The Modern Day Adventures of Rosalind

Rosalind felt that twitch again. That painless, yet intrusive and unwelcome physical notification that the curse had been triggered once more, that her precious magical charge was being pointlessly used so someone she didn't give a shit about could be tormented by someone else she gave even less of a shit about.

It had happened so many times now over the past four hundred years. A little less often as the centuries went by and people thought they had become cleverer and stopped believing in the supernatural, but even that was countered to some degree by the sheer number of women around the globe who carried the curse by this point.

The irony was that, pound for pound, the person who had suffered the most at the hands of Rosalind's curse over the years had been Rosalind herself. Not in the short term, dramatic way that some of its victims had, she could have no master and was at the mercy of nobody, but in just how much it had drained her over the years, the potential in her that it had wasted.

She could barely even remember the name of the guy who had angered her enough to come up with the curse all those years ago., let alone the woman he had spurned her for. She had been young and stupid at the time, and with a temper she could barely control. In truth, the curse would have been a wonderful **** if she had just let it die at the same time as the person she had cast it upon. But such was her rage that she was determined it should fuck up every female relative in her ex fiance's family line from then until the end of humanity. She just hadn't realised quite how many women that would be.

The witch had lost control of the curse almost since the moment it had been cast. It had taken on a life of its own and done whatever it needed to, very effectively, over the centuries and through the generations to ensure its continuation. But that didn't mean it didn't still affect Rosalind. Every time it was activated, every command that was given through it, that power had to come from somewhere, and each and every time it was Rosalind whose magical energy was being used. Someone who, by now, should have been an elite sorceress with the world at her fingertips, was instead not much more than a civilian with a few magic tricks up her sleeve to be used only sparingly, since the curse had ring fenced around ninety per cent of her powers for its own use. Another weird quirk of the curses impact on Rosalind was that her magic, limited as it was, now only worked on females.

The impact of the curse on Rosalind had been almost immediate. Once a mighty sorceress who the authorities in her native England had feared to such an extent she had been considered untouchable, her waning powers had become all too apparent, and she had been a pussy hair away from getting burned at the stake before she had fled to the United States sometime in the late sixteen hundreds.

One thing she loved about her adopted home was its vastness. Unlike in the UK, she could move around it so easily without leaving any trace of herself. That was crucial for someone who had lived for more than four centuries and showed no visible signs of ageing. Something like that tended to raise questions. She had initially settled in Boston, but had moved around a lot since then and resided in more than a dozen states by this point. Home was currently Portland, Oregon, one of her favourite cities so far and a place she would be loathe to leave when the time eventually came to move on. Rosalind had been through a number of different names throughout the years as well. Currently she was calling herself Amy.

What Rosalind hated about her modern life, though, was just how ordinary she had become. She used to love being feared, not because she was a monster but because it made everything so easy. Anything she wanted she was given. She rarely even needed to bother making threats. Now she was just like anybody else, and had been living that way for hundreds of years. It was fucking tiring. She had a nine to five job, working in advertising, with a boss. A mundane, mortal boss called Sylvia who was a stupid, patronising bitch that got to order an actual witch around like she was her inferior. The temptation to turn her into a newt had been huge, but it would have been a waste of Rosalind's limited energy and raised too many questions that would have taken yet more magic to cover up.

There were only two ways for Rosalind to end the curse. One was her own **** and, as exhausted and bored of life as she was, the witch wasn't ready for that yet. The other would require an incredible level of cooperation from someone who had every reason to hate her - the most recent eldest adult daughter in the direct line of eldest daughters of the woman she originally cursed. Rosalind knew who that was, thanks to the magic of the Internet rather than her own, though she had very little information about her. Her name was Holly Petersen, she was twenty four years old and lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. What she would need to ask of Holly would be huge, and ordinarily she would not even bother traipsing all the way across the country to waste her breath. But this latest twinge she had felt was different, stronger. The curse had been activated in someone very close to the original family line and, in all likelihood, someone very close to Holly.

Perhaps Rosalind finally had some decent leverage here. And perhaps it was time to bid farewell to a place she had grown to love and make North Carolina the latest state she called home.