by Kristen Pike
“Slap yourself.” Elias said the first day, using that soft voice that Rowan already despised. “Till your red, and blistered.” He bounced excitedly, his eyes darting as he watched his mother resist. Rowan stood in the corner, her brow furrowed low over her troubled blue eyes. The first slap rang out, a loud sound that hung heavy in the air, dangling in front of Rowan like a horrible sickening reminder that the best part of Elias had died with their father. Rowan could see the struggle within her mother; she could see her mother trying to disobey, pushing against the indiscernible bonds that held her captive.
“Elias?” Rowan said stepping toward him. He turned on her angry, his face twisted in a scowl of hatred, pushing her away from him and she staggered, her back slamming into the wall behind her so hard a sharp twinge shuttered down her spine. Elias turned away from her, his focus drawn back to their mother, who was sobbing uncontrollably, each slap leaving her face a darker shade of red.
Rowan fled from the room and cried on her bed until her throat was hoarse and the tears simply would not fall any longer, leaving a painful lump in her throat and a harsh bruise in her chest that seemed to Rowan might never heal.
The next day Rowan walked in on her mother bashing her head against a wall, her blood splattering down her face like paint had splattered Elias’s clothes.
“I did it for you Rowan!” Elias told her enthusiastically when he caught sight of her, as if he were giving her a great gift, a present to be treasured all her days and all her nights.
“Why would you do this?” Rowan cried, looking at the stranger that stood before her.
“I did it for you!” He repeated incredulous that Rowan wasn’t jumping with joy at his generosity.
“This isn’t for me Elias. None of this is.” She told him angrily, backing away from him as though he might lash out at her next.
A day after that Elias had mother walk outside in nothing but her undergarments and stand outside until her body was a hideous shade of blue and she was so fatigued she could no longer remain upright and she collapsed into a sniveling ball in the snow. Rowan looked disgusted at Elias, and dragged her mother into the house.
“Don’t help her Rowan!” Elias shouted, his features warped into a glare.
“Leave me alone, Elias.” Rowan said hotly, struggling to drag her mother to her room. She hefted her mother onto her silk sheets, where she lay immobile, her body like ice. Rowan covered her with thick blankets, tucking them in under her. Her mother neither responded to nor acknowledged her daughters presence. Rowan left her mother’s room feeling exhausted and older beyond her years.
The next morning Rowan woke to sunshine drifting into her room, out of habit she looked to Elias’s bed, but quickly remembered he wasn’t there. The last few days he had taken to sleeping elsewhere and Rowan could only guess at what he spent his nights doing. Rowan groggily made her way down the stairs, rubbing at her eyes.
“Please Elias.” She heard her mother sob and Rowan cocked her head, stepping off the stairs onto the landing with dread and walking down the hall to the living room, where her mother’s voice had drifted.
“Say it.” Rowan heard Elias say, his voice low, that loathsome musical note laced through it. Rowan hated that voice more than anything in the entire world. She hated the way he was able to speak so soft, and the beautiful way the words floated through the air even when they were sounding out the most atrocious things.
“When you were younger I tried to drown you, your father stopped me, and if I hadn’t been pregnant with Rowan he would have killed me. When Rowan was born, I would not feed her for days. But you children would never die, no matter what I did or how hard I hoped, you’d never die!” Her mother sobbed, Rowan felt sick to her stomach as she staggered down the hall.
“What else, say it.” Elias demanded urgently.
“Please Elias no more, please.” Rowans mother begged, her voice hoarse and cracking from God’s knows how many hours of this torture, as Rowan stepped into the room. Rowans mother sat on the large sofa, her shoulders hunched and silent sobs rocked her body though Rowan couldn’t see tears on her face. Elias held a long slim knife in one hand, blood dripping from the blade with a soft plop onto the hardwood underneath. Thin gashes marred her mother’s arms and face, blood covering the majority of her body as if she had just stepped from a bath with red water. The wood and sofa under her mother was stained red, saturated in thick blood.
“ELIAS!” Rowan yelled. Elias turned to her, his eyes haunted and she could barely find a trace of the brother she loved under the beast that looked out of his eyes.
