I wondered if Rebekah would be angry if she found out I had it, and even more angry if she found out who had given it to me. I momentarily considered handing it back to Joanna, telling her I couldn’t take it. But who was I kidding? My hand felt fused to the guitar. I couldn’t give it back now if I wanted to.
Joanna read my mind. “It would be best if you kept it in your room. Don’t bring it to the circle tonight. Don’t let Rebekah know you have it. Stig has plenty of others you can choose from.” Her dark eyes darted left and right, as though to make sure we were alone. “I suggest you play it right away,” she said in a lowered voice. “And listen carefully to what it has to tell you.”
She brushed her hands over the front of her dress as though to wipe away some invisible trace of dust, and walked past me without a goodbye.
Eventually, I found my way back to my room, went inside, and shut the door. I forgot all about taking a shower, and even my hunger for anima was pushed to the back of my mind as I sat down on my bed with the guitar perched delicately in my hands.
I strummed the song I’d played at Folk Yeah! Fest. It seemed like a thousand years had passed since I’d stood on that stage and played my song in front of all those strangers. The festival organizers had said they’d let the contest participants know within a week who had won. Did it even matter anymore if I ended up the winner? After the festival, I’d entertained a few brief hours of optimism that my life might be headed in the right direction, but now everything had changed.
The notes of my song twanged sweet and buzzy, and I felt their vibration in the air, across my cheeks, and in my fingertips. But there was something a little discordant about the sound, a subtle wrongness. I remembered what Joanna had said about listening carefully to the guitar’s voice, and I tuned it several times, trying to get the sound perfect, but the slight flaw remained. Still, it was an imperfection I could live with. True beauty is in the imperfections, as my mom liked to say.
I played through my song once from beginning to end, and then stopped, pressed my palm over the strings to quiet them, and closed my eyes.
The song I played at Folk Yeah! Fest was the song I’d been playing when Blake saw me the first time after moving to Rushing, before he ever knocked on our door and brought us a plate of his famous oatmeal raisin surprise cookies. I’d taken my guitar into the woods behind our house to practice. There was something divine, almost holy about the bare-bones resonance of an acoustic guitar surrounded by forest and running water. I’d had no idea I wasn’t alone that day, not until a month later when Blake admitted that he’d been spying on me. He said he would have come to talk to me then, but he didn’t want to interrupt, didn’t want me to stop playing.
It occurred to me that the woods where Blake had stood when he first heard me play were the same woods I had destroyed. So much of my old life was gone now, or felt like it was fading, like a dream after waking. I missed Blake terribly. The longing to see him was so deep it made it hard to breathe, like he was a kind of medicine, same as my asthma inhaler or the anima that had eased my lungs that morning. But at the same time I was glad to be away from him, from my mom, and even from Erin. I didn’t want them to see me the way I was now. I’d read once that you were only truly yourself when you were alone in the woods with no one watching. I wasn’t alone at Eclipse, but I felt, for the first time in a long time, like I was closer to my true self here.
I didn’t mean to, but I spent the rest of the day holed up in my room, playing quietly. I remembered the tune of the lullaby my mom used to sing to Erin and me, and I played that and expanded on it, giving it my own spin, adding to the lyrics until the lullaby became a full song. I missed lunch. I missed dinner. Suddenly I looked up and realized the sun had set and the sky was the color of blueberries sprinkled with sugar.
My fingers ached. I held them up in front of my face and saw deep, red grooves in the skin from making chords. I bit my lip and groaned. This was not the first time I had gone into a kind of dissociated state while playing guitar. When I was in the zone, everything else faded into the background. But now that I’d come back to reality, I was fully aware of the empty hunger in me, the beginnings of cramps in my muscles, and a feverish chill across my skin.
A knock on the door startled me and I shot to my feet, scanning the room wildly for a place to hide the guitar. I lifted the mattress and quilts and stowed it beneath, then arranged my pillows and blankets into a haphazard mess so the shape wasn’t noticeable. Hopefully whoever had come to call on me would simply assume I was a slob.
