Nobody ever came out of the castle in one piece. The people who lived there died or, more often than not, went insane. Kendra had survived though. As her family twisted and changed, Kendra stayed the same all through the curse. 

Poking pins into her hair with painstaking precision, Kendra didn’t notice her older sister appear behind her until she appeared in her mirror.

“Luella,” Kendra greeted. Her sister was smiling ear-to-ear. She moved to Kendra’s side and gave her a once over. Kendra smiled politely and held still.

Kendra was dressed— as she always was— in a baby blue bouffant dress with green flats. It used to be filled in by her figure, but now, years after it happened, the dress hung limp. Her cheeks were retreating into her face and the areas around her eye were painted dark purple.

“Well,” Luella stepped back and sighed, “you have a difficult contest being my sister. I am almost the most beautiful girl in the family. But don’t tell Mother or Allura I said that.”

“I won’t. And today is my seventeenth, so I may take your crown,” Kendra conceded and added more iridescent blue to her eye makeup and consulted the clock.

“You may someday,” Luella paused, wiggled her eyebrows in the mirror and Kendra laughed, “over my dead body.”

Kedra’s laughter trickled away and she silently returned to her hair. Luella frowned and snatched a comb to fix rouge strands of caramel hair. 

When she finished she smiled at Kendra and hugged her neck and whispered, “You look beautiful, Ken. Get to that party. I have to fix myself up a little more, but you better have a boyfriend by the time I get down there.”

“I can get any man I want to, Ella,” Kendra defended and watched her sister slip from the room.

Kendra was the only one in her bedroom, but she still felt the air tingling with nerves from the people who were cramming into the ballroom three floors down. Today was a special birthday for the castle.

The party was for show. The most important moment would be at midnight. That’s when the servants would bust into Kendra’s room and shake her awake to run tests. If she was alive come one o’clock, her people would finally be able to breathe. 

Kendra stood and looked at herself in the mirror. Her A-line dress covered the floor in waves of blue satin fabric. A slit in the skirt stretched to the bedazzled detailing around her waist pulled the fabric taut around her torso and flowed into translucent, puffy blue sleeves with veins of silver. She had designed this dress like it was her last because as Kendra had come to accept it— much like everyone in the castle— it was. 

When Kendra arrived, the party was already in full swing. A couple of guards threw open the doors and Kendra strutted into the room. Few people looked up from whatever drink or decadent dessert was occupying them, but the few who did gave her the looks she had grown used to in her teen years as her siblings fell away for various reasons.

There’s the last daughter. The one who will end this family's cursed presence in this palace. One of those looks was coming from her oldest brother's ex-fiancee. She was wearing an eye-sore of a nightdress, shimmering with sequins.

“How could a royal ever be allowed to leave the house looking so trashy?” Luella appeared behind Kendra, shooting the other women an angry look. Kendra smiled but didn’t turn her head to look at her sister and merged into the crowd, closer to her parents.

The King and Queen sat glassy-eyed at a large table near the end of the hall with their dedicated guards watching the affair with disinterest. When Kendra approached and stopped beside her father's guard, a young man named Dean, she let her shoulders relax. 

“Are you nervous?” He whispered.

“Why would I be nervous?”

“Well, this is the birthday all your siblings…” Dean trailed off. Kendra’s anger flared.

“Don’t murmur, Dean. Died. That was the end of your sentence, correct?” Kendra retorted, her muscles tensing once again when her eyes fell upon Luella hovering around the edge of the dance floor, teasing the boys that ignored her like she was a breath of wind. Because, to them, that’s all she was.

Luella’s ghostly bits were much more obvious in the well-lit hall. Her flats hovered two inches above the shiny tile, and candlelight penetrated her skin, making the air around her shimmer. Her dress fluttered when nobody was near her and as much as she denied it, people ignored her because she was dead, not less pretty.

“Then pardon my bluntness but, Kendra,” he paused to mull over his words, “you never mourned them. Do you ever miss them?”

Kendra looked over the people in the crowd. She saw her siblings' faces smiling and waving at her. Her oldest brother was watching his ex-fiancee touch and laugh with another man. Her twin sisters spun together on the dance floor. Luella was standing beside her, trying to fix her awry sleeve. 

“I see them all the time, Dean. I’ve never quite been away from them long enough to mourn them,” Kendra said. She felt her heart slowing in her chest by the minute. She had since her sixteenth birthday. The space between beats was like the time before a jumpscare in a horror moving. The time when the music is screeching and the unsuspecting victim opens the door and…