Hoarfrost (Blood of Cain Book 2)

by J. L. Murray

  "All I have to do is fall," I said, the words lost in the chaos surrounding me. Becky was limp under me, covered in the dark substance still throbbing within me. With sheer force of will, I rose, standing over her. I looked down to see my feet barely touching the earth, a lightness in every limb. We were almost flying when I took Becky's limp hands in mine and pulled her up. It was so easy, so effortless to carry my big sister, such a simple thing to put her over my shoulder.

  I walked to the gap in the world. I could hear a cacophony of sound all around me: crows, ravens, and someone screaming my name. I saw Esme on the ground, trying to move, trying to speak.

  "I'm sorry," I said to no one in particular. I took a breath, but my lungs were already full of darkness. I put my hand into the tear and nothing stopped me. I felt the heat on the other side, making my skin tingle. The ground was shaking and if I stayed I was sure I'd crack this tiny rock in two, send it sinking into the sea. I leaned toward the world that was bleeding dust.

  And fell.

  NINETEEN

  I didn't so much open my eyes as I was able to see again. I touched my chest, blinking, trying to understand what I was feeling. Then I understood. The power inside of me was gone. It seemed I should feel hollowed out, empty, but that's not what I was feeling. I felt light.

  I felt free.

  I was standing in a field, looking out over an ocean of wildflowers. Indian Paintbrush dotted the meadow with gaudy splashes of crimson. I could see the shape of an old foundation underneath all the growth.

  "I know this place," I said, my voice odd, as if I were speaking into a cave, or a tiny room, my voice echoing off the walls right back at me. It was dusk, and pink clouds above floated across the not-quite-dark sky, lending a surreal light to the landscape. Someone was standing next to me, but I couldn't bear to stop looking at the field. It was so achingly familiar.

  "She saw you here, too," said a woman's husky voice. And I knew the voice, too, but couldn't place it. "But she showed you what she thought you needed to see. Hellfire and a cup of tea. Do you remember?"

  I turned slowly to look at her. She was tall, with broad shoulders and hips, and long, raven-colored hair cascading over her shoulders. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress that somehow suited the ancient look in her green eyes, now smiling at me, creasing in the corners.

  "Have we met?" I said.

  "Frankie," said the woman, and there was that familiarity again. What was it about her that I knew? "Girl, you've been through hell. But you're going to have to go through a lot more shit, sweetheart."

  I felt tears tingle behind my eyes and I didn't know why. My cheeks were wet. "Is any of this real?"

  "Everything is as real as you make it, little Frankie," said the woman, and there was real sadness in her eyes. "I'm not really myself right now. Someone took my body, and now I have to live in hers. And you know what? A lot of fucking people want her dead." She laughed an old laugh, a cough mixed with a gleeful giggle. As if she were an old woman...

  "Beatrice?" I said, and suddenly I felt dizzy.

  "The very same," she said, and her own eyes filled with tears. "Frankie, I've missed you."

  "Where did you go?" I said.

  "You saw her," she said. "Walking around in my body, making you think you were in Hell. I went to her, I went to Lilith. I did it to save you from pain, I wanted to help you. But she used me. She took my body and trapped me in that fucking tower in that wasteland of a place."

  "Moledet," I said. "How did you get out? How are you here?"

  "What makes you think I got out?" she said. She grinned at my expression. "Just kidding. Of course I got out. I just walked right through a wall, if you can believe it. Stepped through solid stone. My guess is that the magic holding her there was specific to her. I wasn't her. I stepped right through, and when I stood on the other side, I fell."

  "Fell?"

  "Fell right through the ground and ended up here," she said. "But I'm starting to get the hang of this place. There is magic everywhere on this side, you wouldn't believe it. You see it shining on the ground, in the cracks, in the sky."

  "Where are we?" I said, looking around. "I know this place."

  "Of course you know it," she said, irritated. "I made it for you. So you wouldn't be afraid. Because, child, you should never be afraid here. This place is where you were born to be. I just thought church would be comforting for you about now."