“No more, please no more.” Her mother moaned on the sofa, staring dazedly at the floor, her body wobbling where she sat.
“Isn’t this what you want Rowan? To make her pay for what she’s done to us?” Elias asked, outstretching his hands as if to draw Rowan toward him. Rowan took a step back, afraid of the stranger that stood before her.
“No, Elias. I never wanted this. I hate what you’ve become. I HATE that thing in you.” She said through her teeth, the words like venom in her mouth as she spit them out.
“But we could be Gods Rowan, this power in me could give us everything we ever wanted. I could give you the world if you only ask for it.” He said, his eyes shining. Her mother moaned behind Elias, slumping over onto the couch.
“I only want my brother back.” Rowan said softly. If he even exists in there at all.
“Soon.” Elias assured her and strode from the room, dropping the blood-tinged knife to the floor as he went, leaving Rowan to clean up the mess he had made. Again.
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“Sister! Come look, I am almost done and then we can leave this accursed place!” Elias exclaimed to Rowan the following morning. Elias burst into their room where Rowan sat on her bed staring absently at the wall, drinking a cup of steaming bitter tea.
Rowan looked up at him startled, rousing from her thoughts to look at her brother. His black hair was tousled, unbrushed, and reaching almost to his shoulders. The same blue eyes that Rowan had stared at her with a feverish exhilaration and the true smile Rowan knew to be Elias’s, looked at her so earnestly Rowan couldn’t help but smile back hopefully and take the hand he offered her. Elias grabbed her cup, placing it on a small table they kept in the room and she let him drag her hastily out to the back, towards the Great Tree.
Rowan stopped short when she realized what he intended. “Elias, you cannot do this thing!” She shouted at him as he hurried ahead. Elias stopped beneath their mother, his breaths puffing out in clouds from the cold as he turned to look at his sister. A thick noose hung around her mother’s neck, the bench propped under her in its familiar spot. Rowan could tell she wished to struggle. Her body would tick every now and then, her face contorted in an ugly cry, made uglier by the large dirt brown scabs crisscrossing along her pale skin. Wailing from deep in her soul crushed the silence between Elias and Rowan.
“Elias, my son, my Tal, my Moval, I beg of you, please. I never meant to-“
“Shut your mouth!” Elias screamed at his mother, she fell silent though her desolate tears seemed to fall with a deafening loudness.
The first time Rowan ever used it she had never meant to. She didn’t even know that she could. If she could have gone back in time, she never would have done it, though she did save her mother’s life that day.
Rowan walked to her brother placing her hand on his arm, trying to desperately reach the brother she knew to still be buried inside this brother she did not. His eyes flicked twixt hers, the excitement in them diminishing.
“Elias, you cannot do this, it has been enough. Please, you cannot compel her no more.” Rowan felt a spark of heat a flickering fire a raging inferno beginning to leap to life in her chest, lazily working its way through her, making her limbs tingle but Rowan pushed back against it and the feeling quickly died. Rowan was left feeling tired and cold and for a brief moment, a miniscule second that barely mattered, as if she wanted the heat inside her t
o come back. “For the love you have of me please stop, let this vendetta die.” Elias took a step back. He looked between their mother and Rowan, a deep confusion working its way across his face. He looked as though he wanted to argue; instead, he hurried off, slipping back inside the warmth of the house silently.
“You’re just like him!” Their mother shouted viciously to Elias’s turned back, her voice cracking. The moment Elias disappeared back into the house Rowan’s mother tore the noose from around her neck. She collapsed onto the bench in a dirty heap, with her head buried in her hands. Rowan said not a word to her mother, as she too went back inside.
Rowan didn’t see Elias or their mother for the rest of the day, and she went to bed that night fatigued, her head lost in a hazy cloud. She didn’t think of the repercussions of what she had done. Using the “gift” hadn’t felt as Elias had described, Rowan didn’t feel the adrenaline, the power surging through her. She only felt tired, and perhaps a little sad. It felt more like a curse to her than a gift, a rampant firestorm that would consume her and devour everything that made her who she was until there was nothing left but the Beast inside.
