เรื่องสั้นและนิยายในฉากMelodramatic Curse

My girlfriend, Evanna Zeller, and I have been together for three years now. She says she wants to take me home during the holidays to meet her parents. I've hinted at it and straight-up asked more times than I can count, but she's shut me down every time. So now that she's the one bringing it up, I agree on the spot without a second thought. What I don't expect is that once we get there, everyone tells me I'm already dead.

My family is cursed. Every descendant is fated to die before turning twenty-seven. But the curse has a cure. If the person I truly love climbs Mount Elme and picks a stalk of the Everroot for me, drinking it will heal me completely. Mount Elme only reveals itself once a year. Keith Ryder had gone up five times to pick it for me. And I had waited five years for him to succeed. But every time I drank what he brought back, I collapsed almost instantly, foaming at the mouth and convulsing as I fell from my wheelchair. Each time, his eyes would go red as he looked down at me. "I'm sorry, Tori. I picked the wrong one again. But I promise, next time, I'll bring you the real Everroot." I believed him. This year, I turned twenty-seven. I drank the medicine with my whole heart set on it, and when I collapsed again, Mindy Bloom pointed at me and laughed. "Look at her twitching like that. It's like she's having a seizure! If it weren't for the weed Keith grabbed off the ground, I'd never have gotten to see a show this good." I stared at Keith, stunned. "What did she just say? A weed?" He looked back at me like I was the one in the wrong. "Mindy wanted to see it happen. What's the big deal?" My eyes went wide. My heart felt like it had been stabbed with a needle. "But you know I'm already," I started, only for him to cut me off. "Twenty-seven," he said, brow furrowing with irritation. "Isn't that exactly why you want me to marry you sooner? "Come on, Tori. Mindy's got depression. If I marry you right now, she'll feel insecure. "But I promise, once she's better, I'll bring you every miracle cure there is. Deal?" I looked quietly at his face while the wetness at the corners of my eyes dried on its own. He had no idea. I wasn't going to make it that long.

I was born into the Valerie family, with the noble blood that could give a vampire a powerful hybrid heir. I was meant to marry Ethan, heir to the Prince. But the night before the engagement, his younger brother Adrian knelt in the rain in front of me. “Elena, I’d give up everything.” “I love you. You’re all I want.” So I broke the engagement, let my family disown me, and married him without a backward glance. Then I got pregnant. He started keeping me at arm’s length, finding reasons not to touch me, not even willing to stay in the same room as me. Until the night I heard him tell his men: “Once Elena has the baby, we’ll hand it over to Ethan and Sophia.” “Sophia’s health is fragile. I can’t bear to put her through a pregnancy.” That was when I finally understood. Adrian had never loved me. He’d married me only to free up the place beside Ethan for my cousin Sophia. Even the child I’d struggled so hard to carry had already been promised away to the woman he truly loved. I rested a hand on my belly and called my father. “Dad, I was wrong about him.” Adrian thought I’d stay trapped in his web of lies forever. He had no idea. Two months from now, I would vanish from his world for good.