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carafe on the table, tore a corner off the blue paper pouch and dumped the sweetener into her cup just to keep her fingers busy. “I don’t understand. This curse was originally placed on a witch hunter in 1729 and it’s been passed down through his male descendants for all these years, even if they don’t kill witches anymore? Isn’t that sort of excessive?”
    “Key word curse . If you look in the dictionary, you won’t find it anywhere near ‘justice’.” Cal sipped the last of her coffee. “The original witch hunter was Percival Blake, an English nobleman. He murdered at least thirty-five women, and not all of them were practicing witches. Some were just herbalists or midwives, women of vision or exceptional skills who made their contemporaries jealous enough to suggest they might have come by their talents from a questionable source.
    “When Birgid Cooper cursed him, she put vengeance for thirty-five deaths into her spell—thirty-six if you count Percival’s last victim was rumored to have been pregnant. It takes a long time for that kind of anger to play out. Plus, at the time, it was assumed that fear of witches and witchcraft wasn’t ever going to go away. And it hasn’t. Murder might be illegal now, but prejudice against practitioners of magick isn’t.”
    “But Blake DeWitt isn’t really a witch hunter, is he?”
    “Birgid Cooper believed Percival would train his progeny to do what he did and carry on his legacy. She wanted to make sure they all suffered for it, I suppose, whether they were guilty or not, just like Percival’s victims died whether they were witches or not.”
    Mel gaped. She’d never heard such conviction in Cal’s voice before or seen such pain in her eyes. “Wow. I had no idea. Palmer said Blake DeWitt was evil. Do you think he’s capable of hurting a witch to force her to break the spell?”
    “A desperate man will do anything. The important thing is that the Cabochon gets into the hands of the next demon queen. Then DeWitt will lose his chance to transfer the curse to anyone else. We just need to figure out where the Cabochon is.”
    Mel’s heart fluttered a bit. “Well…DeWitt thinks I have it.”
    Cal arched a brow and scoffed. “Why would he think that?”
    “Because the Gogmar gave it to me.”

Chapter Five
    Blake might not have minded his daily incarceration so much if the cold, silent darkness had been complete. Oblivion from sunrise to sunset each day might have been a blessing at times, but since it was a curse, after all, why should it have an upside?
    Rather than feeling nothing during his imprisonment, he dreamed. Day after day, for ten years, he’d walked in the shoes of Percival Blake, a man who’d lived more than two hundred fifty years ago. Each time Blake closed his eyes and succumbed to the icy embrace of the stone, he lived those horrifying years of an eighteenth century nobleman’s life—from the heart-wrenching moment of his true love’s betrayal, to the last plunge of a well-worn blade into innocent flesh and beyond, into the decades of torment that followed the moment of the curse’s inception.
    Each night when the sun set, he woke shivering in the basement room where he hid himself away, and he stretched stiff muscles and flexed tired limbs that ached from being motionless so long. On waking, he suffered the shame and remorse that Percival never allowed himself to feel.
    This had to end. He couldn’t go on hating himself for the sins of another man, living half a life and never seeing sunlight. He’d grown to envy vampires. They, at least, could look out a window now and then and see the day-lit world.
    As far as Blake DeWitt was concerned, the sun had disappeared, and it wouldn’t return until he broke the curse or, in desperation, passed it to a new bloodline.
    Maybe the Van Houtens would do…
     
     
    Calypso’s jaw dropped, and she stared at Melodie over the lipstick-coated rim of her coffee cup. “ You have the