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.

  Smashwords Edition

  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 cor
rupt use of black magic.

  She should be grateful, 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.

  ***

  Amelia

  Present Day Ireland

  I awoke with a start, staring at my room as if I had never seen it before, my fingers curling around the sheets as I backed up against the headboard. Within seconds the realisation hit me. Another dream. Same people.

  Not real.

  I brought my knees to my chest and tried to slow my breathing. At first, I hadn’t paid attention to the dreams, but they hadn’t started out so vividly. But soon I realised the dreams were a running series of events involving the same people, and every morning I found it harder and harder to wake in my own reality. Instead, I woke wondering why I couldn’t see the stars, and why there was a stifling, oppressive roof over my head. Every night I became Kali, and every day I felt a little less like me.

  Of course, my mind had to play tricks on me when I needed it to stay straight. I figured I had some kind of mental block because I was dreaming about someone else’s life when I should have been suffering from nightmares of my own.

  Checking the clock, I groaned. Five a.m. Brilliant.

  I pulled on my dressing gown and glanced at my hollow eyes in the mirror—stranger’s eyes—before heading to the one place I knew would make me feel as though I were still in the right body. Kali might have found her constant in the stars, but mine was in a single room.

  I shuffled into the kitchen in slippered feet, half expecting to hear Mémère’s voice and smell her perfume, feel the warmth of her protective arms around me. Her soothing words could tell me everything would be okay.

  Instead, I found a cold, empty room. She was the light. She was the warmth. The kitchen had always been just a room. Yet it was where I retreated when I wanted to feel her close to me or when I needed to feel as though I still belonged to my family.

  No milk in the fridge, so I settled for a relatively stale piece of toast. Chewing had become perfunctory. I didn’t taste food; I didn’t feel sunlight on my skin. In some ways I thought it a sin for the sun to shine when my heart was still mourning.

  I sat there alone until Nathan arose, hungry as usual. Werewolves burned away everything they ate. Sometimes Nathan joked around and said hunger caused his stress. I was starting to believe him.

  My brother raised a brow at the sight of me, up before him, but I wasn’t planning on telling him I had been sitting there for over two hours. My body didn’t want to move, so I had frozen to the spot, while images of my grandmother’s broken body flashed before my eyes. For the five billionth time, I wished I had been the one to take revenge on the werewolf who killed her. Not some girl who had only known for a couple of weeks that werewolves existed.

  But I froze with fear in the face of the creatures that I’d always known existed. I hadn’t moved to help one member of my family, and one had died. The werewolf had come for me, had hunted me, but I had hidden while my grandmother tried to protect me. The wolf murdered her instead.

  My family could never forgive me for that.

  The aftermath was almost as difficult to deal with as her death had been. My grandfather had run away. My brother was too concerned with his girlfriend’s feelings to worry about me. And my uncle might as well have lived elsewhere, so rarely did I see him. Sometimes… sometimes I wanted to fall back asleep to be in that dream world as Kali, the girl surrounded by people who all paid attention to her. That girl was never forgotten about. Yeah, she had problems, but her family saw her as an asset. Me? I was the liability.

  “Up early?” Nathan asked, taking a swig of orange juice straight from the carton. I didn’t have the heart to bitch about that.

  “A little.”

  “Well, hurry up and get ready. I need to leave.”

  Story of my life. Nobody wondered how I was feeling. If I was okay. Everyone thought of themselves and got on with it. Mémère would have thought of me first. Then again, if she were around, everyone would be happy. The silence, the gloom, and the depression would all lift.

  But she wasn’t around. And she never would be, thanks to me.

  Nathan didn’t speak much on the way to school, not even when his girlfriend, Perdita, sat next to him on the bus. I stared at her from the corner of my eye and noted how tired she seemed, how the strain showed in her face. Her dark blue eyes held constant misery in them these days, even though she had been the hero, the one who’d stepped in and taken action in the face of danger. Yet, she seemed sadder than anyone. I longed to swap places with her. My chest ached as I wished the heroine had been me, and not her. The awe in Nathan’s face after the battle, and the way the entire family had studied Perdita with an air of admiration… I wanted those desperately for myself.

  I would get them, one way or another.

  Chapter Two

  Amelia

  The sterile smell of the science lab attacked my senses, seared my nostrils, and slammed straight into my brain, where it left a nice kicker of a headache. I rubbed my temples and tried to concentrate on my notebook. Not a chance. My vision was blurring again, driving me to distraction. I could hear someone talking at the front of the room, but the words wouldn’t form into anything coherent. I felt my legs shaking as I swayed on my seat. In a panic, I gripped the edges of the desk. What the hell was wrong with me now?

  I took a couple of deep breaths, wishing I could calm down already. A firm wall of nothing pressed against me. Nothing, yet it made my heart race in double time, and forced my uneven breathing to grow ever harsher. I had to be coming down with something. Maybe I needed to eat more than a slice of dry toast for breakfast. The dizziness began to pass, and I stared at a scratched name on the surface of the desk, determined to get through the class without passing out.

  “You okay?”

  I glanced blankly at my science partner.

  “You haven’t even started writing any of this down,” she said.

  The fair-haired girl smiled encouragingly at me, but I couldn’t place her name. That had been happening a lot lately, along with confusion, dizziness, and headaches, too. Maybe my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t pinpoint one thought or memory that didn’t lead to the horror of my grandmother’s death. Perhaps my brain was protecting me by distracting me from thinking clearly.

  “Amelia?” Confusion crossed the girl’s face, her freckles pulling together as the skin on her
nose wrinkled.

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m fine…” Her name, her name… What the hell was her name?

  “Ger. Remember?” She grinned then, and I couldn’t resist smiling back. I hadn’t made many friends in Dublin. Occasionally, some of my classmates joined me at lunch when I sat at Perdita’s table, but they didn’t want to spend time with me and probably only hoped my more popular older brother would join us. I couldn’t blame them for finding it hard to warm to me. Once I met Perdita, I sort of latched on and didn’t look back, which was not good, especially now that Perdita had so much on her mind. Unfortunately, the curse compelled me to seek her out, to bond with her, yet she seemed to have no trouble running away from me of late. I pushed that thought to the back of my mind. Between my family and Perdita, we all had a lot to deal with. I couldn’t expect anything more.

  As if I had invited conversation, Ger spent the rest of the class chatting away. I didn’t mind so much as I didn’t quite know how to respond. Was I supposed to pretend to be a normal teenage girl or was I supposed to follow Perdita’s lead and push everyone away? I didn’t know how I was supposed to deal with anything anymore, and I didn’t have Mémère to guide me.

  “You should hang out with us sometime,” Ger said as she walked with me to our next class.

  I mumbled something in response, and she seemed to take the hint, because she played with her hair for a couple of seconds before saying goodbye and walking ahead of me. Awkward.

  The headache worsened as I passed by the gym; the stench of sweat and socks and who knew what else completely overwhelmed me. I retched right there before running straight to the bathroom to throw up the little that was in my stomach.

  I sank to the floor of the bathroom while sweat trickled down my temples. The bell had rung while I heaved; I would be late. There wasn’t much point going to class when I couldn’t concentrate on anything aside from the thumping of my headache. Or so I told myself. I scrunched up a piece of tissue in my hand, and rubbed my knuckles against my eyes, hoping to push away the pain. The feelings of nausea had all but vanished, but the headache was worsening. A drumbeat in my skull. A hammer behind my eyes.