5. The Buried Curse #2
Words loosen from the page, curling upward in dark ribbons. The sentence I was reading thins, gaps appearing where letters used to be.
The archive is erasing it.
No.
I grab my notebook and start writing.
“What are you doing?” Mina hisses.
“Copying.”
“Onto paper that could also vanish?”
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
She rips a stack of napkins from her bag. “Use multiple surfaces.”
“That is disturbingly practical.”
“I panic efficiently.”
I write as fast as I can. The words blur in my mind even as I copy them, slippery and resisting memory. Weaver. Red road. Witnesses veiled. Painted eye. Buried curse. Ink lifts faster from the ledger, smoke curling past my fingers with a faint smell of iron and rain.
The brass lamp flickers. Somewhere deep in the stacks, a shelf groans.
The archivist’s voice carries from the front desk without visible alarm. “If the text attempts self-removal, do not inhale.”
Mina looks up. “That would have been useful earlier!”
“Noted,” the archivist says.
I run out of notebook space and write on a napkin. Then another. When the letters smear, I shove up my sleeve and write three words along the inside of my forearm.
WEAVER. WITNESSES. CURSE.
The ink stings against my skin.
Good. Pain helps memory hold.
The ledger page is almost blank now. Only a few lines remain near the bottom, fading even as I bend close.
The buried curse remembers the heart she chooses—
Gone.
—shall bleed through every—
Gone.
Speak—
Gone.
The last word hangs for one breath, black and trembling. Then it lifts. The page empties. Silence drops over the table.
Mina exhales a shaking breath. “Please tell me you got enough.”
I stare at the blank vellum, my forearm burning, my notes scattered across paper and napkins like pieces of a shattered mirror.
“No,” I say.
But my magic curls around the copied fragments with cold recognition.
“Only enough to be terrified.”
I spread the notes across the table: notebook pages, napkins, the inside of my forearm, and one receipt Mina produces from her bag that lists three pastries, two coffees, and the word emergency circled twice.
The ledger sits blank beside them, innocent as a dead thing pretending it was never alive.
I rearrange the fragments before fear can make me polite. The first phrase from the ledger. The bit from the broadside. The marriage records. The disappearing line. All of it broken, partial, ugly.
But broken things still have edges. And edges can fit together.
I read under my breath, moving pieces closer. “She who sees the red road between hearts…”
Mina’s hand tightens on the back of my chair.
“Let no house, hall, stage, or painted eye take measure of the bond before its choosing…”
The words feel colder when assembled.
More awake.
I match the next line to a note scribbled on the pastry receipt.
“The buried curse remembers the heart she chooses…”
My pulse stumbles.
She. The Weaver. The matchmaker.
Me.
No. Not necessarily me. There have been D’Amours before me. There have been matchmakers before me. Women with better posture, fewer emotional avoidance strategies, and presumably less experience being menaced by archival furniture.
This is historical. Academic. Terrifyingly personal academic.
Mina reads the last fragments before I can stop her. “Shall bleed through every—” She looks up. “Every what?”
I close my eyes.
I already know.
Not because the page said it. Because my magic does.
Every match. Every bond. Every red thread I have coaxed into visibility, blessed into courage, nudged toward love with intake forms and tea and mild emotional bullying.
My throat tightens. “Every bond she has made,” I finish.
The brass lamp gutters.
Mina whispers, “Fate.”
I press my fingers to the paper, forcing the fragments into order.
The line forms in my mind with awful clarity, not as a memory, not as a guess, but as a verdict that has been waiting beneath my blood.
“When the Weaver claims her own red thread,the town shall bleed through every bond she has made.”
Mina goes pale.
I keep going because stopping now feels like leaving a knife in halfway. “Speak it, and the curse shall feed. Hide it, and the silence shall bind.”
The words do not echo.
That would be dramatic.
Instead, they settle.
Into the table. The walls. My skin. The space behind my ribs where my magic has gone cold and very, very still.
For one breath, I cannot hear the archive. Only my own heart.
The Weaver claims her own red thread.
Dorian.
