by Kayti McGee
By Any Other Name
Kayti McGee
M. Pierce
Contents
1. Thorn
2. Rose
3. Thorn
4. Rose
5. Thorn
6. Rose
7. Thorn
8. Rose
9. Thorn
10. Rose
11. Thorn
12. Rose
13. Thorn
14. Rose
15. Thorn
16. Rose
17. Thorn
18. Rose
19. Thorn
20. Rose
21. Thorn
22. Rose
23. Thorn
Epilogue
Text copyright © 2019
All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
For Jennifer and Candi
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet...
―William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II
One
Thorn
People die here all the time, below the disused trestle bridge spanning the Juniper Hollow Ravine. Some are jumpers—broken types lured by the valley’s promise of healing, a stench of desperation about them—and some are foolhardy teens, drunk and daring. Once in a while, though, the fall cannot be explained. The victim has nothing to lose; the authorities discover no illuminating note, no impending divorce or secret addiction.
That’s when I am there, the invisible hand in the dark.
The locals believe the bridge to be haunted, as locals tend to do. The rotting wooden structure has been slated for demolition half a dozen times at least, but my family makes sure that never happens. It is simply too useful for us. The 300-foot drop guarantees death and the spate of suicides and accidents in the ravine camouflages my work.
The media hunkers over each incident. A red-lettered warning scrolls before the evening news: The following content contains graphic elements that are not suitable for some audiences. Then come the slow-panning shots of the chasm, a cluster of paramedics, and a tiny, mangled figure like a broken poppet on the rocks.
The Juniper Hollow Ravine is where my story begins. If I start elsewhere, you may mistake me for the hero, and I am not that. All the qualities of heroism—selflessness, sincerity, bravery, and fortitude—she possessed. This story has a heroine, not a hero, and I, if anything, was only the devil on her shoulder.
But I am getting ahead of myself...
It was late in the evening and late in the month, almost October. The first snow had not yet fallen on Juniper Hollow, but the darkness was frosted and breathless and still. Soon the snow would come, very soon, on the heels of the dying leaves.
I hiked the trail to the old trestle bridge with metronome strides. Rhythm, I had learned, mattered in moments like this. Rhythm was the heartbeat, the autonomic pulse that told the dreaming boy ahead of me all is well, all is normal, you are asleep.
I spoke to him, too, my voice a constant, husky purr.
“Never mind that,” I said as he sidestepped a warning plaque. Copious postings urged hikers off the trail. HAZARD AHEAD. DANGER, CLOSED BRIDGE. STOP HERE. NO TRESPASSING. The signs shone eerily in the gloom.
Other, more sobering admonitions scored the trail: Makeshift crosses hammered to trees, wilted memorial flowers, and photographs rotting around the edges. I could not help but pause beside a picture of two pretty teens. Their faces were invisible in the night, but I didn’t need to see to recognize them.
“This wasn’t an accident,” I told my sleeping hostage. I remembered the news coverage vividly, with its misinformation about alcohol and an accident. “You got it wrong. Idiots.” I sighed and took a deep breath, as if I could pull the odor of death off the photo. How sublime that night had been! How brave the girls had seemed to me, how powerful and magnificent. “They were drinking for courage. They were lovers. Their parents were fundamentalists. Ah, you know how it goes.” I gestured vaguely.
The particulars of the double suicide interested me less than the feat itself. I had spirit-walked the whole trail with those girls and I dove into the ravine beside them and drew the power off their death like oil off crushed herbs.
“They were beautiful,” I murmured.
The boy’s lumbering sleep-stride faltered. I glared at the back of his skull. He was a chore and the chore was interrupting my reverie. I might still have siphoned some vestigial power off the girls’ sacrifice, if not for this damn boy who had put his nose where it didn’t belong.
And, strictly speaking, he wasn’t a boy. He was twenty-seven, old enough to know better. He had listened to one too many urban legends and gone snooping up the mountainside where my family lived. The land up there was private, Blackmane territory. Whatever the young man had seen, it had been deemed enough to condemn him.
I felt a tremor along his consciousness. He was awakening, my distraction unsettling our connection. Good, I thought, and I felt a sudden, powerful urge to laugh in his face and terrorize him before I spelled him again.
I blinked and frowned.
“Manibus meis,” I chanted, “motus tua, desiderio meo, nos iter simul.” I traced Raido, the rune of journeying, in the air between the boy and myself. He was a boy to me, after all. Though I looked about his age, I had lived four times as long. I, truly, was old enough to know better than to let my boredom sour into cruelty.
The boy relaxed as I repeated the words. He resumed walking, stumbling along, and I told him how I hated this task, but how I had enjoyed it when I was younger, how I had fancied myself a sort of Angel of Death.
