Four Kinds of Cursed (The True and the Crown Book 4)

  Four Kinds of Cursed

  May Dawson

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Also by May Dawson

  A Note From May

  About the Author

  Prologue

  When I stumble through the gates of my childhood home, I fall to my knees there in the dirt. It feels like the world is spinning around me, and my skin flushes hot. Is this my magic, rushing through me, making me feel like I’m sick? I raise one hand and regard the bloody scrape from the fall. My knees are still stinging, and I draw a deep breath.

  There’s a chill in the air, and I sense someone standing over me. When I look up, I expect to see the ghost of my mother.

  “Welcome home, sweet girl.”

  It’s the ghost of my father smiling down at me. He stands there with his hand in one pocket, tall and aristocratic, looking at me as if there’s nothing strange about me falling at his feet six years after the last time we saw each other.

  “You’re dead,” I say flatly. The fear in my chest presses against my throat until I can barely draw a breath.

  The fact that he’s dead is little comfort. He must have tricked me into coming back here for some reason.

  “Well, yes.” He shrugs. “But I’m not one to let a little thing like death stop me.”

  “Get away from her.” My mother strides toward us. The wind blows back her long, champagne-colored skirt, and her soft blond hair curls around her ears. Her pink lips are set. She looks so much like I remember her, and my heart lifts.

  I scramble to my feet as everything else—the bloodied hands, the heartbreak, the fear—falls away. “Mama?”

  “Tera.” Her eyes are alight as she raises her arms to embrace me.

  I put my arms out too, even though I know better. There’s a part of me that hopes those crazy True stories are right, that my mother really has been alive somewhere, fighting the True.

  But as my fingertips brush her shoulders, my hands grip nothing but icy air.

  Her own arms fall. “I hoped…”

  “Me too.”

  My father snorts.

  “Go away, Padrick,” she says. “She doesn’t want you.”

  “But I want her,” he says lightly. His blue eyes, so like mine, are filled with a triumphant light. “I know what you’re thinking, Tera. You should know your mother and I are a package deal. I’ve never run across a spell yet that banished one ghost from the ground where they died without cleansing the others too.”

  “I’m sure you’re very trustworthy.” I speak to him, but I can’t take my eyes off my mother. She looks just like I remember, except so much smaller; her head barely reaches higher than my shoulder. I breathe in her familiar scent, a soft floral perfume mixed with honey, even though it must be my imagination.

  “You grew tall.” There are tears flooding her eyes, and it makes something throb inside my chest. Here she is, and it’s so unfair that I can’t touch her and she can’t touch me.

  I’d thought that having my mother back as a ghost was all I needed, and yet here I am, and I’m so greedy. I long for more.

  “I’m not tall so much as you are extraordinarily short,” I say, and her eyes crinkle at the corners as she laughs, which makes her tears spill down her cheeks. It’s not much of a joke, but it eases the painful tension in the air.

  Has my magic really returned? Or did something else break open the warded gates so that I could come home.

  I stoop and pick up one of the pieces of gravel from the driveway. Every child in Avalon can levitate an object; ‘spoon-magic’ is the very first trick we all learn. But I haven’t been able to do that since Moirus Neal stole my magic.

  “Tera,” my father begins curiously.

  I close my eyes, shutting him out, as I hold my palm in front of me. The pebble feels far heavier than its small weight, and my hand begins to tremble as I imagine it rising in my mind.

  I don’t want to open my eyes. I can still feel a weight in my palm, and disappointment slams into my chest like a fist.

  But when I finally look, my palm is empty. The pebble hangs in the air in front of my eyes. My heart begins to pound in my chest.

  My magic’s come back.

  I should be relieved, but my magic isn’t the only thing that has returned.

  So has the dark lord who always wanted to use me for his own purposes.

  I’ve waited so long for this moment, and now it feels tainted. I can’t even enjoy it. I catch the rock out of the air, breaking the spell, and toss it back to the earth. What is the old man planning? “So, which one of you summoned me here?”

  My mother’s shoulders dip at the question, but my father straightens proudly.

  “We worked together,” he says. “Just like old times.”

  “It was time for you to come home, sweetheart,” my mother says. “There’s so much we need you to understand.”

  “You two are working together,” I say slowly, as dread settles into my gut.

  “Lord no,” my mother says quickly, casting a dark look at my father. “I despise Padrick.”

  He looks completely unperturbed at this statement, although he raises his eyebrows at me quickly as if in an appeal to my sympathy. As if she’s so unreasonable.

  She catches the look, and her blond brows draw together in response.

  “He murdered me,” she adds, her voice cool. “But I did use him to get you here, sweetheart.”