  "Church?" I said, the word tasting sour in my mouth. But then I remembered. My father's church used to stand here. I stepped toward the ghost of the building, the shadow of a foundation barely visible under the tall grass and flowers. I nudged the front step with my toe. I looked across to where my father used to sweat and condemn, damnation and hellfire, all grown over with wildflowers now.

  "I saw my mother here," I said. "How long ago was that? I saw her in the mirror. It was the first time I knew that I wasn't crazy."

  "A lifetime ago," said Bea that didn't look like Bea. "And also, a few months ago."

  "Are we in the Darkness?" I said. "I feel strange."

  "Only monsters call it Darkness," said Bea. "You're on the other side."

  "There are monsters here," I said. "I've seen them."

  "Frankie, you've got to start seeing that everything has a balance. Darkness always has a light. Monsters are weighted with saints, hate is leveled with love. You need to find your balance."

  "For me there is no balance," I said, my voice soft. “I’ve never had it, and never will. "

  "You will," said Bea, "you just haven't found it yet. And if you don't find it soon, that bitch over there is going to tear you apart. And everything else, too."

  "Why not send a saint?" I said.

  "What?"

  "You said monsters are weighted with saints. So send a saint."

  "We already have," said Bea, shaking her head. "We have you, you idiot."

  "Me?" I said. "You're fucked, then."

  The slap came suddenly, and the anger in Bea's eyes so unexpected, that for a moment I thought I would cry again. "Snap out of it," she said. "You're in this now. You don't get to watch from the sidelines, Frankie. This is you now, this is yours. If you don't fix this, no one will. You're the only one who can."

  "I can't," I said. "She's stronger than me."

  "Yeah, no shit," said Bea. "She's the fucking Mother of Hearts. But everything is temporary, ain't it? She’s in a lot of trouble over here, just so you know. She was supposed to give you a message, not stir up a bunch of shit. Her boss is pissed."

  “Her boss?” I shook my head. "Am I dead?"

  "You're only as dead as you want to be," said Bea. "You know that by now, don't you? That it's not Abel or Cain or Lilith, or any of these other fucking assholes that control you. It's all you, Frankie. None of them can touch you. But you have to get your head out of your ass."

  "I'm dead," I said, trying to wrap my mind around it. "What the hell is happening to me?"

  "Nothing's happening," she said. "You're becoming. Becoming yourself, in my opinion. You've always been tough, girl. But you have to let the light in."

  "I think I killed her again, Bea," I said. "I think I killed Becky."

  "No you didn't. Becky was already dead," she said flatly. "She's been dead since that day at the lake. And she's been an albatross around your neck since the day you were born. Good riddance."

  "Fuck you."

  "That's the spirit," she said. "Get angry. Get pissed off. Stop moaning about what you can't have, you dumb twit. Look at what you are. My gods, you are beautiful."

  "I'm a monster."

  "No," she said, gentler now. "You're hope, Frankie."

  "Who is she?" I said. "The Mother, she's from here."

  "Lots of things are going to wriggle through the cracks now," she said. "Cain made a big goddamn fucking mess, and you're going to make him pay for that, I'm sure. But for now, you have to save the world from being consumed. We have monsters here, yes. But there's good here, too. That bitch, s
he don't give a shit about balance. She wants power. She wants your power, Frankie. And make no mistake, it's big. You have no idea how strong you could be if you would just forget what you can't do. Right now, you're thinking like a poor little country girl raised by crazy-ass parents. Forget all of it, Frankie. Forget what holds you back. You have allies here, sweetheart, big ones. So what's stopping you?"

  "It's Lilith's child," I said. "He's helping her."

  "And in the end," she said, "he's going to help you. But none of that has happened yet. And it won't happen if you don't wake up."

  "Wake up?"

  "Wake the fuck up. You can't afford to be dead for three days. You can't even afford one. Wake the fuck up. Force your body to breathe, force your heart to start beating, scare the shit out of your friends and wake the fuck up!"