His hand under the tavern table. His body between me and the room. The way his eyes see through my jokes and find the fear beneath. The dangerous, impossible warmth of wanting to believe he could be safe.
My first thought is him.
My second is Mara and Caleb.
My third is every couple I have ever matched.
Faces rush through me in a painful blur. First dates. Wedding photos. Mated pairs. Second chances. Humans, witches, shifters, vampires, people who came to me lonely and left with hope tucked trembling in both hands.
If this curse is real, they are no longer success stories. They are targets.
“No,” I whisper.
Mina crouches beside me. “We don’t know for sure.”
“That is the kind of thing people say right before they absolutely know for sure.”
“We know fragments. Old wording. We know—”
“That a couple I matched died in front of me while their thread knotted instead of broke.”
Silence.
Mina has no joke for that.
Neither do I.
In truth, we don't even know what it means. Exactly.
The archivist appears at the end of the aisle, silent as a tax audit and much more ominous. “You found more than you should have,” she says.
I look at her. “Is that your official archivist response?”
“It is my polite one.”
Mina mutters, “I miss libraries with late fees.”
I stare down at the assembled curse, my own handwriting shaking across three surfaces and my skin.
I understand enough to be terrified. Not enough to solve anything. Which feels unfair, because if a curse is going to ruin my life, the least it could do is include instructions in a legible font.
The archivist does not offer comfort. She simply adjusts one black glove, studies the blank ledger, then studies me with the exhausted patience of a woman who has watched too many descendants wander into old disasters wearing modern shoes. “You should close the box,” she says.
I look down at the scattered notes. “Did my family know about this?”
The question comes out sharper than I intend.
The archivist’s expression does not change. “That depends which family member and which century.”
“Useful. Deeply useful. Thank you for weaponizing genealogy.”
Mina touches my arm. “Fate.”
But now the thought has teeth.
My parents.
My mother’s careful smile when I first told her I saw threads. My father setting college brochures on the kitchen table with the tragic optimism of a man trying to outrun destiny using journalism degrees.
“You have a gift with people,” Mom used to say, smoothing my hair back while not quite meeting my eyes. “But gifts still need practical containers.”
Practical containers.
Journalism. Communications. Public relations. Anything with respectable shoes and health insurance and no one arriving at our door because their soulmate had fur, fangs, or a generational curse involving pastry.
I used to think they wanted me away from matchmaking because they thought it was unstable. That I wasn't good enough.
What if it was fear?
Not disappointment. Not practicality. Fear wearing sensible shoes.
My throat burns.
I remember my mother standing in the doorway of our house when I told her I'd been invited to the prom. The look on her face. Sheer dread. As if she was afraid I would go and see every couple’s connection for good or bad…and possibly weave my own.
“No,” was all she had said. And that was that.
My fingers curl against the table. “She should have told me,” I say.
“Yes,” Mina says.
No defense. No softening. Just yes.
Mina’s hand covers mine. “But we are not solving your entire ancestral trauma stack in an underground death library before lunch.”
A laugh slips out, cracked but real.
The archivist slides the red-corded D’Amour fragment box an inch farther away from me.
I point at her. “That feels judgmental.”
“It is preservation.”
“Of the documents?”
“Of everyone.”
I should be offended. Instead, I am suddenly, horribly tired.
Mina squeezes my hand. “Breathe. One curse at a time.”
“One curse at a time,” I repeat.
But my gaze drops to the ink on my forearm, and the words pulse with every beat of my heart.
Every bond she has made.
I think of all those smiling couples on my office wall.
And for the first time, I wonder if my magic was never the family embarrassment. Maybe it was the family danger.
My first instinct is to call Dorian.
This is inconvenient for several reasons, the most obvious being that Dorian Wolfe is not a crisis hotline, a curse specialist, or a man who should be summoned every time my emotional infrastructure catches fire.
Although, in fairness, his voice does have excellent ER properties.
I pull my phone from my coat pocket anyway.
Mina sees the movement and goes still.
The archivist, unhelpfully, does not look surprised.