When I opened the door, I found Cyrus outside, arms crossed tightly over his chest and a glower on his face.
“Where have you been?”
“Here,” I said.
His eyes narrowed and he scrutinized my face as though suspicious that I might be lying. “You’ve been in your room all day? Doing what?”
“Thinking.” I shrugged, and raised my eyebrows at him. “Why did you look for me everywhere but in my room?”
“Because…” He trailed off and shook his head. “I don’t know. I just thought you might’ve gone off on your own. You have to be careful. It isn’t safe to go into the woods alone. There are coyotes, wolves even.”
“Oh, I get it. You thought I tried to escape.” I was kidding, but then I saw Cyrus avert his eyes. “You did, didn’t you?” I said.
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“Why would I want to run away?” I asked, leaning against the doorjamb. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Oh, there’s plenty you don’t know about us yet,” he said, relaxing and cocking a wolfish smile. “So come with me and I’ll teach you a thing or two.”
I hesitated in the doorway. The hunger inside me for more anima was insistent, but not yet an emergency. What did seem like an urgent situation was the fact that I could smell my own body, and I had to pee.
“Mind if I get cleaned up and change first?” I asked.
Cyrus grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Heat sizzled on the back of my neck. “That bad, huh?”
“Let’s just say I’ve been trying not to breathe through my nose when I’m with you.”
“All right, all right. You don’t have to look so amused.” I tried to curve past him, giving him a wide berth, but he hooked an arm around my waist and whirled me back. I found myself in a sort of half embrace with my face only inches from his. The fever on my skin moved to my stomach, and the ravenous hunger in me woke up like a startled bear, roaring to life.
“Let me go,” I said, trying to pry myself from Cyrus’s grip. He held on, planting his hands on my hips. “What are you doing? Let me go!”
I started to panic as I felt myself begin to unravel and reach for him.
“Hold back, Kenna,” he said, his voice calm and serious. “You can’t hurt me, but that’s no reason to let yourself lose control. Don’t let your appetite rule you.”
I tried. I did. I held on, and just when I thought I couldn’t stand it any longer, when I felt like I would burst apart at the seams, Cyrus let me go.
I was breathing heavily, my heart rioting in my chest.
“See?” he said, giving me a nod of approval. “You’re learning already.”
I rounded on him. “Don’t ever do that again.”
I grabbed clean clothes from the pile in my room and stormed past him, not looking to see if he followed, but knowing that he did.
MOONFLOWER AND MOTH
After showering in the thankfully non-coed bathhouse and changing into clean clothes, I joined Cyrus on the front porch, where he was sitting in a wooden rocking chair, watching moths bat themselves against the lanterns that hung along the covered porch. I was still irritated with him for the little “lesson” he’d sprung on me earlier.
The porch spanned the length of Eclipse House, long enough for two picnic-style tables, a dozen rocking chairs, and a swinging bench. Patchwork quilts waited on many of the chairs, like anxious pets anticipating their
owners’ return, and lanterns hung on tiny hooks every few feet along the porch. Moths with moon-colored wings gathered around the light, hovering tentatively before knocking themselves against the glass. I thought of the bug zapper my mom put outside during the summer to keep the insects from overwhelming us. Most of the insects, when they flew into the humming bulb, elicited tiny bursts of electricity as they died, but whenever a moth found its way to the buzzing light the sound of its demise went on and on. Moths didn’t die quickly or easily. They kept on fighting to get at the light, even as the life was seared from them.
I’d never been a fan of moths, maybe because I felt a certain empathy for them with their obsessive natures, their disposition to destroy themselves to get at the thing they craved.
I didn’t sit down in the chair next to Cyrus, but went to the porch railing and leaned against it, my back to Cyrus.
“Where is everyone?” I asked. The yard and fields were empty of Kalyptra.
“Dinner,” he said.
I revolved to face him. “That wasn’t cool, what you did.”
He nodded acceptance. “I see that now.”
