It was never in the same place.
“Hey!” Marvin yelled at it.
“Don’t,” I said. “You don’t know what it is.”
“And you do?”
The canopy in tumult, reek of graves—like the smell had taken form, cold and real enough to smash my head open. Even if we could get to the wall, the church blocked our escape on one side, the woods on the other. In the punishing silence, only the thunder of my pulse in my ears. Marvin’s shallow breaths coming quicker.
“What are you?” Marvin called.
Brave boy, Kai said. Brave brother from misbegotten mother.
Dead leaves whorled. A tree howled as it fell. Leaves and debris spun closer, a whirlwind forming itself into tails, nine slithering lassoes that sliced my hands and face. Marvin’s neck lashed in red. He screamed.
No! Not him, I howled above the wind, my breath pluming white against the spinning debris. I heard my voice amplified and shrill through my foghorn of fear. And Marvin heard it too. His eyes bulged as he stared at me.
And then I heard a rumble, distant like thunder.
It came from under our feet, a thudding that I felt in my bones. It grew louder and closer and the woods drew back. “What is that?” Marvin rasped. The rumble grew thunderous in the false silence of the woods, and then, with a final crack, it stopped.
We were still holding hands. We were still bleeding.
The sharp snap of a branch underfoot made me wheel around to face the church. From around a corner came a broad-shouldered man wrapped in black—in his hand he held some kind of weapon. He moved toward us through the graves. I watched as the man reached up and drew off his hood, except . . .
“A bike helmet?” breathed Marvin.
Big biker boots beneath which cracked the frost.
He came to a stop and glared, and I felt something give in me. “Corby?”
“Meera? From class?” He was holding a small tire iron, so I knew it was he who had defaced the Orrins’ plaque. “I heard someone scream.”
He looked at us clutching each other. But mostly he looked at Marvin, and so, in a kind of awe, did I. Behind the steam of his breath, the lacerations on his neck were gone, or going, tiny threads of crimson across his throat and under his ear, dissipating as I stared. Too small for anyone to see unless they knew what they were looking for. I brought my hands to my own face, then stared down at them. Minute gashes across my knuckles and wrists wriggling back under my skin until with a final blink, they were gone.
“I’m sorry,” Corby said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I come here to pay my, um, respects to the witches.” He moved the tire iron to behind his back.
Marvin dropped my hand. His face chalky white.
“Marvin, this is Corby—my new TA in FiFo.”
Corby pulled off a leather glove and extended a burly hand to Marvin. I looked past them to the woods beyond and could see no hooded being, nothing. The stinky air overlaid again with pine and I closed my eyes, partly to breathe it in and partly not to impolitely stare at how their hands stayed joined in the handshake for just a beat longer than was absolutely necessary.
* * *
One day, in our second spring in the Starvelings, my sister and I head off with a flask and sandwiches to our favorite place to play, even though she is dead and I am too old for games. The lichen-striped outcrop is toward the mouth of the ridge and spiky with grass trees whose spears we use in our games. Kai’s inky hair swooshes back and forth and the flies buzz, and the ravens flap and caw their sad-baby cries. Goannas spit at us in wary boredom. It is Kai who spots the stranger first, a shadowless speck working up through the canyon, so that by the time the birds have gone silent, and the goannas have slithered behind deadfall, the speck has become a man, crawling hand over hand onto the outcrop like a giant spider. He finally stands there and his eyes flick down to our flask and back again.
“The Assistant,” Kai says, in a percussive witchy baritone. “Looking for his . . . thi-i-i-i-ing!”
But the unmanned Assistant looks from my aura of stunted frizz to my sister with the missing eye and her hair standing up from her head, chalk-skinned after death with a map of fiery veins you can follow right to her heart. The Assistant licks dry, flaked lips and then with a hand not as steady as he might wish, more like a moth than a spider, he points to me and then to her and then back again.
“Twins,” he says. “Non-identical.”
