Cursed Love by Lanie Jordan Read Free Book Online

Chapter One
     
    Valentine’s Day sucked.
    Sure, I could be out with friends, but then
I’d have gotten The Look from the parental figures. The look that
clearly says “I’m disappointed in you, Amelia Jenkins” and is
generally worse than the words themselves. It’s the look I try to
avoid whenever possible.
    So instead of being anywhere that was
remotely fun, I was peeping-tom’ing it by staring through
the window of the bowling alley—one of the teen hot spots in town.
One of the places where people gathered and love was
supposed to be in the air.
    Why? Because apparently I had to hunt down a
demon—an Evol, or anti-Cupid—that was hell bent on stealing the
love from some unsuspecting guy.
    “Amelia, honey,” my mom had began as she and
my father sat me down ‘to talk’ an hour ago. She sat next to him on
the couch. They exchanged one of those telling glances, and she
reached out, took hold of his hand. “We’ve got something to tell
you, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
    Any conversation that started with me needing
to be in a sitting position or with the words ‘we’ve got something
to tell you’ was sure to be one I wasn’t going to like. I gaped at
them and leaned forward in my seat before jumping up. “Oh, God. Are
you getting a divorce? Are we becoming a statistic? I don’t want to
be a statistic.”
    My father let out a startled laugh, erasing
the seriousness from his face for at least two full seconds. “No,
no.” He quickly waved his hands. “Nothing like that.”
    I let out a deep breath and sat back down,
eyeing them warily. I wasn’t ready to relax just yet. The ‘nothing
like that’ left a lot of ground uncovered. For instance, they could
tell me I had been adopted or something. “Then what is it?” I
asked. I shouldn’t have. As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew
it’d been a mistake. It was one of those questions you had no
choice but ask, and then found yourself regretting because you
really, really didn’t want the answer once you had it.
    And that’s when they’d told me the story.
Apparently the Carter women—the ones on mom’s side of the
family—were cursed. On their sixteenth Valentine’s Day, they were
charged with saving a man’s love. It seems one of my ancestors
broke a guys heart back in the sixteenth century, and he decided to
save the world from the Carter women’s love and their nefarious
ways.
    Today, the gauntlet was passed to me and it
was my duty to stop the Evol from draining the love from men. An
Evol. The name was kind of funny if you asked me. One letter away
from being ‘evil’, and ‘love’ spelled backwards. Coincidence? I
think not.
    It was a stupid curse. Save love or never
find it yourself. What the hell kind of deal was that, anyway? And
mom, who had supposedly conquered it already, wouldn’t tell me how
I was supposed to. When I pointed out that little fact, she just
shook her head and said, “Some things you have to figure out for
yourself, Am.”
    What the heck kind of parenting is that? I
was up against a demon! Or would be, if I believed in it—which I
didn’t.
    Well, whatever. As soon as I got back at
midnight (which was my deadline for saving love—a little on the
Cinderella side, wasn’t it?), I was going to pretend this day had
never happened.
    Tomorrow, they would probably come out and
say something like, “It was all a dream. What you were experiencing
was a figment of your imagination,” and then tell me I was really
locked up in the mental ward of the hospital. As much as that idea
bothered me, it was sure as hell better than believing in
love-stealing-demons and curses.
    Or maybe it was some twisted parenting method
I’d never heard of. Instead of reverse psychology, it was
like…reverse demonology. Or would be like that, if it made any
sense. I sighed and leaned my head against the window. I was
getting antsy. My own stupid jokes didn’t even make any sense to
me. That couldn’t be a