aren’t master yogis.
Britannia was lying on the couch covered in mirror pieces. She wasn’t bleeding either, and her groans meant she, unfortunately, wasn’t dead. I mean I didn’t want her to be dead either, but you know what I mean.
Wald rushed to her first and wrapped his arms around her, lifting her upright as if she were made of the most fragile porcelain. I turned my attention to poor Agatha. Her body was more of a broken doll than human, and her dead stare had the frozen horror echoing something of nightmares or horror movies. A shiver crawled across my shoulder like a spider, and I shook it off. Glass crunched under my boots as I walked over to Britannia and Wald, wondering what the fuck we were going to do now and praying Agatha had fixed the ring before her untimely demise.
Britannia coughed, her gaze flitting from Wald to me with theOh, you are still alive, too badkind of sneer.
“Where’s the ring?” I asked.
“Agatha had it in the other place. This is all your fault,” Britannia choked out between rasping breaths.
Fault? Oh no. Had we lost the ring? “What? What did I do?”
“That box of Mother’s, you gave it to her. You fucked us,” Britannia sneered.
I looked around the room, but the box was nowhere to be seen. I didn't even know what was inside. Britannia was right about one thing; without the ring we were screwed.
I rubbed my forehead wishing we could go back in timeright now. “Okay, we need to get out of here. The police will be showing up any second.”
Both Wald and Britannia looked at me with raised eyebrows like I’d just told them we needed to go get ice cream. “The cops. The noise? Come on, I can’t be the only one thinking that.”
“There was no noise. No one will come,” Wald said.
Britannia brushed his hand off, sitting up shakily on her own and scowling at me. She ran her hands cautiously through her hair, picking out mirror shards. “I’m going to need a shower before we leave.”
I snapped. “Goddamn it, your aunt is lying in the middle of the room DEAD. Doesn’t that fucking faze you?”
“Interesting choice of word,” Wald said, walking over to Agatha. “We need to find the family album.”
He pulled off his jacket, then his shirt. I stopped cold, my eyes glued to his chest, trailing down to where his hip bones ridged out above his waist. His skin was starkly white and densely muscled without a six pack, just the smooth marble skin I knew was softer than satin. His arms flexed as he laid the shirt reverently over Agatha’s body, and my breath caught.
“Rest well, Agatha,” he said, but it was almost a whisper. His yellow-eyed intensity glistened with tears. He knelt beside Agatha, tucking the fabric tenderly under her. The gentle touch surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. His back shuddered, and I drew closer, placing a hand on his shoulder as he quietly sobbed. Tears burned at the corners of my eyes, but my sorrow was more for Wald than for Agatha. I wished in that moment I had known Agatha better. I’d felt a connection to her, but it was nothing like knowing someone for years and losing them. When my mom had died, I’d sobbed for two days and then had a whisper-thread temper goingfrom anger to tears in two point five seconds. Britannia now stood, tears streaming down her cheeks. I wiped my eyes with the back of a hand and stepped away, wanting to give them a moment with their aunt.
I scanned the room, my mind jumping through the what-do-we-do-next black hole of my near future. That’s when I spotted the album wedged between the wall and the floor underneath the chair I’d been sitting on. I crouched down to grab it, and something jabbed into my finger. Plucking out the offending tiny shard of glass, I sucked the cut. I knew damn well you weren’t supposed to do that, but it’s a jerk reflex kind of thing. Then I squatted down again and dragged the album out.
The leather melded to my fingers, and the tug inside my arm was like a rubber band pulling taut. The finger cut must have opened wider because a line of my blood trailed over the cover.