I feel I’ve turned a corner onto a winter morning. I refuse to look, refuse to face the empty space where my sister has been, an emptiness I always knew was coming again, just not when. Because this is the day that begins and ends with a lesson more important than anything Narn has been trying to teach me with her potions and her spells:
You can never forget who you were. Or what. Because it will never ever forget you.
CHAPTER 19
SWEENEY’S
I was hurrying everywhere these days. A darting runt with two-faced eyes, my misbegotten stories writing themselves—lost fragments of conjure that found each other in the retelling. Fingers in the silverware drawer, webs crawling with spider-hands, vampire babies who suckled blood from witch’s tits, a computer that solved the year of your death through backward reasoning, zombies cursed with eating their own children . . . The stories kept coming, telling themselves anew just in time for Gatherum. I would need a new notebook soon.
Campus life in the Tower Village had ground to a halt—Mades were fleeing to wherever they were from, anywhere safer than here—forfeiting their Redress Award money, forfeiting a tomorrow that was no better than yesterday. Fear spread like a virus. Thanksgiving had come and gone, and as agreed, I’d joined Lara and Trudy at the Thanksgiving party in the student union but it was so poorly attended that we left. The three of us had walked arm in arm back to our room and shared what I had left of Narn’s shroom brew between us.
In contrast to the Village, Fearsome Gatherum numbers were up. Regulars joined by the dozen, lured in by Pagan’s blogged promises of “transformative” readings, of “being lost in a forest of no return,” of “our very own resident survivor holding a mirror up to your darkest fears and hidden desires,” of “fairy tales spun by a ‘born’ storyteller from the land that fairies forgot,” “unspeakable tales conjured by a fearsome enchantress.” Of discounted membership fees subsidized by the already generous donations of Sasha’s inner circle. The readings were standing room only.
You’re the big Made on campus, now, Pagan texted.
That night there was another attack in the woods. Three others had already been airlifted from the college clinic to hospitalization in unspecified locations. I felt the creature stir under the bridge, the pump of vast wings through the midnight clouds. The press had caught onto the whole Hunter hysteria and the Dean had been asked to step down. But between struggling to keep up my grades and my fearsomeness, I didn’t have much time to think about the Hunter. I lived for midnight in the moonlit suite of my beautiful, rich patron, who gave me clothes that smelled like oak moss and whiskey. Sasha got Pagan to open a bank account for my, quote, cut, most of which I wired to Narn through the post office in Norman. Marvin and I hatched up a scheme to anonymously recruit the services of a private security company to provide added protection for Mades at both entrances to the bridge. It worked for a while until a couple of their men got beaten up by some of the more territorial lowlife along the banks, and the firm pulled out. A few days later, there was another attack. I asked Marvin to meet me at Dirty Bert’s to talk about it.
No time, he texted back.
Instead, he said he’d met someone and why didn’t we all have lunch in the student union the next day? I read the text over and over again, wondering what “someone” meant, feeling things flying out of control, a twinge at my temple that soon manifested as a dull headache. Finally, rather than meet Marvin and his new someone, I went over the
bridge looking for the photographer friend of Pagan’s. I sat alone at a freezing café, sipping chocolate that I didn’t want and ordering new underwear. I felt a return of my chest infection, the flutter of panic that wouldn’t lift. At dusk, I wove back across the bridge in velvet oxfords that made no sound. Kai’s bloodstained shoes were in my locker. I was alone on the bridge but didn’t feel alone. My keen eyesight picked up a shadow behind me, too far back to see when I turned around, but unmistakable in hindsight. What did it want with me? What did it want with any of us? I tried to phone Narn while I was there. It wasn’t our scheduled night and she picked up in confusion, not knowing who I was. I hung up without telling her.
To spare Narn, I decided to write my own story for the next Gatherum. I told myself I had plenty of unused material—that her words had sunk in at varying depths for me to plumb at will. I thought of it as a game, like shuffling a deck of cards. I rose to the challenge. I was the big Made on campus, after all.