  For the first time, my father looks offended; he doesn’t like the idea of being used by any woman.

  “Go away, Padrick,” she says, yet again. She takes a step toward the house, then turns back, beckoning me with her.

  I walk with my mother up the long walkway toward the haunted house. In the distance, the surf thunders against the rocks, as if the ocean is trying to dash itself to pieces. As if the world is trying to tear itself apart.

  The other ghost hesitates, and then he follows. The three of us walk toward home, leaving the twisted gates behind us.

  Chapter 1

  Three weeks later…

  “You’re too big to sit on my lap,” I scold my dragon, pushing her off my lap and on to the couch, next to me.

  Penny looks at me reproachfully. She’s in her cat-form, but it’s less and less convincing now that she’s the size of a tiger. But it’s obviously no tiger that follows at my heels; her bright green eyes glow, contrasting with her copper fur.

  “Sorry,” I apologize to the dragon as I pet her between the ears. She bumps her head with my hand, purring. She can shift into a dragon, but she prefers this form.
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  I think at this point, she might be spiting the ghosts. My father’s ghost is invested in my image. He hopes he’ll win me to his side and we’ll continue his legacy together. He imagines me as the second coming of the dark lord, riding my unicorn with a dragon flying at my heels. But neither the dragon nor the unicorn much care for him, and neither do I.

  An enormous brown-and-white bird loops through the open balcony doors and hovers over my coffee table, its wings fluttering as it drops the basket it carries in its claws.

  “Thanks, Ferdinand,” I tell the bird. I don’t want to scare the villagers, so I have as much as possible delivered quietly to my house. I dump my mail out onto the table, then hand the basket back to the bird.

  Ferdinand caws at me and picks up the basket. As Penny chitters curiously, Ferdinand gives her a don’t-even-try-me look and quickly waddles to the edge of the coffee table before soaring off through the French doors again.

  “What’s in the mail?” My mother asks from the doorway. She’s dressed the way I remember her in my childhood, in a simple, elegant silk blouse and skirt, her blond hair pulled back in a soft chignon. That’s not what she was wearing the night she died. I’m not entirely sure if she’s a ghost, or a figment of my imagination.

  But she certainly seems to have a mind of her own, for a figment of my imagination.

  After all these years I yearned for her, my mother is driving me nuts.

  “Let’s see.” I unfold the newspaper to look at the letters tucked inside. The headline flashes by my eyes in the process. THE FOX RESCUES NOBLE CHILDREN FROM TERRIFYING ORPHANAGE.

  That Fox has been busy once again. My lips curl up despite myself at the artist’s black-and-white sketch on the front page; they’ve made him even taller, more dashing, than he is in real life. He doesn’t need embellishment.

  “How’s your beau?” My mother asks lightly.

  I shake my head. “He’s a ridiculous man.”

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t paid you a visit,” she says. “You know they’re all watching over you.”

  “Yes, Mother, I do.” I haven’t seen any of them, but they know where I am. There’s another letter from Cax; the envelope is thick between my fingers, as if he’s included one of his drawings for me. I refuse to read any of them, but I did open the first few, glancing at them without letting my eyes focus on their words. On their lies. It’s always been too easy for them to persuade me to see things their way.

  Penny sniffs the letter and chirps. When she looks up at me wistfully, I say, “I miss them too.”

  Then I open the small wooden trunk that sits on my coffee table and toss the letter in, unopened, on top of the others.

  “We’ll pretend that we burned them,” I remind Penny. I feel like I should. But it’s a bit of a silly dramatic gesture, when it’s only Penny and the ghosts who would know. Deep down, I’m too curious about what my men have written to destroy my chance to read them forever.

  One day, in a moment of weakness, I’m sure I’ll sit on the floor and tear open each one. But not now, and not while the ghosts could watch me weep over these men I never should have loved. That I still love.

  “Do you remember your sixth birthday?” My mother asks, studying the white doors that lead out to the stone patio, and then to the overgrown grass and the sea beyond. “We hung crepe paper streamers and paper stars above the doors. Pink and green. Those were your favorite colors then.”

  I shake my head. My mother brings up little memories, trying to jog my mind. Sometimes I’m not sure I want to remember.

  “You were already a ghost then,” I say.

  She turns to me in surprise. “I was still alive.”

  That’s not what I mean, though; that was after my father had stolen away her personality and left her a shell that smiled and went through the motions of caring for me.

  She’s always trying to make me remember. My father stole some of my memories, or maybe all the time he spent controlling my mind destroyed them in the process. But she doesn’t remember everything either.

  The past is something we both wish never happened. Forgetting is the second best option.

