The Curse

  • 11 Dec - 17 Dec, 2021
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Fiction

If there was some trace of evil in her eyes (they matched, he observed, the lapis lazuli that tiled every surface in her palace), Brian couldn't see it. He had not misidentified her. That much he knew. It was Davina, called still the Blue Jewel, but with such bitter irony that she might as well have been named the Bitch from Hell.

But there had to have been some mistake, even if not with his eyes nor her guiltless, perfect face.

"Brian?" she ventured. Her voice was not like bells or chimes or flutes or anything so musical. It wasn't like anything but a voice - a woman's voice, low and with just enough of a rasp to it that it could come only from real air through a real throat. She was supposed to be a monster. Why wasn't she a monster?

"How do you know my name?" The defiance and suspicion was only in the words chosen. His tone might as well have accompanied a concerned inquiry after her health. The look on his face would have been less incongruous if he'd been speaking a proposal of marriage.

"What? Brian, it's me, Davina," she said. Her face was instantly a mask of concern, but Brian's sharp eyes detected hurt beneath, like he'd wounded her and she was trying for his own sake not to be offended. "Christ, Brian, they told me you'd hit your head, but..."

"What?" That had come out of nowhere. Hit his head? Who were "they"? Why was she swearing by a god who'd been so ineffectual for the past decades that his worship had been all but forgotten? Why was he thinking such odd thoughts when he'd been to church just that morning (for it was Sunday), Davina sitting beside him in the pew?

"Brian, do you remember anything?" she pressed. Her eyes were very blue; his vision of everything save those very blue eyes swam. The background could have been white or red or beige or inky black, he had no notion. The church, he remembered suddenly, was grey stone. When he and Davina had moved to Elm Springs they'd chosen a house near that church specifically because it had looked like such a charming place, a calm bubble of the sacred in their new home.

"I remember..." The background resolved itself. Green walls and white décor and instruments of medicine: he was in a hospital (but it didn't look like a hospital, hospitals were brown and crowded and looked like - well, of course they looked like this. This was what hospitals looked like, because he was in a hospital and it looked like this.) "Davina?"

"Oh, thank the Lord, for a moment I was worried you didn't recognize me," she exclaimed, leaning over him - when had he begun lying down? Why did it surprise him that he was lying down, when he was in a hospital and had hit his head? Of course he needed rest.

Why was he holding a sword?

"They said you might hallucinate

a bit. You hit your head so hard, it's a miracle you're alive, much less awake," Davina said, answering his question and jogging his memory about who "they" were. They were doctors, because he was in a hospital. He had hit his head.

"Davina"?

That's all, she can do anything but change her name, and someone had not told him. That someone, who he was now quite sure had never existed, had not gone on to say if you meet someone named Davina, no matter what, kill her. You're our hope for this decade, Brian. She's only vulnerable once every ten years and then it's back to the hell for everyone if you fail.

"Davina, darling," croaked Brian, trying to think around the headache. "Tell me your name is... uh... Sarah."

"What?" Perfect, guileless confusion crossed her face. "Sarah? Who's that?"

"Nobody. Just tell me that's your name." Prove it's a stupid dream I had when I went tumbling down the stairs and hit my head, and we can go home to our children, and I can take the week off from work, and make love to my wife, my beautiful blue-eyed -

"It's not. My name's Davina, Brian sweetie, don't you remember? I thought you recognised me..." Worry knitted that painted brow, perfect as the magically sculpted face of an immortal demon face of a woman with parents with such good genes (a decade of memories of his in-laws, charming people if he'd ever met any, marched across his mind) ought to be.

"I recognise you. What's your middle name?" he tried. That wouldn't sound so suspicious to his (enemy) wife. He'd just forgotten her middle name.

"I don't have a middle name - do you mean my maiden name?" she asked slowly.

"Yes." Anything but "Davina" or "Blue Jewel", the less appealing of his two histories told him, would be impossible for her to claim as a title - "Blue. I was born Davina Blue," she said. "You remember your last name, I hope? Brian?"

Jewel. (Amron? No, that wasn't a last name, and he wasn't even from "Amron", that place didn't even exist, it was an imaginary city built on the imaginary ruins of Flagstaff, which was in perfectly good repair and had no ruins, and anyway he was from Chicago.) "Jewel," he said. "Davina. Love."

"I'm here, Brian," she murmured in his ear. "This is going to sound stupid, I know, but will you just say the words 'my name is Sarah'? Please."

"Brian Ammon (Ammon? Was that where he'd gotten that imaginary village?) Jewel, you're either delusional, in which case I shouldn't do any such thing in case it makes you worse, or you're sane and I'm not going to play into whatever nonsense you've decided to worry me with today."

He tipped his head back farther into his pillow, and she moved her foot, ever so innocently, and the sword skittered farther away, inaccessible on the other side of the room.

It was a hallucination anyway, so it didn't much matter where it was.

The pasts, one bitter but promising glory, one almost distressingly normal and happy and promising more of the delicious, tantalizing same, battled for Brian's allegiance.

One told him that if he did not kill her before the time was up, he would certainly die.

He didn't want to die; he didn't want to be the latest of a dozen warriors to have failed to topple the Blue Jewel from her lapis throne.

He didn't want to cut that gorgeous head from those trembling shoulders and watch the light go out in those blue eyes.

She knew when she had him, of course. He'd debated a bit longer than some, not as long as others, but she had him where she wanted him in the end.

She let him die in his sleep, twisting his neck with a snap, quick and clean and merciful and none the less deadly.

She waited until her invulnerability was returned to her by the dawn before she threw his body from the mountaintop to advertise his failure to the world, which would remain populated by her victims for the next ten years.

Then she was aloft. Wind whistled in her ears as she traversed the globe, impossible speed achieved by the dark magic that blazed in her blue eyes. She had lost an entire day, and she had work to do. - Anonymous

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