Kieran stopped so abruptly that Calvin very nearly ran into him.
Oh, great. He thinks he’s stuck out in the woods with a lunatic. Not that I blame him.
Calvin opened his mouth to speak once more, but Kieran whirled around, his eyes wide.
“Cursed?”
He looked… well,notlike he thought Calvin was a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
If anything, he lookedexcited.
“Uh, yeah,” he said noncommittally, ready to back down and pretend it was all a joke if he had to.
“I love curses!” Kieran said, before doing a double take.
Calvin did a double take of his own.
O… kay…
“I mean, I don’tlovecurses,” Kieran went on quickly. “But they’re definitely interesting. Half this town has been under a curse of some kind at one point or another.”
“Really?” Despite himself, Calvin found that he was being drawn in. Kieran didn’tseemcrazy – or he hadn’t done so up until now, anyway – and Calvin had to admit that he was curious.
Going from not believing in curses to curses apparently being an almost mundane event was quite the change in worldview, and he wasn’t about to just believe anything that came out of Kieran’s mouth. But he did want to know more.
Kieran nodded. “Yeah, all kinds of weird stuff. Bad luck curses, being unable to shift, being swarmed by random animals… something about this town just seems to invite these things. But the curses always get broken in the end. We’ve got a one hundred percent success rate.”
“I see,” Calvin muttered. If Kieran was telling the truth, then perhaps he’d ended up in the best possible place.
Itwasa bit weird to be having this conversation while standing on a forest path in the dark, but Calvin supposed that it made more sense to talk about these things where no one else could hear them.
“What’s your curse?” Kieran went on, as if it was the most natural question in the world.
“I, uh, break everything I touch,” Calvin said, realizing how stupid it sounded. “Or everything that has to do with electronics,anyway. My car, my phone, my Fitbit – they all stopped working the moment I came into contact with them.”
Kieran whistled sympathetically. “Boy, that’s rough. No wonder you came here by foot.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “And you don’t know what caused the curse?”
“Kind of?” Calvin said dubiously. “It seemed so stupid at the time that I completely dismissed it, but now…”
Kieran looked at him expectantly, and Calvin sighed. “I was out hiking, and I put my feet in a spring to cool them off. There was a flash of light, and then –”
He felt like he was a kid again, standing in front of the teacher and giving a completely unbelievable excuse for why he hadn’t done his homework, but Kieran was just nodding along like it was the most reasonable thing he’d ever heard.
Calvin continued, “Then this glowing woman appeared and said that she was going to put a curse on me because I hadn’t paid her tribute or solved a riddle.”
Kieran’s mouth dropped open.
That’s it,Calvin thought gloomily.I’ve pushed it too far.
“A sprite?” said Kieran, his mouth apparently working again. “You saw a sprite?”
“A sprite?” Calvin echoed, confused.
He had heard of sprites – kind of – but didn’t really know much about them. Certainly, he’d only ever heard of them as a kind of fairy tale when he was a kid. He’d been under the impression that if they had existed, no one knew where they were now – or even if there were any still around.
“Where was this pond?” Kieran asked, suddenly looking very intense.
“Uh, a few miles down the mountain,” Calvin said, confused. “I started off on the Sudden Valley hiking track, but I took a detour along an overgrown dirt path that was almost invisible to the naked eye. The pond was down there.”
