Page 3 of The Sister's Curse

“Let me up! Let me up!” I blubbered. “There’s something down there. There’s—”

Mom reached for my arm and hauled me out. I didn’t think she was that strong, but she tugged me up to the grass with little effort. I curled up in a ball and wrapped my arms around my knees.

Mom gazed into the well, the way she did when staring into her teacup, still and contemplative.

“Was it a snake?” I gasped.

“No,” she said.

I felt it then, that moment when the sun disappeared. I’d always been able to feel that exact moment, even when I was indoorsor under cloudy skies. The light changed that much. I gazed out at the fading sunset and spied the green flash.

I pointed to it excitedly. “Did you see that?”

Mom nodded, but her face was lined with tension. “I saw.”

“What is it?”

She exhaled. “The green flash means that something woke up. Something bad. Something we don’t wanna mess with.”

“But what is it?” I had read entirely too many fairy tales. “Is it fairies?”

She gripped my arm and pulled me to my feet. “No. It’s time for bed.”

I frowned. It was barely dark, but Mom usually made me go to bed early. But this time I was ready to go, to get away from that claustrophobic well and that look in my mom’s eyes.

—

My mom told many lies.

She had to, I think. She was married to a serial killer, the legendary Forest Strangler, who left a trail of deceit and bodies throughout Bayern County. While he lied about his whereabouts, who he’d seen, what he’d been doing. Pretty much everything.

But she’d lied to herself about what kind of evil slept under our roof, and she’d lied to the police about wanting to take care of me. She’d given me up for adoption as soon as my father had been charged and had disappeared into the night.

I’d worshipped my father when I was a little girl. I always thought of myself as my father’s daughter in so many ways, even after I learned who he was and what he’d done. The forest spoke to me the way it spoke to him, and I felt its pull, that beckoning darkness. He’d lied to me the whole time. And I hated that.

And I was slowly beginning to hate him, for both what he did and the lies he told me.

I didn’t know if my mom lied to me about the green flash. There was nothing in it for her to lie to me about it…so why would she?

As an adult, I saw a television meteorologist talk about how the green flash was a rare phenomenon that occurred when a clear sky acted as a prism under just the right conditions. The meteorologist showed some grainy cell phone footage of such a flash. When I was a child, the flash had been magic. As an adult, I was relieved to know that it was just a freak meteorological event, perfectly scientific and perfectly safe.

I supposed my mom was a liar about that, too.

Swallowing the lump of a memory, I turned to Monica, now fifty yards distant, to see if she saw, but her back was turned.

I inhaled, a whispering breeze stirring the grass in a circular pattern. It felt like something was on the move, like on those full-moon fall nights when the deer traveled miles.

At my side, Gibby whined.

I lowered my hand to his head. “We should go back.” Some things in the world were not to be fucked with. This was probably one of them.

A woman screamed in the distance.

Instinct overrode my hesitation, and I burst into a sprint toward the scream. Grasses madezip-zipslashes against my jeans, and Gibby panted beside me. We raced across the field toward the distant cry.

“Help!”

The land was darkening by the time we burst out onto freshly mown grass, a full yellow moon rising in the east. A grand two-story brick house with a slate roof stood in the center of the lawn.Old money, not new money. The slate was streaked from decades of acid rain, and wavy glass windows gazed down with black eyes.