“I know I can’t hurt you, but it feels like I can, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to want to take your life. So from now on can you just warn me when you’re about to, you know … touch me or get close to me or whatever?”
“I can do that.” He stood up and took a step toward me. “How close is too close?” he asked. Even from a couple of feet away, I could sense the anima murmuring its siren song from the other side of his skin.
My body felt flushed, like I’d been standing in the sun too long and was close to heatstroke. My stomach fluttered with either giddiness or anxiety, I wasn’t sure which.
“You could probably get closer than that,” I said, and swallowed. “But not much.”
He took another half step toward me, and my heartbeat pounded until I could feel it all through my body. “That’s far enough,” I said.
Cyrus nodded and moved back. “Good to know,” he said, and then turned and started down the porch steps. When I didn’t immediately follow, he paused and glanced back at me. “What’s the matter? You don’t trust me anymore?”
“I never said I did trust you.”
“Ah. Well, Rebekah trusts you with me, so how about it?” He held out his hand as though for me to place mine in his, but then curled his fingers. “Follow me.”
As Cyrus led me around the side of the house, I wondered what the deal was between him and Rebekah. There was a closeness and intimacy between them that I didn’t sense between Rebekah and any of the other Kalyptra, almost like a mother-son relationship.
“Are you and Rebekah related?” I blurted out, and then felt my cheeks go hot.
Cyrus glanced over at me, brows drawn together. “Why do you ask?”
“Answer the question,” I insisted, growing impatient and nervous for reasons I didn’t want to admit, even to myself.
His mouth quirked as he read something in my eyes that seemed to amuse him. “She’s my mother,” he said.
My stomach dropped, and so did my jaw. That would make Cyrus my—
“At least, that’s how I think of her,” Cyrus continued. His eyes darkened momentarily, like he was recalling an unpleasant memory. “My own mother wasn’t the kind any kid hopes for.”
I sighed, relieved, and nodded. “I get that,” I said.
He studied me, curious. “Anya wasn’t a good mother? I find that hard to believe.”
“In some ways she was.” I shrugged. “In others, not so much.”
We came to a halt in front of a leafy vine that climbed the outer wall. Large white flowers in the shape of trumpets bloomed on the vine. I could smell their sugary sweet fragrance from a few feet away.
“This is our climbing moonflower,” Cyrus told me. “It’s night-blooming, which means its petals unfurl after dark to emit its fragrance. During the day their leaves absorb sunlight, and in the dark their fragrance attracts moths that feed on the nectar and pollen.”
Cyrus reached up and plucked a moonflower the size of my fist from the vine and held it out to me. I accepted it and breathed in its scent until I felt dizzy.
“You don’t want to take straight from the vine, or you’ll end up culling the entire plant. Touching the source of the anima you’re trying to cull directs the flow. Culling wildly from multiple sources is dangerous because you risk taking too much, and the more anima you take, the more you’ll want. Until you learn how to control your vena, you should always touch the thing you want to cull. Always,” he said again for emphasis.
“Vena?” I said, shaking my head.
“That’s what we call them, the threads that emerge when you’re going to take anima,” he said. “Vena means veins in Latin, only these are more like extensions of your own anima.”
“Vena,” I repeated, spinning the moonflower between my thumb and forefinger like an inverted parasol. Then I closed my fist around it, crushing its satiny petals and releasing a pungent waft of its scent, and at the same moment, without thinking, I opened myself to the moonflower’s energy. A dim glow flickered inside my palm. My skin tingled as my “vena” emerged and attached to the flower. A tiny amount of anima trickled into me, and then stopped. In my hand, the flower wilted, and its sugary scent vanished from the air.
The flower’s anima didn’t fill me, but it narrowed the emptiness inside and made my head go swimmy and my skin come alive. I swayed on my feet as the anima concentrated in my vision. The land took on a surreal quality, more like a painting than real life. Moonlight seemed to hover over the ground like fog. The sky was the color of crushed blackberries, the stars bursting huge and white like popcorn.
