Cursed: Paranormal Women's Fiction (Mid-Life Haunts Book 1) Read online

  CURSED

  Mid-Life Haunts 1

  Nhys Glover

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. With the exception of historical events and people used as background for the story, or those clearly in the public domain, the names, characters and incidents portrayed in this work come wholly from the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Published by Belisama Press

  © Nhys Glover 2021

  The right of Nhys Glover to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is copyright. All rights reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please delete it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  OTHER BOOKS BY NHYS GLOVER

  ANCIENT ROMAN HISTORICAL ROMANCES:

  Liquid Fire

  The Barbarian's Mistress

  Lionslayer's Woman (Sequel to Liquid Fire)

  White Raven's Lover (Sequel to Barbarian's Mistress)

  The Gladiator's Bride (Sequel to White Raven's Lover)

  WEREWOLF KEEP TRILOGY:

  Guardian of Werewolf Keep

  Imprisoned at Werewolf Keep

  Defiance at Werewolf Keep

  Insane (A novella)

  NEW ATLANTIS TIME TRAVEL SERIES:

  Nine Lives (Cara/Jac)

  The Dreamer's Prince (Jane/Julio)

  Savage (Faith/ Luke)

  Shared Soul (Maggie/Travis)

  Bitter Oath (Liv/ Rene)

  The Titan Drowns (Eilish/Max, Karl/Lizzie, Pia/Marco)

  The Key (Kat/Bart)

  Pieces (Krista/Dirk)

  Second Chance (Bree/Hakon)

  Watcher (Jin/Rafe)

  Vision of You (Ellen/Duke)

  Osiris (Takhara/Dan)

  Causality (Willow/Jarvidh)

  Gods of Time (Teagan/Jason, Lucien/Alba)

  Book of Seeds (Shay/Cy)

  SCORPIO SONS SF/SHIFTER ROMANCE SERIES:

  1: Colton 2: Connor 3: Cooper 4: Chase

  5: Cameron 6: Caleb 7: Conrad 8: Charles

  GREYWORLD SWEET PARANORMAL ROMANCE

  Your World or Mine?

  Her World or Ours?

  Their Worlds Collide

  His World on Repeat

  REVERSE HAREM ADVENTURES:

  THE AIRLUDS TRILOGY:

  The Sacrifice

  The Chosen One

  Goddess Unbound

  THE AIRSHAN CHRONICLES

  The Five

  Daemon

  The Devourer

  GLADIATOR

  1. Typhon 2.Asterius 3. Talos 4.Orion 5.Marcus

  THE DANANS

  Captive

  Escape

  Reunion

  Outliers

  Gift

  Shattered

  Stolen

  ALFIE WIMPLE TRILOGY (Paranormal Romantic Comedy)

  Sticks and Standing Stones Can Break my Bones

  But Ferrets Can Never Hurt Me

  Dragons, On the Other Hand...

  MINERVA’S MYSTERIES (Cozy Mysteries)

  The Lost Child

  The Missing Party-Girl

  OTHERS:

  The Way Home (Ghost Romance)

  Caught in a Dream (SF Sweet Romance)

  Labyrinth of Light (New Age Inspirational)

  For Love of Liam (A Sweet Romanic Comedy)

  Haunted (A sweetish Romantic Mystery)

  Find out more about Nhys and her books here:

  www.nhysglover.com

  1

  I stared out at the bleak panorama before me. Time had not healed the land. It was even more desolate now than the last time I saw it twenty-five years ago.

  Twenty-five years. How could twenty-five years have passed so quickly? Like a dream. Yet the evidence of those years was standing beside me, just as horrified as I was at the sight. No dream left such living, breathing residue in its wake.

  “It’s awful, Mom,” Hilary exclaimed in her melodramatic fashion that was both her most appealing feature and her most annoying, depending on my mood.

  Right now I was leaning toward annoyance.

  “Yes, I can see that,” I answered patiently, running an absent hand through my short, unruly curls. “But I did warn you, didn’t I? Full disclosure and all that.”

  Hilary huffed out an exasperated sigh. “You told me the property had been damaged. But that was years ago. Surely nature should have repaired itself by now. It does that, you know. I read about it. It has to be the prophecy at work. The magic.”

  My heart was heavy in my chest, making it my turn to sigh. “There are some things not even nature can heal. Nor time. I shouldn’t have come back.”

  Hilary was immediately contrite, placing an arm around my shoulder and pressing her baby bump into my side. “The house is beautiful. A grand mansion, just as you said it was. So, the view is awful. As long as I have a comfortable bed and fresh coffee to wake up to, I don’t care about the lack of a view. The backyard at Aunt Lucy’s place wasn’t much better than this.”

  “Coffee is bad for the bub, you know that,” I answered automatically, slipping into maternal lecture mode without a thought.

  Hilary was my elder child, conceived a year to the day after I left Grand Haven a quarter century ago. I’d been seventeen and rebellious, determined that no boy would ever get the better of me again. I’d take my pleasure where I chose and leave broken hearts in my wake.

