Denise Swank: The Curse Keepers

The woman smiled, pulling her reading glasses off her nose. “Oh, no, honey. We were about to leave.”

“You all are welcome to stay as long as you like,” I said, shifting my weight, trying to calm my increasing anxiety. I was getting light headed and I fought the urge to gasp for air. My blood pounded in my head. The man and woman in front of me seemed fine. “No need to hurry off.” If they left, I’d be alone in the dining room with the stranger. Sure, Fred was in the back, but little good that did me.

The older gentleman stood and grabbed his backpack. “Thanks for the beer recommendation. That was the best draft ale I’ve had in a long time.”

“You’re welcome,” I forced out with a smile, my heart racing as they headed for the door. “Thanks for coming in. Have a great day.”

They waved as they walked into the summer heat, and I turned to table five, trying to force air into my lungs. This is stupid. He’s just some guy. Give him his ticket, and he’ll leave and that will be that. This has nothing to do with him.

But I knew he was different. Deep, deep down in the pit of my soul. One of the few things I remembered from Daddy’s story floated into memory, begging for attention. My shoe caught on the edge of a table foot, and I stumbled, sloshing tea over the side of the pitcher and onto a nearby table.

What in the hell was wrong with me?

The man turned his face to watch me. His dark eyes burned into mine. Marlena was right. He was an extremely good-looking man. His dark hair was closely trimmed and stubble covered his face, like he’d forgotten to shave for a few days. But the hint of dark circles underlined his eyes, giving him a weary look. He clutched his beer bottle, his knuckles white, as though he were nervous even though his expression suggested otherwise.

Alarms rang in my head again, my instincts pinging every nerve along my spine. I needed him to leave. Now.

I set the pitcher on the sticky table and took two steps toward him. The hair on my arms stood on end as though I’d become electrically charged.

What the hell?

The man’s eyes widened as he turned to me, his lips parting slightly.

I thrust the folder toward him from several feet away, and flopped it on the table with a dull thud. “You can pay whenever you’re ready,” I said in a rasp, the air sticking in my throat even more than before. My panic rose and I stomped it down, frustrated that after all these years, the fucking curse was the first place my mind leapt to in this situation.

The corners of his mouth lifted into the barest hint of a smile, giving him a ruggedly handsome look. I was sure most women around the world swooned at the sight. I, on the other hand, was close to passing out from lack of oxygen.

His chest rose and fell in heavy gasps. He was having a hard time breathing as well. It should have made me feel better. Instead, it made my near-hysteria worse.

Don’t let him touch you .

I took two steps back and put my hand over my heart. Maybe we were being overcome with carbon monoxide poisoning. Could you get that from air conditioning? There had to be some logical explanation what was happening to me. Happening to us . I just couldn’t seem to find it at the moment.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and hastily removed some cash, tossing it on the table. The hair on his arms stood on end.

My eyes widened in fear as he got to his feet. He took a step toward me and stopped as I backed into a table. His dark, almost black, eyes held my gaze. “I didn’t catch your name.” His breath escaped in short bursts.

My face tingled from lack of oxygen, and I felt dangerously close to passing out. The closer he came toward me, the more difficult it was to breathe. I knew I should move away from him but everything around me slowed, and I couldn’t seem to get my muscles to work. Not to mention I was trapped by the table and two chairs on either side of me. The hair on my head felt electrified. “I didn’t give it.” My words came out slurred.

His face had paled and his eyes moved to my name tag. He grinned, but it wasn’t friendly. “Thank you, Ellie .” My name sounded like the answer to a riddle on his lips. “Until next time.”

He started to walk away, then stopped, spinning around and grabbing my right hand with his, as though he meant to shake my hand. An electrical shock ran from my palm into my chest.

For one brief moment, the entire world seemed magnified and microscopic all at once. The room faded and I was no longer me. I was the waves in the sound off the pier and the clouds in the sky. I was an ant outside on the parking lot. I was part of every tree on the street.

Before I could marvel at the vast connectedness of the universe, I felt a tear in the veil separating the earthly world from the spiritual, and the screams of hundreds of things, ugly and foul, filled my head.

The man’s mouth opened, and he dropped his hold with a start. Stumbling backward, he hurried out the door, not even casting a glance back.

My lungs expanded, as though some invisible band around my chest had burst loose. I sank into a nearby chair and sucked in gasps of air. My head spun, grappling to make sense of what had just happened, sure that I’d just had a hallucination, further proof that there was a logical explanation. Maybe I’d been poisoned. Or drugged. People didn’t sense bugs or plants. People didn’t feel like they were one with the water a hundred feet away.

The door creaked, and I jumped out of the seat, worried that he’d returned. Instead, a young family entered the restaurant. The mother pulled off her sunglasses and squinted at my startled reaction. I forced a smile and snatched up the pitcher off the nearby table. “Welcome to the New Moon. You all can take a seat wherever you’d like. I’ll be right with you.”

I hurried to the back and washed the now dried, sticky tea from my hand, trying to calm down. Never in my twenty-three years had I experienced anything like that. Yet part of the story Daddy had recited since before I could talk echoed in my head.

“ When the two Keepers meet for the first time, the seam separating the spirit world and our world will be ripped apart and the gate will be opened. Your chest will tighten, and you’ll have a hard time catching your breath. It will be as though the very air you breathe is sucked out of you. It is. The Keepers watch over the seam dividing the worlds. They alone will feel the tear. That is when the curse will be broken. Then God help us all .”

My palm tingled and I glanced down at my hand, gasping at the faint pink mark I saw there—but that wasn’t all. The outline of a square surrounding a circle, their lines intersecting, covered my palm.

“ Once the mark of the Keeper appears, you have until the beginning of the seventh day to make things right .”

Oh shit.

I had to talk to Daddy.

Another rush hit within minutes of the man running out the door. It was as though he’d been keeping everyone away. But when I thought about it later, it was probably the two of us combined. He and I were polar opposites, like magnets when you try to stick the wrong ends together and they shove each other away. Not only could we not occupy the same space without repelling one another, but we flung off the people around us.

Until you flipped the magnets and set them right.

But then again, to my irritation, I’d hardly been repelled at all. Nearly suffocated, sure. But repelled? No. Marlena was right. He was extremely good looking, if only I could get past my sudden asthma attack. My reaction had to have been some kind of breathing episode exacerbated by my overactive imagination, because for some reason, he triggered a resurfacing of all the hocus-pocus I’d left in the past with my middle school Tamagotchi and *NSYNC posters.