Free The Rain-Soaked Bride by Guy Adams Page B

taken ages too,’ she said, finishing her mime abruptly. ‘In a curse,’ she continued, ‘despite the fact that a third presence is becoming involved – the power that enacts the curse – the cause of death is usually something natural. There are exceptions but a hex spirit doesn’t usually kill directly, it encourages an external state where death becomes likely. It makes the world around the cursed person excessively hostile.’
    ‘That fits. All three deaths could appear accidental.’
    ‘Perhaps it’s simplest to look on the forces that fulfil the curse as agents of death,’ Cassandra continued. ‘Once invoked, they follow the victim around, affecting their environment wherever they go. They don’t do the killing themselves, they just create an environment in which it’s likely to happen.’
    ‘Right, anything else?’
    ‘There are limitations. In magic there always are. Firstly, the person who cast the curse has to be close by. Nobody’s sure why, it’s just part of the recipe. One of the factors that has to happen for the curse to trigger. Victim plus attacker plus external magical force equals
boom.
It’s the rules. Also, the curse can be reversed, but the victim has to stay alive long enough to do it. It’s like a game of Black Queen.’
    Toby shrugged. ‘I’m not that up on card games.’
    ‘No? Brilliant! We should play strip poker! I bet you have really funny pants.’ She screwed her eyes up and stared at him again. ‘Do they have cartoon characters on them?’
    ‘No,’ Toby replied.
    ‘Don’t believe you!’ Cassandra laughed.
    ‘Black Queen,’ she said, ‘is a game where you take cards off one another, trying to make up pairs and stuff but the real object is not to get stuck with the Queen of Spades. If you’re left with that as your only card you’re dead! Well, not dead, not unless you play
really
competitively. That’s how you lose, though. Curses are the same. It’s dealt to the victim and they’re stuck with it unless they manage to hand it to someone else, preferably, unless you’re just horrid, the person that gave it to you in the first place.’
    ‘And how do you do that?’
    ‘Well, that’s where the idea of a digital curse is even more freaky. Traditionally, the curse is written on a piece of paper. That piece of paper is then given to the victim. It can’t just be slipped into their pocket or something, they have to actually accept it. You can be cunning about it, obviously. Say you sent it to someone by registered post so they have to sign for it, they open the envelope, the curse is inside it, you know? There are ways of sneaking it onto people, but the rules are strict – there has to be some kind of acceptance from the victim.’
    ‘Pressing the button on your mobile that opens the text message for example,’ said Shining.
    ‘Yeah, I guess that’s close enough. There is at least an act of acceptance. Then, once you have it, the only way to escape it is to pass it back in the same manner. So you have to get the person who sent it to you to accept it back.’
    ‘Which they’re unlikely to do,’ said Toby.
    ‘Well, no, you’d have to be really, really clever about it. Again, it’s all about acceptance. Say you dropped the piece of paper and someone else picked it up. That doesn’t count. It wasn’t an active act of exchange, yes? The person casting the curse usually takes a few safety measures too, tries to build in a self-destruct, you know? So, the piece of paper is likely to get caught by wind, or fall in the fire.’
    ‘It has a life of its own?’
    ‘No, but it’s the same as the world changing around the victim, becoming an environment where something horrible is likely to happen. The world around the curse is likely to get hostile too, accidents will happen.’
    ‘But if the curse is being sent by SMS,’ said Shining, ‘and the phone destroys itself on receipt of the message …’
    ‘Then you couldn’t text it back,’ Cassandra