Moths began to flutter toward me, alighting on my clothes. One landed on my cheek and I felt its feathery antenna brush my skin.
“It must think I’m a moonflower,” I said to Cyrus.
Cyrus reached out tentatively, his eyes asking permission before he touched me. His strong, warm fingers wrapped around my wrist and he raised it toward his mouth. I tensed, thinking of Blake, of how he would feel if he saw another guy touching me. He wasn’t a jealous type that I knew of, but then I’d never given him any reason to be jealous. I wasn’t even sure if what was happening at that moment was cause for jealousy. But this worry was fleeting. It evaporated and was replaced by serenity. Anima left no room for anxious thoughts.
Cyrus inhaled. “You do smell like the moonflower.”
I felt an easy smile play on my mouth. “Can I have another?” I asked.
Cyrus plucked a new blossom from the vine and handed it to me. I promptly culled its anima, and felt the energy sink into the cracks inside me. I tilted my head back and spread my arms out wide, gazing up at the expanse of stars, blinking at their brightness. The sky seemed to revolve slowly. Or maybe it was the earth. The ground beneath my feet throbbed. I could feel the world inhaling and exhaling. It had its own slow, steady heartbeat. And its breath was everywhere. The universe gathered around me, stardust falling on me like lazy snow.
This was the world behind the veil, I thought. This was the world that no one but the Kalyptra got to experience.
Another handful of moths touched down on my hair, my forehead, their fuzzy legs scratching softly at my skin, their curled proboscises licking at my pores. That’s what the vena looked like, I thought. Like the proboscises of these moths, curling and searching.
“One more,” I said, laughing. “One more flower.”
Cyrus picked another moonflower and handed it to me, and I culled it, too.
My head rolled on my shoulders, and I had to fight the urge to let myself fall backward as though a cloud would catch me. Auroras of emerald and sapphire light whirled languidly above me. I wanted to go on feeling this way forever, drawing down galaxies and heavenly bodies and swimming in the turmoil of color and fire.
Moths surrounded me like I was made of light. I reached for one of them, feeling the vena come loose and search fo
r the moth.
“Kenna, no!” Cyrus’s voice was like a whip crack and startled me even through the anima haze.
I yanked my hand back. “What did I do?”
He was shaking his head roughly, a look of alarm on his face. “I’m sorry, it’s my fault. I forgot to tell you that we don’t take moth anima. It’s forbidden.”
“Why?” I asked, my brow furrowing until I remembered what my mom said about moths having some kind of spiritual symbolism to the Kalyptra.
“Did Rebekah tell you how certain types of anima are tainted by their vessels, that they carry properties of it?”
I nodded, and then shook my head. “She did, but I’m not sure I understand.”
“If you cull the anima of a squirrel, you’ll be filled with energy. The anima of a bear, you’ll feel mighty and powerful. If you were to cull the anima of a wolf, you would have the urge to run and hunt. The lamb’s anima Rebekah gave you when you first arrived made you peaceful. But if you take moth anima, you become a slave to your impulse, and your only imperative will be to seek light at any cost. If there is a light on the other side of a glass window, you will smash your hand through it to reach it. If there is a fire, you will walk straight into it.”
“Why is it so strong?” I asked. “Rebekah said insect anima isn’t that potent.”
He hesitated. “Because we’re not meant to cull moth anima, so we would be punished for the transgression. Moths are our kin, in a sense. To take the anima of a moth would be … well, a kind of sacrilege. Just remember … no moth anima. Not ever.”
Moths are our kin? We would be punished for our transgression? To take the anima of a moth would be a kind of sacrilege?
I wasn’t sure if these statements were as odd as they sounded, or if it was the anima twisting through my brain that made them sound so … archaic. So eerie and unsettling, bringing to mind religious zealots and cult leaders dressed all in white.
I wondered if Cyrus knew that I had culled thousands, possibly tens of thousands of moths the night my family was murdered. But that was before I knew better.
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