Page 22 of Castle of the Cursed
“Your face has been haunting me. I started to believe I was going mad.”
Only in my imagination would this guy be obsessed with me.
“The explanation,” he goes on, “must be that you are the bruja responsible for bringing me here.”
I have no idea what he means, but given the pain he can cause me, I’d rather play along than piss him off. “I was on the news,” I say, my throat smarting with the effort of speaking. “The… subway.”
A flash of electricity claps in his eyes.
“That is the spell of which I speak,” he says, to my bewilderment.
I’m not sure how long I stare at him, immobilized by his words, until the small voice in my mind reminds me: He’s in your head.
This is some desperate part of my brain reaching for any kind of explanation for what happened to my parents. Only this is really a reach. The kind of reach that probably wouldn’t be taking place if I had stayed at the center.
It’s clear I wasn’t ready to leave.
I breathe in the scent of a frigid night, and I’m back in a wooden cabin on an icy mountain in Montana where my parents and I once spent the winter. The snow was so thick that there were no sweet plant notes in the air, nor the earthy scent of the ground, nor the musk of small animals. I remember thinking whatever smell remained must be the scent of the stars.
That’s what I inhale now as the shadow beast leans in, and I have to tilt my neck all the way back to keep from breaking his stare.
“I… I need time to figure this out,” I say, in hopes of putting an end to this encounter. “But kill me, and… and the spell becomes unbreakable.”
He stares into my eyes, like he’s trying to see through my lies. “You have until next nightfall.”
His voice is the quiet rumble of the first thunder from an approaching storm.
“Free me or die.”
I don’t stop running until I reach my room, then I go into my bathroom and yank open the drawer that I filled to the brim with period pads and tampons. I shove my hand in to pull out the notepad I hid last night, and I bring it to the desk.
I flip to my list of strange occurrences. On the next page, I jot today’s date and start a new list, titled: Shadow beast.
Then I bullet-point what I know so far:
Dreamed him up months ago
Has silver eyes
Seems to command shadows
Says he came to the castle the day of the subway
Claims to be under a spell
Caused me physical pain
Thinks I’m the witch responsible
Of all the far-fetched things on the list, the most unbelievable to me is the last. He doesn’t trust me. It’s almost flattering.
I wake up to golden sunlight, with the notepad open on my chest. The shadow beast’s face swims before me as the details of my dreams slip between my fingers, like water.
All I remember is he was in every single one of them, hunting me through the castle, like some twisted game of hide-and-seek. Only every time he found me, the nightmare reset, and a new chase set off.
I still feel the ghost of my pulse as I sit up, and my notepad topples to my lap. I look down at the last thing I wrote last night:
“You don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself.”
