Adversity (Cursed #2.5) Read online

Adversity

  (Cursed # 2.5)

  By Claire Farrell

  Kali is the seventh of seventh, both blessed and cursed. With a father willing to sell her, and a life already mapped out for her, she’s desperate for an escape. But her way out can only come from the most unavailable person she knows, and stealing happiness comes with a price that many generations will bear.

  Amelia’s haunted by disturbingly vivid dreams about a gypsy girl but ignored by everyone else in her life. She’s desperate to prove herself. To show everyone she can help. So when her brother and best friend display the influence of the curse on their free will—or lack of it—and a spirit warns of Perdita’s fast approaching death, she knows she has to do something. Yet she can’t ignore that something huge is happening to her too, and her journey leads her back to where it all began, but not everyone wants her help, after all.

  May 2012

  Copyright © Claire Farrell 2012

  [email protected]

  Book cover images provided by:

  ©Chukephoto @ Dreamstime.com

  © Sbelov @ Dreamstime.com

  © Smithore @Dreamstime.com

  Licence Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter One

  Kali

  18th century Ukraine

  Sleep didn’t come easy. With her arms stretched out beyond her blanket and her fingers hovering over damp blades of grass, Kali stared upward at the stars and longed to find reason in the one constant of her life. No matter where she moved, no matter where she slept, she always had the stars. They felt like home, and when she gazed at them, she could forget about the ways her life would soon change. The stars remained the same, but her destiny clawed at her, trying to scoop her up into her fate. She should have felt honoured, but she couldn’t feel anything beyond reluctance and absolute terror.

  “Kali? Awake still?”

  Kali sat up as a figure stumbled toward her in the dark. Drina. Sister number six. Aged seventeen and married three years ago, her sister had a swollen belly and unhappy eyes, but the lightness in her step couldn’t be snuffed, not even by the oaf she had married.

  Maybe the future would hold the same for Kali. Maybe she could keep a piece of herself, despite everything else.

  “You should be with your husband,” Kali chided gently, knowing it was the right thing to say, though she didn’t quite believe it herself.

  Drina eased herself to the ground with a soft grunt. She leaned close to Kali and wrapped her in a fierce grip, overcoming years of distance in mere seconds.

  “He has little interest in me right now,” Drina said. “Besides, I’ve missed my little sister. It gets lonely without you all.”

  Kali leaned into her embrace, a sudden lump blocking her throat. “I’ve missed you, too.”

  “I hope he finds someone here for you. I would like to have one of my sisters close by.”

  Blinking rapidly, Kali refused to answer. As much as she longed to stay with her sister, doing so would mean her future had caught up with her—marriage, her responsibilities as a chovihani, and that double curse of hers. Drina would call it a blessing, the accident of birth that made her irresistibly valuable to her people. For Kali, the accident worked as a chain, as bondage. Freedom was impossible.

  Her birthright was the thing that provoked her father to drag her from camp to camp, to try to find the highest bidder before she became too old to be of any worth.

  “He’s having trouble finding anyone to take me,” she confided in her sister. “Times are changing. We haven’t had a Guardian in such a long time that many of the younger ones don’t believe anymore. All the men see is the greed in our father’s eyes, so they won’t pay what he wants. I can’t pretend to be meek and dutiful when the women pinch my cheeks and measure my hips, trying to decide how many children I’ll bear before fading away completely.”

  Drina’s husky laughter rumbled loudly. How Kali had missed that familiar laugh.

  “You’ll never change, little one.” Drina smiled.

  “Enough of the ‘little.’ There’s barely a year between us.”

  “Why are you so obsessed with time? It isn’t natural. I don’t know how many years my own husband has been on this earth, and you… you’ve never been able to stop thinking about the length of your time here.”

  “I’ve always needed to know how much time I have left,” Kali said softly.

  Drina squeezed her hand. “It would be so much easier for you if you would learn to accept it. He would be easier on you.”

  “All he cares about is his final payoff. Then we’ll both be free of each other.” Kali ignored the bitterness behind her own words though they rang true; her father would never go easy on her. She was a disappointment to him in every regard. She wasn’t like him, and the things he wanted her to do repulsed her. He was respected—or rather, tolerated—for his role as chovihano, but he used his power in ways Kali couldn’t. She would never be as powerful as long as she held onto her morals.

  One of her other sisters might have taken on the burden of chovihani, instead of Kali, but her father saw Kali’s birth as an investment. But time really was running out, along with her father’s patience, and no clan would support her without a return on their investment. A clan couldn’t support her. Everyone had to pull their weight to keep the clan’s camp running smoothly.

  “If you, while you’re here, could only do what he says and make them want you. We could be together forever.”

  The tremor in Drina’s voice was enough to release the stubborn tears from Kali’s eyes. She couldn’t hurt Drina, but she would never do the things her father wanted her to do. Curses and dark magic. Things that would make her powerful. Feared. For these reasons, she hadn’t fully taken on the chovihani role destined to be hers, and the power within her was resentful. She felt it bubbling inside her with an intensity that took her breath away. The idea of releasing it terrified her more than the idea of marriage or bearing a new bloodline of werewolves.

  The main trouble came from the voice in her head telling her what was right and wrong, a whisper of conscience that warned her not to interfere when desperate women begged her for love potions and fertility spells.

  She didn’t want to make people unhappy, but she didn’t feel she had the right to meddle in the affairs of the gaje, especially when the men never knew magic had been used against them. Magic could take away a person’s free will, something she understood far too well to inflict magic on another person.

  Besides, using her power felt dark, wrong somehow, as though the true meaning of the magic had been twisted into profit and obsession. The people who came to her looking for help believed in her magic, which only strengthened its unwieldy power in her blood. Her power sometimes drew out consequences even she didn’t expect.

  Her mother had once called her a dreamer, said she thought too well of herself, but Kali had watched all six of her older sisters marry and age before their time. She wanted something different; she wanted her value to be more than the coin she brought home.

  Maybe dreaming was pointless, but it got her through the tedious hours of fortune telling and putting on a show. Her magic wasn’t bells and whistles but the power of word and intent, something more than the rattling doors and dying flowers most people expected from the curse makers. Her magic should be respected, something her father seemed to have forgotten. Having magic came with a price, which was why most chovihani never uttered a curse in their entire lives. Of course, she had to be born from the chovihano who blackened everyone else’s name with his corrupt use of black magic.

  She should be gr
ateful, she tried to remind herself. The only reason she hadn’t married yet was because of that same power that chained her to her father. But the power already present in her blood was growing, and her father was anxious to pass it on, to marry her off and leave her with a clan who would pay him a massive dowry to have their own chovihani.

  Kali was more than a mere chovihani. Her life was different from all of the others who had come before her. She was a gift since she was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, which meant she was a lot more than a fortune-teller. She offered protection from the dead because her offspring would become the white wolves that would once again guard her people from the fallen souls trying to scramble back from hell. As the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter, Kali had power. And power meant horror.

  Power meant her own father would use her as a bargaining tool.

  He had fooled and teased a number of clans along the way, and visited camp after camp to figure out who could pay the most to have her, who would value her the most. But, as he liked to remind her, she would have no value if she brought nothing to her new people, and her blood would not turn worthy for many years yet, after which her kin would become the newest line of wolf guardian. Until then, she had to prove herself by selling hopes and dreams, and by giving the clan plenty of strong, healthy babies before her body gave out.

  She slept little that night. For hours, feeling unsettled, she listened to Drina’s snores. She was in yet another new camp and wondering what her gift would mean for her. The possibilities weighed heavily, and she wished she were as accepting as Drina.

  Yet, she couldn’t help but wish for a way out, instead.