Summer Sons(103)

She hadn’t been born a Fulton, and marriage hadn’t made her one, but blood had done the job in the end. Andrew recalled the coating of rotten copper that had clung to his gums even as the fire-and-rescue team scooped him up, whisked him from the darkness of the cavern: the reminder that no matter what came afterward, he belonged to Eddie in flesh and spirit. He hadn’t asked for that inheritance, but he’d gotten it regardless. His breath lodged in his throat in a wheeze.

“Andrew,” Sam barked, startling him out of his spiral.

He snapped the book shut in his hand, face stiff and hot. Juxtaposed against the version he’d gathered from the McCormicks, one shared point stood out: the fact that the curse wasn’t tied to the born-and-bred Fultons alone, but wove like a fat thread across their land and their blood, ready to stitch a fresh inheritor in at will—or, maybe, at knifepoint.

“You see what I’m seeing, yeah?” Riley asked.

Andrew nodded slowly, attempting to find the words to summarize. He said finally, “If the curse was just a hereditary problem for the Fultons, none of this would matter, but it isn’t. People can be brought in from the outside, and they might wanna be, because it works.”

Riley replied, “If it’s not actually a curse in the ‘all bad, no good, oops you made a mistake’ sense, but more like a magical inheritance that comes with a price, and if you could pass that power on to someone else consensually…”

“Or nonconsensually,” Andrew finished. “Someone might be able to force the issue, try to take it from you, if they knew. If they had reason to believe it was real.”

Sam shuddered with discomfort and swigged from his beer while the three of them tried that thought on for size. A motive that might’ve seemed far-fetched weeks ago slid into place with an ugly, neat click in Andrew’s head. The specter’s constant efforts to drag him into his power made more sense, at least in part, if he was generous to the creature.

“Except Eddie wasn’t the only one carrying it, last Fulton or not. And that wasn’t exactly common knowledge,” he admitted.

“I don’t like the fucking sound of any of that,” Sam said.

“Of course you don’t,” Riley snapped. “But what other leads do you have for us to follow?”

Sam held his hands up in deflection. “I didn’t say y’all were wrong, it just sounds like some nasty fucking business. And from the outside, I’ve got to say, I don’t like how that professor fits into this mess. She gave you back his ring when she shouldn’t have had it at all, if we’re being real, and Riley and you both seem to agree there’s something off about it. But I thought you said she just wanted his research, like to publish, some petty insider shit?”

Riley and Andrew regarded each other, separately parsing the same set of details and implications. Riley said first, “I’m not so sure about that anymore, but it doesn’t add up either way with the other shit we know about them.”

“Like, neither of them, Troth or her husband, would’ve been strong enough to handle Eddie’s body at the end,” Andrew said. “There’s got to be someone else in the picture with them. We need more information.”

“Their library was a trip though, and she keeps popping up. Plus, how much do you really know about the husband? Even if he’s sick right now, maybe he wasn’t as bad off over the summer,” Riley said.

Andrew grunted his agreement, turning the monograph between his palms while he wracked his aching brain. Eddie had found his answer, though. The pinboard of articles on their disappearance in the carrel, the haunted-house stories, the cemetery visits and late-night communions with the dead; all of that mess led him to one long paragraph in an old monograph. He’d worried at it like a sore tooth until he unearthed the rotten core. If Troth’s interest was more than academic—

“Wait,” Andrew said. “Was there more in this, like about her family?”

Riley cocked his head. “Uh, I dove straight into the index, read that Fulton bit, and booked it over here to share.”

“She talked up that fuckin’ library being full of her family’s stories, and you said it was massive—but when I mentioned this one book, she and her husband both pretended not to know shit about it,” Andrew said while he paged through the index.

Damp, aged-paper stink wafted off the print; he ran his thumbnail through the T section until he saw Troth, 32–41 with a series of subheadings: plantation, witchcraft, ritual magic, Civil War, genealogy. Ten pages in such a short collection meant a full chapter, a significant fraction of the material. What were the odds that she and the rest of her predecessors had missed out on the monograph for the last sixty years? It was circumstantial, but joined an increasing pile of bad coincidences surrounding her.

Unless her concern wasn’t the research, as Riley suggested, but getting at the curse.

“Can I ask you something?” Riley murmured, splitting the tension.

Andrew lifted his chin and found both cousins watching him, one sympathetic and the other upset, with the same flat set to their mouths. His incisors had marred Sam’s neck with their imprints; a matched pair of thumbprint bruises sat at the upper notch of his biceps. He’d put those there when he grabbed on for dear life. He remembered how his vocal cords had cracked on a startled sound he’d not made before.