  That had been the bitter plan. Unfortunately, unprotected sex with a guy, whose heart would never be broken by someone like me, ended my plans. I was a single-mom at eighteen, living with a reluctant aunt and her family in Miami. The aunt with the untended back garden.

  Spring Break was not the best place to start a career as a heart-breaker, I’d found out the hard way. Hilary’s dad, whoever he was, didn’t even know he was a father. I was just lucky the only thing he’d given me was a child. AIDs was a thing, a very big thing back then.

  Luckily for me, and Hilary, a rich older man took a fancy to me a year after Hilly was born. It was a classic rags to riches story. Or maybe riches to rags, and back to riches again, would be a better description of my adventures. This empty mansion in front of me was evidence enough that my childhood had been an affluent one.

  And back then the acres of forest that surrounded my home were lush and green and filled with life. The perfect setting for the jewel of a house that was set amidst it.

  Until me. Until my taint befouled it all.

  “We don’t have to live here,” Hilary pointed out gently, her arm tightening about my shoulders. “Dad was pretty generous in the settlement. If you don’t want to stay here we can go somewhere else and start again. You have options. More options than you had when you were young.”

  “Hey, I’m still young!” I exclaimed with faux indignation. “Forty-one is not old!”

  Hilary smirked, knowing she’d gotten the reaction she wanted. She knew me better than anyone. She should. She’d been a part of my life longer than anyone else. Even my own mom had only been part of my life for the first sixteen years. Hilary had been with me for twenty-three, or four if you counted her time in my belly. Which I did. If there was ever a time a mo
ther and child bonded it was during pregnancy when two people shared one body.

  It hadn’t been the same with Michael, though. He had never really felt like mine, even in the womb. His dad, Paul, had been so thrilled at the idea of being a father in his middle years that he’d spent every spare moment talking to my belly, telling him all about the many father/son activities they’d do together.

  Hilary had been accepted as his daughter, because Paul was good that way. But she was never in any doubt that Michael, when he came into the world when she was four years old, was the light of her stepfather’s life.

  Paul had waited to leave me until Michael graduated high school and prepared to leave home for college. He’d wanted every moment he could get of fatherhood. I guess I should have been grateful to my son for keeping the family together as long as he did. Our life had been comfortable and secure. If I had to ignore Paul’s occasional indiscretions to maintain that pleasant facade, then so be it. His preference for waitresses was what had landed me him in the first place, wasn’t it? How could I claim it was a surprise when he found other waitresses appealing enough to take to his bed?

  Now Paul was about to marry his third wife, a girl Hilary’s age, and I was…

  Home.

  To arrange my mother’s funeral and decide if I could stand living in this place again.

  “You could sell it…” Hilary suggested doubtfully.

  But we both knew the chances of anyone wanting a place like this, set as it was in the midst of a toxic wasteland, were little to none. I either chose to live here or I let the place fall into ruin. Like the land.

  Maybe that was a fitting end for it.

  No. It wasn’t the house’s fault that my life had been derailed within its walls. It wasn’t its fault that I had inadvertently released a terrible darkness into the world.

  Of course, at the time I didn’t know. The prophecy had been part of my heritage since my great-great-grandfather built Channing Manor back in the nineteenth century. He had been a rich second son who married a witch. And he’d begun a dynasty built on sand.

  “Or you could… I don’t know… fulfill the prophecy. The rest of it, I mean…” Hilary continued when I remained silently staring at the two-story, stone masterpiece before us.

  Such a waste, people would say. Such a waste that such a marvelous building should be set amongst such desolation.

  “I really wish I hadn’t told you that story. That’ll teach me to drink too much around you,” I complained.

  Hilary had been sixteen when I shared my heritage with her one drunken night when I was feeling very sorry for myself. Paul was away on a business trip, and doing some waitress in Chicago.

  That girl hadn’t lasted long. Most didn’t, because they had no idea how to keep the fish on the hook. I had. Not intentionally, of course. That would have required a certain level of deviousness in my personality, and I had always been short on that useful quality. No, I’d lucked out. Paul had been unhappily married to a woman who couldn’t give him children. I had a daughter, proving that I was not only a beautiful natural blonde but fertile as well. I could give him his heart’s desire.

  And I did. It took a few years, but I did. And in the interim he’d practiced being a father with my daughter, assuring himself that he’d be an even better father when his real children came along.

  I could have had more kids I supposed. But something in me knew that my life with Paul always had a use-by date. Why extend it? Why not start my single life again while I was still reasonably young?

  Forty-one was not old. But it wasn’t young, either. And becoming a grandmother in the next few months was going to hammer home my new stage of life only too well.

  Anyone want to say Mid-Life Crisis on the way?