  She clapped her hands hard in my face and I closed my eyes. And then everything hurt. I was so heavy, it felt as though I were filled with stones. I opened my eyes and Bea was gone. The field was gone. I was lying on hard ground, with grit in my throat and a sob at my lips. I sucked in air, my eyes tearing up from the pain in my chest as my lungs expanded and my heart started beating. I rolled over and vomited bile into the dusty ground, dry heaving until I was weak, and as I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I saw her. Becky, my sister, lips blue, skin bloodless, eyes flat and lifeless.

  She was dead.

  The white-eyed raven perched on her chest and peered at me. I closed my eyes, but it didn't stop the tears.

  TWENTY

  I tried to dig a hole with my hands, but the ground was too hard. I looked around at my surroundings. Brown patches of grass sat like ghosts upon the flat, hard earth. Dust blew in sporadic clouds, the wind half-hearted and listless. The crushing, encompassing fog disappeared, and the flashes of hot and cold had been reduced to a dull heat accompanied by the random gust of wind, stirring up dust devils but not much else. I saw in the distance the crumbled shape of what used to be a building. A tower, I realized. A shining black tower that once rose up from the earth, a windowless prison for Lilith.

  The darkness, so heavy now, started to pulse and shift inside me. I felt the fatigue in my arms from trying to dig through the dirt with my hands, my fingernails black and bleeding, torn away in spots. I walked over to the rubble of the tower and kicked a splintered and cracked piece of wood, watching as it rolled a few inches, stopping at a large, jet black stone. There were similar stones everywhere with bits of mortar still stuck to their sides, some cracked in half from whatever had happened here. Becky said the Mother of Hearts came, and Cain was hurt.

  Crouching down, I hefted one of the stones and, heading back from where I'd come, I forced myself to look at Becky's body. I dropped the shining black stone next to her and, bending low, hovered over her, my tears falling onto her bloodless skin. I touched her face, cold and waxy. I closed my eyes, but opened them again when the dead-eyed raven shrieked at me. I looked over to see it standing a few feet off and watching me.

  "I brought you back to life," I said. "Why not her?"

  The raven shrieked again, hopping closer and seeming to be admonishing me through its filmy eyes. It cawed and flapped its wings, then rose up from the ground and flew right at me, missing me by an inch with its talons brushing my face. It came to land on the other side of Becky's body and shrieked again as I touched the scratch across my cheek. The raven glared at me, and I looked back down at my sister.

  "You died," I said to the corpse. "Back at the lake, you died. Maybe you were in another place for a while, but that was the day you really died." The raven stopped shrieking and was still as I stared into Becky's lifeless face. I remembered going home that night and whispering to Beatrice that Becky was no longer Becky. I remembered that horrible day, the day my father died, my not-mother and not-sister killing him, killing him, killing him. It wasn't Becky, but I'd always see her face, joyful and laughing and covered in our father's blood. And the night when I came back home with a can of gasoline and a box of matches exactly like the ones she’d burned me with as a child. She died then, too.

  My sister, dead three times now, and I was looking right into her pale eyes with a hand on her cold, cold face. With a cry, I pulled my hand away from her, the darkness bubbling in my palm, itching to get out. The shapeshifter did this, a poor copy of my father. I felt the darkness lurch in my chest now and it was hard to breathe. I touched her again, but this time I wasn't thinking about bringing her back, I wasn't thinking about my own grief. Hers was a life unlived, her body stolen when she was only just becoming a woman. She woke up to be burned alive, brought back, forced into slavery, her life bartered over between two brothers who didn't give a damn about any of us. And now, she slept. Finally. She deserved at least to be left alone.

  "I'm sorry, Becky," I said, the words thick in my mouth. "I'm so sorry for how it was for you. You never had a first kiss, or learned to dance, or went out and discovered the world. You deserved to live, you deserved to find out who you were." I bent lower until our cheeks were touching. "I'm going to stop them. I'm going to tear them apart if I have to. The Mother of Hearts, the fucker that looks like Daddy. There are consequences, and those consequences are me. You were right, I think. When Mama brought me home, you said you looked at me and you swore I had wings. I did have wings, Becky, but not like angel. Not like an angel at all."

