Crystal Cove (Friday Harbor #4)(9)

What’s wrong with me?

She had felt this ache before, but never so intensely.

As Justine unwrapped the linen, a wonderful perfume rippled upward, honey-sweet, greeny-herbal, lavender-musty, candle-waxy. The cloth, with its frayed selvage and ancient fingerprint smudges, fell away to reveal a leather-bound book with ragged deckle-edged pages. The leather binding gleamed like the skin of black plums and cherries. A design of a clock face had been tooled on the front cover, with a small copper keyhole in the center.

She traced the single word emblazoned on the book’s spine: Triodecad. It was the word for a group of thirteen, a number that bonded multiplicity into oneness. The ancient book, more than two centuries old, was filled with spells, rituals, and secrets.

Usually a grimoire was burned upon its owner’s death, but a few, like the Triodecad, were too powerful to destroy. Such rare and revered volumes had been passed down through generations. Since a grimoire preferred to remain with its keeper, it was almost impossible to steal one. But even if someone did manage such a feat, he or she would never be able to open the book without a key.

“Never read page thirteen,” her mother had warned on the day she had given the spellbook to Justine.

“What’s on page thirteen?”

“It’s different for everyone. It will show you how to achieve your heart’s desire.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“It never turns out the way you expect,” Marigold had said. “Page thirteen teaches one lesson only: Be careful what you wish for.”

Justine had looked down at the grimoire with a chiding grin and jostled it playfully. “You wouldn’t get me into trouble, would you?”

And she had felt the Triodecad’s cover flex as if it were smiling back at her.

Now, as she stared guiltily at the spellbook, she knew that what she was considering was wrong. But she wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. She wasn’t asking for anything extraordinary. Was it so terrible to want to change her own heart?

I should leave well enough alone, she thought uneasily.

Except that leaving well enough alone was only an option as long as things really were well enough. In Justine’s case, they weren’t. And if she didn’t do something, they never would be.

She reached beneath the neck of her T-shirt and pulled out the copper key on a chain. Leaning forward, she unlocked the Triodecad. Instantly, the book rustled and flipped of its own accord, fanning her with the resinous perfume of vellum and ink. The rag paper pages revealed a rainbow blur of illustrations … sunflower yellow, peacock blue, medieval red, soot black, deepest emerald.

The spine of the volume slumped abruptly as it reached 13. Unlike the rest of the book, this page was blank. But beneath Justine’s curious gaze, symbols appeared in random places like bubbles rising to the surface of champagne. A spell was forming. Justine stared at the page, her pulse thumping hard at the base of her throat.

The first line, written in elaborate and archaic letters, puzzled her:

TO BREAK A GEAS

Justine knew little about a geas, except that it was pronounced like “guest” with a sh sound instead of a t. A geas was a lifetime enchantment, most often a curse. The effort to break one was so difficult and dangerous that the results were potentially even worse than the original curse. The unlucky victim of a geas was usually better off learning to live with it.

“This can’t be right,” Justine said in bewilderment. “This won’t fix my problem. What does a geas have to do with anything?”

The page rippled emphatically, as if to say, Look at me. Slowly it dawned on her: This was the answer.

The words played through her mind with strange variations on emphasis … this was the answer … this was the answer …

“I’ve been cursed?” she asked after a long time, in the insulated silence. “That’s not possible.”

But it was.

Someone had condemned her to a lifetime of solitude. Who would have done such a thing to her? And why? She had never hurt anyone. She didn’t deserve this. No one did.

Too many feelings were coming to her at once. The cage of her chest was too small to contain them, pressure building behind her ribs. She trembled, breathed, waited, until the shock and pain burned down to a white-hot core of fury.

It took considerable skill and power to cast a spell of lifelong duration. The crafter would most likely have had to permanently sacrifice a portion of her power, which was sufficient deterrent to make a geas a rare spell, indeed.

All of which meant that this had been done to Justine by someone who had hated her.

But a geas wasn’t unbreakable. Nothing was. And no matter what it took, Justine would break this one.

Four

Justine didn’t give a damn about what it would cost her to get rid of the geas. She would do whatever it took. So mote it be. A blaze of injustice filled her. She had spent the past few years waiting and wishing for something that was never going to happen. Because that choice had already been made for her, regardless of what she might have wanted or dreamed of.

She would find out who was responsible. She would turn the geas right around back on them. She would …

Her plans for vengeance faded as she blinked hard against a salty blur. She pressed her palms hard against her eyes. A headache throbbed behind the front and sides of her skull, the kind of pain that no medicine could ease. She thought briefly of calling her mother, even though she and Marigold had been estranged for four years. Even knowing it would do no good. Marigold wouldn’t be sympathetic, and even if she knew something about the geas, she wouldn’t admit it.