  “I needed to know,” Hilary said determinedly. “I never could understand why you never took me to visit Grandma. Other kids had doting grandparents. I got a dad almost old enough to be a grandfather and a grandmother I knew pretty much only via Skype. Until that night I didn’t understand why. But I will admit I thought you made it up. The whole prophecy thing. But then I realized you weren't capable of making something like that up.”

  “Are you saying I have no imagination?” I huffed out indignantly, playing along.

  Hilary rolled her bright blue eyes. They looked even bluer, set as they were amidst a forest of dark lashes. My blue eyes were surrounded by pale lashes. Only when I wore smoky makeup did they pop the way Hilary’s did naturally.

  I could be beautiful if I put in enough effort. Hilary, with her dark blonde hair, pale skin and delicate features, did beauty naturally. I was always grateful for the genes her absent father passed on to her.

  Her looks had ticked another box on Paul’s checklist for a wife. A gorgeous, delightful child was an even better option than just any child evidencing fecundity.

  She also proved my ability to mother. That had been on the checklist as well. Paul had wanted a good mother for the many children he planned to have.

  He hadn’t realized he needed that requirement when he married the first time. In his youth, having the most beautiful woman in the room on his arm was all that mattered. That she was as wealthy as he was had seemed like icing on the cake. He learned the hard way that looks weren’t everything. And a wife with equal wealth meant constant jockeying for power in the relationship. His next two wives were women who were down on their luck when he found them. Women who knew their place in the hierarchy.

  I sometimes wondered if Bethany, Paul’s first wife, actually remained childless on purpose because she had no desire to be a mother. She was a cold bitch. A very rich, cold bitch.

  “I’m saying that you would have to have been another JK Rowling to come up with that story,” Hilary said, gently drawing me forward toward the empty house.

  The waiting, empty house.

  Could a house be waiting for me? It had never felt sentient when I was growing up. Sure, odd things happened in it. Why wouldn’t they, with a family like mine? But it never felt like the house was responsible for any of it. The house was like the men in our family. The solid, neutral settings for the jewels of our idiosyncrasies.

  My feet only dragged a little. Part of me did want to go inside. Part of me had missed this beautiful structure. It had never seemed too grand and imposing when I was growing up. Never a place a child could be seen but not heard. Where dirty fingerprints couldn’t be found on expensive furnishings. No, this had always been the kind of home where the glorious, curved banisters could be slid down by a child. Or where the smooth marble entryway could be made into the perfect skating rink for small, socked feet.

  Channing Manor had always been a nurturing place because it had been passed down the matriarchal line. We were the ones who had the magic, after all. We were the mothers and daughters who were supposed to protect the land and keep the prophecy from coming true.

  But I wasn’t told the prophecy until it was too late. Until I’d done the unthinkable.

  And so, in an attempt to repair the damage, I left. Bitter, twisted, guilt-ridden and broken-hearted. Horrified by what I’d inadvertently unleashed on this idyllic place.

  And my mother had remained to do penance for her part in the disaster. For not warning me. For underestimating her birth-right and her obligation. She remained to bear witness to the death that was constantly spreading further and further out from the epicenter that was the house. Ground zero. The house was ground zero. That was where the taint had begun.

  In that first year the house found itself sitting in the center of a rough circle, nearly two and a half acres of death. By the following year, that had become almost ten acres. Now, twenty-five years later, fifteen hundred acres lay in desolate ruin around the house.

  It was the silence that affected me the most. The utter silence that was broken only by the wind. No birds sang in the dead trees. No small creatures scampered amongst what was left of the dead undergrowth.

  From the look of it, a forest fire had
passed through the area some years before. Lush green foliage had returned to the rest of the mountains since then. But not here. Not on this part of Channing land. Nothing lived on this ever-expanding stretch of Channing land.

  Would the spread end when the borders of our land were reached? That would be soon, I knew. And I wasn’t the only one who pondered that question. It was why government scientists and environmentalists haunted the area, becoming the only life, beyond my mother, to be found in the dead terrain. Curious, concerned scientists with their gauges and their equipment, who took endless samples, and analyzed and hypothesized possible reasons for the phenomenon.

  No one knew when the spread would end or even slow. If it would ever slow. Could the whole world fall foul of the prophecy and my mistake?

  Was it a mistake? That word made the action sound so benign. So fixable. You make a mistake, you acknowledge it, and you move on, making recompense where you could.

  This wasn’t a mistake.

  I shouldn’t have come back. I was risking Hilary’s baby. Panic suddenly closed off my throat until I could barely breathe. This mausoleum was no place for a baby. A new life. What was I thinking bringing my daughter and her unborn child here?

  My heels dug into the gravel, bringing Hilary to a halt along with me.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’m risking your baby,” I told her as the panic grew inside me. “Nothing lives here. Look around! You won’t even find cockroaches in that house!”

  “I won’t have the baby here,” my daughter placated me gently. “And by the time she comes along you’ll have either fixed the problem or we’ll have moved on. Don’t worry about us. Your mom lived all these years right in the middle of it. She was as healthy as a horse until she got run over by a cab in New York City.