The bridge came into a view, black against the blue night. It looked for all the world like a gaping grin. As we broke from the trail, the pines opened around us and a gust of colder air hit our faces. The boy hesitated again. I stroked his mind with honey-sweet intention. “This place isn’t haunted,” I told him, “but I wish it were. The quaint little mythologies of laypeople are so... underappreciated.”
The forest service had erected vast chain-link fences around the ravine. For me, it was simple to open them. I whispered and the locks twisted inside and clunked apart. The gate swung open. More crosses and photos festooned the metal mesh.
I guided the boy toward the bridge.
Phantom breath rose from the ravine.
I used to shiver as I stepped onto the frost-slick wood.
I used to feel something: The gravity of my task or a moral certitude that I was protecting my family, a trill of fear, a spike of adrenaline.
Now I felt nothing beyond the biting cold and my own bristling impatience, so I got on with the business of shoving the boy to his death.
I watched his body somersault away until the shadows engulfed it.
A small, sickening thud echoed upward.
At least there was no scream. At least he had not come to his senses during the plummet. His, I told myself, was an enviable death, a dreaming death. We should all be so lucky, I told myself. I told myself many things.
I rocked on my boot heels and gazed into the abyssal dark. Not for the first time, I considered following my victim. I felt a morbid curios
ity about his experience, and I doubted the fall would kill me.
In the world of witches, the longer you live, the harder it gets to die.
I whistled a melancholy tune in the dark as I walked back down the trail. I could have spirited through the night much faster, but I found I preferred to walk these days. I had nothing but time on my hands.
I retraced my steps exactly and, as I did, the prints of my boots vanished from the forest floor. When the police arrived, they would find only the boy’s footfalls on the trail.
I reached Imogen’s house after midnight.
Like most Blackmane homes, the structure was ostentatious—large, modern, and opulent—and built into the mountainside with a postcard view of the valley. The air was thin and pine-scented. The firs rustled with ghosts.
Imogen’s front door stood open. The odor of burnt damiana leaves pricked at my nostrils. I smirked and shook my head as I stepped inside. No Blackmane home could or would deny me entry. They knew me too well.
Candles and accent lamps cast a soft glow around the room. Imogen was a sucker for ambiance. Animal furs crisscrossed the wooden floor and incense smoke hung in air.
I fanned a hand beneath my nose. It was all a bit much for me.
“I knew you would come,” Imogen said.
She stepped out of the hallway and I glimpsed a lot of skin and a little black lace before averting my eyes.
“Don’t,” I said.
She did anyway. She sidled up behind me and rubbed her cheek along my shoulder blade in a curiously feline gesture.
“Hmmm, you smell like death.” Her fingernails bit at my biceps.
“Stop... leaving your divinations in the woods.” I grated out the words. I didn’t feel like having sex. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like having sex.
“Is that why you’re here?” Imogen’s grip relaxed.
“Yes. If you insist on poking around in raccoon guts, at least put that shit on the road when you’re done. Hikers keep finding them. Just stop. Stop.”
“What happens if I don’t?” She came around to face me. Her long fingers clasped my jaw. She moved my head and made me look at her. She had cut her hair into a blunt, sharp style. It suited her. Her mouth was a daub of blood red lipstick. “Will you lead me up to the bridge one day?” There was no cynicism in her voice and no amusement on her face. Her large, dark eyes were wide with longing. I shuddered and stepped back.
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know.” She giggled. “Does it matter? Isn’t it what you want? I’d rather die than go crazy. I can’t tell if I already am.” Imogen looked at her own hands. “If I offered myself for sacrifice, would you even care?”
I rolled my eyes and blew out a breath. I wanted this tedious metaphysical conversation even less than I wanted sex, and that was saying something.
“Confide in me,” she whispered. “You used to. It helped you. It helped me.”
“Put your damn carcasses on the road, Imogen. If I need to confide in someone, I’ll go to church.”
I turned on a heel and left. Stepping out, I felt as if I were breaking through cobwebs. The spidery touch of weak magic tore and let me pass.
I almost laughed. Imogen had attempted a summoning spell, it seemed. She was trying her best to seduce me, and I had barely noticed. Disgusting, to be that weak, and further proof that playing with animal entrails and dancing in the forest did nothing to strengthen anyone’s power.
I had one more stop to make before I could go home, or wherever I would go that morning. I was having trouble sleeping. Maybe I would return to Imogen and rest against her soft, warm body. Maybe I would drink a tonic and drift into the borderland between reality and dreams.
But I saw terrible things there... broken half-visions, nightmare forests...
“Thorn,” the Maven whispered.
I was standing in her library.