  I rose to my knees and smoothed Becky's hair. Even now, she was beautiful. Without life, she was a pale doll, her skin like fine china, her features too perfect to be real. She looked at peace now and I bowed my head for a moment. Then I opened my eyes and it was as if the world got brighter.

  "Goodbye, Rebecca," I said, and laid the stone gently on top of her body. Then I rose and walked wearily back to the collapsed tower to gather another. Then another. Then another. Until all I could see was Rebecca's beautiful face, where I couldn't bear to lay a stone. So, instead, I took some sticks from the ground and wrapped a long weed around the tips. Just like Beatrice taught us as kids. I laid the devil's trap atop her face and backed away. What would my father have done? I thought of the old reverend at his pulpit, sweat pouring from his face as he shouted at his wide-eyed parishioners about sin. I looked up at the colorless sky.

  "Is this what you wanted, God?" I said, tears streaming into my hair. "Is it all just darkness and death and pain?" I shook my head. "Is any of this even real? My father believed in you. My mother was sure you existed. They were so sure that they based their lives around you. But, you know, I've met some gods now, and they're not great. They're not untouchable like they said you were in church. They lost their power to a baby girl. How is that even possible? I was only a baby. And now look at me, look at what I've done with all this phenomenal godly power. Do you see me? I'm broken. All of this has broken me. I don't even think I was ever together in the first place. So, you tell me, how could any of this be real? How?"

  I was sucking in long, painful sobs, the power inside me throbbing to the rapid beat of my heart. "My sister believed in you, too," I said softly. "She suffered because she believed so deeply that you were real. She believed you were going to save her. And maybe," I said, my voice falling to a whisper, "maybe I believed, too. Maybe I suffered because I thought I was your enemy. You were the light of everything. You were everything. And if you're not real, if you're not out there trying to help us, who's going to save us when the other side seeps into the world?

  “You want me to think this is some magical time when we're all going to paradise? When the sky is made of fire and the ground is nothing but ice? Because you can ask anyone, I am not the Heaven type. The devil’s had his claws in me since the day I was born."

  I let myself kneel to the ground then, my hands on the stone directly over Becky's still heart. "I didn't bring her back from the dead because I wanted her to rest. I don't even know if I can bring her back. But I didn't try. For her, I didn't try. Because I love my sister. Despite everything, I love her more than anyone. And I can't do that to her." />
  I looked to the sky again. "So if you're real, if she's with you, please take care of her. She's everything to me. That's why I had to let her go. I should have saved her, I should have looked harder, I should have done something. Anything. I knew she was here, in this place, but I was so caught up in my own life that I couldn't be bothered to save hers. Then I killed her. I killed her to save a complete stranger and...two complete strangers, actually. Is Dekker another cosmic joke? You've got a really shitty sense of humor." I felt the last of my strength go and I slumped over my sister's grave.

  "Take care of her, if you're out there. Maybe you can't save us. Maybe you don't have anything to do with anything, or you would have stopped Cain and Abel. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you stop pain and death if you could?" I rested my face on the cool stone and closed my eyes, feeling suddenly too tired to hold them open.

  And then I slept.

  "You will know her," said a woman's voice. I was moving, sitting in the passenger seat of a car. My car. I looked over to see a beautiful woman with mahogany-colored skin driving, watching the road. All I could see was the black strip of road in the headlights, a yellow dotted line down the middle. It was blacker than night outside, and so cold I shivered. I turned to look behind me, sensing something in the back seat, but the woman put a hand on my arm. "Better you don’t look," she said. "Not yet." She was wearing a large pair of sunglasses, the kind movie stars wore.

  "Am I dreaming again?" I said.

  "You met Atropos," she said, ignoring my question.

  "Who?"

  "She calls herself Moira," the woman smiled. "She used to be powerful, you know. When her sisters were around, she was revered. But now she's old and withered, only tangled string and threats."

  "It looked like red yarn," I said.