I’d never seen a curse quite so large or complex. It seemed to originate at his throat and spread from there. Several tendrils disappeared beneath the collar of his white shirt. More of it crawled up the left side of his face, covering one eye. It turned that eye completely black leaving the other a pleasant shade of ocean green.

Curses were supposed to scar the bearer, make them ugly and undesirable—but Tram’s curse—it only made him more handsome. And right now I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off him.  

I'm working on that Victorian fantasy I talked about forever ago. Well, I guess I can't say I'm working on it so much as I'm toying with it. 

Here's the opening paragraph:

Ellie rubbed the curse mark on the underside of her wrist. It appeared on her thirteenth birthday, a sure sign she’d inherited the curse through family lineage. It wasn’t her fault, but people looked at her like she deserved the curse, like it was a punishment for some terrible deed. When in fact, she had no idea where the curse had come from. Neither did her parents. 

            They found the BMW bent around a tree, a deer injured at the roadside.

My mother loved deer. She had an odd talent of summoning animals. They gathered wherever she was. Maybe that deer, that night, had sensed her. Or maybe he’d just been running scared from something else.

It didn’t matter now.

The deer was dead. So was my mother.