Page 44 of The Paranormal Investigation Bureau
Chapter32
Beyla
Thankfully, there was an email waiting with several attachments when I lowered myself in the tub. I knew it was his job, and Kaine would have done this just as fast for any agent who asked, but I was still grateful.
Kaine had this thing for a beer from a specific brewery run by dragons. He couldn’t get it at the grocery store, and his local bar had swapped out the tap for another beer. The brewery had an online store and would ship, and Kaine had stacks of gold and jewels hoarded all over the damned house, but he was also dead ass cheap. He would bitch about that beer every time he went out to the bar, but he also refused to pay the shipping to get it delivered. He complained about that too. So, before I broke into those attachments, I ordered him five cases. He’d call and fuss at me for spending money on shipping, and then he’d fall over himself, thanking me for thinking of him. He deserved that beer, and so much more. He really was terrific.
The first file was on Selena. Santiago was the one that’d turned her in, before fleeing the country. What exactly went wrong there? He wrote an entire ballet for her… he even designed the costumes. I’d seen some of the ballet and had heard the music he composed; it was clear he put his heart and soul into it.
Then I learned something I didn’t know… Santiago wasn’t a patron of the ballet, like Marsden wrote in his manifesto, he was the artistic directoranda talented ballet dancer in addition to everything else he could do. Why did Marsden lie about that? He had to have known the truth when he sent us that hot mess of a manifesto. He came out of retirement to dance with his wife in this massive project he took on for her, all because he got caught with her rival.
I got that Santiago had messed up, but no one had ever loved me enough to do that much to get me to forgive them! Fuck, Derrick just up and disappeared after breaking my feet.
Most of Selena’s file was Santiago’s statement, but it was brief. Selena was playing the lead, and Tabitha was her understudy. Everyone knew this ballet was for Selena, and it might be the last one she ever performed, because she was past the age of retirement, and her knee was giving her trouble.
Why had I never heard of the rivalry between Selena and Tabitha before? Tabitha was just as bad as Bellatrix, and it didn’t stop with that ballet. Instead of letting Selena go out with a bang in the ballet her husband wrote for her, Santiago gave a statement about the mind games Tabitha tried to play with Selena to steal the role from her.
This was some sort of rare form of psychological torture, and for what? The lead in a ballet? Santiago was dancing Arden’s role. He had the part ofEl Gato Blanco.Tabitha was trying to get Selena benched in every rehearsal to flirt with Santiago in front of her.
It seemed that leaving presents in people’s dance bags was a thing one hundred and fifty years ago, too. From what Santiago had said in his statement, it appeared that Selena was deathly afraid of rodents and didn’t even like using their parts in spells. Back then, pest control differed from it was now.The Phad a resident cat, like most places, to catch mice and rats. Everyone knew about Selena’s phobia because she regularly lost it if the cat missed one, and it made an appearance in the studio.
Santiago stated that someone was leaving dead rats and mice in Selena’s pointe shoes and dressing room. Everyone suspected Tabitha, but no one could prove it. Selena was a witch who had immigrated to the US from Mexico. Witches and warlocks were a suspicious bunch by nature, so anything and everything could be considered a bad omen to us if looked at hard enough.
Santiago tried to tell her it was probably Tabitha playing mind games, but she thought it was an omen that something terrible was coming. Santiago reported she was slipping away and becoming paranoid after she stopped focusing on rehearsals and started becoming a danger to the male leads.
Santiago made the wrong choice, he admitted that in his statement. Instead of removing Tabitha from the ballet and the source of the conflict with Selena, he gave the part to Tabitha. He reasoned that if he pulled her from ballet entirely, she would recover and start teaching at the academy.
Selena didn’t view it that way, it was the ultimate betrayal in her eyes. Santiago pulled her from the ballet he wrote for her and gave her lead to Tabitha. She acted like everything was fine. He thought things were going back to normal, and that she’d forgiven him.
She hadn’t.
She was a prima ballerina, an outright star, but she came from a long line of powerful witches. Her family specialized in the darkest kinds of magic. Selena knew curses they didn’t teach most witches and warlocks anymore because they were just too awful. She knew curses not even famous curse breakers could break.
Selena didn’t just know dark magic that already existed. One of the reasons she left Mexico with Santiago was that she was also a talented spell writer. Santiago wasn’t a prince, I read that in his statement, but the Unseelie had trained him in the arts to entertain their court. He defected, just like Marsden had done.
The Unseelie really wanted him back and had sent one of their warriors to Mexico to fetch him. Selena had laid down a curse on them so severely, the Unseelie made a stink with the Mexican government. Santiago and Selena fled to the United States.
After everything Selena and Santiago had been through together, being taken out of that ballet was the last straw for her. She pretended to forgive him, and Santiago said he thought everything was okay and resumed rehearsals with Tabitha dancing Damita. It wasn’t okay though. Selena laid one of her curses, not against him, but against the entire ballet. If she weren’t dancing the lead, then no one would. She wanted Tabitha to pay for taking her part, and she was angry at all four male leads for not defending her by insisting Tabitha be fired.
When he confronted her after one of the male leads was brutally murdered, she refused to admit anything. Every single male lead, except Santiago, was murdered, and Tabitha was saved for last. Santiago had no choice but to cancel the ballet.
He confronted her again, and that was when she admitted to the curse she’d laid. The ballet was written for, and was meant for, Selena to dance Damita. Since Santiago took that away from her, she made damn sureno onewould ever dance that role again.
That was the end of that file. What the fuck? Witches and warlocks could certainly get arrested for curses, but it gave little information about what she cast and who was murdering cast members. I had a lot of information here, but nothing useful that would show me how to reverse the curse.
Curses were almost always attached to objects, so you if you destroy the object, you destroy the curse. As far as I knew you couldn’t curse something intangible, like a ballet. There were ways to curse people and bloodlines, but I didn’t think that was the case here.
Having a child could be a career ender for a ballet dancer. If you got pregnant, you generally stopped performing and started teaching. Some people could manage both, but it was challenging, and childbirth permanently changed the alignment of your hips, and therefore your turnout.
The original cast was dead, except Santiago, and I doubted any of them had children for the curse to be passed down through… Selena certainly didn’t have any before she was arrested.
Would she have cursed Santiago because she was that angry with him? He hadn’t popped up again as an artistic director or artist anywhere else, or I would have heard about him. It was like afterThe Sugar Skull Girlgot canceled, he stopped making art and disappeared to Canada.
He had to be ancient by now. Unseelie lived a long time, but they still aged. If he knew he was cursed, he probably stayed as far away fromThe Pand this production as possible. How would he even know it was being attempted again if the internet wasn’t around until recently?
Curses didn’t work like that. It wouldn’t keep him atThe P,stopping anyone from dancing Damita. If a curse was attached to a person, there were only two ways to break it. You either had to figure out what the curse wanted, or you could outrun it by moving somewhere you couldn’t hurt anyone and just wait to die.
That wasn’t it. It sounded like Santiago left the country, like he was trying to avoid everything associated withThe P.It could be a curse, or it could just be terrible memories… it still didn’t explain who was murdering cast members.
