Cursed [Book 1] ✔

Prologue: Or, That Stuff Before the Real Stuff

"I wanna break up."

It was the first thing I said when Sean opened the door.

After my very blunt sentence, sans greeting, I held out a shoe box, a few of his things rattling inside.

We'd been dating for six months. Longer than a lot of my other relationships. However, just like all the ones before, I knew it would come to an end. I just wanted to get it over with.

Sean blinked his large emerald eyes at me, running a hand through blonde wavy hair. Even in a pair of plaid pjs, his tall and muscled frame was evident. I'll admit, his clichéd good looks played into why we had stayed together so long.

He did not take the box from me.

"Why?"

I sighed and delivered my next tried and true line: "It's not gonna work."

Inevitably, when I said this, all of my exes had asked the same question. Sean, my about-to-be ex, was no different.

"How do you know?"

"I just know."

Sean scoffed. When he still didn't move to accept the box from my hands, I set it on the floor.

"You are a piece of work, Imogen," he told me.

I didn't answer. I just turned and walked away from yet another relationship in my young life.

It would've taken too long to explain to Sean how in a few weeks, he'd make out with a freshman at a party. He would actually feel bad about it and tell me. That wouldn't change how betrayed I felt, and Sean would get a text about me sleeping with his best friend as a form of revenge.

All of that drama and mess could be avoided because I knew it was in the cards for us. I'd seen it by seeing Sean's future.

So, I took control of my future by avoiding Sean's.

~*~

I've been called many names.

Prescient.

Fortuneteller.

Dream keeper.

That last one was probably my favorite: dream keeper. Still, I thought of myself as more of a dream hijacker, even though it's everyone else's dreams that were intruding. I'd rather have been left alone.

Especially since the only dreams I ever had were bad, bad as in dead, dead as in everyone. By some ancient rule of fate, or a quantum entanglement, seeing into my future proved fruitless.

However, seeing into the future of others became a way of life. Though I learned over and over that my dreams couldn't be changed.

Who the hell had decided I should see things, only to stay helpless? There couldn't be a Creator, not the sort who would let terrible things happen. Then again, if no higher power existed, human actions orchestrated events. Thus, terrible events weren't God's fault, but mine.

Many dreams and visions later, I realized whatever happened was supposed to happen that way. My interference had never been interference at all. The actions I carried out only assisted the future, not change it. This epiphany hit me after years of repeatedly trying to help people. No matter what I did, I couldn't change the outcome of my visions. By the time my sixteenth birthday arrived, I stopped trying to save anyone.

Even so, I honed an advantage over the years. At first, my dreams generated at random. As I got older, I learned if I focused my energies on a person, I could access their imminent future whenever I wished.

This was a particularly useful skill set when it came to boyfriends (as you saw earlier), but mostly I kept tabs on the rest of my family. My mother and other little sister, Rosalind, were the only two people in the world I worried about. At all times, I was attuned to their futures. Not that I could do anything about it, but at least I could prepare myself for the pain ahead, just as I did now.

For the past few minutes, my mom sobbed into the phone, finally attempting a full sentence: "Imogen, it's Rosalind, she...I...she...."

"Mom, I know."

Silence echoed on either end of the phone until my mother collected herself enough to say, "Get on a plane and come home."

"Already in the terminal. See ya in a few hours."

~*~

A/N: I'm super excited to re-edit Cursed. Everyone cringes at their early work, and every time I see the initial print-run of Cursed, I cringe. I've grown so much as a writer, and I've got plenty more growin' to do.

Readers, please join me on the ride. Thanks for your supportive votes and comments, they mean a lot :D