CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE PRESENT DAY
“Stop staring. It won’t bite.”
Despite the reassurance, I’m not sure where Jesse thinks my attention would be better directed if not at the corpse in the middle of the room.
Painfully bright lights wash over the cavernous mortuary.
Silver faucets gleam behind three enormous sinks, two of which are filled to the brim with what smells like lemon and bleach.
Five metal slabs, including the one currently occupied by a dead body, are lined up in perfect symmetry in the middle of the room.
A tiny drain perforates the center of every slab, the coils rusted red.
On the other side, tightly latched lockers cover the wall.
Cold and clinical, Elias Talbot’s mortuary leaves no doubt that this is not a place where the living belong.
The vent above the sink rattles. A whoosh of cold air hits the top of my head.
Jesse waves a hand. “Just the AC. He keeps it cold in here.”
Of course. For the bodies.
I lean against one of the slabs, trying to school my features into neutrality.
Boredom, even. A dead body just a couple of feet away?
Okay, and I had chicken parm for lunch, so now we have two facts nobody cares about.
A freezing basement mortuary where the only sound is the hum of the machine that sanitizes the tools Mr. Talbot is going to use on said dead body? Please.
I am not going to think about it.
From behind a desktop roughly the size of small television, Jesse says, “The faster you get over here, the faster we can leave. My dad’s software doesn’t let me extract information on a hard drive, and if I try to email it to myself, he’ll get the notification on his phone.”
I think the corpse was a woman.
“Why did you use your dad’s computer to begin with?”
“His database.”
I wait for him to tack on the rest of the sentence, but he presses a button on the keyboard without glancing up.
“Congratulations, you just won first prize for THE most useless answer!” I applaud politely.
Mirthful eyes flick up from beneath his lashes, his lips twisting in a reaction I now recognize as him locking in a laugh before it can break free.
The sight is enough to ease a few of the knots tightening in my belly.
It’s strange, not having to hold back my thoughts before I speak or edit my words to make sure they’re the best fit for the person hearing them.
I’ve spent so much of my life moving through the world as though I need to compensate for taking up space in it.
As though everyone whose life I entered was owed the best version of me, and the best version was who they wanted.
Jesse, though … none of my calculations work on Jesse.
I can’t figure out which Mina he wants, so he just gets the Mina that is.
“Remember when I told you my dad spent a few years trying to figure out what kind of deal my mom made in Sarasota?
Well, he needed access to a ton of information, and he found a way to compile a search engine with a database of articles he pulled from across the globe.
The database only covers twelve countries, but he scoured them from head to toe.
Every region and locality, every newspaper, periodical, bulletin, or police report.
It took him years to put it together.” Jesse chuckles, though there’s no humor in it. “All that work only to find out my mom’s curse originated on the west coast of Florida.”
I inch around the slabs, sticking close to the wall. Jesse watches me, brow arched, looking torn between amusement and exasperation. When I finally reach his table, he kicks a stool toward me. “Glad you had a safe voyage.”
I huff, settling onto the stool. “You know, I think you should rein in the sarcasm a little considering I haven’t screamed even once at the DEAD BODY.”
“This is me reining it in,” he says. “If I rein it in any more, I’ll end up on one of the slabs.”
I aim a kick toward his stool and wince when my toe slams into a metal leg. “That isn’t funny!”
He flashes a smile so wicked it would make the devil flinch. “Last one, I promise.”
Right, and someday I’ll be able to watch Assal Eswed without sobbing at the ending. I shake my head. It only occurs to me after Jesse returns his attention to the monitor that the knots in my stomach have almost completely disappeared.
“I figured out what the numbers in your mom’s journal mean.” Jesse purses his lips. In an unusual turn of events, he seems to be struggling for words. “When your mom found out she was pregnant with you, I think she started researching the curse.”
The glow from the monitor casts the sharp angles of Jesse’s face in a ghoulish blue. The knots return with a vengeance. “And? What did she find?”
“She found other families who had struck deals like the one Bamba made. She traced the curse all over the world.” Jesse angles the journal toward me and taps a line of numbers with his pen.
“Once I found this family, it was easier to figure out what she was looking for.”
