CURSED LOVE
By Lanie Jordan
Copyright © 2011 Lanie Jordan
Cover Art Copyright © 2011 Lanie Jordan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity between actual persons living and dead is purely coincidental. Any use of locales, establishments, or events are used fictitiously.
I dedicate this story to anyone who’s ever taken a risk for love,
and to those still waiting for their chance to.
To my Sashatasha (aka Sasha Devlin, my non-twin twin),
I’ll DM with you a time/date for our Space Time Continuum breakage.
Or our Time Space Continuum breakage. Ah, what the heck; we’ll break both!
(Also, I still don’t see what’s wrong with a nosy kiss. It was just curious.)
And, of course, to my special ladies in MoChat (y’all know who you are).
May your Valentine’s Day be full of joy, hope and love!
Chapter One
Valentine’s Day sucked.
Sure, I could be out with friends, but then I’d have gotten The Look from the parental figures. The look that clearly says “I’m disappointed in you, Amelia Jenkins” and is generally worse than the words themselves. It’s the look I try to avoid whenever possible.
So instead of being anywhere that was remotely fun, I was peeping-tom’ing it by staring through the window of the bowling alley—one of the teen hot spots in town. One of the places where people gathered and love was supposed to be in the air.
Why? Because apparently I had to hunt down a demon—an Evol, or anti-Cupid—that was hell bent on stealing the love from some unsuspecting guy.
“Amelia, honey,” my mom had began as she and my father sat me down ‘to talk’ an hour ago. She sat next to him on the couch. They exchanged one of those telling glances, and she reached out, took hold of his hand. “We’ve got something to tell you, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
Any conversation that started with me needing to be in a sitting position or with the words ‘we’ve got something to tell you’ was sure to be one I wasn’t going to like. I gaped at them and leaned forward in my seat before jumping up. “Oh, God. Are you getting a divorce? Are we becoming a statistic? I don’t want to be a statistic.”
My father let out a startled laugh, erasing the seriousness from his face for at least two full seconds. “No, no.” He quickly waved his hands. “Nothing like that.”
I let out a deep breath and sat back down, eyeing them warily. I wasn’t ready to relax just yet. The ‘nothing like that’ left a lot of ground uncovered. For instance, they could tell me I had been adopted or something. “Then what is it?” I asked. I shouldn’t have. As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew it’d been a mistake. It was one of those questions you had no choice but ask, and then found yourself regretting because you really, really didn’t want the answer once you had it.
And that’s when they’d told me the story. Apparently the Carter women—the ones on mom’s side of the family—were cursed. On their sixteenth Valentine’s Day, they were charged with saving a man’s love. It seems one of my ancestors broke a guys heart back in the sixteenth century, and he decided to save the world from the Carter women’s love and their nefarious ways.
Today, the gauntlet was passed to me and it was my duty to stop the Evol from draining the love from men. An Evol. The name was kind of funny if you asked me. One letter away from being ‘evil’, and ‘love’ spelled backwards. Coincidence? I think not.
It was a stupid curse. Save love or never find it yourself. What the hell kind of deal was that, anyway? And mom, who had supposedly conquered it already, wouldn’t tell me how I was supposed to. When I pointed out that little fact, she just shook her head and said, “Some things you have to figure out for yourself, Am.”
What the heck kind of parenting is that? I was up against a demon! Or would be, if I believed in it—which I didn’t.
Well, whatever. As soon as I got back at midnight (which was my deadline for saving love—a little on the Cinderella side, wasn’t it?), I was going to pretend this day had never happened.
Tomorrow, they would probably come out and say something like, “It was all a dream. What you were experiencing was a figment of your imagination,” and then tell me I was really locked up in the mental ward of the hospital. As much as that idea bothered me, it was sure as hell better than believing in love-stealing-demons and curses.
Or maybe it was some twisted parenting method I’d never heard of. Instead of reverse psychology, it was like…reverse demonology. Or would be like that, if it made any sense. I sighed and leaned my head against the window. I was getting antsy. My own stupid jokes didn’t even make any sense to me. That couldn’t be a good sign.
I was just about to turn away and move on to the next target area on my non-list list when I spotted a group of guys. Two had their backs to me so I didn’t see their faces, but that didn’t really matter. The boys weren’t what had caught my attention. No. It was the thing that was floating ten feet behind them.
My heart slammed against my chest, and I wondered if it could get whiplash.
I had found the Evol/anti-Cupid thing.
You know what’s worse than admitting you’re wrong? Admitting your parents were right. Demons were real and everyone else in the building was oblivious to it.
It didn’t look at all like I’d expected—not that I had any real expectations other than something disgusting and slimy. Perhaps a little…bigger. Okay, I expected something a lot bigger. Weren’t demons supposed to be larger than life?
I stood where I was, planted to the spot like I’d become part of the sidewalk. If demons were real, then the rest of what my parents told me was probably true. Damnit! Now I had to actually figure out a way to stop it.
Okay. All I needed to do, at least until I figured that out, was get the Evol away from the group, right? Right. I was debating just how to do that when the two boys that’d had their backs to me turned around and I finally saw their faces.
My jaw dropped with an audible pop and probably would have hit the ground had it not been attached. Closing my eyes, I let my head fall against the glass once more and banged it twice, silently wondering how many puppies and kittens I must have murdered in a past life to deserve such cruel and unusual punishment.
The Evol was moving in on its intended victim, and for a second, I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to do anything to stop it. Misery loved company, didn’t it?
That wasn’t the seriously distressing part, though. No. Not only did I know its intended victim, but I knew him. As in personally. As in his name was Aaron and he was a creep.
And he just happened to be my ex-boyfriend.