When Rowan crawled under the covers and closed her eyes, she did not expect to be woken just a few short hours later by her panicked brother.
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The door came crashing open and Rowan bolted upright in her bed, her heart jolting inside her chest. Its mother come back to finish me off at last. Rowan thought alarmingly in her sleepy state. When she only saw Elias, she breathed a sigh of relief. I’m being silly, Rowan thought, and tried to calm her frantic heart.
“Rowan, it won’t work!” Elias cried flinging himself into the room. “It won’t work! She is coming for me and she means to kill me!” He whimpered. A look was on his face that Rowan had never before seen her brother wear. Not when they discovered father dead, or when mother came in the night. He was only ever brave, never letting Rowan see the fear he had. Now, he looked like an animal, his eyes darting hysterically, his hair disheveled. He had small cut on his neck and blood dribbled down into the collar of his off-white sleeping shirt.
“Elias, I’m not sure-“ Rowan started, puzzled.
“You must listen Rowan! I cannot compel her any longer. I must go! I must leave! I am so sorry, but-”
“ELIAS!” Rowan heard her mother roar deep in the house, causing her brother to stagger backward. He looked stricken, the blood draining from his face. He shook his head once at her, and disappeared back down the darkened hall. “ELIAS! I WILL KILL YOU FOR THIS!” Her mother bellowed.
Rowan tried to scramble from her bed only to tangle in her blankets and go sprawling along the floor. The front door banged open and Rowan heard the pounding of footsteps on the gravel running from the house, as if their life depended on it, which perhaps it did.
“Elias!” Rowan screamed, disentangling herself from her blankets and staggering to her feet. She unlocked her window and threw it open, the cold winter air slammed into her lungs, stealing her breath. “Please Elias, do not leave me! ELIAS!” Rowan shrieked, but already the footsteps were no more than a memory, a whisper in the night. A shadow that had once held her brother. Even if he had been lost this past week, she still loved him, she could have gotten him back.
Now, the last person Rowan loved in this world was abandoning her also, without a second look back. Rowan slid down the wall, her heart collapsing into a dusty misshapen pile of broken dreams and a life outside this house and hundred million things she would never get to say to Elias. One by one, the stars overhead winked down, the moon smirking as though it and her mother had won the war, Elias was gone, and Rowan might as well be dead for all the feeling that remained in her limp, shivering body.
FOUR
SEVEN MONTHS AGO- JANUARY
Vordis looked around him at the empty beds with crisp white linens, at the sterile walls and worn wood floor. A deep silence penetrated his ears as his blurry vision focused on a stethoscope hanging on the wall, his own heart beating slowly, so slowly, struggling to find a reason to even do that much.
Incompetent.
To old.
Not good enough.
Vordis harrumphed, praying a kid with a broken arm would walk through his practice door, or a laboring mother, at this point he would take a case of the sniffles.
Inept.
His hands shake so badly now, he sliced open Daniel Murphy’s leg, he needed six stitches.
Not good enough.
He could hear the whispers of his fellow townspeople as they hurried by his building, laughing at the old doctor who dwelled inside, his hearing was shot to hell, but when the people around you made no effort to disguise their mockery, it wasn’t that hard to hear them anyway. Vordis clasped his hands in front of him to keep them from shaking, but no matter how hard he squeezed, he could still feel his leathery, veiny, hands trembling.
Clumsy.
He walks with a hunch like some kind of freak.
Not good enough.
Vordis tried to sit up straighter, but pain started leaking down his spine until he hunched back over with a sigh, turning his head down to the floor.
Incompetent.
To old.
Not good enough.
Not good enough, he thought to himself sadly. Maybe it WAS time to retire. He had had a good run, 30 years as a doctor; it was more than most had gotten.
He knew he would never retire though, he could never give up the thrill of a diagnosis, the look on a face when he cured someone, that adoration, that gratefulness, he lived for it. He had been born to be a doctor, he was useless at anything else, empty without a stethoscope in his hand.
