Henry took the seat beside her and stared into the last vestiges of the fire. How to explain and not sound completely daft? “It started with a dare,” he began. He told her about King and Rory and how they’d earned the sobriquet Misfortune’s Favorites because anyone who associated with them ended up facing misfortunes.
“Why would you misbehave when the penalties were so harsh?” she asked. Obviously, she had always been a rule follower and didn’t understand that miscreants like himself didn’t need a reason to misbehave, though in the intervening years, he had considered his motivations ad nauseum.
“Looking back, I suppose I didn’t really want trouble. I wanted attention. My father had always seemed more interested in the opinion of his friends in the House of Lords than he was me.”
“But he couldn’t help but notice you when a headmaster threw you out.”
She was clever. She saw immediately what it had taken him years to parse himself.
“You have it exactly. But we finally went too far, and it wasn’t our fathers or the headmaster who scared us into good behavior.It was a witch. Don’t look at me like that. I don’t want to believe in witches any more than you do.”
“Go on, then.”
He could tell she was humoring him, but he continued regardless. “There was a woman and her sister who lived not far from the school. Everyone called her a witch or a hag somewhat interchangeably. She was poor and lived in little more than a pile of wood. I suppose she must have had a small distillery and survived from selling what whiskey she produced. Well, one night at dinner one of the boys—I don’t know if it was me or one of my friends, or maybe one of the other boys—proposed we steal the witch’s whiskey. It was more of a dare than a proposition.”
“And you couldn’t say no.”
He heard the censure in her voice. “If we’d said no, the other boys would have called us cowards. But I didn’t really care what the other boys said. I liked a challenge. I liked a dare.”
“You were a gambler even then.”
“Unfortunately, because that night we went to the witch’s lair—”
“Carlisle, really. She was an old woman, not a witch.”
“That’s what you say now. But you don’t know what happened after we stole her whiskey.”
Katie put her hands to her mouth. “You didn’t.”
“And dropped it.”
She gasped.
“We broke the barrel, and the witch came out of her lair—hovel, I mean—and cursed us. I’ll never forget what she said.”
“What was it?”
Henry felt invisible fingers climb up his spine. He didn’t like to repeat it. He looked behind him, checked the hearth again to be certain no disembodied heads were in there, then leaned close. “I’ll only say it once.”
Katie moved closer to him, and her warmth and the scent of vanilla and lavender teased his nose. Best not to think about how good she smelled, or he’d think about how they were alone and all the ways he might ruin her. Then he’d reallyhaveto marry her.
“This is what she said.”
When he didn’t speak, Katie raised her brows expectantly.
Henry cleared his throat. “I’ll add there was thunder and lightning and the middle of the night. She was holding some sort of vial. In the curse, she calls it a flagon.”
“Just say it, Carlisle.”
He swallowed.
“Take tooth of giant; seize nail ofdragon.
Unite with holy water in thisflagon.
Hear me now, oh great lords ofnight.
Give me my revenge; ease myplight.
