AURUM

. a curse reborn .

- chapter 7 -

Myra stumbled backwards, a gasp caught in her throat. I'm dead, she thought as she stared up at the man in front of her, eyes wide with shock and disbelief. I'm dead.

But there was no pain. No blood stained her clothes or trickled over her skin. She was, in fact, still alive.

Myra looked down at the wound in her side, only to find there was none. Any and all traces of what just happened had entirely disappeared, save for a thin trail of smoke rising from the gun. Her eyes returned to the man, who now wore the slyest of satisfied grins. Simply looking at him made Myra's stomach turn. He shot her. . . He shot her. . .

But why wasn't she dead? All reasonable thought told her that she should be in torturous agony, bleeding, falling steadily into certain death. Yet she remained on her feet, not suffering one bit.

"I just had to be sure." Myra looked up at the grinning man as he spoke, a flicker of anger igniting within her. It made her sick, the way he looked so full of himself, as though he had just made some brilliant discovery. She couldn't see what was so satisfying about all this.

"Be sure of what?" she seethed, her voice tinged with unforgiving rage.

"Of the curse." Curse? Myra blinked bewilderedly, clearly wanting an explanation. "You see," he continued, appearing blissfully oblivious to the graveness of what had just happened, "there was a curse on those 882 pieces of gold. 'Any mortal that removes but a single piece from that stone chest shall be punished for eternity.'" He seemed to know this all to well.

"Punished?" she repeated, trying her best to understand, but finding all this rather difficult to digest at once. Not only had she been trying to figure out how and why she'd been sent here to begin with, Myra now had to deal with this curse, whatever it might have been. "Punished how?"

All she received as an answer was a smug grin and a taunting "You'll see."

Myra frowned angrily, having expected more sufficient a reply. "And what," she asked sourly, "is that supposed to mean?" This time only a smirk was her answer, and the man's eyes lifting to the cloudy sky.

An icy wind rushed through the dark alleyway. Myra, following his gaze, looked towards the star-less sky, watching as the breeze brushed through the clouds. Another gust of wind sent the delicate wisps away from a shining crescent moon, one bright enough to send a soft, hazy light down upon the streets of Tortuga. For a long, unbearable moment, Myra tried to determine what exactly was supposed to happen. Was she supposed to shrivel up into nothing? Would she dissolve into a pile of dust? Just what kind of curse was this?

Myra looked down, not expecting to find anything about her changed. Why would she be different? There is no curse, she tried to convince herself, he's just fooling you, just fooling.

It only took an instant, though, for those hopeful thoughts to be dashed to smithereens.

Myra felt a scream form in her mouth, but no sound came. She lifted her hands in front of her face, her eyes wide with disbelief. What exactly happened to her, she couldn't say, but now in the moonlight she had been reduced to little more than rotted corpse. There was no skin on her bones and no blood in her veins. She was nothing more than a skeleton, a skeleton wearing clothes. This isn't happening, she told herself, her hands shaking and her lip trembling. Myra lowered her arms from in front of her, unable to speak or even fully comprehend what was going on. Several times she tried to say something, but each time her words caught on one another, her voice seeming to have disappeared with her skin. I must be dreaming, she decided, and now she desperately tried to wake herself up. But try as she might, she kept her horrific skeletal appearance. She did not open her eyes and find herself in a warm bed back at home. The harder she tried to escape this nightmare, the more she realized that all this was real.

The man looked at her, expressionless, and gave a slight nod of his head. "We'd best get you inside."

A/N: Thank you for all the reviews! I'm so sorry to have left you guys with a cliffhanger in the last chapter. All will be explained, I promise:) This chapter is a bit on the short side. I tried really really hard to make the descriptions realistic, but I personally don't know how one reacts to getting shot or realizing you're an undead zombie.

Anyway, reviews are loved, as always. Thanks for reading!