On my way back to the Village, the never-ending pulse of the bridge reflected in the multiple gaze of the Towers, I ran into two Mades I didn’t know. They were weeping, on their way to the campus clinic where one of their friends lay fighting for her life, the latest nameless victim of the Hunter. Maybe it was that. Or maybe it was my reflection in the ascending elevator, as desirable as I had ever wanted to be—friendless, sisterless, shameless. But not gutless, no. Never again. Sasha must love me as I am, or not at all—I’d seen enough of a glimmer of possibility that she would. More than a glimmer. She owed me after all. Without me, she’d be . . . Or maybe it was just that old fiend, self-sabotage, rearing its misbegotten head. Whatever it was, when I sat down to write my story, for the first time, it was me. Just me and my twin, the dead blank page.
But when I got to the high turret room the next Sunday, all the self-confidence I’d conjured deserted me while I waited for my turn in the chair. As the headliner, I always went last. I felt out of control. Spinning, netless in a Big Top of my own making. Deathly white faces all around to watch me fall. I was about to leave with some excuse about a headache, when Pagan came up behind me. “Coming to Sweeney’s afterwards?” I must have blanched, because she reached out and tucked a loose curl behind my ear. “Sasha said to put you on the List.”
I’d had a Plan B just in case I lost my nerve—a tale of twin demonic princesses, but Pagan’s invitation disorientated me. I sat under the electric chair’s terrible cap and opened my notebook. Without meaning to I recited my recklessly scribbled story about a demonic medical doctor who collected lady-bits in a cabinet of curiosities he called a matrix.
A row of candles blew out. A waiter belched.
“Boo,” someone jeered.
“Boring.”
Sasha’s eyes were unreadable slits. She said something from the chaise where she lounged. But in my anxiety, I couldn’t hear her. I could just see her mouth move. The maple branches scratched a distress signal on the window. Short short short long long long short short short.
Remember!
I looked at Sasha and for a moment she was unrecognizable to me. She looked as yellowed and brittle as the fake vellum of my notebook, as drained of life.
Imagine!
“And then . . . the lady-bits turned to snakes and jumped onto his eyes and wormed their way into his soul and took it down to hell.”
“How,” someone drawled, “did the snakes jump out if they were in jars?”
I wasn’t used to hecklers.
Wing it! Kai said. Show some guts!
So I did.
“The doctor had an assistant, who wasn’t really his assistant, but an ancient avenger who dwelled in the underworld. Instead of punishing him for his crimes against blood, as was her right, she asked him to teach her everything he knew. They made a deal—in return for his hell powers, she’d bring him back from the dead to avenge his blood enemies.”
My voice felt like it was speeding up. My tongue twisted around the truth. The maple branch screeched against the window, and I registered the collective murmuring of concern, hostility even. But it was too late to stop now. I slowed my voice to a crawl.
“Except that when she emerged to begin her reign of terror, the world had moved on, and she could not. Blood vengeance was no longer a thing—change would not bend to her will and she, being a goddess of rage, of fury, could not bend to its. What kind of world was this, what trick had the universe played on her, when the ancient laws were all undone? And the night was winged and the winds of change were bane to her shriveled lungs, and the hunter, unshepherded, became the hunted?”
The applause was sporadic. Uncertain. “What’s the answer to the question?” someone called out. “What happened in the end?”
“To be continued,” I sat back in the electric chair. And my smile was the rictus of the doomed.
Sasha was gone.
* * *
The Assistant never makes it past the property gate. The thylacine is an airborne blur of stripes and teeth, gets the intruder to the ground, goes for his face first, pulling it off by the lips. The Assistant gets his hand around a fallen branch, uses it to break one of Eric’s ribs—the yelping draws me from the outcrop at a dead run. By the time I get to the porch, the Assistant has lurched to a stand, reaching for his pistol. A central strip of skin hangs from his chin like a bloody beard, nose bone and tongue gaily flapping, eyes bulging from bony sockets. Eric regroups and tears at his crotch—where Kai stomped his man-thing off.
