The magnolia trees around Caveill Manor had been dying for as long as anyone in the family could remember. Their branches were twisted and blackened, their leaves curled and brown, and the flowers that did manage to bloom were the colour of old blood. But they still stood, like skeletal sentinels guarding a graveyard that had forgotten its dead.

Silas sat on the veranda, watching the swamp water rise and fall with the tide, and tried to remember what it felt like to believe in anything.

In his first life, he had been a journalist in New Orleans. He had written exposés on corruption, on abuse of power, on the ways that the old families of the South used their wealth and their magic to crush anyone who got in their way. He had been good at his job. Too good. And then he had written the story that got him killed.

The Caveill family had been in the bayou for a hundred years. They were keepers of the Curse, the magical affliction that ran through their bloodline like a river of poison. Every generation, someone in the family went mad. Someone disappeared. Someone died in ways that the coroner could not explain. And the family covered it up, as families do, with money and silence and the kind of love that looks like cruelty to the outside world.

Silas had spent three months in this body, trying to understand what had happened to him. He had woken up in this room, in this manor, with memories of a life that wasn't his pressing against his skull. He had spent those months reading the family records, talking to the servants, walking the grounds. And he had found the pattern.

The Curse was not random. It was targeted. It chose its victims with a precision that suggested intelligence, design, intention. And the victims were always the ones who asked too many questions.

The door opened. His uncle Raymond entered, a man whose body had been ruined by gluttony and drink, whose face was a mask of lazy indifference that hid a mind as sharp and cold as a scalpel.

Silas, he said. You have been spending a lot of time in the library.

I have been reading.

Reading what?

The family history.

Raymond smiled, a slow, unpleasant smile. And what do you think you have found?

Nothing, Silas said. Just stories. Old stories.

Raymond laughed, a wet, phlegmatic sound. Stories are all we have, boy. Stories and the Curse. And one of them will kill you just as surely as the other.

He left, and Silas sat on the veranda and watched the swamp water rise.

That night, he went to the cellar. The family had a secret room down there, behind a wall of rotting shelving that held bottles of wine that had turned to vinegar decades ago. The room was small, windowless, and filled with the smell of damp earth and old paper. In the centre of the room stood a mirror, tall and ornate, its frame carved with symbols that Silas did not recognise.

He approached the mirror. His reflection stared back at him, pale and haunted, with eyes that were too old for a twenty-year-old face. And then the reflection smiled, and Silas was not smiling.

Hello, Silas, the reflection said. Its voice was his voice, but different. Colder. Older.

Who are you? Silas asked.

I am what you could be, the reflection said. If you stop running. If you stop fighting. If you accept what you are.

I'm not like you.

Aren't you? You have the gift, just like I did. Just like my mother did. Just like her mother before her. You can see the truth. You can see the Curse for what it is. And now you have to decide what to do with that knowledge.

What is the Curse? Silas asked.

The Curse is the family, the reflection said. The Curse is the blood. The Curse is the thing that makes us who we are, and the thing that will kill us all. And you, Silas Caveill, are next in line.

Silas stepped back from the mirror. His heart was beating so fast he thought it might break.

No, he said.

Yes, the reflection said. And when the time comes, you will have a choice. You can fight it, and die trying. Or you can accept it, and become something more than human.

Silas turned and ran. He ran up the stairs, through the manor, out into the swamp, and he did not stop running until the sun came up and the magnolia trees stood black against the pale sky.

He did not go back to the manor that day. He did not go back the next day, or the day after that. He lived in a shack on the edge of the swamp, eating canned food and drinking whiskey and trying to forget what the mirror had said.

But the Curse does not forget. And it does not wait forever.

Three weeks later, his grandmother died. She was eighty-two years old, and she had been dying for five years, slowly, painfully, her body wasting away like a candle burning to nothing. When she died, she left Silas a letter.

Dear Silas, she wrote. If you are reading this, then you have run again. You have always run. And running will not save you. The Curse is in your blood, Silas. It always has been. And when the time comes, you will have to face it. Not me. Not your uncle. You.

He folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He looked at the swamp water, black and still and endless, and he knew that she was right.

Running would not save him.

He walked back to the manor.