  “We had a chocolate cake,” she muses. “Your friends from the village came. You children played out in the forest almost the whole time. You were always a wild one, you always had a way with nature.”

  She turns a fond smile on Penny and me. It’s true that while humans often despise me, I seem to bond easily with creatures, especially the magical variety.

  “And then you sent me off to boarding school,” I fill in the blanks, “and when I came home, you were gone. Dead. What happened?”

  “Tera,” she chides. “It’s rude to ask a ghost about her death.”

  I’ve never read that in any etiquette book, and we certainly covered etiquette in excruciating detail as part of our boarding school curriculum. “Do you even know?”

  She shakes her head, but she might just be refusing to answer.

  “I need to know, Mama,” I say.

  She smiles when I call her mama. She always does. I try to say mother, because I’m no longer five, but sometimes it slips out.

  Since she’s impossible, I pick up the last envelope. I expect it to be from Airren—usually, he and Cax take turns writing me, but sometimes their letters arrive on the same day—but unusual handwriting catches my eye. I stop on the verge of tossing it into the trunk and frown.

  “What is it?” she asks me.

  “It’s a letter from the dread prince of Vasilik,” I say, “although I believe I made it clear to him that I wasn’t interested in his evil plans.”

  It’s hard to see Devlin, with his smug mask that slips away sometime to reveal keen, clear eyes and a soft, sensual mouth, as a villain. But as has recently become apparent, I don’t have great taste in men.

  Still, I rip it open. Inside is a thick sheet of black cardstock—he certainly is playing to type—engraved with bold gold letters.

  “This party’s in Avalon,” I tell my mother. She watches me expectantly; she’d like for me to read it aloud, but she’s too well-bred to ask to read my mail. “Just on the border in Minsk.”

  The border between Vasilik and Avalon is mountainous, but a few small villages and towns—and at least one boarding school—teeter on the edge of the snowy mountains. They’re meant to be hubs for diplomacy.

  “I shouldn’t go,” I say. “I’m an international incident waiting to happen. I wonder why he invited me.”

  The north and south are already on the edge of war.

  “I can’t imagine,” my mother says airily. She’s being sarcastic, and I use the invitation to cover my smile. Of course my mother thinks I’m beautiful. “Aren’t you bored here?”

  “No. I’m trying to grieve a broken heart, Mother.”

  She rolls her eyes. She’s not too well-bred for that. “You should make up with those men of yours. Haven’t they groveled long enough?”

  “It’s only been a few weeks,” I remind her.

  “Long enough. I think I’d like them. You should invite them here.”

  A faint chill sweeps through the room, and my mother frowns before she corrects herself. “No, perhaps better not.”

  When my father strides into the room, tall and aristocratic, he seems far more energetic than a ghost should be, especially before eight in the morning.

  “Good morning, Tera,” he says, a smile lighting his face. It reminds me of when I was a child. I remember him more than I remember my mother, and with far more complicated feelings. “How’d you sleep?”

  “The usual nightmares, Father,” I tell him, an edge in my voice. I toss the invitation face-down on the tabletop; my usual habit, to vex the ghosts who can’t turn over paper to read my mail. As I rise from the table, something on the back of the invitation catches my eye, and I lean forward to pick it up.

  Whatever my father’s saying fades as I read Devlin’s personal note, scrawled in silver in his own messy hand.

  Tera—I ho
pe you’re doing well despite the unpleasant secrets I revealed. I hate that I played a part in hurting you, and if you hate me for it too, I understand. But I hope I’ll see you in Minsk. Truth is power—and there’s more Power yet to be discovered. Fondly—Devlin

  I flip the card back over and throw it into the trunk, closing the lid. The last thing my father needs is a hint I could be more powerful.

  Devlin’s words will haunt me all day anyway. He’s being mysterious. He wants me to come to his stupid party, in the hopes I’ll follow him all the way to Vasilik. If the Vasilik government can unite the True in Avalon, they could win the looming war. Avalon can’t fight a True coup and the Vasilik troopers simultaneously.

  “Honestly, the Crown should probably have me killed,” I say to no one in particular, but it certainly stops my father’s ranting and my mother’s chiding responses. The two of them are apparently doomed to bicker throughout eternity. Now both of them break off, turning to me, and I groan internally.

  “Tera,” my mother says reprovingly. She has more to say—she always does—but she’s interrupted.

  “How can you be loyal to people you think would do you harm?” My father immediately seizes upon the thought. “Tera. Please. I can help you unlock your full potential, so that you can protect yourself.”

  “I don’t want anything from you.” My magic has returned anyway. Of course it has, now that I have mixed feelings about whether I even want it. And I’m far more powerful than I was as a child.