He presses a number on his keyboard, and a series of paintings show up. On one of them, an unsmiling set of parents stand behind two somber young children. The palace around them is nothing short of grand, rendered in hues of red and gold.
“This was a military general’s family in the Ottoman Empire.
He was nobody. No wealth, no reputation, no well-to-do family.
Then out of nowhere, he’s appointed to a top political position in the region.
He builds a mansion so spectacular, the townspeople start mistaking it for a royal post. But soon after it’s built—”
“Children start to disappear,” I finish, unable to tear my gaze from the man in the uniform.
“Yes. It continues for six generations.” Jesse points to the line of numbers in my mother’s journal again, to the left of the dates. A simple ? marked the generations.
“What happened after the sixth generation?”
He taps the keyboard again, and a translated black-and-white headline fills the screen.
MASS DEATHS OF DEMIR FAMILY: ESHAK PALACE IN RUIN
“When the curse finishes with a family, it doesn’t just end.
It eliminates every living member of that family and destroys the host home.
Look at your mom’s markings—each of these rows is a place where the curse traveled and the number of generations it lasted.
Families across the world: Germany, Portugal, Libya, Nigeria, New York.
Your mom traced at least a dozen. The longest the curse lasted in a family was nine generations.
” He swivels back to the monitor and hits the arrow.
Another image loads, this one a black-and-white photo of a large family posing in front of a beautiful countryside estate, their smiles aimed at the camera and each other.
In the corner of the screen, Jesse has pinned a row of scanned newspaper articles under the heading “Possibly Linked Disappearances.
“ I might’ve gathered the energy to make a crack about how if Jesse showed this amount of discipline with his schoolwork, he might be graduating as valedictorian instead of Aida.
But my eyes fall on the photo of a small boy at the bottom of the screen and freeze.
“I know him.” My voice echoes between the mortuary’s sterile walls. “That’s the boy I saw in your room—the shadow!”
“Him?” Jesse enlarges the photo, and I nod, tears pricking my eyes. The headline is in French, but thanks to a language app and a two-year obsession with Anna and the French Kiss in middle school, I can decipher “missing” and “dead.”
That smiling family had killed him.
How many children has this curse taken? How many lineages has it ended at the expense of maintaining its favored one?
“I wonder why the shadows showed you this kid in particular,” Jesse muses.
I swipe a tear from under my eye before Jesse can see. “I don’t know. Who took the curse on for this family?”
“I couldn’t find records tracing back to the origin, just that the first recorded owner of the estate came into wealth suddenly and held on to it for decades.
This thing, this curse … it always picks someone broken down, no money or family.
They have nothing, and then the curse gives them everything. ”
“And in exchange, they get to take away everything from people who have nothing.” The bitterness leaks into my voice, and Jesse finally glances over, brows knitting in concern.
I don’t look at him. “Did the curse always end the same way?”
Silence follows.
“So it is going to kill me,” I say dully. “I’m not useful to it, and Khalto Safa is sick. When she dies and there’s no one left to satisfy the conditions of the curse, every Haikal in the world dies with her.”
“No.” The harshness startles me, and I find Jesse’s boot at the bottom of my stool, his burning gaze inches away.
“I didn’t bring you here to show you how you’re going to die, Mansour.
Your mom had a plan. She was trying to find a way to break the curse without, you know, killing Bamba’s entire bloodline.
I’m guessing she used your dad’s access to the National Archives to find some of these dates. ”
“Why would she think she could end it? She has a younger sister who seems pretty happy giving the curse whatever it wants.”
Jesse watches me for a minute. The scent of acetone and alcohol wipes tingles in my nose. “Do you not remember what the housekeeper said the night you saw the door?”
Why else do you think she brought Nadine’s daughter here?
The house has been in ruins for years.
Safa’s sick.
“Your aunt is dying, Mina.”
I weave my fingers together to stop their trembling.
Jesse keeps going. “She’s probably been sick for a long time. She called you when she did because her time was finally running out, and she knew there would be nobody left to satisfy the curse.”
“But why?” I gasp. “She could have just found someone else. Why would she bring me to that house knowing what it meant?”
Jesse flips the pages of the journal, back to the very first entry we read at the Grease & Grind.