Cursed by the Light for Loving the Dark novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Black Car
At the harvest supper Cassian Dray arrives with his fiancee, sneers at the dying woman on the porch, announces the wedding at the lake and drops a signed testimony at her feet that she never wrote.
Forty of our neighbors were eating pie on my mother's lawn when the black car stopped at the gate.
It was the Saturday harvest supper.
Mom had set out the long tables herself, with paper cloths and jars of purple asters.
I stood on the porch with one hand on the pillar and the other on her arm.
My legs gave out if I stayed upright too long, so she had stopped asking me to walk the lawn.
The car door opened, and a man in a black coat got out.
It was Cassian Dray, and he had not aged a day in seven years.
Every neighbor on the lawn stopped chewing.
A woman got out on the other side, in a cream coat, with yellow-gold hair and a soft, pretty face.
She walked around the car and put her hand on his waist and left it there.
They came up the lawn together and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.
"Linnet," he said.
That was all I got for seven years. My name, from the foot of my mother's stairs.
Then he looked me over, from my shawl to my slippers.
"Seven years in the sunlight," he said, "and you still look like something dug up."
Somebody's fork hit a plate.
Mom's arm went hard under my hand.
"You're on private property, mister," she said.
"I know exactly whose property it is, Mrs. Ashgrove," he said. "I've had seven years to learn the address."
Mom didn't back up one inch.
Heaven had taken my wings for loving him, and the black lines under my sleeves would reach my heart at midnight on Tuesday.
Cassian didn't know that.
I pulled my shawl tighter over my arms and decided he never would, not from me, not while he looked at me like that.
"Welcome home," I said. "Congratulations on the fiancée."
"I'm Odile," the woman said.
She came up two steps and held out her hand, and her smile was easy and warm.
"He's told me nothing about you, which means he thinks about you constantly."
"Odile," Cassian said.
"Oh, hush." She had already taken a glass of water off the nearest table, and she pressed it into my hands.
"You're shaking. Sit down before you fall down."
I sat on the top step, because she was right.
"Don't be kind to her," Cassian said. "She hasn't earned it."
I opened my mouth.
I wanted to tell him why I fell. I wanted to tell him it was nothing like what he thought.
My throat shut around the words the way it had every day for seven years.
I coughed, and nothing came out.
"Don't force it," Odile said softly, and patted my knee. "It only hurts you more."
I had never told her about my throat.
I looked up at her, but she was already smiling at the neighbors, and I let it go.
"We are marrying here," Cassian said.
He said it to the whole lawn, loud enough for the pastor at the far table.
"At the lake gate, at midnight, three days from now. My court's law."
Forty people looked at the lake, and then at me.
"I want you there, Linnet," he said. "I want you to watch me do the thing you couldn't. Keep a vow."
Mom said something under her breath that I won't repeat.
The pastor's wife whispered, "Is that the man who left her?" and nobody answered her.
I put the glass down on the step.
Behind me my mother was breathing hard.
In front of me stood the only man I had ever loved, who had waited seven years to do this in front of my neighbors.
I could have cried, or begged, or let him go on thinking I was already dead.
So I stood up with my hand on the pillar and told him I would be there.
"Tuesday. Midnight," I said. "I'll wear something nice."
His jaw stopped moving.
Odile's smile stayed exactly where it was.
He didn't answer me, and for a long moment I thought that was all.
Then he reached into his coat and took out a folded sheet of heavy paper.
He dropped it on the step by my slipper.
"You should remember this," he said. "The Light's court read it to me while I was in chains."
He turned and walked back down the lawn with Odile's hand on his waist.
I bent down for the paper, and Mom's fingers dug into my shoulder.
It was a single page in thick black ink.
"I, Linnet, give this testimony against Cassian Dray, and ask that he be sentenced."
My name was signed at the bottom.
It was my handwriting, down to the loop I always put on the L.
I had never seen the page in my life.
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