Spellbound - Cara Lynn Shultz [71]
“Emma, you’re going to think I’m deranged.”
My heart caught in my throat. “I promise you, Brendan, I will not think you are deranged,” I said, my eyes burning into his. “I swear it to you.”
He eyed me warily, but took a deep breath and started speaking. “This curse was just an anecdote told at weddings and family reunions. Supposedly, every couple of generations, one of the Salingers is supposed to have this incredible romance—a straight-up, fairy-tale, true-love kind of thing. Only, it would end up an epic failure. Any time one of my cousins got dumped or shot down by a girl, we’d joke about the curse killing our game. No one took it seriously. I sure didn’t.”
Brendan’s eyes flickered to me, gauging my reaction. I hadn’t flinched yet.
“The curse is tied to a crest that’s been in my family for ages—nearly a thousand years, I believe. As the story goes, if one of the Salingers met someone wearing the crest, they were supposed to be your…true love.” Brendan’s tone was gentle over those words.
“My grandfather has a pretty massive library at his house, with all these old family documents, books, photos and such. I figured I should research the crest a little more, because—” he paused, picking up my necklace “—you’re wearing it.”
He dropped the pendant, and I was positive that it was on fire, the way it was stinging my skin. I wanted to open my mouth, to tell Brendan that I knew what he was talking about, but I couldn’t speak. A very small part of me had believed that the curse was just fantasy, my pathetic way of manufacturing a bond with Brendan. But as he spoke, the reality of the situation rushed at me, trapping my voice in my throat as I listened to Brendan talk about how he discovered the very thing I stumbled upon in Hadrian’s Medieval Legends. The very thing my brother’s spirit was warning me against.
“I found some old books, but they just repeated the same information that I already knew,” Brendan explained. “It was an old family seal, belonging to some lord from forever ago, who redesigned it in honor of his wife.
“So I talked to my grandfather. And he told me about the house that used to be here.”
Brendan leaned back, dropping my hands and rubbing his eyes. “I’m making no sense.”
“Actually, you are.” I leaned forward and, clutching his hands a little desperately into mine, begged, “Please tell me about the house that used to be here.”
Brendan took a deep breath and began. “My great-great-grandfather Robert lived here—in the house you dreamed of. When he was on his deathbed, he warned his grandson—my grandfather—that he thought the curse might actually be real. Robert said when he was a young man, he fell head-over-heels for a factory worker named Constance. He called her his golden angel, because she was a blonde or whatever. It was love at first sight, of course. They had planned to elope, but she was killed the day before their wedding.
“The thing is, they thought they’d cheated death. She had worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and she said she had a bad feeling about the place and wanted to quit. She’d been having horrible nightmares about being trapped in a fire. But she didn’t want to look like she was out for Robert’s money. He told her to quit—and she did, just a week before there was a huge fire that killed most of the workers. But it was like death was coming for her,” Brendan said bitterly.
“Was she in this house when it burned down?” I asked quietly.
Brendan didn’t reply, which was answer enough for me.
“It was an electrical fire. The fuses were overloaded. Robert thought he had fixed the problem, but I guess he didn’t do such a great job.”
Brendan paused. “Back then, pennies were made of copper. So Robert stuck coins in the fuse box. An employee of his explained how to do it. Robert was so proud of himself for being industrious.”
“Does that even work?” I asked.
“It does, but it’s hardly what I’d call safe. When you do something like that, there’s no way to regulate the electrical current. And Constance hated staying in the house