From close range on the porch, I shoot the pistol from his hand. Eric finishes the Assistant off, burying his muzzle in the soft flesh of his right breast. He gets his teeth around the heart and tosses it, still beating, to the ravens, followed by intestines, bladder, stomach, and lungs. Proudly arranging them in a spreading circle, barking like a lunatic as if to entice the victim to the game of his own dying.
It is only when the ravens swoop, Eric called to heel, that I notice Mag hunched off to one side, their hood pulled back high above their face so that I get a full view of the inky scrawl. It is a labyrinthine map—delineations of geographical features familiar yet strange—and it covers their entire face and what I can see of their hands and the patch of ankle above their sneakers. Their entire flesh a topographical atlas of a forgotten world—place names and lakes and rivers and dark meadows. Narn stumbles past, blood pouring from her good eye and all around us that hellbound hum.
“Never safe,” Narn moans. “Nowhere safe from Father.”
“How did he find us?” I yell after her. “Your lost sister told him, didn’t she? Because the only one she’s lost to is you!”
Narn looks at me in rage and Mag leads her away, bearing what’s left of the Assistant’s hand. They disappear for days, leaving me finally alone in the kitchen with lichen gone blighty and nothing to eat but what I dig from the vegetable patch, the air filled with orgiastic reverb from the cave as the scourge rips flesh down to the bone. This time Kai does not come back. And there is no one to explain it to me. I sit alone at the kitchen table in a patch of sunlight, and I eat a tomato and wait for something to happen. Eric clicks back and forth across the porch, bewildered totem waiting just as I wait, for nothing.
“I hate you,” I call out.
“Witches,” I shriek. “Hags!”
I leaf through the parchment grimoire looking for a curse, but I can’t make out enough of the words. What language is it in and where did Kai learn it, and why had I not? I sweep the kitchen table clear of piled lichen and bundled herbs and Eric whines at the crash of precious vials onto the floor. I light a match and watch it burn down to my thumb, Eric’s undead gaze never leaving the flame.
I tie a rope around my neck and head to the bloodwood tree but the thylacine cuts me off snarling—he has been to the land of the dead and it is not my place. I sink down on the ground, the rope still around my neck. He comes close, leans into me. Presses that marsupial mu
zzle into my neck. We stay like that for a while—one beast as unviable as the other.
And still the tears don’t come.
He leads me back to the hut and I throw up. Then the tears come. And they don’t stop until I throw up again. I don’t want to live this way, but I don’t want to die, so what else is there? It doesn’t occur to me yet that death is not the only way to leave this place. It doesn’t occur to me yet that as a failure at both living and dying, I will have to find another way.
I light every candle in the hut.
A confusion of tongues fills the night.
You left while my back was turned, Kai. I had to—the Assistant found us. I have to make sure he isn’t followed. By whom? You know who. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. I said it for both of us. Kai? Meera. It should have been me. It is you, Meera. It was always you . . .
I look over my shoulder in the first manifestation of a tic I will have all my life, just in case she’s twice-returned.
. . . to find me to see me to be free.
* * *
Despite my disgrace, I went with my new sisters to Sweeney’s Landing, the oldest inn in Wellsburg, built onto the riverbank, and famous for its rooftop parties.
But it was not to the roof where Pagan led me.
Lichen-sprayed columns at the street level entrance disguised the old pub’s age, the dazzling decrepitude inside. Beneath a dusty crystal chandelier, I felt unattractive in what I was wearing—some ill-fitting cast-off of Pagan’s. I had a bitter taste in my mouth about where Sasha had gone, and how she had refused to look at me before she disappeared, Pagan explained, to prepare for a reception tomorrow.
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