It was always this way, when I went to see my aunt. I never strolled up to her doorstep. I could not have said exactly where she lived. She surrounded her home with a labyrinthine enchantment. One simply walked up the mountainside with the intention of seeing her and, if she willed it, the traveler might find himself in her house.
I sank onto her couch and closed my eyes.
“I used to hate that feeling,” I mumbled. I meant the drugged trance of Marion’s magic. I meant losing track of myself and my senses in the woods. It made me feel weak, like one of my victims at the trestle bridge.
“And now?” she said.
She was close to me. She smelled of jasmine and linseed oil. She must have been painting. If I opened my eyes, I would see the long yellow plait of her hair and an exquisite, deceptively youthful face.
For whatever reason, Marion chose to suspend her aging at twenty. Her waifish figure frightened me. To see her walking in the forest was like seeing the bean nighe and discovering that she was washing your bloodied clothes in the river.
Here was true power, in the form of the Blackmane Coven’s head. If I wanted to worship anything, I should have worshiped her, but I’m not the worshiping kind.
“Now I like it,” I admitted. “That feeling... like I’m drunk. It’s so hard to get drunk anymore, and I can’t sleep.” I reclined against the leathery cushion. “I told Imogen to put her toys on the road. Joseph Bell will be on the morning news.”
“Good,” Marion said. “Imogen—how are you two?”
“We’re not. We haven’t been for a while.”
“You know, she’s probably dissecting those poor animals to get your attention.”
“And she got it. She disgusts me.”
“Oh, listen to you.” Marion chuckled and drifted behind the couch. Her fingertips came to rest on my temples. I wanted to recoil. No one touched me normally anymore. They touched me with pity or longing or fear. I hated it. She kneaded my temples gently and then, as if she sensed my revulsion, wandered away. “On your way here, weren’t you thinking about returning to her arms?”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“You were near my house. How else should I gauge your intentions?”
I opened my eyes and glanced around the library. The Maven, at least, kept a normal home. There were no animal skulls perched on the shelves and no charms hanging from the rafters. She didn’t play at being witch; it wasn’t a game for her. I walked to the window and watched the night.
“I’m bored, that’s all. Maybe I’m finally becoming a decadent fool like everyone else in this family. Imogen is a good distraction.”
“I think you should travel. Get away for awhile. If you aren’t sleeping, it’s because you don’t need to.”
“But I want to,” I snapped.
Sometimes, I thought Marion had laced more than one spell through her home. That, or I felt very comfortable with her. I was uncommonly candid in her presence.
“You’re too hard on the family. They do what gives them pleasure. You should try it, Thorn. And you should travel, I think.” She ghosted up behind me. “But take care of this first.” Marion touched the glass of the window. It rippled like water and, in its black surface, I saw a young woman waiting in line at a café. Red hair tumbled from a sloppy ponytail. Her skin was pale, her cheeks softly rounded. As I watched, she licked her lips and checked her phone.
Alive, I thought spontaneously. The girl looked alive—so much more alive than I felt.
I turned and met the Maven’s pale eyes.
For the first time in years, I wanted to know what this mortal had done to deserve death at my hands. And, for that reason, I didn’t ask.
Two
Rose
My results had come in the mail on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.
FamilyTreeGenetics, said the envelope, which arrived along with two payment reminders. The first, that the electricity bill was overdue. The other, that my favorite wine club needed renewal. I threw one away and took the other two over to the kitchen table. My hands shook as I opened the wine club’s b
ill first, putting off the knowledge I’d waited so long to gain. As though it would change in my hesitance. As though it could be anything other than what it was, all the infinite possibilities vanished the second I’d sent in my sample. And then when I couldn’t wait anymore, I ripped into the FamilyTree envelope, managing to tear a corner off the single sheet inside while I was at it.
It didn’t matter, I saw, smoothing out the remaining chunk. There were only three lines on the report.
99% Scotland/Ireland/Wales
1% Undetermined
Join the Tree online for more information.
Sure, my red hair meant I wasn’t terribly surprised to discover my birth parents were Scots/Irish, but I was not expecting to discover I was such a… thoroughbred. Although it did go a ways toward explaining the fondness for wine my adoptive parents never shared.
It was strange to think of them in terms like that. Mother and Father had been my parents since the day I was born. I was happy enough with them.
Most of the books children read present parents as the givers of absolute love, as unconditional as the color of the sky. There’s a reason we call those fairy tales. Parents are judge and jury, parents are a template children never quite fit. A parent’s love is as conditional as any other contract. Signing that contract in blood changes nothing, from what I’ve observed in my twenty-two years.
I spent my own childhood reading stories about orphans.
Books like The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Peppermints in the Parlor, even the retrospectively problematic Little Princess taught me that adults lie, capitalism blows, and that pleasure should be had when you can have it, because it could be taken away at any time at all. For any, or no reason.