Obsidian Curse by Barbra Annino Page B

her acquiesce. “Very well.”
    The three sisters broke the huddle and formed a semicircle around the apothecary table.
    Birdie was the one to speak. “It seems, granddaughter, that your aunts may have invoked the hundred-year curse.”
    I tapped my foot. “Well, that doesn’t sound good.”
    Aunt Fiona said, “All Geraghtys pay a deep price when the curse is awakened.”
    “It’s nearly impossible to stop,” Birdie said.
    “That doesn’t sound any better. What price?” I asked.
    “The highest price of all,” Lolly answered. “Loss of our loved ones. Forever.”
    “You mean, as in death?” I asked.
    Birdie nodded solemnly.
    That wasn’t an option I was willing to accept. “So what’s the curse? Who’s the Leanan Sidhe? And what’s the plan?”

Chapter 15

    Birdie looked at me and said, “The Leanan Sidhe was once an Irish fairy-muse.”
    “The name translates to fairy mistress ,” Fiona added.
    Birdie nodded. “That’s right. Her beauty was unsurpassed by any mortal woman; her gifts, pure genius to human men.”
    “For whom she had an insatiable appetite,” said Lolly.
    Birdie continued. “Her lovers were painters, poets, sculptors, scribes, musicians, architects—anyone involved in some form of creative art. She would inspire their work through her magic, feeding their creativity, and elevating merely talented men to become masters of their craft.”
    “Her influence sparked some of the greatest art, literature, and music the world had ever known,” said Fiona. “Gifts to humanity.”
    “But they came at a price,” Lolly said softly.
    Birdie went on to explain. “Men who were bespelled by her would fall so irretrievably in love that eventually, after weeks or months of blissful passion, the creative energy could no longer sustain them. They needed more and more of the muse herself, and that was a demand she could not meet for long, for it drained her power, her life force. Inspiration—creativity itself—was what sustained her.”
    Fiona said, “So she could only have them sucking that away for so long until one day, she would be forced to leave her lover.”
    “Which is when they would suffer an emotional pain so unbearable many would either die of a broken heart, self-destruction such as drink or drugs, or by their own hand,” Lolly said.
    “So where does the curse come in?” I asked.
    Birdie said, “Eventually she became intoxicated by the power of her magic. It occurred to her what a waste it was that she fed these men all of her imaginative juices only for them to be discarded in death.”
    “So she devised a plan to siphon the energy back,” said Lolly.
    “How?” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer, but thinking it was important to the story.
    Birdie exchanged a look with her sisters. “She would sneak into their homes after they had died and steal their bodies.”
    I grimaced. “Please tell me we aren’t talking about necrophilia.”
    “No,” Birdie said. “She would drain all the blood from their bodies, fill a large cauldron with it, and bathe herself.”
    I don’t think I had ever been more horrified in my life.
    Fiona said, “Sometimes she would drink it.”
    Correction. Now I was more horrified than I had ever been. I gagged. “Oh, so vampirism then. Much better.”
    Lolly said, “Really?”
    “No, not really.” I stood up. “This is the worst story I think you’ve ever told me, and I’ve heard quite a few humdingers.” I went to the sink and washed my hands, then I stuck my head under the faucet and gargled. What I really wanted to do was boil myself and electroshock my brain to unhear that tale.
    I blew out a sigh, grabbed a towel to dry my hands, and turned around. “So the curse?”
    “Right,” Birdie said. “You see, when the Tuatha Dé Danann discovered what she was doing to mortal men, they bound her to the Otherworld and banished her from ever making contact with our realm again.”
    “Only they didn’t count on one of their