Vordis looked around his practice again. He hadn’t had a patient for weeks, the little bell over his door hanging unwrung, except for when he himself had to leave; he ached to hear the obnoxious tingling that he normally hated. He could dust. Again. He could scrub the floors. Again. His back twinging in pain as he bent over, wiping the coarse brush across the wood. He could straighten his medical tools. Again. Though he knew that they were already lined up, sanitized with no use, gleaming under the sunlight begging to be held in his wrinkled palm, feeling as useless as he did.
Vordis rubbed his soft fingers over his watery eyes. Who was he kidding? He had dried up months ago, ever since damned Daniel Murphy. Word had spread fast after he had sliced the kid’s leg open, like wildfire, and its implications; that he was too old to practice medicine, had devastated his business.
Vordis wobbled to his feet, his back crying out in pain as he did so. Hunching, he walked to the back of the large house where he lived and treated – used to treat- patients.
I’m closing my doors, he thought with disbelief, even as he began writing out a sign with shaky handwriting.
Incompetent.
To old.
Not good enough.
It had become his litany over the last month, wrapping around him like an old familiar blanket but with all the comfort of a pit of poisonous vipers.
The bell at the front door jingled and Vordis frowned. His hearing might not be up to par but he wasn’t so far gone as to be imagining things in his head. Was he? Vordis turned slowly, which was how he did everything now a days, slowly, and with pain.
A young pair stood just inside his doorway, the girl looking uncomfortable, the boy, just behind her, examining his office, his eyes finally resting on Vordis himself. Vordis straightened his back under the newcomers’ scrutiny. Holding his head high, he smiled at the pair as he made his way toward them, trying not to shuffle his feet and hunch back over though his back was screaming at him to do just that.
Vordis expected the boy to speak, but the girl addressed him instead. “Are you the doctor? Dr. Vordis Hamlin?” She asked, her voice soft and fragile, reminding him of his own daughter who was grown and moved to Fedway with her husband.
“Yes, that’s me, how might I help you?” Vordis tried to speak without rasping, but he found he was a little short of breath these
days, he looked them over for any sign of injury or illness but they both appeared to be healthy. Damn.
The girl looked back at the boy, her black hair swinging around her shoulders. The boy smiled encouragingly at her, his eyes lighting up when he looked down at her. The girl turned back to him, “Well, I had a… um, a proposition of sorts, that I would like to discuss with you.”
“Oh, yes?” he stopped to take in a ragged breath, “why don’t we all go upstairs and I’ll put on a kettle of tea.”
“Of course.” The girl smiled, “I’m Rowan, by the way, Rowan Chase. And this is Jace Tarrow.” The girl, Rowan, said.
“It’s a pleasure,” he said, “to meet the both of you, this way, up the stairs.” Vordis turned, hoping they were following him as he made his way to the back of his medical practice where a set of creaky narrow steps led up to the second floor. He started up them, each step announcing the ascent into his tiny cramped home.
At the top of the stairs was a heavy door that he pushed open, the bottom scraping the wood floor. Vordis scanned the small one room to make sure it was suitable for guests. He had a few dishes sitting on the counter, and a pot hanging over his wood stove from last night, and his bed was unmade, his blankets sitting in a knotted heap atop his rock hard bed, but it was acceptable. After all this was a last minute invitation, had he known he would have company he would have hidden his dishes and at least straightened out his blankets.
Vordis turned around, pulling out a chair from his tiny table. “I’m sorry I only have the one chair…” Vordis trailed off, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the small room where he lived.
Incompetent.
To old.
Not good enough.
Vordis shook his head, trying to banish the vicious whispers from his thoughts.
“That’s really alright, we can’t stay long.” Rowan smiled at him kindly, but her eyes looked tired, weary, sad, and for the first time Vordis really took in her appearance. Her black hair was slightly tangled, blue bags under her eyes, her dress hanging slightly baggy on her slim frame. Vordis had looked much as she had after his wife had left him some years ago; he recalled the sleepless nights, the tasteless food, the memories sitting bitterly in the pit of his stomach. He wondered who had left her.